This is a topic that has interested me for many years. How do we, as writers, get in behind all of our cultural assumptions and think for ourselves? Get to the root of things? Name them in art?
Behind science, behind religion, to the earth's real existence as the thing that it is that exists whether we do or not. And the lessons it can teach us as writers who are interested in the truth.
I have come to understand, in glimpses, that everything we need to know about how to live green, harmonius, better lives on the planet is right in front of us.
As a way of illustrating my point, here are excerpts from a couple of books by authors who are actively working to help us with the task of adjusting the lens. This, from Sean Kane's excellent book The Wisdom of the Mythtellers:
"Historically, this degree of abstraction has many causes. Foremost among them is the ascendency of the written text...It is not just the case that the act of writing something down as an aid to memory is basically a decision to forget it...It is that the text, as a framing device, allows an item of consciousnesss to be held in place long enough for an endless array of further frameworks to be postioned on it...To the mythtellers, frames marked permeable boundaries. The boundary--the membrane--is the place where truth is felt...With literacy, that permable boundary is hardened. In effect, the boundary is as hard as the written page."
The profound limitations of this blog to provide a membrane between you and the earth that is speaking to you. Maybe in the electricity you are sharing with the machine.
And this passage from David Matlin's newest book It Might Do Well With Strawberries:
"Who are my days? This question haunts the core of these writings. And hovering over this two-year space lies another question which has to do with Whitman and what the Nation belongs to and whether we as citizens can any longer belong to the nation in what it is letting itself become...A wandering about, searching as I could, for some means of expression before what has so bewilderingly numbed and silenced. How could I as one person speak exactly as I can before that numbness and what it has and continues to mutilate. The mutilation is much more astute than it has ever been. The empire of that astuteness and how it has expertly immersed our lives in a radical disarray and a bigotry against humane accomplishment are what this book attempts to speak to."
And hear this echoed in Jeff Encke's poem posted just today on
http://100dayspoems.blogspot.com Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days
None of the people I quote or point to here know each other. Our filaments do meet. This is the ecological spirituality of poetry and thought, the living, organic beauty of our consciesness that tells us where we are and where we are not. It's real. You're part of it. That's amazing.
And to help us slow down and look, Tim McNulty:
CLOUD STUDIES
On a small shale ledge
over the Graywolf,
poised with tripod and lens,
half the day in the rain—
It takes time to see,
you say.
Five years with clouds is nothing.
A ridgeline softens
and drifts up valley,
small breaths
lift from an empty ravine,
curve against contours
pillow and swale
or the wavering
finger dance of mists
caught on an updraft
strained through crooked silver snags.
Light meter,
dripping whiskers.
Higher, the clouds ebb
and break along narrow cliffs
of polished bone,
Eocene flow,
the long slow sift
of riverstone
far below.
Maybe ten years is a start.
A hemlock bough lifts and settles.
the maple leaf tips;
twenty miles of rain.
Tim McNulty
The task of the poet is, in the last analysis, always this: to keep the self at bay, to represent out of profound respect what is actual in the world, and to be a cipher of language for the world's spirit. Maybe a philosophical idea appears, maybe not. In any landscape there is spirit, and the good wilderness poet digs for that spirit, which is not something anyone can own. By working toward that spirit in language, the poet finds herself canceled out in what is true and utterly alive. But this is not just what happens in wilderness poetry. This is what happens in a moving poem about history, a woman's body, a failed bank, a painting.
