pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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BESTIA, or, THE CALL OF THE WILD

Readers who know Latin probably saw that title and assumed that they would be reading my description of the wild sex I had with the wild babe I picked up last night.

Sorry, but I'm not writing about that at all.

Instead, I'm exploring cosmologies and words and the writing of Mary Oliver and Descartes and Cartesian thought and Native American spirals and spiritual release and unbridled lust and the ways in which embracing mystery and wildness can allow us to move beyond the boundaries of our logocentric selves into deeper connections and interconnections. And I'm writing about linguistics. Sort of.

Descartes divides thinking minds from the material world—a useful distinction for the objective sciences—but, as philosopher David Abram points out,

these sciences consistently overlook our ordinary, everyday experience of the world around us. Our direct experience is necessarily subjective, necessarily relative to our own position or place in the midst of things, to our particular desires, tastes, and concerns.

Partitioning ourselves in this manner can make us afraid of the natural world, can inhibit our ability to live fully in it.

Max Oelschlaeger says that our

prevailing definitions of "wildness" and "wilderness" preclude recognition of nature as a spontaneous and naturally organized system in which all parts are harmoniously interrelated.

In the West, we define nature as wild. And we define wildness as uncivilized. We sever ourselves from nature and impose an artificial order on it (and, by extension, on our own untamed terrains).

But, as Native-American poet Joy Harjo points out, even our chickens have become too civilized.

In an age of domestication, wildness and mystery and organic connections and responding to lust and losing control are all considered dangerous, uncivilized. And undomesticated.

Harjo says that

Europe . . . gifted us with inventions, books and the intricate mechanics of imposing structures on the earth, but there are other means to knowledge and the structuring of knowledge that have no context in the European mind.

Embracing wildness is one other means to knowledge, and so is recognizing that we exist in n untamed world and are subject to its processes—and are, ourselves, wild at our core. Of course Cartesian rationality is useful, but an over-reliance on it limits us.

Now I'm as logocentric as the next INTP, but the poet in me recognizes the worlds and experiences that would be unreachable to me if I limited myself to Cartesian rationality. And I celebrate those experiences, seek them out.

Color me undomesticated (please!) but, like great sex, poetry and other creative endeavors transport me to wild and dangerous worlds.

Harjo says this much better:

Each time I write I am in a different and wild place, and travel toward something I do not know the name of. Each poem is a jumping-off edge and I am not safe.

Embracing wildness allows this poet to deal with the unknown in a manner that acknowledges her (and our) basic inability to control the world around us.

"To survive is sometimes a leap into madness," she says. And that madness can expand our worlds.

Oelschlaeger again:

Human beings are not pure thinking things ensconced within Euroculture, but [are] beings whose thoughts and feelings are embodied, centered, in an organic human nature fashioned in the web of life over the longueurs of space and time, internally related to nature.

I am most at home outdoors and recognize connections between my selves and nature (and am rational enough to recognize that these connections are themselves an act of imagination. Is it Merleau-Ponty who said "my body is my presence in the world"? (Or was it Adrienne Rich?).

Anyway, I don't buy that crap about humans having dominion over the so-called lesser species. I don't believe that humans have any special rights as a species, in fact, but instead are just one part of the whole. . . . I also believe we ought to try to live in harmony with other beings rather than attempt to control them.

At best, the earth seems indifferent to us; at worst, it should destroy us in order to save itself.

I have been trying to pay more attention to the words I use when I speak about nature and connections and wildness . . . in part, because I want to express myself as accurately as possible, but also because several writers I've read recently have made me recognize my need to do this.

David Abrams makes this point in The Spell of the Sensuous:

in indigenous, oral cultures, . . . language seems to encourage and augment the participatory life of the senses, while in Western civilization language seems to deny or deaden that life, promoting a massive distrust of sensorial experience while valorizing an abstract realm of ideas hidden behind or beyond the sensory appearances.

Similarly, Paula Gunn Allen points out that,

in English, one can divide the universe into two parts: the natural and the supernatural. Humanity has no real part in either, being neither animal nor spirit—that is, the supernatural is discussed as though it were apart from people, and the natural as though people were apart from it. This necessarily forces English-speaking people into a position of alienation from the world they live in. Such isolation is entirely foreign to American Indian thought. At base, every story, every song, every ceremony tells the Indian that each creature is part of a living whole and that all parts of that whole are related to one another by virtue of their participation in the whole of being.

And Harjo notes that

language is culture, a resonant life form itself that acts on the people and the people on it. The worldview, values, relationships of all kinds—everything, in fact, is addressed in and through a language.

The great chain of being theory that informed Shakespeare and other seventeenth-century Westerners is based on inflexible hierarchies—on an incorporeal intellect that places us above corporeal things in a rigid pecking order.

This linear cosmology recognizes the interrelatedness of everything, but in a way that insists that the natural order of the world is one that positions humans at the apex.

In Shakespearean plays, a disruption in one aspect of the so-called natural order of things at results in disruptions every level: The disruption of a Danish king's "natural" right to rule the world, for example, causes storms on the promontory and results in women seeking to usurp the "natural" power of men, thus creating universal disharmony.

(Big aside, but I just love that we once believed that our universe would sing if we maintained perfect order. Now we just wonder when we'll blow the whole thing up or render it uninhabitable.)

Earlier Western civilizations understood the connection between humans and nonhumans, which an examination of our language makes clear. The root of the word "animal" for example, is "animale" (having the breath of life), which is derived from "anima" (life), which is derived from "animus" (mind, spirit, soul).

Modern native cultures recognize that animals have souls. And many modern poets express our interconnection in their writing.

Wendell Berry "places value . . . on the restoration of a traditional understanding that measures value by a mutual interdependence" between self and world. (Stephen Whithed)

I don't have much faith about this, but hope that we can come to understand this mutual interdependence as a culture.

Here's another good observation.

Neil Evernden, in Creation, writes that

once we accept, through the study of Nature, that all life is organically related, organically the same through the linkage of evolution, then humanity is literally a part of Nature. Not figuratively, not poetically, but literally an object like other natural objects.

Hmm.Then maybe I'll come hom and write about Kristeva's semiology of the uncanny.

5:35 p.m. - 2005-03-26

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