NATURE AND THE WORD
By Alice Bolstridge
My father lived all of his seventy-three years on the one-hundred-acre farm
where he grew up in northern Maine. Though he did build a bigger house, as
far as I know, he never ventured further than Bangor; and according to my
memory, this momentous event occurred only once. I did not inherit my
wanderlust from him, but perhaps because of his influence, it was slow to
develop.
Before I left Maine in 1982, I lived in at least six different homes in
Aroostook County, two different ones in Millinocket, and one in Orono. In
1982, I lived out of my Plymouth sedan for three months, technically
homeless, without an address, zigzagging across the lower 48 states to an
unknown destination. I stared greedily at landscapes: prairies, mountains,
forests, deserts, waterways, seacoast. I paused in Stillwater, Oklahoma for
four years where I moved at least once a year. In Cincinnati, I settled in
for six years in one apartment, but then moved for my final year there.
Everywhere I have lived I have been a greedy seeker.
Now, I live back in Aroostook County and fancy that I might have found a
place where I can live out the rest of my life and satisfy my wanderlust
with vacations to different places, as I imagine many do, but it isn’t the
little home in Washburn that I lived in for two and a half years when I
first moved back. I got restless and looked for a bigger place, one out of
town with a view of the river, a few acres for gardening, a bit of woods, a
pond nearby, and southern-exposure windows for light and warmth—very
important to me in northern Maine. Upon reading Naturalist by Edward
O. Wilson, I discovered I was looking for a common dream of home. Citing a
study of zoologist Gordon Orians, Wilson describes this dream as a place
that closely resembles the African savanna where humans are believed to have
originated. It is a place that provides protection from predators, water,
opportunity for hunting and gathering, a high open place for a wide vista
view, and close to the kind of trees that can be readily climbed. Wilson
comments on the modern expression of this dream of home: “Consider a New
York multimillionaire who, provided by wealth with a free choice of
habitation, selects a penthouse overlooking Central Park, in sight of the
lake if possible, and rims its terrace with potted shrubs. In a deeper sense
than he perhaps understands, he is returning to his roots.”
This is a dream of home that hearkens back to nomadic life. Studies of
anthropology and history suggest that our definition of ourselves as
separate from nature began with the simultaneous advent of agriculture,
which settles us in one place, and history, which tells stories of our past
and transmits them to future generations in language. History’s stories are
imbued with a passion for significance; they take on a sense of cosmic
importance with retelling, creating mythology, the verbal foundation of
culture.
The word culture, related to cult and cultivate, bears
in its roots the bonds of religious myth with agriculture and suggests the
process of division from nature. A cult is defined by its differences, its
ideological boundaries. Cultivation alters the land and creates boundaries.
Evidence of the split between human consciousness and nature appears
everywhere in the mythology of the Judeo-Christian culture I was born into.
Genesis, the story of our ancestors’ birth into culture, references language
as the originator: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.” God is a supernatural being, above nature, the
creator of nature and not to be confused with the created. Created in a
paradise garden, not a wilderness, but nevertheless one that did not require
labor before the fall, and made in His image, Adam and Eve are directed to
take dominion over the earth, and simultaneously they are forbidden to eat
from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a terrible double bind. How
could they take dominion without tasting all of earth’s fruit? Knowing good
from evil marks the boundary between innocence and guilt. Out of the union
of agriculture and history, morality was born, and we have been torn and
divided ever since. Our mythological parents were caught in the transition
from nomadic to agrarian life, which marks the separation from our animal
natures. They fell out of nature into culture.
Adam after the fall, Abraham, Noah, Job—all our patriarchs were farmers
supplying food for the growth of civilization, which furthers the boundaries
between culture and nature, and I am struck everywhere I look by images that
pervert the common dream of home. We uproot the landscape and cover it over
with paving and concrete buildings: skyscrapers of glass, sprawling malls
with skylights and trees growing inside. We build outdoor floors and
football fields covered with artificial turf. We cut down trees to pave our
streets and plant new ones along the sidewalks in neatly edged circles of
brick, then cover the dirt in the circles with white crushed rock. In our
zeal to control and perfect her, to separate and distinguish ourselves from
her, we simultaneously defy nature and slavishly imitate her. And we remain
restless, lonely, longing.
Our literature is filled with images of a primordial garden as a place in
which we can reconnect with nature. In some this garden is a wilderness;
Huckleberry Finn lit out for the territories to find it. For Wordsworth, in
“Intimations of Immortality,” it is a dream of glory before grief:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But yet I know, where-er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
In some, the garden is a respite from moral struggle and despair. After his
long journey of awakening to the evils of human nature, Voltaire’s Candide
retires to tend his gardens. For T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, the
garden is a vision of innocent sexuality and promise of fertility,
furnishing the chief contrasting element to the despair of failed love
throughout the poem:
When we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
The moral faculty is rendered blind, deaf, and dumb by such a vision—unconscious.
In his Four Quartets, a rose garden is a memory of lost promise in
the opening poem, “Burnt Norton.”
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
In the last poem of the Four Quartets, “Little Gidding,” the rose is
the image of temporal and failed human love transformed into eternal divine
love: “All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are
in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are
one.” This image of union ends the poem, matter annihilated by energy,
transformed back to the wild.
The primordial garden is the place just on the cusp of moral consciousness
and culture.
For my father, a creature of this culture, the garden was a place he
struggled to wrench from nature, regardless of the cost. He claimed a
bounded territory he inherited from his father, one hundred acres of forest
and farmland, and he fought all his life with the elements of nature—insects
and weeds in the crops, disease organisms in his body, the long cold and
darkness of northern Maine winter, drought or too much rain in summer. A
thoroughly New England man, not demonstrative with affection, he expressed
love through his rage against these elements and his struggle to overpower
them, to survive and feed his family, dragging his crippled leg through
planting and weeding, through hunting and fishing and wood cutting. For him,
northern Maine was no Eden, and his love was as harsh as his struggle to
master that one hundred acres, harsh as that of Adam and Eve after their
fall, harsh as God’s appearance to Job out of the whirlwind.
I found and bought my dream of home. It has a glassed-in porch along the
entire south side. The Aroostook River is a quarter mile walk through wild
woods, and I walk through tree farms on both sides of the road. Moose and
deer walk down through my field. A bear walked up and scratched itself on my
willow tree one morning. I watch a pair of ducks fly in and out of the old
farm pond across the road, and I search every spring for their nest. I have
less than four acres, but I struggle between conflicting desires to order it
all in garden patterns or to let it go wild and reverence the burdock and
thistle, the fire bushes, and the fir and poplar that will turn my small
field back to a forest in just a few years if I don’t tame the land. I
remember my father and wonder if I am settled, if I want to be settled. In
my deepest longings I am still a nomad, roaming to find an Eden I will not
have to struggle to create.
Though Father didn’t venture far, I don’t have to look deeply into family
history to find restless spirits. My ancestors on both sides were, after
all, immigrants. And, since it became fashionable to do so, one member of my
mother’s family has discovered a Native American great-great grandmother
from Canada. I fancy that if it is true, she comes from one of the nomadic
tribes. Stories of my grandfather indicate he was often gone, working or
looking for work, my mother said when I questioned what he was doing during
those absences. And even Father ventured a bit off his own land to hunt and
fish.
I hunt for thrills of wildlife watching: the flocking of loons on Portage
Lake in August, migrating Canada geese on Mill Pond in October, the sudden
appearance of an otter out of the ice in November—we gazed intently into
each other’s eyes for a moment before it turned abruptly and swam away back
under the ice. These moments are felt with passionate intensity,
biophilia, a term Wilson uses to describe the intense feelings of
fascination, revulsion, love, hunger we feel for other creatures. In
reflecting upon my gaze at the lavish display of nature’s phenomena all
about me, under and over and around, I am reminded of the gaze between
mother and baby or between lovers. Or the gaze of the hunter at the hunted,
the gaze described by Jane Goodall in explaining meat-eating behavior of
apes. She built a cage to house her child safely by her side while
continuing her studies.
The closest physical connection possible, as close as sex, as close as
mother and fetus, is eating or being eaten. Love is a complex emotion, or a
complex of emotions, perhaps better left with its loose and vague
definitions. But I can’t help escape my sense that the impulse to join,
however abstracted, sublimated, rechanneled, symbolized, or mythologized by
language, is always connected with wild issues of survival and sacrifice. My
life always depends on the sacrifice of some life. I must take my turn in
the sacrificial cycle. Boundaries between me and all other life in nature
are quite literally fictional, only. And while fiction is a fine and
useful thing— I spend much of my life as a producer or consumer of it—I must
not take the boundaries created by it too seriously.
The rite of the Eucharist and the doctrine of transubstantiation has
profoundly literal implications when seen in the evolutionist’s light, and
becomes closely allied with some of the Native American practices suggested
by their mythology of animal worship. To be the hunter who loves, praises,
and gives thanks to the hunted for the sacrifice is about the most religious
attitude I can think of. To stare the hunted in the eye as I did that otter;
or to stare into the dead gaze of an animal I have helped to care for and
then to eat that meat as I did as a child; further, to kill and clean my own
meat (which I have not done in years as I haven’t the spiritual stamina for
it)— each of these may be an act of reverential love such as a trip to the
meat counter at the supermarket can never rival. Thus the idea that
transubstantiation represents, the eating of the body and blood of Christ,
is an apt image of salvation for carnivorous creatures. Melville suggests
this in Moby Dick: the coffin of the cannibal Queequeg serves as the
instrument of Ishmael’s salvation.
Profound love is always sacrificial. Mothers must sacrifice sleep, comfort,
and nearly all forms of self-gratification in the intense care a new baby
requires. Strong as it is, as attested to by the fact that the species has
survived as long as it has, at its best, this bond is fraught with peril
from the sheer weight of the responsibility and sacrifice—feelings of
fatigue, rage, or depression are all as common in the reality of maternal
care as feelings of devotion. Although the bond does not always form or
hold, it is remarkable that it works as well as it does and is formed in
something as ephemeral as a gaze. The gaze between mother and child is the
most intense and sustained bonding gaze we ever experience, through frequent
feedings, changings, bathings, all day.
In sentimentally romantic movies and literature, the gaze between lovers
rivals the mother-baby love gaze, but the reality of life always falls far
short. Often, likely always in the beginning stages when it is most intense,
the gaze of the lover is more like the predator’s gaze, hunting for
gratification of a basic biological need, sex. A connected, sustained gaze
between lovers is far rarer than popular imagination conceives it. Like the
hunting lion, the human lover sustains a gaze until gratification or defeat
of purpose, and then she/he yawns and turns away. The child too must turn
away from its mother’s gaze to become an individual, a cultural being.
Cultural to the core, I yet remain nature’s creature: seeking survival
needs, predatory and acquisitive, driven by a sense of loss and isolation
that individuation brings, longing to lose my self in connection. With my
fellow isolates, I shift my gaze, scan the landscape, seek a new target,
sublimate. I pour my dedication into doing the best I can to care for
life—recycle, monitor use of pollutants, teach, and join in the chorus that
praises creation and takes vows to protect and care for it. I wander and
wonder. In this scientific, post-evolutionist age, this millennial age, I
resurrect and reincarnate the stories that collectively make up a mythology
I long ago rejected. I live on the edge, in the boundaries—between this
mythological past and an unknown future, between facts of experience and
transformations of fiction, between home and away. I live in the dual fall
of necessity and moral consciousness, restless, searching for Eden.
