Who doesn't love Thoreau? From our vantage point, 150 years more emersed in an industrial landscape than he, the Transcendentalist poet appears more peaceful and grounded by Nature. He was observant and respectful of "the wild," and when we compare his priorities to our own, Thoreau looks like a sage trying to steer Western society in the right direction.
But from another perspective (and perspective is what this post is all about), Thoreau can appear naive and superficial. When you compare his experience in the American wild to that of the Native American, he comes off as a tourist and his writing seems romanticized. Why should we care about his perspective of Nature when an entire race of people lived closer to the subject and had infinitely more to say about it?
In the following essay, I want to exploit the gap between these vantage points, and I'm going to quote from Luther Standing Bear, a Lakota chief of the late 19th century. He writes:
We did not think of the American landscape, with its tangled growth, as “wild.” Only to the White Man was nature a “wilderness”. To us, the Earth was tame, bountiful, and surrounded with the blessings of The Great Mystery.
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Before we go down this road though, we got to make sure you're properly insecure about the subject, Nature (or specifically: Relating to Nature.) Because, if Thoreau was a novice, you sure can't profess to be "in-tune with the wild." We're too disadvantaged now. The whole planet is now affected by Man.
Plus, our minds are further from wild. We're now born to understand things in relation to thoughts rather than just relating to them directly. Our intellect has become our defense, our distancer from Nature, and the scientific gaze has become our cultural perspective. But this "studying approach" won't gain insight into the Native American perspective and unless we drop this viewpoint (which is all it is), we will only distance ourselves further.
A wise man once said, "Understanding is the booby prize of life." In other words, there's real observation and participation that could otherwise be had. And if Standing Bear is to be read, we need to accept that we don't (and can't) contextualize Everything. We must accept there's mystery. He uses that word right there his quote, but all Native Americans spoke of Great Spirit and clearly their culture honored mystery. To ignore these words, or to erase them from the study of Nature, would be like studying a tree without acknowledging the ground the tree is attached to (which, BTW, is exactly how specialists are trained to see Everything.)
So, achieving self-reflection or humility is going to be tall order for us, but it's worth the try. And although I'm in the same boat you are, totally ignorant about my relationship to Nature, I'm going to proceed using the metaphors I studied because that's what I'm familiar with...
I come from an art background, and I believe that with this subject John Berger might serve us well. . Specifically, I'm going to build off his famous mid-century critique, Ways of Seeing.
Now, for those who don't know his work, Berger reflects intensely on the art-audience's vantage-point. He points out how art-viewers are not "blank slates", and that they were never given the chance to see art cleanly. He notes how Modern people are born with cultural context that predetermines meaning for us. Our understanding is already formed and it's impossible to erase. For instance, our education and a never-ending bombardment of media-affirmations continue shape our perspective. We can't see without these contextualizations.
And if we can't see Art for what it is, perhaps we can't see Nature for what it is either. In our minds we already "know" what we're seeing (though, obviously, we don't: History proves we're perpetually taking new information into account, and we have to adjust the "facts" we hold true.) The worst part about our this is, none of us are aware of it! We rationalize our convictions using the same cerebral tools that actually block us from seeing Nature in its' whole!
Well, as for Berger, his critique on art went over the heads of the general audience (his essay effectively changed nothing about the way we see art), but what a shame if this were to happen with Nature! The stakes are high. So, let's begin by looking at the Nature from scratch, without out pre-formed perspective. Let's start by looking at our looking...
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Chapter 1. Deconstructing What It Means "To See"
"To see," is to connect two entities: (1) There's someone doing the seeing, and (2) there's something being seen.
The eyes are like ambassadors between these entities. They gaze externally, imprinting the world's perceptible properties on to the retina, and then connect internally to the brain via the optic nerve. This is the physical act of seeing that we're all taught, but the dual external/ internal function makes vision a far more profound of a subject.
If it were just purely physical, seeing would the focus of the ophthalmologists and no one else. But there's another definition that launches deep into meta-physicals (beyond the physical) and this is how we usually use the word. Etymologically, and still in the dictionary, "seeing" is also defined as understanding what we see. We combine the internal and external.
Descartes ("I think, therefore I am), for example, thought that the eyes were the crossroads of the soul, like a highway on/off ramp in an ontological relationship between body and mind. Plato, too, emphasized the eye’s role in our relationship to "the Truth" (which, according to the Allegory of the Cave, lay somewhere out there for our discovery.) What we know to be true, according to the Greek, is made possible by where we stand and which direction we're looking.
You may think these are ancient thoughts but, in actuality, they describe our everyday assumptions. They are still famous because these philosophers laid-down ideas that continue to dominate our notion of the human experience. For instance, when we say, "Do you see what I'm saying?", we're extending Plato's exact metaphor* of The Cave.
And the reason I'm bringing it up is, the ambiguous relationship between our non-physical thoughts (including personal identity, what we think as "us" verses "other") and our physical senses (like eyesight), is a problem that continues to perplex as we view Nature and ourselves. We still have not discovered a better way of relating to the world other than "internal me" versus "everything outside of me" (although Eastern philosophy and religions offer alternatives.)
To recap: Perspective influences what we think is real and not. Thoughts change as our vantage-point changes (which seems obvious to say, but for some reason we don't remember it -- or don't believe it -- when only our brain gets involved.) I, personally, believe we need to doubt all understanding (which is just a vantage-point) and keep our eyes open to new discoveries, new positions. And to accept strange statements like that, or anything said by Standing Bear, we will gain access to the bigger picture.
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This is The End, for now. As I said, it's a work in progress and it's part of a book I'm working on. I'll finish it there. maybe
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*I can't resist reflecting on the word, Metaphor...
You can see how meta-phor shares a prefix with meta-physics but don't be frightened by that, the definition of metaphysical isn't owned by the religious. Metaphysics is simply the pairing of meta ("behind" or "beyond") and physical. The Greeks coined the word to describe aspects of realities which were in the head and not found in the physical world. Psychology, for instance. Thoughts, feelings, and yes, spirituality are examples of meta-physical study.
So that's a little on the meta part, but with Meta-phor the suffix is equally interesting. Phor comes from the ancient word bher, which means "to bear", as in a child. Thus, a Meta-phor is properly defined as something that bears another thing's meaning -- pods to carry another thing forward. Words themselves are examples of metaphor since they bear the definition of a concept we wish to communicate (ipso facto, metaphor is a metaphor of itself!)
In other words, we don't communicate in physical fact, we communicate in meta-phoric packages. We'd like to think things can be "perfectly clear" between two people but that's an impossible fantasy. Definitions are already subjectified in our heads, but they become further metaphorical as they're communicated and unpackaged by the second person. There is no such thing as understanding between two people, there is only "I, personally, made sense of the information and I think we're more or less on the same page now."
