[work in progress...]
Who doesn't love Thoreau? From our vantage point, 150 years deeper enmeshed in the industrial landscape, the Transcendentalist poet appears peaceful and grounded by Nature. He is both respectful and observant of "the wild," and when we compare his priorities to ours, Thoreau looks like a sage trying to steer the West in the right direction.
But from another perspective, Thoreau can appear naive and superficial. When you compare his experience in the American wild to that of the Native American, he comes off like 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.
Before we go down this road though, we gotta make sure you're properly insecure about the subject. If Thoreau is a novice, you sure won't understand relating to Nature! We're too disadvantaged. You and I were born to "understand" things and it's become our defense, our distancer, our cultural perspective. But our "studying approach" won't gain insight into the Native American perspective on Nature, and until we drop it, it will only distance ourselves further.
So, self-reflection is job number one. Secondly, we need to accept that we don't, and can't, contextualize what we see in Nature. We must accept there's mystery. Standing Bear says it right there in that quote, but all Native Americans spoke of this spirit. To ignore these words, or to shut it out of the picture, would be like describing a tree without acknowledging the ground it rises from (which, BTW, is the default way we're trained to see.)
Achieving this self-reflection, or humility, is a tall order but it's worth the try. Just remember, I'm in the same boat you are, so I'm going to try to elicit "the right perspective" by using metaphors I'm most familiar with: I come from an art background, and I believe John Berger might serve this discovery well. Specifically, I'm going to build off his famous mid-century critique, Ways of Seeing....
For those who don't know his work, Berger basically reflects on the art-audience's vantage point. He illustrates how art-viewers were never given the chance to think for themselves We were born into a cultural context that predetermines the meaning of a picture (our education and a never-ending bombardment of media affirmations continue this programming), and eventually we get to the point where the sight of anything is opportunity to contextualize.
In other words, we can't see art cleanly. We see only what we already "know," and this steers our reading of it. Worst of all, none of us are aware of it. Well, it's this principle that I suspect applies to our relationship to Nature, and again, I believe the Native American perspective offers a hidden way out.
As for Berger, his critique went right over the heads of the general audience (his essay effectively changed nothing about the way Western people see art) but what a shame if this were to happen with Nature. The stakes are too big. So let's begin by looking at the wild by starting from scratch. We will look at our looking...
--------------------
Part 2: 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 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 define it. Etymologically, and according to the OED, seeing is about understanding what we see, so it's a combined internal/ external matter.
Descartes, for example, thought the eyes were the crossroads of the soul, like a highway on-ramp to an ontological relationship between the body and mind. And Plato, too, studied 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.) You may think these as ancient philosophies but in everyday practice thoughts like these continue to dominate our notion of the human experience. (When we say, Do you see what I'm saying?, we're extending Plato's exact meta-phor* of The Cave: presupposing that human knowledge is related to what's visible and not.)
The point I'm trying to make is: Perspective influences what we think is real and not. Our thoughts change as our vantage-point changes, which seems obvious to say, but for some reason we don't believe it when only our thoughts are involved. Our brain just assumes what's real to us IS what's real. But I'm saying, we need to keep our eyes open to new discoveries and new positions. We need to accept strange statements like Standing Bear's if we want to see the bigger picture.
--------------------
Part 3: To See Nature
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.
Please tell me you're self-reflective enough to know this quote isn't about Nature, it's not about White Man or the Indigenous Peoples, and it's not about "the wild." It's about seeing Nature.
And since this quote presents a vision of the wild that challenges our own (Trust me, as a farmer I can tell you this perspective is a perfect 180 degrees opposite the history of Western agri-science), we might be curious about blind spots we've overlooked. We might even be jealous of the benefits the indigenous people enjoyed compared to our own agriculture.
Just for starts, Standing Bear was obviously more adhered to Nature, more trusting of it, and a hell of a lot more appreciative of the land just the way it was. Could this cause us shame? Putting two-and-two together, we might reflect on today's climate and soil problems, as well all the extinction crises, and we can imagine how our actions led to them. But actions come second: It was our perceived distance (or disassociation) with Nature that begot these problems.
I mean, just our use of the word "wild" is evidence of the faulty attitude. "wild" is not a neutral word, for hundreds of years it morphed into something negative, something scary, something portending ominous things for Man. But originally it just meant the natural state. "The wild" just meant that which Man had not yet manipulated. (BTW, we've done with other natural occurrences too, taken their pure meaning and supplanted them with negative associations. Vegetation, insects, and indigenous peoples have been replaced the by words such as, "weed", "bug", or "primitive" to impose negative thoughts in otherwise neutral minds.
But now we hear Standing Bear associating the wild with the opposite! He says it's a thing of bounty, a thing of wonder. White people saw America as a "a tangled mess" in need of clearing, whereas he saw intelligence and self-sufficiency in the vegetation. Nature was already tame!
-------------------
Part 4: The Intelligence of Nature is Spiritual
The last part of Standing Bear's quote is hardest for me to comment on, and yet I know it's the most significant too. Nothing about his Nature was isolated, it was all interrelated and the Great Spririt clearly is a clue to that vission. I'm certain Western people can not, and will not, understand Nature beyond the novice Thoreau-like way without accepting this sprituality. But am I qulaified to represent what Standing Bear meant? Not on your life.
I can, however, offer critisism of Western Spirituality (which may of us deny) and I'd argue that we try to use our brains to circumvent the discussion. So much so, that I think we even project our intelligence onto the world. In other words, we consider ourselves the source of the intelligence on this planet.
We judge everything else accordingly. When an animal reflects our kind of intelligence back at us (it "apes" us), then and only then, will we identify Nature as intelligent too (but never as intelligent.) In other words, intelligence is a property that comes from within us.
It's also a proportional quality, as we see it. The world is not universally intellingent, it's a scarcity product that we get to ration. We see this in our treatment of each other (professionals like scientists and doctors are believed to be more intelligent while other professionals are mocked), but Standing Bear's comes along and throws this all on its head. For him intelligence is a universal quality, out there in the world to be discovered. It's not "in" us (although we can experience it), it's out there to be witnessed.
If that doesn't speak of the differences between his perception versus our own, I don't know what does. But let me also take a stab at further demistifying his mention of The Great Spirit. I want to draw attention to his word "blessings" and again contrast that to the modern farmer like myself. Because, whereas I associate food-sustenance with hard work, I know that people outside the farm world share my opinion. Even if you live in the city you're still mostly aware what it takes to stock the grocery shelves, and who do we give thanks to? The farmer, not the Great Spirit. So, what I'm saying is, Western Man attributes it all to himself rather than a force greater than he.
----------
The End, for now.
Note: This excerpt is currently a "start" in a MUCH longer book I'm working on. Hopefully, I'll get it published one day (and if you're in the biz, reach out to me.) This isn't a how-to book, it's a cultural critique on farming and more largely, our societial understanding of what Nature is, and how we should relate to it. Don't expect idealistic solutions or alternatives to the problems (that's not what a critic is for), I write for the sake of injecting introspection into our culture of bind progress. Introspection is important enough (and sorely lacking), and we are at a point in history where if we don't step backwards, we'll most certainly erode humanities' future.
----------
*I can't resist reflecting on "Metaphor", since it's such a great word. It obviously shares prefix with meta-physics but don't be repulsed by the modern, pseudo-religious definition. Traditionally, meta means "behind" or "beyond", and the Greeks used the word to describe aspects of realities which were non-physical (thoughts, feelings, spirituality, etc.) With Metaphor, the phor part comes from the ancient word bher, which means "to bear", as in a child. So, a Metaphor is something that bears another thing's meaning (which you already know.)
Technically, Metaphor is, in itself, a metaphor. In fact, all words are metaphors -- they're pods of meaning which stands-in for the actual thing. The dictionary is a compilation of metaphors used to tap into what we know [personally]. And if we don't know the meaning, we must personalize a way forward.
But just think about how this works! How does a thing come to carry another thing's meaning? To make the leap "beyond" one definition to another requires imagination, does it not? This is fascinating stuff! Much of what we know is founded-on so many unknows yet somehow it all works!
