Wonder is not enough

I launched this newsletter project nearly two years ago with the image above, then had to take it down as a header because too many people were grossed out by it. I love this photo. I was thrilled to stumble across this tiny scene. The hatched egg that the robin has cleared out of the nest. The ants cleaning the membrane out of the shell. The congruence of beauty and ick.

This image lives in my head as an avatar for the kind of nature writing I want to read, the nature writing I want to do. Writing that tries not to “make discriminations.” Writing that tries not to reinforce the dualistic thinking patterns we all live under, nor create new ones. Writing that does not privilege “the beautiful” over “the gross.”

I haven’t written about it much here, but I have a memoir manuscript in progress called Wilderness of Bones. It’s about wilderness and grief, about hiking with grizzlies, about living in a stunningly beautiful place, and about how navigating grief and navigating wilderness resemble one another, but not in the ways you might think.

In an early chapter, I write about being startled by the sight of this valley, reproduced as a photographic wrap on a Chicago city bus. My current home reduced to a commodity, passing by as I stood on a street corner in the place I grew up:

When you write about nature, there’s a certain pressure to make it beautiful. No matter how far we get from the Romantics, there’s still this idea that nature writing exists to explore wonder, that it’s purpose is to convince the people on those busses, the people on those city streets watching the busses go past, that “the natural world” is real, and beautiful, and it is because of this that they should care. 

It’s bad enough that we cordon it off like that. “The natural world,” as though the rest of the world isn’t natural. I studied with Gary Snyder in grad school, and one night he was on my car radio as I was driving down to the cabin. He had a new book out, and Terry Gross asked him why, since he was a nature poet, why did he include a poem about his pickup truck? 

“It’s all just phenomena Terry,” Gary replied. 

Nature is phenomena. Phenomena is Nature. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. The gorgeous mountains on either side as I drive down to the cabin, and the ancient gunk still lurking in Chuck’s latest find, a bison skull so old that it appears to have had the brain plate hacked out with stone tools. The robin’s egg and the ants.

My recent impatience with certain trends in nature writing that privilege personal experience is not exactly new. Yes, like most teenagers I thrilled to Thoreau’s exhortation to “Live deep and suck the marrow from life,” but what I want as an adult is not a writer using nature as a jumping-off place for chains of associative thought, despite the aesthetic pleasures of that project. Nature writing that centers the self reinforces the very anthropocentrism that we need so desperately to get past if we have any hope at all of saving our home, the earth.

So I did what I always do when I’m annoyed about something literary, I ordered way too many books, starting with Theory of Water by Leanne Betasamoske Simpson. Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, artist, and musician who has worked for more than 20 years in indigenous land-based education. This alone nearly sidetracked me, her descriptions of this new/old framework for not just educating childern, but being in relationship with them, however, I digress. Theory of Water opens with snow, and skiing, then expands it’s field of vision to encompass the contested waterways of Simpson’s home territory between the Great Lakes of Ontario and Huron. It is a book of nature writing that asks us, over and over, and in many different ways, what our lives would be like if we thought about our relationships with both our human and nonhuman neighbors in a horizontal manner, like water? If we could escape the vertical hierarchies of “the Moderns” in order to think like snow, which sinters after it falls.

In an interview with David Naimon, Simpson explained what fascinates her about sintering:

It’s this transformation that snowflakes go under as soon as they arrive on the land from the sky world. And it’s not a melting process, it’s a slow deformation where the kind of branches of their crystals round, and they become bonded to each other. So … I started to think about this in terms of communities and relationships and solidarity and about how this bonding to each other was a very important step in Indigenous resistance in the past. When I think of my ancestors in the 1700s and the early 1800s, when they were engaging in organizing politically, they walked around and visited with other camps and other communities, often like a very far distance, they shared food, they got to know each other, they developed these bonds of trust. I think that that’s what those snowflakes were reminding me and were teaching me. … reminded me a lot of Anishinaabe political traditions, where you can share territory and you can have separate sovereignties and separate jurisdictions, where we think of beavers and moose as being nations that we share time and space with. So this sintering process, the snowflake is still a snowflake. It’s in slightly different formation, but it’s bonded to its neighbor in a way that doesn’t destroy itself, and it doesn’t destroy its neighbor. It’s not a transformation like melting. It’s not a complete change in form. It’s a slight change in form.

Theory of Water is not Simpson’s story of How Skiing Changed My Thinking. This is not an account that centers on Leanne, although the book is very personal, especially the way she threads her grief over the death of her friend and elder and mentor through the work. This is a book that takes it’s audience seriously, that pushes itself to explore what it might mean to relate horizontally, what it would mean to extend our field of relationality out like water, water that touches everything. Simpson notes that:

In our knowledge system, the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg share everything with all living things and their formations. We are deeply interdependent. We are intercommunal. We are but one form of life in a complex web of cascading lives. We are no more important — and many would say we are less important — than the other beings and systems making up the universe. We have no more ‘rights’ than any other living thing in that web. We are not special, extra or exceptional. We are not owed the lives of other living things.
We are not owed the planet.
We are not owed comfortable lives.
We believe this not for self-involved reasons — not because our continuance depends upon the earth being healthy, not because our lives depend upon this, even if they do — but because, ethically, who do we think we are? Who are we to place ourselves above all other living things, most of which we don’t understand? Who are we to place ourselves first when we struggle and fail so often to do what comes naturally to other forms of life?

Perhaps the most important thing any of us who are not native can learn from our native fellow travellers is this, to keep looking outside the self: to find relationships, to nurture those relationships. We can do that without being assholes about it — without pretending to be “white shamans” or appropriating myths that are not our own. We can do this by holding the mantra “We are not owed the planet. We are not owed comfortable lives” in our hearts, turning that thought over and over, letting it seep into our bones, letting it inform the ways we share resources with our neighbors both human and nonhuman.

Another reason I am often so impatient with recent nature writing is that too much of it is disingenuous. If your work pretends to be innocent, pretends that no one has ever thought about dualism, or what it means to be both an individual AND a part of the whole big blue marble, if your work comes in at this late stage asking a question as stupid as “Is a River Alive?” then I don’t trust you. Part of your job as a writer, especially a writer working on issues of critical importance like these, is to know. Your job is to know better than to assume that your thoughts are original, or that you’re the first one to have considered an issue. There is at least 40 years of theory dismantling the idea of a unitary reality, the idea that “science” is value-neutral, the idea that the truth, like the “virgin wilderness” is out there waiting to be discovered, claimed, defiled. While Simpson is working out of an indigenous tradition not available to many of us as lived experience, we do have ready access to the work of thinkers like Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, Bruno Latour and Phillipe Descola. It’s right there, out in the open, a group of eminent scholars and compatriots, who have been teaching and writing and presenting at conferences for decades about the constructed nature of nature, the relational nature of reality, the negotiations we must make within and across species and life forms.

Why does it matter though? Why does it matter if nature writers are taking the nature of reality into consideration? What is the problem with nice books that tell stories about experiences in nature? about adventures? It matters because if we are to understand how our constructed realities have effected the world, especially in this time of impending climate catastrophe, then as Donna Haraway notes in Staying with the Trouble:

“It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”

I’ll be continuing to unpack some of the really exciting work that came from my rage-buying spree, but for now, let’s leave the last word to Leanne Betasamoske Simpson, who asks, in Theory of Water,

My understanding of mino-bimaadiziwin is that it decenters the idea of the human, decenters the needs, desires, knowledges, and influences of humans and favours forms of life that layer many ecologies, beyond physical bodies.
It is this understanding that leads me to ask: What if, in resisiting colonialism and capitalism, we didn’t focus on being recognized within the knowledge, political and ethical systems of the state, which means being recognized in the category of ‘human’ as defined by the state? What if, instead, we obliterated the categories of gender and human and rights altogether, and created lateral, co-operative systems of sharing, all in service to bringing forth more life?

What if we also took this as our poetics? What if our poetics of nature writing insisted on the obliteraiton of categories? of capitalism? of the state? What if our poetics of nature writing was not just the kind of pretty writing that’s the literary equivalent of that photo of my beautiful home valley, wrapped around a city bus as a marketing tool? As a means of selling this place, selling it based on the lowest common denominator values, the values of tourism?

What if we came up with a poetics of nature writing that was truly radical?