Kidland and Other Poems, by Paul Kingsnorth

A few months ago, I discovered the work of the Dark Mountain Project. It is a collective of artists/scientists/environmentalists with some shared premises: that our society is not actually serious about solving its environmental problems; that we are driving towards a wall of firm ecological limits; that, even with the parts falling off our industrial machine, we will fairly soon hit this wall with a greater or lesser degree of violence; and that any environmental vision that imagines our Western lifestyles continuing unchanged with a few solar panels and hybrid cars is an unworkable fantasy.

The sooner we abandon this fantasy, they argue, and acknowledge the coming cataclysms, the sooner we can start talking about—not solutions, but other visions of society and culture that might work in a world of severe and chaotic weather, depleted soil and oceans, and very little remaining oil.

There are statistics to defend these claims, but if you haven't felt, emotionally, the bankruptcy and destructiveness of the modern industrial project, I doubt they will convince you. For whatever reason, I am already at that place. When I read the Dark Mountain manifesto—and I am not usually the sort of person to read manifestos—I felt page after page the ring of absolute truth.

I still have to get copies of the Project's two anthologies, but I read some of Paul Kingsnorth's contributions—he is one of the Project's founders—and felt a deep affinity. His favorite poets are also mine—Edward Thomas, John Clare, Robinson Jeffers—and he has a belief, which I hope is not delusional, that the arts have something to contribute in changing the consciousness of people who are losing faith, with good reason, in industrial society and its promises.

Kingsnorth has mainly written journalism up to this point, but from his website he seems to see himself fundamentally as a poet. Kidland is his first book of verse. It may seem strange to see a cyclone on the horizon and emerge from your shelter to present the storm with some poems—but, well, the world needs poems along with guides on organic farming; they make life worthwhile whether disaster is a year or centuries away. And in any case disaster is always approaching.

The question remains, though: what kind of art does one make for a society that has no long-term future? If you believe this is a silly question, and aren't convinced about any of the premises I mentioned in the first paragraph, don't bother with Kingsnorth, because his work won't make sense to you. If any of them struck a chord, though, I think his poems will be worth your time.

I read Kidland with pleasure and with disappointment. It is an extremely uneven book: too eager to make points, heavy-handed, and now and then very beautiful. It reminded me of a Robert Musil quote that you can't feel profoundly out of step with your society without doing some damage to yourself. Rage and a sense of disconnectedness from one's potential audience—and from humanity as a whole—injure as much as they inspire. Declining civilizations often cripple their own genuine talents in this way; this is part of how the disease wards off the possibility of healing.

Let me give an example. Here is an excerpt from “Kidland,” the long narrative poem at the center of the book. It is about a man who has set up camp in a forest in Northern England—a “utopia of one,” in his words—because of disgust with the ecological destructiveness of his species. There is also a young city woman, Sarah, who stumbles upon his camp, and a farmer who is abandoning his land in the area. The quote below is from the man in the woods, who is speaking to Sarah:

Where is the urgency? he was saying. Can you not see
how things are? The great forests are burning, the great
   forests
of the world. The breath of your lungs is taken from you
and what do you do? There are a million jewelled creatures
that you will never see, that the world
will never see again. There is poison in the water
and in the air and in every cell that you are made of.
Poison: our gift to the world. Do you ever wonder
What the place would be like without us? Free
I would say, to breathe again.

Every one of these thoughts can find a home in my mind, but when I read these lines they are just words. The music is missing—that something that carries the words into the deeper consciousness and makes them larger than the ideas they contain. “Talk / is cheap,” Sarah responds, a fitting response. This long, ambitious poem then goes on to feature a heavily allegorical rape and a sudden death. As with some of Jeffers' narrative poems with their extremes of emotion and violence, for anyone expecting realism the story can feel a bit ludicrous.

I think it is telling that Kingsnorth's most ambitious poems are, to my mind, the least successful, while the small lyrics are often wonderful. Here, for example, is the poem that follows “Kidland.”

and the trees

and the trees on the hill stand waiting to reclaim the field
and the field lies yellow and cut beneath the sky
and the sky hangs grey above the grassline
and the grasses quieten at the approach of night
and night comes and I rise and move towards the trees
I hope they will have their way soon
and I tell them so

Let that sit for a second. Try to read it slowly if you can; I know the monitor makes it difficult. The thought is the same—the sense of sympathy with the non-human world, the question of what it would be like if we were gone, or at least left things alone. Here, though, the lines sing. They are coming from a deeper place, as they do in another poem about trees, “A chaos of you,” which ends with this description: “They dream, rooted, of the hills beyond their kerbside / and in the autumn, unexpected but meant for the moment, / their dreams are carried away to be born.”

Robinson Jeffers wrote something interesting once in a letter to Mark Van Doren about Van Doren's now-forgotten poetry: “I have a criticism,” he wrote, “and no doubt from me it will surprise you. I think you are too (vulgar word) pessimistic...Civilization is bitter to the singer, it is bitter in that essential way to everyone, but I think we can remember that there was a time before it and will be a time after it, and can keep an important part of us timeless enough to be uncivilized.”

Jeffers knew that he was handling material that was difficult to make poetry out of—but he was rooted in the natural world and also in a historical sense of the ebb and flow of civilizations. He often seems to be flying at an enormous height where he calmly sees the wreck of our modern civilization just a few miles down from the ruins of Rome and Kahokia and Palenque, along with the mountains and rivers that have survived them all. The fact that his society was in decline did not strike him as an unprecedented calamity but part of a longstanding historical pattern.

Kingsnorth's best poems have some of this timelessness, but a great deal of his work is instead filled with an entirely understandable disgust, not just with the world modern man has created, but with humanity itself. There is almost a longing for apocalypse. In several poems, a character stands in for Man and Kingsnorth writes about fundamental flaws in his character: too much greed, too little foresight. Again, one can sympathize, but the attitude makes the poetry captive to a few ideas: “I give you what you ask for, / you ask for more. I leave you / alone in the place, you wreck it all,” says the creator figure in “Changeling.”

Disgust, I think, is hard to make poetry out of—you say temporary things when you are disgusted, and in such moods it is best not to try to make points about humanity. In one of my favorite poems, “Parable of the tares,” though, the disgust deepens into a kind of acceptance, and Kingsnorth captures the fury and distraction of the masses living within a disintegrating system—it is a worthy successor to “Rearmament,” the Jeffers poem that gave the Dark Mountain project its name.

Nothing is permanent, everything pulling apart, cascading
away from the highest peaks. Vibrate the strings of this
   once green world
one final time, make merry, go with laughter
and with fury, almost-masters.

“Almost-masters”—there, I think, is the hand of a real poet. If there are only a few such moments in this book, that's more than most of us ever manage.

I wrote earlier that declining civilizations find ways to resist their own renewal, not only by how they treat artists but also by stunting and distracting the public that might encounter the ideas these thinkers produce. The machinery of distraction, though, requires resources, and eventually it comes apart along with everything else. As the official narrative frays, once marginal ideas begin to get a hearing. Many of these ideas will be crazy; the Dark Mountain Project and Kingsnorth are not. They strike me as some of the few people looking at our likely future with open eyes. As a poet, Kingsnorth is still finding his voice, but he is walking down a genuine path and has my gratitude.

Man and the Natural World, by Keith Thomas

Most people in today's society are profoundly helpless. Try to imagine what you would do if the water stopped coming out of the faucets and filling up your toilet tank. As America and perhaps the global industrial system begin to come apart at the seams, one stops taking such services for granted. One also realizes that potable water comes out of faucets every so often in human history, but then also disappears, usually for centuries at a time.

I would give you some of the specifics, but unfortunately I have been realizing lately that I am a historical illiterate. Virtually everything I know about the human past has been picked up from historical novels, movies, or asides in books about other things. I haven't read a work of pure history in a long time, and it's only recently -- as I realized that modern industrial civilization is just as susceptible to collapse as the ones that have come before it -- that I began to feel the weight of my ignorance.

Which brings us to Man and the Natural World. I found it for a dollar at an outdoor book market and was attracted to the title. Thomas describes changing attitudes to the natural world in early modern Britain, a time period that he sets at approximately 1500-1800. A great many things happened in the relationship between Britons and their natural environment during this period: enclosures of common land, increasing urbanization, the birth of scientific taxonomy, early attempts at conservation, and many others. I read a few pages, saw that Thomas was an engaging writer, and decided to take a first step towards dispelling my massive ignorance of the human past.

Man and the Natural World, as a study of attitudes, contains references to an extraordinary variety of sources, everything from poetry to pamphlets to popular sermons to the log books of merchants and aristocrats. Thomas realizes that to convince people that a certain belief was actually widely held, he must accumulate a fair amount of evidence, and the book often consists of fascinating lists of information. Here is an example from the chapter on botanical nomenclature:

Anyone who wants evidence of the way in which polite sensibilities have changed with the centuries need only consider the briskly anatomical nature of this now suppressed terminology, for in the seventeenth-century countryside there grew black maidenhair, naked ladies, pissabed (or shitabed), mares fart and priest's ballocks. In the herb garden could be found horse pistle and prick madam; while in the orchard the open arse (or medlar) was a popular fruit. Even the black beetle was twitch-ballock and the long-tailed titmouse bum-towel. Many of today's more fanciful flower names—lords and ladies, for example—are deliberate inventions of the nineteenth century, designed to obliterate some unacceptable indecency of the past...

If this passage bores you, don't bother with Man and the Natural World. If you are delighted and a little sad that the pissabed is now called a dandelion, this book will give you endless pleasure. My favorite country-name for a plant was "welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk," now commonly known, apparently, as the houseleek, and still associated with virility in some quarters.

Man and the Natural World is more than a wonderful assemblage; Thomas's arguments slowly emerge out of these progressions of lists, and his points are complicated and sometimes disturbing. For example, one might simply long for earlier times when local people knew plants and their functions. As Thomas demonstrates, though, these names only existed for plants with some obvious human utility, and placed man's needs at the center of their world (pissabed describes the diuretic quality of the plant's roots, whereas the more modern word dandelion apparently comes from the "lion's tooth" shape of the leaves themselves.) Early naturalists who came to rural people to help identify plants soon reached the limits of their knowledge; rural curiosity did not extend to even common plants that had no known human function, so the naturalists had to go around naming and classifying these plants themselves.

"By eroding the old vocabulary, with its rich symbolic overtones," Thomas writes, "the naturalists had completed their onslaught on the long established notion that nature was responsive to human affairs." This may seem like a simple impoverishment, but it also led to the modern attitude, which I am certainly in sympathy with, that parts of the natural world deserve to be left alone whether people can get anything out of them or not.

Another fascinating chapter is on the human attitude towards animals. Thomas shows how urbanization and the keeping of pets led to a sentimental attitude towards animals (he has a list of animal names over time, showing how they got progressively closer to human ones) which then led, often, to the revulsion of city-dwellers towards country people who made a living off these animals. And the country people were, indeed, enormously cruel. Some of the old means of producing tastier meat, including nailing live ducks to a floor by their webs, are as brutal as anything one can find in a modern industrial plant, albeit on a smaller scale.

So which attitude is "correct" -- that of the practical countryman, or the city sentimentalist who refuses to give up the meat and services which these animals provide, but instead, like Gilbert White, simply plants a screen of trees to protect himself from the sight of the slaughterhouse? And to what extent is vegetarianism -- which is my personal choice -- even possible without the global supply lines that provide people in cold climates with a continuous supply of varied food?

These questions arise constantly while reading this book, because Thomas convincingly shows how most modern environmental attitudes actually arose out an increasing estrangement from nature, which then produced a longing for the world that was being destroyed, often without a concomitant willingness to give up the fruits of that destruction.

...by the end of the eighteenth century, a growing number of people had come to find man's ascendancy over nature increasingly abhorrent to their moral and aesthetic sensibilities. This was the human dilemma: how to reconcile the physical requirements of civilization with the new feelings and values which that same civilization had generated...The growth of towns had led to a new longing for the countryside. The progress of cultivation had fostered a taste for weeds, mountains and unsubdued nature. The new-found security from wild animals had generated in increasing concern to protect birds and preserve wild creatures in their natural state. Economic independence of animal power and urban isolation from animal farming had nourished emotional attitudes which were hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with the exploitation of animals by which most people lived.

Obviously, none of these contradictions have gone away. It is generally comfortable city-dwellers that call for environmental protection, are quite convinced about climate change, and then take flights across the country to enjoy the scenery of their favorite national park, all while depending on massive quantities of resources to maintain every aspect of their lifestyle.

And yet some of the attitudes that such people have developed, even tinged with hypocrisy and a lack of practical knowledge, seem to have enduring value: a respect for nature outside its utility to man, compassion for the lives and suffering of animals, and an aesthetic feeling for wild as well as managed nature. As D. H. Lawrence once wrote, the road that modern man has been struggling along has been filled with waste and mistakes, and we may end up going back to where we came from, but it has also been a real journey; there has been some development along with the destruction. When we begin to return to a pre-industrial pattern of life -- I am starting to suspect this will happen forcibly with the end of cheap oil, and probably entail a great deal of suffering -- hopefully there are some lessons that can be saved from the path that we have been on. We also have lots of things to re-learn from past societies, and books like Thomas's (his other classic work about the same early modern period is called Religion and the Decline of Magic) can help illuminate the road that led to the modern world, which we may soon be walking back down.

Paul et Virginie, by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

I became interested in this largely forgotten novel because of a passage in Edward Goldsmith's The Way, which I wrote about a few months ago. In response to arguments about the essential randomness of nature, Goldsmith quotes a passage from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Etudes de la Nature:

If snails, nay bugs, caterpillars and locusts ravage our plains, it is because we destroy the birds of our groves which live upon them; or because on transporting the trees of foreign countries into our own, such as the great chestnut of India, the ebony and others, we have transported with them the eggs of those insects which they nourish, without importing likewise the birds of the same climate which destroy them. Every country has those peculiar to itself, for the preservation of its plants.

This seemed like an unusually wise man, both for our own time and the late 18th century. My French is bad, so I decided not to take on the multi-volume Etudes, which were once famous. At the end of these volumes, though, Bernardin placed the small novel Paul et Virginie, which he considered a distillation of his ideas about the natural order.

The book must still be read in France, because I found several new editions in a foreign language bookstore, although the introduction indicates that it is regarded by French critics as an embarrassment, something like Uncle Tom's Cabin in American literature. Paul et Virginie was an enormous popular sensation in its day, and admired by everyone from Napoleon (it was apparently his favorite book) to Alexander von Humboldt, who had it virtually memorized.

A copy also made its way into the room of little Emma Rouault, who would grow up to become Madame Bovary. This paragraph is probably the only place where English-speakers regularly encounter the book. Saint-Pierre's novel is mentioned at the beginning of the famous fourth chapter -- which, incidentally, I have always found very unconvincing as psychology -- where we hear about the reading that gave rise to Emma's dreams of romance:

She had read Paul and Virginia, and had dreamed of the bamboo cabin, of the Negro Domingo and the dog Fidele; and especially she dreamed that she, too, had a sweet little brother for a devoted friend, and that he climbed trees as tall as church steeples to pluck her their crimson fruit, and came running barefoot over the sand to bring her a bird's nest.

The story is simple. Two women end up alone with young children on the Île de France, a colonial name for modern-day Mauritius: one's husband has died, and the other has been abandoned by her lover. The two decide to live near each other and raise their children together, along with their faithful slaves Marie and Domingue, who grow to love each other. The novel's attitude to slavery seems to be that it's fine as long as the masters are nice to them.

Their son and daughter are Paul and Virginie. They are beautiful little children, in touch with the natural world, free from the corrupting influence of civilization, healthy and vigorous. The earth provides everything they need, and they care for their little piece of land and make it blooming and beautiful. As they get older, possibly from lack of other options, they begin to fall in love with each other. Their mothers want them to marry one day, but Virginie's mother -- in one of those refreshing bits of openness often found in French novels -- is worried the girl will get pregnant too young. She is also concerned that the two will have no money when they grow up. So, when a rich aunt in Paris offers to make Virginie her heir if her mother will send her back to France, the girl is put on a boat. As you can imagine, things begin to go wrong when she leaves the island.

It is, in many ways, a silly novel. In addition to its offensive depiction of slavery, long conversations are devoted to dated social criticism, people burst into tears on virtually every page, and its depiction of natural morality is often ludicrous. Virginie, for example, is unwilling to be saved from a foundering ship because it would require that she strip off some of her clothes in front of a male sailor. And this modesty, which she apparently learned from wandering around the forests of a tropical island, is presented as quite noble and right; only a corrupt, civilized woman would expose herself so shamelessly to save her life.

And yet, as easy as it is to mock, the book, somehow, is not dead. Many parts, to my surprise, are still extraordinarily beautiful. For one, the descriptions. The forests are painted with wonderful felicity, heightened for me by the lovely feel of certain French words: "La rivière qui coule en bouillonnant sur un lit de roche..." ("The river which runs foaming over a bed of rock..." but how inadequate "foaming" or "bubbling" feels in the face of a word like "bouillonnant"!) I loved the image of the palms rising above the other trees, and looking from above like a second forest planted on the ground of the lower canopy.

So -- if you wipe away the lugubrious melodrama and all the criticism of civilization -- which none of Saint-Pierre's city readers, from Napoleon down, seem to have taken very seriously -- something genuine still remains, and that something is a sense of reverence for the tropical landscape. Virginie, for example, will never eat a fruit without making sure that she places its seeds in good soil. Her intuition, her natural sense of gratitude, tells her that this is somehow part of the arrangement. When she writes a letter to her family from France, she makes sure she includes some European seeds, which, despite Paul's attentions, don't flourish on the climate of the island.

As you can tell, Bernardin's sense of realism is much better with plants than people -- none of the characters in this little novel are particularly real, but the sense of integration between their lives and the world around them, the respect for the terms on which the gift of abundance is given -- all of these still feel genuine, and continue to give the myth of Paul et Virginie a certain power.

D. H. Lawrence mentioned Saint-Pierre in the chapter on Hector St. John de Crevecoeur from Studies in Classic American Literature. He names him in a list of all of the other back-to-nature writers. "I used to admire my head off," he writes, "before I tiptoed into the Wilds and saw the shacks of the Homesteaders ... Poor haggard drudge, like a ghost wailing in the wilderness, nine times out of ten.

"Hector St. John, you have lied to me. You lied even more scurrilously to yourself ... Jean Jacques, Bernardin de St Pierre, Chateaubriand, exquisite Francois Le Vaillant, you lying little lot, with your Nature-Sweet-and-Pure!"

Lawrence, I must admit, is right. There is lying in this book, which is why every type of person from dictators to dreamy little provincial girls have found what they were looking for in its pages. But, as Lawrence continues, "Crevecoeur was an artist as well as a liar, otherwise we would not have bothered with him," and the same can be said of Bernardin. What remains true in this book is worth more, for me, than all of the dry ironies of Madame Bovary.

Randall Jarrell once wrote that "Soon we shall know everything the eighteenth century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us." Well, it is worth blunting your sense of the ridiculous (temporarily), finding your inner Emma Rouault, and trying to rediscover some of what Paul et Virginie has to teach.

The Way: An Ecological World-View, by Edward Goldsmith

Edward Goldsmith, who passed away a few years ago, was quite famous in England, where he founded The Ecologist in 1970 and was instrumental in the creation of the Green Party. The Way: An Ecological World-View is his grand summation; it took him twenty years to write, and with appendix and bibliography is 500 pages long.

It is not well-known in America, where the University of Georgia Press publishes it. I first saw the book mentioned in The Revenge of Gaia, by James Lovelock. Lovelock was listing plans to combat catastrophic climate change, including spraying particulate matter in the atmosphere and building a sunshade in space. After several increasingly terrifying proposals, Lovelock took a step back and said that, since we couldn't possibly predict the consequences of such massive bioengineering projects, it might be better if we returned to the kind of modest, responsible lives our ancestors once lived, as his friend Edward Goldsmith recommended in The Way. I decided immediately to go out and read it, since this seemed like a saner strategy than blocking out the sun.

The Way is a book for determined readers. First of all, to get past the first few chapters, you pretty much need to already be convinced of several things: that we are on the brink of an ecological collapse; that the past two hundreds years of industrial development have been a doubtful blessing for humans and the environment; and that we need to learn a great deal from certain pre-industrial societies and their relationship with the planet if we want any chance at decent survival.

Even if you are convinced of these things, and I am, Goldsmith does not make your work easy. You have to push through a mass of neologisms – heterotelic, chreods, homeorhetic – which only gradually sink in and then begin to seem useful. The early chapters are filled with cross-references – one page in chapter two, for example, refers a reader to five other chapters as well as the appendix for further development of ideas. It can seem like a maddening tangle.

This tangle, even if it might not be the best way to attract an audience, does end up serving a function. I think The Way is trying to be non-linear, associative, and extensively inter-linked as a mirror of the ecological worldview it is trying to describe. Each chapter is named after a certain principle – for example, “Natural systems are homeostatic” – that is less a link in an argument than a point in a constellation (most chapters are only a few pages long). Goldsmith wants to show how everything is connected – from the move away from early Earth-based religions to the breakdown of modern urban communities – and he jumps continually from one subject to another. The connections between these areas are not usually defended with statistics; they simply exist together in space, and the lines form between them (if they do) through a kind of intuition.

I eventually accepted that Goldsmith's goal was not to convince skeptics or suggest a definite course of action. As with Thoreau, the goal is not intellectual coherence but the communication of a certain spirit - a way of approaching the natural world - that can embrace a variety of responses. It is closer to religious conversion than argumentation. To his credit, Goldsmith realizes this:

Science (he writes) has not banished faith. It has substituted faith in modern science for faith in conventional religion. Ecology, with which we must replace it, is also a faith. It is a faith in the wisdom of those forces that created the natural world and the cosmos of which it is part; it is a faith in the latter's ability to provide us with extraordinary benefits — those required to satisfy our fundamental needs. It is a faith in our capacity to develop cultural patterns that can enable us to maintain its integrity and stability.

Unfortunately, Goldsmith forgets that certain citadels do not fall easily to the weapons of faith. He opens the book by trying to take down what he sees as the reductionistic assumptions of modern science. It is an attempt filled with logical holes that even a sympathetic reader can't fail to notice. Goldsmith begins by bringing up various mathematical models used in ecology, and points out that they cannot capture all aspects of reality (no one expects models to do this). In criticizing the Markovian mathematical formula used to predict ecological succession towards climax, he doesn't bother to indicate just what crucial aspect of reality is being left out. He attacks the neo-Darwinian explanation of evolution brought about through random mutations, but can't explain by what other mechanism it might take place.

Look at the word that I used, though, quite unconsciously: “mechanism.” These are the only kinds of explanations that most people accept as sound: cause-and-effect, the domino hitting the next in the line. But most natural processes do not work in this way. Goldsmith provides fascinating examples, like the relationship between salmon and mosquito larvae, and lays out the staggering array of complicated feedbacks and influences on what would seem to be a simple correlation.

His explanation is not intellectually satisfying; it is, in fact, not an explanation at all, but a gesture towards a mystery. A part of my mind – and most modern minds, I suspect – reflexively struggles against such mysteries and wants to do with away with them. When I encounter Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, or Goldsmith's argument that an ecosystem carefully coordinates its own development, or a description of Cairnsian mutations, where bacteria seem to produce certain beneficial genetic changes in a non-random manner, I am constantly sputtering, “But how can these things happen? Who's in control of it?”

Goldsmith cannot supply the kind of evidence that would satisfy this part of my brain. A similar sense of intellectual dissatisfaction occurs when theologians argue with atheistic philosophers, or intelligent design advocates with Darwinists. The former simply look stupid: they do not have an explanation to duel with the other one, only a sense that something crucial is being left out of the other's world-view - and while I might still crave such explanations, I'm not so sure that they're wrong.

So an ecologist won't be able to say exactly what a new chemical will do to our bodies and to the natural world over the next hundred years. Instead, she might counsel a spirit of caution before we introduce substances with no precedent into our ecosystem. And she will inevitably seem muddleheaded in comparison to a scientist who has run laboratory tests that find no evidence of harm, until twenty years later people find that all of the earthworms are dying – or the bees – or the swallows – and that this is having unexpected and cascading consequences for the biosphere. It is only when the network begins to collapse that we can see how we have disturbed it. And then, maybe, we begin to learn a little humility.

As Tim Parks said in our old interview, people aren't convinced by reasons; they become convinced when the bad news starts to pile up. As the modern belief in endless progress and constant development through technology yields increasingly useless marvels to go along with mounting environmental catastrophes, people, little by little, are beginning to consider other visions of being. Goldsmith's instinct is to look back to what he calls “vernacular societies” – from the ancient Greeks to Vedic Indians to African tribesmen – and draw inspiration from their ways of life. He doesn't spend time considering the possibility of limitless green energy through various as-yet-uninvented technologies. He writes, quite reasonably, that it is presumptuous "to postulate an ideal society for which there is no precedent in the human experience on this planet and whose biological, social and ecological viability has never been demonstrated."

Instead, the book provides examples of how philosophy and ritual helped keep these small human communities, both hunter-gatherer and agrarian, in balance with their environment for thousands of years. These models are not likely to suggest any practical steps to the modern reader – the divergence between the societies he describes and ours is simply too huge – but I'm glad that Goldsmith insisted on following his ideas to their natural conclusions. It gives the book a certain purity of spirit. Few people could hope to live up to this spirit (and certainly not a man typing away at night on a laptop) but it remains a true ideal, one that we can keep striving to make manifest in our various impure ways.

When I finished this book, and what began as confusion had turned to admiration, I remembered a passage from Chuang Tzu, when he describes Hui Tzu's objections to his ideas:

“I have a big tree called a shu. Its trunk is too gnarled and bumpy to apply a measuring line to, its branches too bent and twisty to match up to a compass or square. You could stand it by the road and no carpenter would look at it twice. Your words, too, are big and useless, and so everyone alike spurns them.”

Remember, though, that animals love the hollows of a tree – a gnarled trunk will always be more full of life than a smooth one. The Way is stuffed with a lifetime's reading, crankiness, and ideas both deeply felt and poorly defended. I finished it a month ago, and have found myself continually flipping back to odd spots and finding more and more to explore. If the world created by the carpenters and their measuring lines doesn't strike you as a satisfactory place anymore, it is worth your time.

"Not Man Apart": George Dennison and Edwin Muir

Robinson Jeffers, a disagreeable poet but unquestionably a great one, spent much of his life hectoring a dwindling audience that human beings need to stop being concerned so exclusively with their own affairs, and turn their attention instead to "the wholeness of life and things" -- the natural world of sea and rocks and animals that Jeffers described so beautifully. Love that, he wrote, not man apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken.

I have read two books recently that show, in very different ways, what this sense of wholeness might look like. One is the autobiography of Edwin Muir, a Scottish poet and translator (you may have seen his name on early editions of Kafka); the other is George Dennison's novella Shawno about his life in rural Maine with his family, his neighbors, and his dog Shawno.

The first hundred pages of Muir's biography describe his childhood on the Orkney Islands in a largely self-sufficient farming community. The narrative drifts through early memories: family songs and first scraps of text, walking through the legs of the cows in the field, the butchering of a pig, and the boats that went from one little island to another.

Eventually, when rents go up, the Muirs have to leave for Glasgow, a move that brings about the collapse of their family. As the Orkney section of the book comes to a close, Muir reflects for the first time on the value of the life they had to abandon:

I cannot say how much my idea of a good life was influenced by my early upbringing, but it seems to me that the life of the little island of Wyre was a good one, and that its sins were sins of the flesh, which are excusable, and not sins of the spirit. The farmers did not know ambition and the petty torments of ambition; they did not realize what competition was, though they lived at the end of Queen Victoria's reign; they helped one another with their work when help was required, following the old usage; they had a culture made up of legend, folk-song, and the poetry and prose of the Bible; they had customs which sanctioned their instinctive feelings for the earth; their life was an order, and a good order.

I wouldn't trust a statement like this if it was not preceded by a hundred pages that describe, with great specificity, the elements of this order, from sowing seeds to salting pork. The writing is often beautiful, but its most impressive quality is a sense of truthfulness. As T.S Eliot wrote in his introduction to Muir's poems, "Utter honesty with oneself and with the world is no more common among men of letters than among men of other occupations. I stress this unmistakable integrity, because I came to recognise it in Edwin Muir's work as well as in the man himself."

Dennison's work, to me, gives off a similar feeling of honesty. Even though Shawno is technically fiction, very little of it feels invented, and it hews pretty close to the facts of Dennison's life. After many years in New York, he moved with his family to the little town of Temple in the Maine countryside, and his later works all take place in this setting. Today, he is best known (if at all) for The Lives of Children, a wonderful book about teaching in a free school in New York for poor children. Dennison devoted the rest of his life to fiction, and produced much good work before his early death from cancer.

Unlike Muir's Orcadian childhood, which could just as easily have taken place centuries ago instead of the early 20th century, Shawno is firmly set in the modern world. The family drives to the grocery store to get food and occasionally watches TV at night. But there is, throughout, a sense of community that seems to belong to an older world. This community includes not just the people of Temple but all of the animals, tamed and wild, that share the town with them. Everyone who grows food keeps a dog or, as Dennison writes, "the woodchucks take it all," and these animals, including all of Temple's deer and finches and porcupine, keep crossing paths with each other and the town's human residents.


The book has a meandering quality, moving from descriptions of the creek to the general store to a flashback describing Shawno's days in New York. It is only at the end that a reader realizes how skilfully Dennison has gone about providing the knowledge needed to understand the story's conclusion.

One of the wonderful things about the human characters in Shawno (mostly Dennison's country neighbors, as well as a few other dislocated artists) is the feeling of competence that comes off of them. Today, when all most of us possess is an ephemeral competence involving the manipulation of gadgetry and the navigation of arbitrary man-made procedures, the characters in Shawno can drive posts for a cabin, hunt, replace shingles on a roof, and sugar the maples on their land. Their knowledge grows out of a life lived close to natural cycles, and increases their sense of connectedness with the world rather than drawing them further into themselves. They can also fiddle and draw and sing, the sort of skills that come from generating art and entertainment for yourself instead of always having them supplied to you.

Dennison describes all of this work and play with care and respect. One character sketch, of the man who runs the town's general store, contains a line that I think helps locate the achievement of both of these writers.

Of the men in the village he was certainly the least rural. He had grown up on a farm, loved to hunt and fish, play poker, drink whiskey, and swap yarns. But he had gone away to college, and then to business school, and had worked in Boston for three years. He was not just clever or smart but was extremely intelligent, with a meticulous, lively, retentive mind. He had come home not because he couldn't make a go of things in the city but because he loved the countryside and sorely missed the people. He subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, read many periodicals, was interested in politics and controversy and changing customs. When I met him his three children were away at college. We disagreed irreconcilably on politics. I was aware of his forbearance and was grateful for it. And I was impressed by his wit, and by his kindliness, as when he would allow certain impoverished children to cluster for long, long minutes before the candy rack, blocking his narrow aisle; and as when he built a ramp for the wheelchair of a neighbor who could no longer walk but was still alert and lively. He was not a happy man. He drank too much to be healthy, and his powers of mind by and large went unused. Yet one could sense in him a bedrock of contentment, and a correct choice of place and work.

"A bedrock of contentment" -- like Muir, Dennison is always searching for this sense of rightness, and the vision of a good life that underlies both of these books goes beyond the narrow circle of human concerns to include our relationship with the natural world, and some sense of our proper place in the "good order" that Muir found in the Orkneys.

As you can probably tell, neither writer has much sense of humor, and Dennison's writing in particular is sometimes stiff and high-toned (I usually prefer my "impoverished children" to be old-fashioned poor kids). There are parts of his other books -- Luisa Domic, for example, about a Chilean refugee from the Pinochet takeover -- where I find him sort of insufferable. There is, though, a seriousness and dignity in these two writers that is a much more valuable quality than irony, which is easy enough to find elsewhere. Muir is simply a great artist, and everything I have read by him, from essays to poetry, has been illuminating. I think Shawno is the best fiction that Dennison ever wrote, and along with Jimenez's Platero y yo is probably the best book I have read about a man's relationship with an animal.

It is depressing but in some ways unsurprising that both of these books, along with Muir's poetry, are entirely out of print. As a society, I think we are a little scared of what they have to tell us. Search them out, though. If we want to understand why our civilization keeps absorbing more and more resources while generating less and less human satisfaction, these are the visions we will have to confront, and learn from.

Ensouling Language, by Stephen Harrod Buhner

Among Gandhi’s thousands of articles and pamphlets, written in English and Gujurati, are several on sanitation. “A small spade is the means of salvation from a great nuisance,” Gandhi writes in one article. “In his book on rural hygiene, Dr. Poore says that excreta should be buried in earth no deeper than nine to twelve inches. The author contends that the superficial earth is charged with minute life, which, together with light and air which easily penetrate it, turn the excreta into good soft sweet-smelling soil within a week. Any villager can test this for himself.”

I felt a strange charge when reading these passages. This is how to write, I thought - this is how to approach life. Gandhi doesn’t bully people with rhetoric or his own authority. He does his research, he checks everything for himself. I would bet my life he dug his own nine-to-twelve inch latrines. Notice the use of “good” and “sweet-smelling,” too, which no scientist would write. There is always an emotional and moral element to Gandhi’s writing, and an underlying vision of a society where people respect each other and live responsibly on the earth.

To leave your waste is “a sin against God and humanity,” he writes. Even in this tiny pamphlet, he is trying to bring about “the restoration of the holy to everyday life,” using a subject that most of us have no inclination to think about.

The last quote – “the restoration of the holy” – is from Stephen Harrod Buhner’s wonderful book on writing, which arrived unsolicited on my doorstep a few months ago. When I started reading it, I remembered Gandhi’s piece, and my old thought that no good piece of writing is ever just about its nominal topic. Buhner’s book argues that any subject can be a doorway to the larger truths of existence, as long as the writer has developed a real emotional connection with his material - although some subjects, of course, are more likely to produce such a connection than others.

Buhner begins with the observation that the majority of books sold today are non-fiction, and not memoirs and histories and other such “serious” books, but genre nonfiction: books on gardening, trail guides, identifying birds, losing weight, etc. To a large extent, this is what people actually read. “There is no reason,” Buhner says, “that the art of writing should neglect the largest segment of the nonfiction field. Well, no reputable reason.”

He then quotes from how-to books like James Krenov’s The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking, and shows how the writer is creating “something that is more than the sum of the parts, something that touches on the depths of the human and the human relationship to the universe around her” – the same thing that I felt in those lines from Gandhi. This is an experience traditionally only associated with belletristic writing – poetry, novels, plays – and not even seen as a goal in more information-oriented work.

Buhner’s book describes how any writer, even one writing about, say, adobe walls, can achieve the sense of expansion - of traveling into larger worlds - that has always marked the best art. And although the subject is nonfiction, what Buhner has to say applies to serious writing of any kind.

Buhner, who is an herbalist as well as a writer, expressed his guiding principle in an earlier book, The Lost Language of Plants: “I do not believe we can solve the environmental problems facing us,” he wrote, “unless we develop our capacity for feeling and our empathy for other life-forms to the same degree that we have developed our facility for thought.”

Although it never struck me as important before, I noticed once that many of my favorite writers had a sense that consciousness was not limited to human beings. Reading their books, you felt life coming from everywhere. Edward Thomas’s winds whistle their joy or pain through cracks in the wall. Transtromer never doubts that plants have thoughts, and the oak tree that speaks to Prince Andrei in War and Peace is as important as any human character. Nicholson Baker, one of the few modern writers I follow with interest, can feel life coming up through old paper straws and other products of industrial civilization.

This experience is commonly known as the pathetic fallacy. Although ordinary people continue, stubbornly, to experience the world in this way, our culture’s intellectual and artistic leaders often see it, at best, as a useful delusion for poets. To argue that we can experience genuine communication with the non-human world without generating the message ourselves, one has to go against the entire current of our society and, by extension, our language. Modern artists who have felt the reality of such messages have often had to invent or procure their own words for it. Hopkins talked about inscape and instress, Lorca about duende. Buhner has to go back to the Greeks.

It is this exact exchange [between the human and non-human] they called aisthesis. For the ancient Greeks, the organ of aisthesis, that is, the part of us that is capable of accessing this experience, is the human heart — aisthesis comes directly out of our capacity to feel. The ancient Greeks insisted this experience could be shared with any part of the world, even the world itself, insisted there could be an invisible, sensorial touching between the human and nonhuman in such moments. And during those moments, understandings, perceptions, and insights that can be obtained no other way flow into us.

Buhner has several writing exercises – some of the very few I have ever found useful – to help get into a state of mind where such a stream of understanding might pass between you and some part of the world. The first step is getting a sense of what might have deep resonance for you: locating your loves and hates, your heroes, and the words and books that have already put down roots in your spirit.

Bertram Dobell, in his introduction to Thomas Traherne’s Centuries, wrote that “utter sincerity of thought, though it is not indeed the only requisite for a great writer, is yet, I think, the one indispensable quality without which all others are useless.” Buhner’s book, as well as being a clear example of this sincerity, is a forceful reminder that anything we produce without this core of conviction is probably going to be worthless. After all, most pieces of writing today – all the millions of articles and blog posts and novels – are not failed shots at greatness but successful attempts to achieve petty objectives.

But surely, one might say, not every piece of writing needs to be so important. Sometimes you need your guilty pleasures, your brainless time; there has to be something that fulfills that function. I don’t think Buhner would agree, and I don’t either. If you can find beauty anywhere, you also can’t forgive ugliness and thoughtlessness in any form. I am simply never in the mood to be lied to. From bad movies to the design of office buildings, the belief that large areas of our culture are inconsequential will, I'm convinced, eventually degrade our ability to find the truth even in the things that we do value.

Beyond the obvious crap, of course, there are the well-intentioned attempts to communicate information and ideas, provide intelligent diversion. Buhner has little tolerance for writing of this sort, motivated by no emotional charge. There is an obvious objection to this, but I will let it be made by a smarter man. Here is James Agee in his review of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard:

On the charge of lifelessness [he writes] I can only say that in my opinion there are two main kinds of life in art, not just one. The warmer, richer kind comes, invariably, from the kind of artist who works from far inside himself and his creatures. For the other kind, we can thank the good observer. Brackett and Wilder apparently have little if any gift from working from inside, but they are first rate observers, and their films are full of that kind of life. It is true, I think, that they fail to make much of the powerful tragic possibilities which are inherent in their story; they don’t even explore much of the deep anguish and pathos which are still more richly inherent, though they often reveal it, quickly and brilliantly. But this does not seem to me a shameful kind of failure, if indeed it is proper to call it a failure at all: they are simply not the men for such a job, nor was this the kind of job they were trying to do. But they are beautifully equipped to do the cold, exact, adroit, sardonic job they have done; and artists who, consciously or unconsciously, learn to be true to their limitations as well as to their gifts, deserve a kind of gratitude and respect they much too seldom get.

There is a whole world of Wilder’s kind of art that Buhner has no time for, and would probably not consider art at all (Roth, for example, whom I respect, is dismissed with a line). But I think this book is a necessary corrective, because today the kind of observational art that Agee describes gets far too much rather than too little respect. It is what goes into most television, even the best stuff, where wit and ingenuity are pretty much the entirety of what’s on display. It is also the same kind of “intelligence” that goes into our value-free mainstream political analysis.

So if Buhner dismisses too much – and takes too many potshots at MFA programs and the NY literary scene – I forgive him. Many of his concepts are taken, openly, from other thinkers – Stafford, Bly, and Gardner, mostly – but the synthesis is impressive, the writing is consistently excellent, and the depth and variety and seriousness of his reading are an inspiration (the book would be worth reading for the quotes alone). Buhner's book also meets its own criterion; by going deep enough into its subject, it gives us glimpses of the whole world and man's relationship to it, and a measure of greatness is achieved simply by telling our society what it most urgently needs to hear right now.

You might raise an eyebrow at the title (the publisher’s decision – Buhner’s preferred title is Inhabiting the Word) and by the author’s involvement with something called the Institute of Gaian Studies. I had those reactions at first, and they are entirely to my discredit. Remember that only time has given people like Blake and Tolstoy their veneer of respectability, and that kneejerk skepticism often keeps us from precisely the people who have something new to teach us. Renewal, if it comes for our society, is going to come from the margins. We just need to go seek it out.