In our Nature: Stories from the Wildness - Book Report/Review Example

and Sur Your Due In wildness we found. (Stories of nature, which show our place in nature In wildness is the preservation of the world." (Thoreau) "Consult the genius of the place in all; That tells the waters or to rise, or fall; Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale Or scoops in circling theatres the vale; Calls in the country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades, Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines; Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs." (Pope) I choose this poem to begin this essay because, although not directly related to our subject, it sheds light on aspects which I feel are very important to lay the ground to our analysis. The poem talks of the genius loci, or the spirit of the place. This refers to the "unique, distinctive and cherished aspects of a place" (wiki). The concept implies that a place is more than a physical location: it has also an essence which is sometimes personified in folk tales, by such creatures as faeries, gnomes or other fantastic creatures. At the core of this concept lies the important idea that places are somewhat like people, and therefore, can be suggested to possess similar traits to people. This idea gains considerable depth if we think of the story Barred Owl (Offutt). This story is arguably about displaced identities and homesickness, as it revolves about two Kentuckians who get acquainted in Colorado, a place where they've found themselves transplanted to. There, they find themselves somehow alienated and longing from the Wild from which they came; Travis has a fixation for collecting arrow ends and bird wings, so when he finds a dead Owl on the road, he asks the narrator's help to assist him in stuffing the animal, since he somewhat shamefully admits he can't even kill a fly. The narrator, after working at the dead bird claims that he had "never seen a creature so clean on the outside and so tore up on the inside", and he appears to recognize himself on the creature, or so we're hinted. Travis, who had claimed that "A barred owl getting this far west ain't right" ends up killing himself with an arrowhead he'd found. We're left to wonder upon the parallel between the bird had strayed too far from his home, and fatefully lost its way; and, in a similar manner, the Kentuckian who coveted its pelt ended up meeting and identical destiny. This is a story that captures the complexities of the dangerous and calming side of the wild, but it's ultimately a story about how the places we come from can help to define who we are; and how sometimes we can't allow ourselves to be anything else. Trough this story, the notion that we're less unencumbered by our origins and our roots begun to dawn upon myself, a notion which I'll try to develop along this paper, as well as the important awareness of the dramatic confront of man with nature, and the unbounded destructiveness which can arise from the unbalanced interaction of both. Let's take a moment to reflect upon the concepts of "Wild" and "Wildness". At the free encyclopedia, we can find the following definition, which is very illustrative: "Wildness (the method) is most clearly found in wilderness (a place where wildness can work uninterrupted), causing everything there to become wild (the state achieved in each organism after wildness). Wildness explores behaviours, thoughts and processes irrespective of human bounds, and is typically free and daring. It nourishes biodiversity, sustainable growth and the development of a web of ecology."(wiki) From this definition, we can assess that wildness is a state or mind, or rather, the natural state in which animals live. Wild is untamed behaviour, and therefore free. These concepts manifest in wilderness, which is a place unaffected by civilization. Wild is therefore, the abstract "genius loci" that can be found in the Wilderness, and wildness is the instinct trough with it manifests. This is a somewhat abstract notion that we'll try to develop further along. Man lives in a state which is not natural; we have severed our roots and now it appears that we slowly begin to wither. Civilization is built upon an artificial state, and we struggle against our nature, and stem away from our intuition, while other animals use the wildness to establish their position within an environment. Animals have instincts that link them to the land and which defines their law. We, on the other hand, integrate many rules, beliefs and boundaries in our behaviour and thought patters which are artificially devised. This may be a fundamental cause to many psychological problems that we now face. Currently there is an area called ecopsychology which studies the implications and limits of such connection, and its political and practical implications intend to show us ways to heal our alienation, and develop and overall more balanced and sane society. In the preface to the book of collected short stories "In our Nature", Donna Seaman argues that "In spite of our machines, our plastics, and our artificial ingredients, we are as much a part of nature as any other animal () We need to feed our senses with sunshine and wind, night and rain, hills, tress and flowing water". Even if sometimes it seems as tough our lives are all about traffic jams, pollution, stress and technology, we can not neglect the severed bond which is a likely cause of our spiritual sickness, of the characteristic melancholy and apathy which defines the times we live in; of the unexplained longing that we all feel and which we try to suppress by stuffing ourselves with hollow entertainment, mere objects and futilities which do not fulfil our hearts in the ways that nature can. Because, nature is where we come from, so it's therefore who we are. Deny it as we might, we'd only be fooling ourselves. In the text by Rick Bass that is also reprinted in the same anthology, we're presented with the story of an ad executive reflecting upon his childhood. He was part of a gang who regularly beat up a nature "geek", to whom they referred to as "Swamp Boy". The kid had a strong connection to his environment, and somehow didn't seem to be upset, and although he did ran from his antagonists, he would not go out of his way to avoid them. He loved to wander down to a pond called Hidden Lake, to catch frogs and tadpoles. His innocent and passionate connection to nature apparently annoyed his stalkers to no end; in his present, the narrator wonders if they simply didn't want to be friends with him (which is a keen insight, given the fact that it's generally what bullies want from their victims). Actually, it seems as tough the narrator does figure that, to some degree, there was a level of friendship involved, or at least a hidden admiration, in their relentless pursuits: "A ripple blew across the water - a slight mystery in the wind or a subtle swamp movement just beneath the surface. I could feel some essence, a truth, down in the soil beneath my feet - but I'd catch myself before saying to the other boys, "Let's go." Instead of jumping into the water, or giving myself up to the search for whatever that living essence was beneath me, I watched."(Bass) He describes a magical place swamp boy usually went to, where a herd of buffalo had left a circular scar on the ground, as a result of their characteristic grouped defensive stance. "The trees, before they were cut down, told this story. () Swamp Boy could feel these things as he moved across the prairie." In the present, from where the story is told, we learn that those woods where Swamp Boy roamed were long ago turned into buildings. We also learn that the narrator, who now works in a skyscraper, admits that he did feel friendship for the boy, and learned many things about nature just by watching him, and actually seemed to have also become attuned to it, as he admitted "the beat of the earth's heart" made him feel regrets for not standing up for the boy. What all on this stands, to the effect of our analysis, is that there's a sort of hidden, silent wisdom that is characteristic and intrinsic of Nature, a wisdom that despite natural, we're not attuned to, as a result of our civilisation conditioning us. It certainly makes us wonder at the relativity of the values which we're imparted with from childhood, as makes us wonder as well what's of real importance in this life. Let's go thus back to the concept of ecopsychology, which we presented earlier in this paper. The basic idea underlining this field of enquiry is that there is a synergistic relation between the well being of the planet and personal well being, and that the needs of one are relevant to the other. Our mind is imbibed not only in the social world, but also the natural world, and our mental health is severely disturbed if we deprive ourselves from the green. A common practice in ecopsychology is to remove the patients from office buildings and take them outside for a walk in the woods, of even a walk in the park; this is because it has been found in studies that simply looking at pictures of nature can ease the mind, and this a phenomenon that can be explained by our genetic backgrounds, because while industrialization is a somewhat recent invention, it was preceded by many thousand years of communion with nature, and this arcane relationship is therefore impressed in the very fabric of our being. In the foreword to "A Sense of Place: The Artist and the American Landscape", David Bower puts it this way: "The places that we have roots in, and the flavor of their light and sound and feel when things are right in those places, are the wellsprings of our serenity." (Gussow) Trough the book, the author presents us with a collection of paintings which range from the Earliest depiction of America to contemporary American masterpieces. For each picture, we're presented with a description in the artist's own words of the scene that inspired the painting, and the whole of the pictures with the accompanying texts are therefore documents to the impact that the landscape has had on the imagination of the artists and on the collective imaginary, trough their representation. There's a particular quote by George Catlin which is illustrative of this point: "No man's imagination with all the aids of description that can be given to it, can ever picture the beauty and wildness of scenes that may be daily witnessed in this romantic country". This, simply put, acknowledges for the fact that, no matter how beautiful the rendering that a man can make, it will always pale in comparison to the natural scenario from which it derived. It is widely known that many creators draw their inspiration from nature, a fact that most artists proudly assume as the underlying force beneath their work. Jack Kerouac, for instance, whom we all know as a precursor of the beat generation, is a fine example of such attitude. Trough his life, we roamed the lands, backpacking to his heart's content, and never settling down one single place, but rather living an on-going quest for the unspeakable, which he would then try to articulate within his works: "I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstacy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass." (Kerouac) It was in Nature that we found ourselves. And it is trough Nature that we can find out who we really are, and only in Nature can we unbound from the shackles of society which restrain us, even when we're not aware of it. Only thus can we truly be free, because if there is a certain path to liberation, it must certainly thread along the wide open spaces on the unscathed earth. Works Cited: Bass, Rick. Swamp Boy. In Seaman, Donna, 2000. Gussow, A. A Sense of Place: The Artist and the American Landscape. Island Press, 1997 Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York: Penguin Books., 1976 Offut, Chris. Barred Owl. In Seaman, Donna, 2000. Pope, Alexander. Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington Seaman, Donna. In our Nature: Stories from the Wildness, New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishers, 2000 "Spirit of Place". Wikipedia. Accessed 25/05/06. Thoreau, Henry David. "Walking". Excursions, 1873. Read More