Page 38 - WTP Vol. XIII #3

Poet Ezra Pound once opined that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” He was wrong. Nature doesn’t “do” symbols. Its narratives are all nonfiction; they can’t be otherwise. Which does not suggest they’re easy to parse. Quite the opposite.
I’ve had self-delusory moments, especially in truly wild landscapes, when I surmised that I shared in the wholeness and harmony of the natural world. I can’t remember how I came upon it, but I remember my enthusiastic response to a letter from Romain Rolland to Sigmund Freud, in which the French writer used the phrase “oceanic feeling,” describing as best he could “a sensation of eternity,” a feeling of “being one with the external world as a whole.”
Yes, I’ve known that feeling. As a younger man.
Walking our dogs on this wintry Vermont morning, I was struck by a counter-intuition. Oddly enough,
it didn’t dismay me as much as I’d have guessed
it would, in part, perhaps, because I’d had similar prior inklings without dwelling on them in this focused way.
We’ve lived a long, long time in this place, some 70 miles south of the Québec border. We are surrounded by old mountains, grown rounded over millenia. Cellar holes and rock walls are dispersed throughout these woods, relics of a time when farming was by far the principal mode of life in these parts. Refrigeration changed the game. Australia and New Zealand did
us out of sheep, the great West out of cattle. In 1900, Vermont was 85 percent cleared land, mostly tillage and pasture, and 15 percent woods. Those propor- tions are reversed now.
But back to that walk with the dogs. A cluster of sweet fern, rampant along the dirt road, caught my attention for no discernible reason, and, speaking of symbols, that mental lightbulb, an idea as it used to be implied in old cartoons and comic books, flashed on. By its beam I saw that everything in nature, not merely in my home state but everywhere, has its own idiosyncratic, multi-tiered story: that shock of fern, each blade of our meadow’s grass, a familiar, striated boulder, oak, puddle, clot of earth, solitary remnant fruit on the wild grapevine, fleck of green-shield mica. Onward ad infinitum.
Never had the fallacy of certain heroes’ thoughts seemed so obvious. Coleridge could testify to the one life within us and abroad/ Which meets all motion
and becomes its soul,/ A light in sound, a sound-like power in light/ Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere. The often mocked but brilliant, prophet- ic Transcendental feminist Margaret Fuller rightly objected to America’s “male” vision of conquering the land, but her countervailing “feminine” ideal insisted on harmony with nature, a view that depended on her notion of it as “a cultivated garden.” This morn- ing, it was clearer to me than ever that the world of capital-N Nature scarcely displays synchrony, synes- thesia, harmony, susceptibility to cultivation. It can’t be so tidily reduced, because it contains too many tales, in fact an infinite number, and not a single one can truly be read.
Like many others, I have an impulse to the verbal that’s all but irrepressible. Storytelling is in
my blood. At the same time, I commit myself to honesty, for the most part successfully, mean- ing I won’t simply invent (or more bluntly, lie) unless I’ve made it clear that my intentions are fictional. Pound might have imagined focusing on a single natural object to make adequate testi- mony to whatever needed it. Yet in my writing or anywhere, such an attempt is doomed to failure before I start. No one apart from some Almighty could begin to imagine what any single object’s narrative might consist of, let alone the sprawl
of accounts couched in other components of the natural world.
So far from inducing Rolland’s oceanic feeling, his sense of wholeness, my morning’s insight opened my ears to competing histories, each of these in- numerable accounts quite apart from the others. A Babel, in truth.
After my walk, I sat a while with my coffee, skimming an article about avoiding dementia. Then I headed to the P&H truck stop to pick up a chocolate cream pie, which is not one of the things the doctor-writer rec- ommended. I love P&H, its friendly waitresses, neigh- bors of mine who have worked there for decades in most cases; I savor the crude paintings on its dining room’s four walls, each rendering a season, graz-
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Challenges
sydney lea