Once, when I was writing my first book, I lived on a fertile island of a bald volcano called civilization, whose grass cutters sing its song to turn its forests into golf courses.
I watched waves taller than factory chimneys crash over cliffs as black as spacetime, making the mansions look like life.
I saw the old indifferent face of a turtle older than a light bulb hatching its young under a NO TROUBLE sign on a private beach.
I looked into the gaping mouth of the volcano mocking the sky in the language of time.
I have been thinking about how those fault lines between the foundation and the ephemera of human life reveal easily our greatest challenge of civilization: regarding nature as something to conquer, to neutralize, to tame, “forgetting that we are also creation,” forgetting that we control our wilderness, harming our souls.
Jay Griffiths offers a powerful solution in his 2006 masterpiece Wild: The Basic Journey (public library) — the product of “years of longing” that draws him “to the unbound, to the open and clear world,” learning to think with the mind of the mountain and to feel in the heart of the forest, seeking “something shy, naked and basic—the soul.” What emerges is an act of rebellion (against sanitation, against domestication of the soul) and an act of reverence (which cannot be suppressed in nature, the posture of the world as a way of knowledge, of living on Earth, as impossible and wonderful as love.)
A century and a half after Thoreau “went to the forest to live on purpose” (leaving in his famous story of spartan solitude the freshly baked donuts and pies that his mother and sister brought to him every Sunday), Griffiths spent seven years maddening his soul in the deserts of the world, from the Amazon to the Arctic, trying to “touch the life of the spirit,” which had the effect of the ancient “spirit.” The Himalayas up to applaud the sky.” You write:
I wanted to the will wild… The only thing I had to hold on to was the sharp need for a knife to rely on my basics.
I wanted to live on the edge of responsibility, in the soft anger of a moment of indifference, because in this short and pointlist life, black light and electricity, I have nothing else to do.
[…]
The human spirit has great loyalty to the wild, to really live, pluck the fruit and suck it, spill the juice. We may think we are home but we are not.
It all started with getting lost in a “mental wasteland, in a long and dark depression” that left him unable to walk or write, “pathless, sad and confused, not knowing where to turn.” (A decade later, Griffiths would write an entire book about that annual episode of emotional distress.) Searching for “octaves of possibility,” including “psychic possibility,” longing for release from the mental aisles of the supermarket, he began to find the cruel antipode “this chloroform school, where the chloroform school is forever filled. soft and the windows are closed forever.” You write:
I felt an urgent need in my blood. I heard its call. Its cries disturbed me during the day and its cries woke me up at night. I heard the sun drum. Every path was a calling sound, the flight of every bird is a plea, the color of the snow is an invitation: come. The forest was fiddling, wickedly beautiful, eyes sharp and sparkling with a swift dance. Every leaf in every breeze was a toe that gave out the same rhythm and every mountain peak that rose from the cloud fascinated my mind, because the wind in the peaks was climbing, licking its lips, tickling me dangerously with the inaudible songs that I strained to hear, my eyes longed for the sound to come out. This was the call, the rage, the irresistible quest of a ferocious angel— take a flight. All that is wild has wings – life, mind and language – and knows the feeling of the spirit “on a soaring plane, silhouetted in the primal.”
He lived for months with a mountain tribe in the jungles of the Burmese border, he lost all his fingernails climbing Kilimanjaro, he met “cannibals who are much kinder and more reliable than the murderous missionaries who preached to them,” he heard “what it is like to cry alone on Christmas Day in the forest on the other side of the world,” nature learned that nature is nothing, because “nature is nothing.”
He shows:
To me, humanity is not a stressor in the wilderness as others seem to think. Rather, the human spirit is one of the most remarkable elements of the wilderness. It is as beautiful as an ice crystal, it has the power of life as water, it is breathed as air. Embedded in all of us, intimate cheekiness, sweet as a nut. In the rebellious soul of everyone, then, the right to wear feathers, drink the stars and ask for the moon… We are people — each one of us — we are a force of nature, although sometimes it is necessary to consciously relearn what we have never forgotten; the art of transcendence, the heart of the traveler.
Beating under passionate poetry is a crime and a persuasion. Ten years after Maya Angelou conveyed the same diversity of human nature in her stunningly atmospheric poem “The Brave and the Terrible Truth,” Griffiths writes:
There are two sides: waste agents and wild lovers. It is either with life or against it. And each of us has to choose.
Reclaiming our spontaneity emerges as an act of courage and resistance amidst the conspicuous consumption that late-stage capitalism makes us mistake for, eliminating the urgency of our death – that source of everything good and lasting that we do. What Griffiths offers is a wake-up call from this nearness, a spell against indifference, against air con and asphalt, against our removal from our nature:
Wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is something. Unmissable, unforgettable, immovable, as basic as earth and ice, water, fire and air, quintessence, pure air, irresolvable into parts. Don't waste your citizenship: it is precious and necessary. Actually, in fact. Wildness is a universal song, sung in green gold, that we see where we hear. The wild is what repels the bee, the will of the dragonfly, drives the wind and forces the poem. Wilderness does not satisfy life; and it truly knows itself without the other. The wilderness… absorbs it now, it burns in your eyes and shines on everyone who deliberately walks its path.
He is a completer Wild – a good read as a whole – with Wendell Berry's timeless poem “The Peace of Wild Things” and the artist Rockwell Kent, writing a hundred years earlier, in the wilderness and creation, then revisiting Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris's amazing renewal of the human spirit.
