“ Alexander Wilson was even capable of activism on behalf of birds. When in 1807 good sense would not prevail with merchants who were killing thousands of robins to satisfy the genteel palates of Philadelphia, he wrote an anonymous article to city newspapers explaining that robin flesh was unhealthy because of the birds’ heavy diet of pokeberries; though Wilson knew the claim to be entirely false, it effectively curtailed the slaughter of robins for the Philadelphia market. ”
Robins: almost another passenger pigeon? This is Michael Branch in the article, “Indexing American Possibilities”
“ Nature is the only gardener able to do work so fine ”
John Muir (with his humanism showing?) in My First Summer in the Sierra
More on seeing nature as a man-like actor...
Alison Byerly’s 1996 article, “The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and The National Park System,” describes the human-centric tendency to describe natural wonders as art, (perhaps God’s art, though I don’t think she says this.). We therefore expect that we can stretch a velvet rope and that the natural forms will remain unchanging as a painting on a museum wall. (It’s very much a response to the Yellowstone fires of 1988)
She concludes with a call to appreciate parks and wilderness as something other than art - something that remakes itself. Then, I think, she goes off the rails a bit, in calling parks “nature’s laboratory.” Why is it better to say “nature is a scientist like us” than to say “nature is an artist like us”? Both are human-centric, and both are elite - she frets that “aestheticization of landscape” is a luxury for leisure classes; nature-as-scientist seems to me a luxury for educated ones.
My First Summer in the Sierra
John Muir, covering the summer of 1869, published in 1911
(How close to the original diary was it?)
I’ve had these notes sitting on my desk on a scrap of peper for several weeks.
Muir calls the real shepherd, a naysayer to the beauty of the land, “poor in spirit.” Here, then, is the opposition of the worker and the tourists down below who come to see the valley. But where does Muir, the budding environmentalist? He’s not quite a shepherd and not quite a tourist.
The sheep as commodity interested me. (I must read the Quest of the Silver Fleece - the DuBois book, which, I am told, is all about cotton as commodity.) Muir often, wryly it seems, or as part of a slang I do not understand, refers to the sheep as “the wool,” as in, “The wool is dry and calm.”
Muir’s description of how the landscape comes to be (he was actually ahead of his time at understanding the action of glaciers, for instance) uses phrases like “meadows planted with _____” or says that bears “turn and till the soil.” Here, I think, he bounces interestingly off of William Howarth’s “Some principles of ecocriticism.” He points out that the very language for geography and geology often comes from human bodies, buildings, tools, etc. Is it really a humanistic tendency, though? To me, it seems that Muir’s insistence upon a land planted by birds or tilled by bears is one that insists on an animal-centrism, on animals as actors. The question, I suppose, is, Can such content and intent allow you escape from etymology?
I have not been so bad...
I read Huck Finn. I have been plugging through the Ecocriticism Reader. I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer - another first encounter with a writer who has me really impressed. I’d like to get to her nonfiction, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle soon.
Oh, yes, and I’ve been obsessing over teaching. That’s where the rest of the time goes.
The first prose draft of “The Fascination of What’s Difficult.” JWF mentioned this today, drawing attention to the heart-breakingly adorable misspelling of “colt,” and saying that some have suggested that Yeats was a dyslexic. This piques my dyslexic pride radar, for obvious familial reasons. The final, in case you need your memory jogged:
The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
I think I die of love for Yeats whenever I read this poem. (Prose draft swiped from Jeffares on Yeats, of course.)
“ A prison becomes a home if you hold the key. ”
Supposedly, this is George Sterling, when asked about the cyanide pill he carried for years before eventually committing suicide with it. I’d love if I could substantiate it somewhere, but I’m having no luck.
Wind from an Enemy Sky
D’Arcy McNickle, 1978 (‘78 is the year after he died; I’m not actually sure when he wrote the book)
It may take me a while to collect my thoughts on Wind From an Enemy Sky. It seems to me to be a more ambitious and complicated, more beautiful and more flawed than The Surrounded. My biggest disappointment is with Adam Pell and his sister Geneva Cooke. When we meet them, Cooke’s son has just been murdered, and these two characters simply don’t act like a bereaved family – any plot device might have gotten them in the room to talk about their holdover squabbles from childhood, etc (151).
McNickle’s own biography (what I know of it) plays interestingly into the places and events portrayed here. He is critical of the conversion of the reservations from commonly-held lands to parceled allotments, and the subsequent sale of many ‘spare’ allotments to white settlers. He himself sold his reservation allotment to finance an Oxford education. He is also offering a nuanced critique of the Indian bureau (which succeeds in distinguishing the institution from the people working for it, as represented by Rafferty, the agent, and The Boy, the tribal policeman), one that comes from experience – he worked for the bureau under John Collier, whose papers I combed through looking for the famous circulars prohibiting traditional dance, about which my dear M. Austin had so much to say. The dance controversy reared its head in The Surrounded, and again here (4).
McNickle is also (like Zora Neale Hurston) an anthropologist. The book portrays Adam Pell, capitalist who collects and keeps a museum on the side (I’m reminded of the millionaire collector who showed up and made an ass of himself at Junior’s grandmother’s funeral in Absolutely True Diary)… he loves to say how much he respects the Native Americans, (as he imagines should be evident from how much he likes buying their art and artifacts and digging up their ancestors’ bones (149-50). Pell alternates between total ass and somewhat-anthropologically self-aware. He describes an Incan artifact as “ripped from its cultural context” but is dumb enough to think that the Indians of the (fictional) Northwestern tribe (“The Little Elk People”) might accept it in place of their destroyed medicine bundle.
We get various ways to understand that sacred object – as a physical thing (210), through its origin-story, never to be told to a white man but printed here nonetheless (207-8) and through the political and land-history of the region, which Pell thinks, rightly or wrongly, allows him to understand the sacred object (209). See also his collection of the pre-columbian cartwheel (142)! And the suggestion that ‘cultural respect’ can be just another system of control! (38)
McNickle has a reputation as one of the first ‘pan-indianists,’ but he’s clearly no fan of Pell’s practice of lumping South American civilizations with the Little Elk People. Pell’s attempt to substitute one sacred object for another turns out disastrously… but the day before that all occurs, Pell takes a drive around the reservation and sees the sub-divided lands, encroached on by outsiders… and with Pell’s enormous wealth, though McNickle never comes out and says it, he might have bought out those small landholders. This was the injustice begging to be righted, whereas the cultural disinheritance was a fate that never could be righted. Yet he never says it, just leaves that landscape-vision there, a way to derail the tragic train of events, trembling on the edge of obviousness.
Astonishingly, I’ve gotten this far without naming some of the complex and (in contrast to Pell), convincingly drawn characters, Bull, the aging chief, Two Sleeps, the outsider and seer (given McNickle’s obvious consciousness about cultural mixing, I found moments when Two Sleeps or Pell might have fit Christian martyr archetypes to be quite interesting, as well as moments of biblical language, ‘a cleft of the rock’ on p.1, etc.), Bull’s more assimilated brother Henry Jim, bitter Louis… and Bull’s grandson Antoine, who’s been (kidnapped) away at school.
Names are important throughout, often marking someone’s degree of assimilation, but there’s a meditation on the translation of them on 26.
“foolish Indian anger” - internalized stereotype? Borne up by the book? (24)
Great meditation on grid survey as a Great Plains necessity stupidly imposed on the northwestern terrain (191-2)
picture of paternalism (93)
A few scatters of gorgeous phrases:
wind from an enemy sky (197)
“the wind is pulling at my shadow” (19).
the ‘bleached bones’ of the ‘killed water’ (2-3)
Finally, both here and in The Surrounded, I appreciate how McNickle individuates horses. They’re more than just hooved set-pieces to him, whether it’s Henry Jim’s big bay, or Antoine’s little buckskin…
Story of My Boyhood and Youth
1913, John Muir
We associate John Muir with Yoesmite and the West, but this is the story of his growing up in Wisconsin. (Between Muir, Leopold, and even Little House in the Big Woods, I can’t help but feel like Michigan is getting short-changed while our neighbors to the west are so well-chronicled. I guess I need to spend some more time with Hemingway’s northern Michigan stories. But really, what’s good early Michigan literature?)
Anyway, on to content. Parts of this story make you wonder to what extent Muir is mythologizing himself, and/or if some people just live bigger than the rest of us. Muir’s waking at 1:00 each morning (I’m reminded of recent research on short sleepers) to tinker with inventions and efforts at stealing time from farmwork to read borrowed books read like something very like an Abe Lincoln biography. I keep feeling like there are also resonances with Wordsworth’s Prelude, but I’ve not managed to make that idea textually specific.
Add to my earlier observation on domestic animals: birds. As wild as the country Muir’s family settled was, 100 miles from a rail line, crossed by Indians (whose loss of land Muir seems to sympathize with) and marked by Indian mounds… he spends a good deal of time being interested in birds. How striking to find John Muir to be someone who loves nature because he had a pony and a good dog and loved to watch birds…
Recent woodcut illustration of a young John Muir by Michael McCurdy for Story of My Boyhood and Youth.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek...
1974, Annie Dillard
Things that have rattled around in my head for the last few days:
… see passage where Dillard narrates the pleasure of experiencing an unnarrated time in the woods while stalking muskrats. “For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I recieved impressions; I did not print out captions.” (200) (She attributes a charming ingenuity to photography (though they tell me I should not longer use that word to mean ‘ingenuousness’))
Also interested in her use of the microscope as a pleasure instrument rather than as science (or science for pleasure).
Giant water-strider section (early) and meditation on the motives of creation.
Dillard’s afterward on wanting to publish as A. Dillard or as a male pseudonym because “a great number of otherwise admirable men do not read books that American women write.”
Also, Dillard’s appetite for trivia reminds me of Rebecca :-)
