The Land's Wild Music

Encounters with Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin

Mark Tredinnick

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781595340931
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

The Land's Wild Music explores the home terrains and the writing of four great American writers of place—Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin. In their work and its relationship with their home places, Tredinnick, an Australian writer, searches for answers to such questions such as whether it's possible for a writer to make an authentic witness of a place; how one captures the landscape as it truly is; and how one joins the place in witness so that its lyric becomes one's own and enters into one's own work. He asks what it might mean to enact an ecological imagination of the world and whether it might be possible to see the work—and the writer—as part of the place itself. The work is a meditation on the nature of landscape and its power to shape the lives and syntax of men and women. It is animated by the author's encounters with Lopez, Matthiessen, Williams, and Galvin, by critical readings of their work, and by the author's engagement with the landscapes that have shaped these writers and their writing—the Cascades, Long Island, the Colorado Plateau, and the high prairies of the Rocky Mountains. Tredinnick seeks "the spring of nature writing deep in the nature of a place itself, carried in a writer's wild self inside and resonated over and over again at the desk until it is a work in which the place itself sings."

1 The Essential Prose of Things

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?

—Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things—
earth, stone and water,

Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars—

. . . For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock

And water and sky are constant—to feel

Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly,
the natural

Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.

—Robinson Jeffers, “The Beauty of Things”

About the most obvious and least interesting thing you could say about nature writing is that it is writing about nature. I’d rather put it another way: Nature writing is literature that engages with the more than human realm. It’s a literature—in its subject matter and its point of view—that is not merely human.

Lots of people—nature writers themselves, Ed Abbey, Henry Beston, John Hay, William Kittredge, Joseph Wood Krutch, Barry Lopez, Scott Russell Sanders, and Gary Snyder, among them; and scholars like Larry Buell, SueEllen Campbell, Thomas Lyon, Sherman Paul, Scott Slovic, and Frank Stewart—have thought hard and deep about the nature of the nature writing beast. These people have been my guides; and if you go to them, you’ll find much that’s worth knowing about this literature. Joseph Wood Krutch, for instance, typified nature writing as “experience with the natural world, as opposed, for example, to science writing, which is knowledge about natural phenomena” (quoted in F. Stewart 1995, 219). It is not merely a literature of nature appreciation. That’s worth remembering.

I’ve come to a conclusion of my own, which I would put like this: The world that nature writing engages with is not bounded by society; it extends to the universe that came before, that goes beyond, that contains the human world. The world it deals with includes geology, weather, plants, animals, the lives of rivers, the fate of men and women somewhere among those other forms and forces of life (and death). It writes ecologies, not just societies. It writes the lives of men and women as though they were shaped by the landscapes and weathers, which they also shape; as though politics and love affairs and tragedies and wars, whatever else they may be, were aspects of the natural history of the world, with implications, large and small, for the whole of creation. Geologic time is what you hear ticking behind a work of nature writing. Natural history—Thoreau’s actual earth—always has the bearing. It is the context—the imaginal ecology—out of which every sentence of every book of nature writing is written, no matter what that sentence speaks about.

But that kind of enterprise, that sense of geologic time, that feeling for the larger order of life, that placement of the present human moment in the broader scheme of things, you might tell me, is what the best literature, from the dawn of time, particularly poetry, has always attempted. And I would say you’re right. But I would add that nature writing is the literature of our time—and it happens not just in essays, and its subject matter may be many things other than the natural history of a place—that most clearly perpetuates what Barry Lopez (see chapter 2) calls the ancient discourse of mankind: our attempt to know ourselves in this real world, our attempt to know the world and adapt to it and, where needs be, to adapt the world so that we might live well within it.

So, nature writing is, to use the jargon, biocentric (see Campbell 1996, 128; Sanders 1996, 189). It returns the natural order—all of it—to the ethical and aesthetic purview of mankind; and it returns mankind—all of us—to the natural world.

Places are what this literature writes; they are the stories it tells. Places and their people. The world is made of places; and it is through places that we know the world and know also who we are within it. Most nature writing describes the encounter of the writer, and of other human characters, with the actual world, with creation somewhere; it tries to render that meeting, that entering into the life of the wild world, in language that expresses the more than merely human (but also the human and, indeed, the personal) nature of that meeting. This literature is always located. It starts from the ground in one place on earth and resonates what wisdom and music it discerns there.

But giving us the place is not the whole point. The nature writer—if I may paraphrase Wallace Stegner—wants to explore who we are, as humans, because of where we are. By her witness of a place—by her noticing and writing—the nature writer is trying to know and elaborate the world differently. She is trying to discern and voice the realities that run through the nonhuman world, the world beyond our selves, and through the mind and body and very being of each of us humans; she is trying to discover the ways in which she—and by extension, all of us—belongs within the characteristic pattern of relationships that are the world just here.

But then again, what sets this literature apart is not so much what nature writing is about (the nature of places and who we are because of them) or the encounter it describes (my being in this place), as where it stands and speaks from. Nature writing stands inside nature—inside nature somewhere in particular—and looks at and listens to and speaks of a whole world of matters from there. It considers many things from nature’s point of view—politics, aesthetics, language, authorship, morality, culture, humanity, and so on. It takes an ecological view of all things—not just landscape, but even authorship, selfhood, the source of language and meaning.

When the nature writer writes, she remembers the earth in every phrase and sentence. And that makes all the difference.

Theory asserts that men and women make meaning in the world;¹ nature writing senses that it is the land that gives rise to all meaning. The land is, and we are there within it, trying to perceive and understand and express it all greatly. Whatever it is we come to know, we learn by paying attention to the world; by listening to country. If we are truly wise, we will know that we know nothing more than the land has known since the start of things. Meanings dawn like days; neither will nor language makes them. But having listened and heard, we may speak of what we have come to know in writing that rings true to the land, to the patterns of the place in which that wisdom came to us. And if we were to do that, it would be nature that we’d be writing.

Scott Slovic broke new ground for nature writing and its study by considering it as a literature of human environmental awareness. In his essay “Nature Writing and Environmental Psychology” (1996) and in his book Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (1992), Slovic looks at “the interiority of outdoor experience” and suggests that nature writing explores not so much nature as the nature of human (environmental) awareness. Although mine is not, like Slovic’s, an inquiry into consciousness, perhaps I am, from a different standpoint (not environmental psychology but phenomenology, linguistic and music theory, and literary composition), exploring pretty much the same relationship: that between the human mind (and the works it makes) and the nonhuman world—specifically, the nature writer’s imaginative engagement with place. But my inquiry here is Slovic’s turned inside out. What I’m interested in is the exteriority of the very indoor experience of writing authentic witnesses of place—that is, the ways in which place may be said to touch mind and, through it, text; to fashion diction and syntax, even awareness itself. Where Slovic was concerned with nature writing as a state of mind, as a way of being mindfully in the world, I am interested in nature writing as a way of the world’s being in us, a way of our entering into and sharing the state of mind of a place.

The Lyric Stance

Nature writing, then, is ecologically imagined, landscape-leaning literature, mostly performed in prose. It tries to set aside the presumption of the primacy of humankind. Yet, it is deeply concerned with our fate, among the fates of all the places of earth and their other inhabitants. This means that, while it is oriented toward what is normally called the “natural world,” while it engages with land and extends its compassion and imagination toward it, nature writing is concerned with the whole world, really. But it conceives of the world as a network of ecological connections and life stories, of bird and river and sky and mountain and humankind—their politics and poetry.

In nature writing, the land is the thing, is the whole, is the mind: we are a part of it, one of its ideas, one of its essential elements. Nature writing imagines the world this way, beginning, usually, with the author’s particular encounter with it, within it.

Nature writing also concerns and tries to express the music that plays from place to man or woman. Nature writing is, itself, the music that plays back to the place—the response to the call of the land. And if the writer speaks of other matters, she speaks from within the land; and the voice she uses is that of her encounter, the music of her engagement with a place.

This literature does not so much attempt to write about nature—this place, this landscape—from one person’s viewpoint, as to write one life-within-landscape from nature’s viewpoint. And the life in question is the life usually of the writer, a listener within its sphere, lyrically disposed toward the place, a kind of everyman-poet. The writer’s life, though, as expressed in a poem or an essay, stands not merely for itself; it stands for all of us. The writer is there as a witness. He or she stands for the human in all of us, and for how the world shapes and makes us over, time and again.

Nature writing is a literature of intimacy with the world. Intimacy with the world beyond our selves is what it practices and what it encourages in us. In his seminal essay “The Land Ethic” from A Sand County Almanac (1946), Aldo Leopold, if I may paraphrase him, asks, How can we save what we do not love, and how can we love what we do not know? This literature encourages intimate awareness of the earth where we are, so that by the poetry of such place-mindfulness we might save the world and find ourselves in it again, more fully human.

Nature writing, in most people’s conception, happens in essays. But if I have described the work of nature writing accurately, it is hard to exclude other forms—particularly nature poetry—from the genre. Nor does there seem to be any reason, on the face of it, why we could not be talking about novels, too. I want to take a moment here to consider the real difference between poetry and prose and the more meaningful difference between lyric and narrative writing, in order to suggest that, despite the particular aptness of the essay for nature writing, it matters less what mode—fiction, nonfiction, or poetry—one chooses for the task of witnessing the world than how one goes about being in the world and speaking of it. What counts is whether one is there to discover the world and be moved by it (the lyric stance) or to invent it (the narrative stance).

First, a word on the lyric stance—and on prose and prosody. Then a short exploration of the essay, its lyric project, and its aptness for nature writing. Then I’ll be ready to take you out among these writers, into their fields and forests, their deserts and mountains, across their meadows and along their shores.

Literature has long distinguished between the lyric and the narrative, as approaches to the creation of works of literary art and as writerly dispositions. Writers are inclined to experience the world and write of their experience in one mode or the other. A lyric writer understands their work as a kind of witness, as a response in words to a call they hear in a place or a moment. The work is intended to reverberate an encounter in the world. To that end, the lyric writer understands writing also as song rather than as tale. Language is music, for the lyricist, as much as it is an instrument of meaning. The narrative writer, by contrast, makes tales by imposing an order—a plot, the passage of time, a sequence of events—upon their experience. The work creates a world or describes one; it is not meant to be replete with one. In the narrative project, the words and sentences are there to carry the drama, to express the thought, and to get the story told. Their musicality is a small matter.

The writer of lyric disposition writes out of the heart of personal encounter with the world—not about other things (natural phenomena, lifeforms, and so on), as though they were objects of study, nor yet about herself as a watcher. She aims to capture the lifeworld of all that arises for her, this avid witness, in a moment, in a space. The lyric writer gives witness to the broken sequence of what SueEllen Campbell (following Roland Barthes) calls “figures”:² those fragments of encounter, those steps within what seems also to be a dance, those momentary and, at the same time, meaningful “attitudes of the body”—in the wild, in love, in contemplation. The lyricist writes out of those figures; her writing belongs to that space.

In two elegant essays, “The Flexible Lyric” and “Ruthless Attention” (in Voigt 1999), Ellen Bryant Voigt, a poet, essayist, and literary critic, explores the lyric point of view, a stance oriented toward neither the self nor the other (place or lover or whatever) but engaged with what lies between. For the lyricist, significance lies in the world as it gave itself to the observer—the writer—at a certain moment, and it is that encountered world that must resound for the reader. One’s own presence in the space and moment that one’s poem or work of lyric prose concerns, writes Voigt, “becomes only another of the phenomena crowding around [the writer]. . . . One’s relationship to one’s materials presumes that significance lies in the world, not in the poet’s will to create it” (Voigt 1999, 178).

By contrast, the writer who adopts the narrative approach, making a story with beginning, middle, and end, orders what she sees; she invents or creates a world (her text). Significance lies within herself, and in her capacity to make something of what she sees. She will write sentences fit to carry her tale forward, but she will not make them fit for carrying the lifeworld of a particular encounter with the world to the reader. That is not her project.

Syntactical structures rule in narrative. In most narrative discourse, as Voigt puts it, words and phrases “perform as semaphore”: they signify, in a more or less purely functional way; they are there to get the tale told, to let sense arise. They are there to say what a writer means the reader to understand; they are there to signify things, not to sing. In lyric discourse, by contrast (specifically in poems), “compression and song will freight the signifiers with additional, usually emotive, information. Compression and song, of course, are the characteristics most firmly assigned to the lyric, and they release a poem for ‘excursions into particularity’” (Voigt 1999, 122, quoting Ransom 1984). Poems, along with lyric pieces of prose, do their work through what Voigt calls their texture, as well as by logic. That is, lyric relies on sound pattern, rhythm, compressed image, and tone to carry out its work. In addition, of course, it relies, like all writing, on grammatical, lexical, and semantic structures that allow the words to make sense and mean something. It sings, and it means—and the singing is not marginal. Lyric writing, when paraphrased (and, if we are not careful, when translated), loses that which makes it what it is: it is robbed of its music, its texture. The lyric sings and means, but what it means is the ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Wild Music of Places: An Introduction
• 1. The Essential Prose of Things
• 2. The Edge of the Trees
• 3. The Long Coastline
• 4. The Heart of an Arid Land
• 5. The Real World
• Catching the Lyric of the Country: A Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index