Toward an Ecohumanities

 

Christmas Day. A beautiful piebald pony raises its head and stares at me from behind a series of fences. There's a gleam in those dark intelligent eyes that is asking questions to which I have no reply.

California is planting in my body
Seeds of mysteries, an oak
To route me to the underworld,
Flames to flicker with humming birds,
Nest the bees, arrange my bones
Into the breathing ground.
[S. Rowland. From, "Christmas."]

I enter the canyon thinking, "I'm too tired to go very far today." But this changes when I think of the three week trek from Luka, Nepal to Base Camp on Mt. Everest. Rising from 9000 ft to 17,500 ft, it acclimates climbers to altitudes at which lungs will cry for oxygen, and brains will begin to die. Of the 36,000 people who made the trip last year, most were walkers, there for the pleasure of a landscape that slowly rises toward the numinous without conquering it.

On his experience trekking to, and partly circumambulating, Kailas, the Buddhist holy mountain in Tibet, T.S. Blakeney wrote:

The contemporary Western mind may find it hard to appreciate 'sacredness' in a mountain, but the fact of such reverence cannot be disregarded and must be accepted if one is to travel to such places. ["Kailas: A Holy Mountain." In, M.C. Tobias and H. Drasdo, eds., The Mountain Spirit. Woodstock, NY, 1979.]

After a hesitant start, I pass the four benches, begin an uphill climb, then down, making a right-hand turn onto a path I hadn't taken before. Above the canyon: wide vista of mountains, cloudless

sky, the broad valley beneath. Stride down, cooling in the shadows of trees. At the lowest point, I can smell moisture hidden beneath a shroud of leaves.

Climbing again, the trail steep and switchbacking, I realize that since moving west, almost fifty years ago, I have always lived within sight of a mountain, to whose summit my spirit would dream of soaring, In what is presently California, "Each human group had its own vision of the world, which almost invariably began atop the highest peak in their territory, or within a known distance. Here the Creator and other powerful gods lived, and here the world was created." [B. Fagan, Before California. Lanham, MD, 2003.]

But suddenly there came a time in my life when, heavy with memories, it's the valley that beckoned me.

The descent beckons
                as the ascent beckoned.
                                 Memory is a kind
of accomplishment,
                a sort of renewal
                               even
an initiation...
[W. C. Williams. From, "The Descent."]

Thus, the path narrows then widens again. I have come this way before, but from the opposite direction. I walk until the landscape looks unfamiliar; then backtrack, but find no other way out.

A while ago he had been running straight south, and I, who had travelled only by the compass or the stars had said to myself that he was mad. But here, within one hundred and fifty miles of the Magnetic Pole, the compass went crazy, and there were no stars. He was looking for a sign known only to himself, and there were times when—to my anguish—we turned round and went back half an hour in search of that sign. [G. de Poncins, Kabloona. Alexandria, VA, 1980.]

Turn again, and not far from where I turned before, thinking I'd come the wrong way, is the trailhead where I began.

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Where the river should be, using small stones someone has written: I LOVE YOU MOMMY. I think of Sedna, Mother of Animals, especially those who swim. While fleeing a cruel husband, she lost her fingers (they became dolphins) to the knife of her cowardly father. Drowning, she sank into the depths of our imagination and dreams.

In the Far North, hunters depend on Sedna's moods for a plethora of game. Shamans dive into her realm to trick her into setting the animals free. During this long drought, she has not only withheld the fish, but the water too! Christians are praying to Jesus; mosques are offering up their traditional rain prayer, Salatul Istisqa. I'll send my shaman's spirit down to beg Sedna's pardon for horseshit drying in the dry riverbed.

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New Year's morning I awoke and took a different direction, walking to where a sign said: Waterbirds Come Home (to a dry, drought-cracked, pond). I walk back to the road, where the heavy scent of orange blossoms mix with the fumes of diesel engines with enough horsepower to pull a forest out by its roots.

The young heroes of Greek myths rode their horses into the air. Bellerophon on Pegasus, Phaethon driving his father's chariot of the sun, Hippolytos racing off the roadside to his death. They couldn't hold their horses, and crashed. [J. Hillman, "Horses and Heroes." Spring Journal, 1996]

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Powder-dry, the moisture from one day's drizzle sucked down. I haven't been on this trail for several weeks. Stopping to rest at the second bench, I recall a photograph of Rainer Maria Rilke standing by a similar bench: small thin man in a suit and tie, hands clasped behind his back, looking philosophical.

John Haines reflected on a poem he had written, wondering why he wrote it with "a kind of bitten-off quality," instead of "more naturally, according to its phrasing." After seeing it both ways, he concluded that, "the hard-bitten compression suits the material, the substance; it suited my life." ["Further Reflections On Line and the Poetic Voice." In, S. Friebert & D. Young, eds., A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. New York, 1980.]

For many years, Haines lived in an isolated wilderness cabin he had built above Alaska's Tanana River; hunting, fishing, trapping food that saw him through long dark "hard-bitten" winters. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty said: "We live the life we must live in order to do the work we must do."

I used to ask how Pablo Ruiz became Pablo Picasso, how Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan. Now I ask, Why?

Nothing is as it seems. Reality is flickering and fluctuating; climate change mean continuous change unfolding and reshaping the planet and Earth's image in the universe it inhabits.

In the wilderness, I recognize shoe prints as mine, hoof prints as mine, paw prints of a cougar I made walking in a different direction. Tracking is surveillance, and all surveillance is self-surveillance.

“I don't see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I'm trying to listen to what the technology wants...It's suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can't stop the tracking.” [K. Kelly, “The Technium, An Interview with Kevin Kelly.” Feb 5, 2014. www.edge.org.]

A rusty barbed wire fence has been snipped, opening a path on what had been private property. Looking for what may be unseen with a brain that is always one step behind my feet, I veer off the trail to examine the uncanny shape of a stone. The Greeks didn't just build their temples of stone, the stone itself was sacred. A pillar could contain the DNA of a god. "And so Hermes ceased to be one with the stone; his appearance became human, his theophany became myth." [M. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York, 1971.]

Let it be like the judgment of Hermes,
God of the stone heap, where the stones were verdicts
Cast solidly at his feet, piling up around him
Until he stood waist deep in the cairn
Of his apotheosis...
[S. Heaney. From, “The Stone Verdict.”]

I turn back and see, a plant growing near me may be poison oak.

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In mid-February, with no rain predicted, I recall the Anasazi, who built cities of vaulted cliff houses with hundreds of rooms, and kivas for meetings and secret rites...until the climate changed and strict fields of corn became rows of blowing sand.

One day, one last time, the Ancient Ones walked their extensive system of radiating roads, leaving behind shards of flatware plates and narrow-necked jars buried in the ruins where for a thousand years they had maintained a sustainable society.

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Sweater tied around my waist, water bottle in a pack sounding like a croaking frog, mountains still bathed in mist, I walk until reaching the decision I must make as to which direction to take past the fourth bench.

Two men are trekking across the immense wilderness of melting Arctic ice, heading for the North Pole, dragging the gear of their survival over lifted pressure ridges, crossing rifts of moving collaspsing fields of ice with nothing in sight but dazzling white and a sun sitting a just few degrees above the horizon, all day and through what would be night, like an old faqir.

Their mission is in remembrance of Robert Edwin Peary, "possibly the most successful and probably the most unpleasant man in the annals of polar exploration." [F. Fleming, Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole. London, 2001] If Peary and his posse reached the North Pole, which is located on floating ice, one hundred years ago, it would have been without the aid of a satellite phone, hi-tech camping gear, or GPS device. There remains controversy over his attainment, with the most acceptable viewpoint being that he came within five miles of the "Great Nail."

Their task completed, heading home seated in a heated helicopter, looking down at the receding forbidden land, one of them remarked: "The North Pole is so ephemeral, so fleeting, that it can feel like an illusion. What is left is the image we choose to retain." [S. Copeland, Into the Cold: A Journey to the Soul, 2011]

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A few days ago, while I sat on the fifth bench, dedicated to Ojai's Recycling Program, a woman ran past, looking tired but determined like an old poet. She said, "They say it's going to rain tomorrow." I waited for her return, so I could reply, "I hope they're right."

Further on, there's a wooden bridge, both sides guarded by tall iron pipes. Insulting the eyes, they keep horses off its fragile planks. On the other side is a bifurcation of paths, where I realize that the path I chose first chose me.

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On the first day of March, in the third year of drought, the roots of trees finally relax their thirst-driven downward thrust. Animals slurp up muddy puddles; waterbirds sail down to formerly desiccated ponds; rusty fingers of rain massage the reservoir's feeble body. Skirting or leaping across streams that gird the trail, the river I've never seen smells like a freshly-tuned guitar. I breathe it in, it flows through me, distilled through my bones, then gone.

"The first to be dissolved is a landscape in the rain; lines and forms melt away. But little by little the whole world is brought together again in its water. A single matter has taken over everything. 'Everything is dissolved.'" [G. Bachelard, Water and Dreams. Dallas, 1983.]

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In 1980, an essay by David Walker, titled “Stone Soup: Contemporary Poetry and the Obsessive Image,” appeared in an important anthology. "(Stone) seems a central metaphor of our poetry," Walker began. “Even a glance at half a dozen recent volumes yields enough stone to fill a geologist’s knapsack.” [In, S Friebert and D. Young, editors, A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. New York, 1980.]

Perhaps it was the summer I discovered a faux cave in the Catskill Mountains that I began to hear the "orisons of the stones." Its tapering portal led to no den of indigenous art or artifacts, no rebus chiseled into fluted gray walls; but the fantasies sired as a child inspired the mysteries that dwell in my present imagination.

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As the morning sun rises, casting its shadows against the face of a cliff unable to fathom the depth of its own reflection, I am struck by the gnarly roots that cling to its side, each twist the agony of an anonymous story. Although streams I recently sprung across are dry washes again, the river still runs, at least for today; and there is evidence that a chthonic earth persists beneath the land's sandy surface. The mystery above is my story below.

          
                              There is no turning back—
                                                      it's all here, and
                                                              now

                       beginning again.