Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin’s Echo and the Anasazi. Reg Saner. 1998. ISBN 0874805538
EXCERPTS
Over more than a dozen summers, with an occasional autumn thrown in, I have fed my pleasure on the ruins, the canyons and mesas of this book, as other work permitted. “Points along the way” were both places and stops toward answering two deceptively simple questions: “Why do I find these things so strangely moving?” and “What are they trying to tell us?”
If biblical minds agreed on one thing, it was that desert is demonic. To efface it utterly was to praise the Lord.
Odd that in this universe where maybe nothing is divine except what’s missing, our last few desert places seem profoundly blessed by what isn’t there. We now feel that truly to bring forth the fruit of such terrain is to agree that its silence and space are unimprovable. We say so any time we answer its hush with an attentive stillness, one wide and deep as respect.
Even assuming that religious emotions are indeed illusory, is human life possible without them? Their impulses seem so universal as to be innate, as if encoded genetically. Are they evolution’s protection against what evolution itself has created, reason’s analytical habit?
Any sacred building’s layout and symbols offer alignment, orientation. They give directions without saying a word.
Christianity, especially, identifies the sacred with “good,” whereas ancient Greeks and Pueblos – to cite parallel extremes – conceived the sacred in ways making “good” irrelevant, even absurd.
By projecting a secularized sacrality onto nature as a sort of benign whiff exuded from forests, vernal woods, or whitewater streams, we may forget that sacred power is traditionally grounded in the supernatural, whereas, and by definition, nature is natural. Yet a Hope leader could say, “The Hopi land is the Hopi religion,” because to Pueblos nature is never only natural.
All the same, though “bleak” should name my mood, it doesn’t. “Emptiness,” yes, and one I’m well content to sit quietly filled with. Its slight sadness feels like wisdom, as if that’s what I, too, had come to Chaco for.
No lands feel more desolate than those of the Hopi, no religion more beautiful or complex. That very desolation must have begotten such beauty and complexity. Encircled by utter indifference in every empty direction, you could feel yourself the least of beings, the merest speck; or you could sense yourself as the focus of spirits and sacred powers – without ceasing, however, to realize that in such vastitudes everyone’s daily affairs hither and yon around your tiny pueblo count for no more than the trickles of ant people busily seething round their anthill.
… is the sacred really self-love echoed back to sound like a call? A circular transaction? For me, its “place” exists anytime we stand at a center, the center of a moment: our own widest awareness of, and agreement to be, who and where we are.
Haven’t the gods always been made of our own limitations? No god has qualities a human wouldn’t find useful.
For most of humankind, wonders merely natural aren’t quite enough – as if our species sorely needs religious emotion to restore what analytical reason makes away with.
There are places you go, simply to be there. In the old days, such going toward was called pilgrimage.
Just as we living ones need the dead to remember us and help us with our lives, the gods rely on us mortals to sustain them.
If you believe there’s such a thing as desecration, you believe in the sacred.
Lots of rock, lots of sand, lots of wind, and very little rain can make juniper stands growing there, at the far end of possibility, an outpost of marginalized eccentrics.
There amid the deranged and violent I also discovered “good” trees battening on the same rimrock; witnessed all the living optimism, all the hurt joy that can scuffle upward out of such rock and suffer openly. In wresting a living from limestone’s long famines of rain, they must sometimes have felt that enduring there was next to impossible, but endure they had.
Mountains echo whatever you tell them, but desert space is always a listener, its only voice a quiet so unbroken it hushes you, thereby making you fit to enter.
Primitive? Yes, but wouldn’t it feel good to regress, to live among townsfolk where nobody had a job? Where instead of jobs, everybody has a life, and every life a clear purpose?
… an escape from self, the “me”. From the incessantly mumbling, grumbling, scheming, blithering first-person singular. It’s a brief but soothing release.
As for a New Mexico, Arizona, or Utah evening, your mood there can invest time’s barest necessities with an allure so narcotic you feel on the verge of understanding things no one will ever understand.
Questing toward some imagined Grand Happiness, we find it rarely if ever; meanwhile, a few blessed moments find us. They’re not anything we’d know how to look for. Besides, that’s not how it works. The blessed moments aren’t targetable. They just happen. Years later, merely recollecting them can summon us back to our best selves, but only if when they come, we’re not too busy to see them for what they are.
If you live long enough, you begin having days when it seems you may actually be getting some sense. How to act, how to see, what to care about. What truly matters.
Now comes the twist that makes endless questing for knowledge problematic. We assume that to know what, where, and why we are is a good thing. Is it? When ignorance is bliss, the proverb reminds us, “tis folly to be wise.” Despite such sayings, don’t we claim to follow “truth” wherever it leads? Or is that only a flattering mirage?
Even at a standstill you can feel it inside you: the road as verge, as threshold, making “destination” a mere pretext for the real business of going to meet it.
But for many of us four-wheeled, non-Native Americans, isn’t it true that our “center” and best mode of being is motion? Whose aim is less a place than simply the horizon.
A people who’ve survived desert conditions for ages are realists. You haven’t a choice. In desert, you become either a realist or a set of bleached bones. Paradoxically, you also come into kinship with a world of realities they eye has not seen …
Showing posts with label nature travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nature travel. Show all posts
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Beyond the Wall by Edward Abbey - Excerpts
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside. Edward Abbey. 1984. ISBN 978-0805008203
EXCERPTS
If you desire to know, feel and live the desert, as opposed to only looking at it as tourists and art critics do, you’ve got to arise from your bottom end and walk upright like a human being, alone or with a friend, into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the world freedom until you do.
I do not hold with those who find in geometry the essence of elegance; what Euclid and his successors fell in love with was not the world out there but the world inside – structures of the human mind. They were admiring an aspect of themselves, like Narcissus doting on his image in the pool.
Beyond the hill is the auburn-colored desolation of the desert: stony hills, lean peaks, narrow bands of olive-drab shrubbery winding along the waterless drainages and in the distance, on all horizons, from fifty to sixty miles away, the farther ranges of blue, magenta and purple mountains, where nothing human lives or ever did. I find this a cheery, even exhilarating prospect. The world of nature is faithful and never disappoints.
I have now walked seventy-five miles plus side trips. Only fifty to go. Five days so far in the open, without roof, without walls. An emotion old as the human race, essence without name, flows through my heart and mind.
… the birds will gather the fruit, eat the flesh, scatter the seeds on the barren ground. But not utterly barren, even here. A few will germinate, sprout, take root, resume the endless, pointless, beautiful cycle, again and again and again. For what purpose? Only the weary and the foolish insist on a purpose. Let being be. To make shade for a titmouse, that is the purpose.
Seated once more on my rear end, like everybody else in the modern world, I slump with relief back into the delights of the civilization I love to despise. My feet are even happier than I am. Within minutes my 115-mile walk through the desert hills becomes a thing apart, a disjunct reality on the far side of a bottomless abyss, immediately beyond physical recollection. But it’s all still there in my heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure – they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come, like a treasure found and then, voluntarily, surrendered. Returned to the mountains with my blessing. It leaves a golden glowing in the mind.
We were desert mystics, my few friends and I, the kind who read maps as others read their holy books. I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.
But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements? Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt in detail with this question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever than means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that it; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom – commendable virtues in any many, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present – all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as “Why wilderness”? To which, nevertheless, I shall append on further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
We topped out on a small rise and there ahead lay the red wasteland again – red dust, red sand, the dark smoldering purple reds of ancient rocks, Chinle, Shinarump and Moenkopi, the old Triassic formations full of radium, dinosaurs, petrified wood, arsenic and selenium, fatal evil monstrous things, beautiful, beautiful. Miles of it, leagues of it, glittering under the radiant light, swimming beneath waves of heat, a great vast aching vacancy of pure space, waiting. Waiting for what? Why, waiting for us.
There was a middle-aged fellow sitting outside the store, on a bench in the shade, drinking beer. He had about a month’s growth of whiskers on what passed for a face. I bought him another can of Coors and tried to draw him into conversation. He was taciturn. Would not reveal his name. When I asked him what he did around there, he looked up at the clouds and over at the river and down at the ground between his boots, thinking hard, and finally said: “Nothing.” A good and sufficient answer. Taking that hint, I went away from there, leaving him in peace. My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do nothing – and find it enough.
The river tugged at our bodies with a gentle but insistent urge: Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea … Sweet and subtle song. Perhaps I should have surrendered. I almost did. But didn’t.
The shimmer of heat waves, hanging like a scrim across the horizon, is enough in itself to confuse the senses, puzzle the mind. The mountains float like ships on the waves of superheated air, drifting away from one another, then returning, merging, inverting themselves, assuming shapes out of fantasy. The madness of mirage.
In the Dream Time, say the wise old men of the outback, we made our beginning; from the Dream Time we come; into the Dream Time, after death, we shall return. The dream is the real; waking life is only a dream within a greater dream.
What does the desert mean? It means what it is. It is there, it will be there when we are gone. But for a while we are living things – men, women, birds, that coyote howling far off on yonder stony ridge – we were a part of it all. That should be enough.
Buzzards circled overhead – there always seem to be more buzzards in the sky on the Mexican side of the border. Why? Because both life and death are more abundant down in Mexico. It’s the kind of country buzzards love. A candid country, harsh and bare, which is no doubt why it strikes us overcivilized Americans as crude, vulgar and dangerous.
I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plentitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.
Which is more likely? asked Mark Twain (I paraphrase): that the unicorn exists or that men tell lies?
I am aware of the argument that hunting and fishing can lead a man into an intense, intimate engagement with the natural world unknown to the casual hiker. When the hunting or fishing is based on hunger, on need, I know that this is true. But sport, in the end, is only sport – divertissement. A diversion, that is, from the game of life. Which is – what? Let’s not go into that.
Yet I know that even the mosquito has a function – you might say a purpose – in the great web of life. Their larvae help feed fingerlings, for example. Certain of their women help spread the parasitic protozoa that give us dengue, breakbone fever, yellow fever and malaria, for example, keeping in control the human population of places like Borneo, Angola, Italy and Mississippi. No organism can be condemned as totally useless.
The top of the world. But of course, the giddy, dizzying truth is that the words “top” and “bottom”, from a planetary point of view, have no meaning. From out here in deep space, where I am orbiting, there is no top, there is no bottom, no floor, no ceiling, to anything. We spin through an infinite void, following our curving path around the sun, which is as bewildered as we are. True, the infinite is incomprehensible – but the finite is absurd. Einstein claimed otherwise, I know, but Einstein was only a mortal like us. No ceiling, no floor, no walls …
What can I say except confess that I have seen but little of the real North, and of that little understood less. The planet is bigger than we ever imagined. The world is colder, more ancient, more strange and more mysterious than we had dreamed. And we puny human creatures with our many tools and toys and fears and hopes make only one small leaf on the great efflorescing tree of life. Too much. No equation however organic, no prose however royally purple, can bracket our world within the boundaries of mind.
QUOTATIONS
Paul Klee
There are two mountains on which the weather is bright and clear, the mountain of the animals and the mountain of the gods. But between lies the shadowy valley of men.
EXCERPTS
If you desire to know, feel and live the desert, as opposed to only looking at it as tourists and art critics do, you’ve got to arise from your bottom end and walk upright like a human being, alone or with a friend, into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the world freedom until you do.
I do not hold with those who find in geometry the essence of elegance; what Euclid and his successors fell in love with was not the world out there but the world inside – structures of the human mind. They were admiring an aspect of themselves, like Narcissus doting on his image in the pool.
Beyond the hill is the auburn-colored desolation of the desert: stony hills, lean peaks, narrow bands of olive-drab shrubbery winding along the waterless drainages and in the distance, on all horizons, from fifty to sixty miles away, the farther ranges of blue, magenta and purple mountains, where nothing human lives or ever did. I find this a cheery, even exhilarating prospect. The world of nature is faithful and never disappoints.
I have now walked seventy-five miles plus side trips. Only fifty to go. Five days so far in the open, without roof, without walls. An emotion old as the human race, essence without name, flows through my heart and mind.
… the birds will gather the fruit, eat the flesh, scatter the seeds on the barren ground. But not utterly barren, even here. A few will germinate, sprout, take root, resume the endless, pointless, beautiful cycle, again and again and again. For what purpose? Only the weary and the foolish insist on a purpose. Let being be. To make shade for a titmouse, that is the purpose.
Seated once more on my rear end, like everybody else in the modern world, I slump with relief back into the delights of the civilization I love to despise. My feet are even happier than I am. Within minutes my 115-mile walk through the desert hills becomes a thing apart, a disjunct reality on the far side of a bottomless abyss, immediately beyond physical recollection. But it’s all still there in my heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure – they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come, like a treasure found and then, voluntarily, surrendered. Returned to the mountains with my blessing. It leaves a golden glowing in the mind.
We were desert mystics, my few friends and I, the kind who read maps as others read their holy books. I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.
But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements? Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt in detail with this question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever than means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that it; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom – commendable virtues in any many, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present – all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as “Why wilderness”? To which, nevertheless, I shall append on further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
We topped out on a small rise and there ahead lay the red wasteland again – red dust, red sand, the dark smoldering purple reds of ancient rocks, Chinle, Shinarump and Moenkopi, the old Triassic formations full of radium, dinosaurs, petrified wood, arsenic and selenium, fatal evil monstrous things, beautiful, beautiful. Miles of it, leagues of it, glittering under the radiant light, swimming beneath waves of heat, a great vast aching vacancy of pure space, waiting. Waiting for what? Why, waiting for us.
There was a middle-aged fellow sitting outside the store, on a bench in the shade, drinking beer. He had about a month’s growth of whiskers on what passed for a face. I bought him another can of Coors and tried to draw him into conversation. He was taciturn. Would not reveal his name. When I asked him what he did around there, he looked up at the clouds and over at the river and down at the ground between his boots, thinking hard, and finally said: “Nothing.” A good and sufficient answer. Taking that hint, I went away from there, leaving him in peace. My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do nothing – and find it enough.
The river tugged at our bodies with a gentle but insistent urge: Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea … Sweet and subtle song. Perhaps I should have surrendered. I almost did. But didn’t.
The shimmer of heat waves, hanging like a scrim across the horizon, is enough in itself to confuse the senses, puzzle the mind. The mountains float like ships on the waves of superheated air, drifting away from one another, then returning, merging, inverting themselves, assuming shapes out of fantasy. The madness of mirage.
In the Dream Time, say the wise old men of the outback, we made our beginning; from the Dream Time we come; into the Dream Time, after death, we shall return. The dream is the real; waking life is only a dream within a greater dream.
What does the desert mean? It means what it is. It is there, it will be there when we are gone. But for a while we are living things – men, women, birds, that coyote howling far off on yonder stony ridge – we were a part of it all. That should be enough.
Buzzards circled overhead – there always seem to be more buzzards in the sky on the Mexican side of the border. Why? Because both life and death are more abundant down in Mexico. It’s the kind of country buzzards love. A candid country, harsh and bare, which is no doubt why it strikes us overcivilized Americans as crude, vulgar and dangerous.
I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plentitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.
Which is more likely? asked Mark Twain (I paraphrase): that the unicorn exists or that men tell lies?
I am aware of the argument that hunting and fishing can lead a man into an intense, intimate engagement with the natural world unknown to the casual hiker. When the hunting or fishing is based on hunger, on need, I know that this is true. But sport, in the end, is only sport – divertissement. A diversion, that is, from the game of life. Which is – what? Let’s not go into that.
Yet I know that even the mosquito has a function – you might say a purpose – in the great web of life. Their larvae help feed fingerlings, for example. Certain of their women help spread the parasitic protozoa that give us dengue, breakbone fever, yellow fever and malaria, for example, keeping in control the human population of places like Borneo, Angola, Italy and Mississippi. No organism can be condemned as totally useless.
The top of the world. But of course, the giddy, dizzying truth is that the words “top” and “bottom”, from a planetary point of view, have no meaning. From out here in deep space, where I am orbiting, there is no top, there is no bottom, no floor, no ceiling, to anything. We spin through an infinite void, following our curving path around the sun, which is as bewildered as we are. True, the infinite is incomprehensible – but the finite is absurd. Einstein claimed otherwise, I know, but Einstein was only a mortal like us. No ceiling, no floor, no walls …
What can I say except confess that I have seen but little of the real North, and of that little understood less. The planet is bigger than we ever imagined. The world is colder, more ancient, more strange and more mysterious than we had dreamed. And we puny human creatures with our many tools and toys and fears and hopes make only one small leaf on the great efflorescing tree of life. Too much. No equation however organic, no prose however royally purple, can bracket our world within the boundaries of mind.
QUOTATIONS
Paul Klee
There are two mountains on which the weather is bright and clear, the mountain of the animals and the mountain of the gods. But between lies the shadowy valley of men.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Searching for Crusoe by Thurston Clarke - Excerpts
Searching for Crusoe: A Journey Among the Last Real Islands. Thurston Clarke. 2001. ISBN 0345411439
EXCERPTS
Crusoe persuades us that islands are more liberating than confining, more contemplative than lonely, and that they are holy ground where we meet God more easily because we have been, like him, “removed from all the wickedness of the world.”
… an islomane, someone who, according to that famous island-lover Lawrence Durrell, experiences, an “indescribable intoxication” at finding himself in “a little world surrounded by the sea.”
Before Selkirk marooned himself and Defoe marooned his fictional Crusoe, tropical islands had been considered fearful places where sailors risked the lonely death of a castaway or the spears of hostile natives. After Selkirk and Crusoe, they were seen as places of redemption and improvement, where you could escape the wickedness of the world, build Utopia, and find God.
“Here, I have time to think, to listen to what is in here,” [Marietta] said, touching her chest.
I had never been anywhere where people lived so lightly on the land and took up so little psychological space. They were not unfriendly, just living so deeply within themselves that every conversation felt like an interruption, and even when I was among them, I felt alone.
Islands are so self-contained, and even ones within sight of one another so different, they demand comparison. When I land on a new one I weight it against others I know, asking what it would take to send me seeking refuge on it. Would I make it my home if I had lost everyone I loved? An insoluble more dilemma, an unforgivable crime? Barren Greek islands are for minor romantic setbacks and midlife crises. Tropical South Pacific islands are for longer sojourns and larger calamites: a bankruptcy ruining your closest friends, a wife falling in love with your brother, a traffic accident killing a child. But Isla Crusoe was in island where you could disappear forever, one to reserve for the most shattering catastrophe.
Most of the marooned passengers went through a predicable emotional trajectory. They were furious, then resigned. Finally they relaxed, and “allowed the island to redirect their emotions.”
Being marooned on an uninhabited and unvisited island outside the polar circles, and remaining undetected and unrescued for Crusoe’s twenty-eight years, or Selkirk’s four, is no longer possible. Castaway records are not like four-minute miles, records begging to be broken, and islands like this one have become places where people come to find, or lose, themselves.
Back in Santiago I experienced the same tenderness and inability to decide which was the dream, the island or the mainland, that follows my departure from remote islands.
The colors were so brilliant my eyes ached, the lagoon so smooth I could imagine skating across it, the forests dense enough to hide tigers.
Bora-Bora is Bali-ha’i because Michener called it “the most beautiful island in the world … as close to paradise as men in this world ever get.”
… an island whose horizon is empty in every direction resembles a self-contained universe, floating in water instead of space and capable of setting its own rules … But however they do it, some remote islands can provide the ultimate freedom, from time itself.
The assumption that any impact would be negative, at least for the Maldivians, may be justifiable, considering the assault on island cultures elsewhere by mass tourism. But it has to discourage anyone who struggles to believe travel can sometimes enrich visitor and host.
She is the right person for an island: self-sufficient, frugal, an avid reader, comfortable with solitude, and greedy for small pleasures.
[George Orwell] predicted the Pleasure Spots of the future would be outfitted with sunlight lamps, pools with artificial waves, and amplified music, and would follow five principles:
1. One is never alone.
2. One never does anything for oneself.
3. One is never within sight of wild vegetation or natural objects of any kind.
4. Light and temperature are always artificially regulated.
5. One is never out of the sound of artificial music.
To this last principle he added: “The function of the music is to prevent thought and conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude.”
From the deck of my ferry it looked so bleak and forbidding I imagined travelers changing their minds when they saw it and continuing to the next island. Like all the best islands, Tilos was a complete and self-contained world.
The Polynesians’ myths say they traveled to escape overpopulation, land disputes, and warfare – the usual island plagues. But anyone mesmerized by an empty horizon knows they must also have been restless and curious, sailing beyond their reef for the same reason boys who grow up hearing train whistles in prairie towns head for Chicago.
[Russell] Kirk blamed Eigg’s perilous condition on the preference of big governments for big mainland institutions. He argued that small and cantankerous islands represented a symbolic criticism of the centralized and industrialized mainland, and he predicted their eventual depopulation and abandonment. He never imagined the phenomenon of Nantucket, Key West, and other Pleasure Spot islands, of mainland culture annexing and taming islands, or that a half century later, Eigg itself would symbolize a rare triumph for the small and eccentric.
A diagram showing how, when and where everyone interacted during an average week on an island like Eigg would be a confusing blur of crisscrossing lines. But it would be a good representation of the kind of freedom people find on such an island – the freedom to pursue a number of interests, fill a number of jobs, use a number of talents, and become, like Crusoe, accomplished in many fields.
… incomers remained separated from natives by the fundamental fact that natives bore the isolation and material privations of an island in order to live where they had been born and raised, while incomers were free spirits who, by coming to an island, had cut precisely the kind of geographic, community, and family ties that island natives prized.
Eigg really was a Utopia where no one was very rich or poor, and where everyone ate a similar diet, lived in similar dwellings, and acted like members of an extended family. Castaways face the horror of solitude without community …, but community without solitude could be a Sartrean No Exit of people trapped for eternity in a brightly lit room. Eigg’s inhabitants enjoyed the balance of community and solitude Robert Lax found on Patmos, living in a landscape as wild as Jura’s and as beautiful as the Bandas, yet shaking hands every day.
The Odyssey contains some of the greatest island horror stories of all time, and bears some responsibility for the notions that an island’s temptations are more fabulous than those of a continent and its dangers more terrifying, but that even a frightening island can be seductive.
It is astonishing how many islands, particularly beautiful tropical ones, have a horror story in their past. Many of these stories involve shipwrecked sailors who attempt to subjugate the natives and are murdered by them, or romantics who come searching for paradise and become mortal enemies.
The cannibals may be gone, but most of us have prison lands in our backyards. The same isolation and freedom from mainland scrutiny that make islands so appealing also make them great places for a prison. In fact, so many islands have served as prisons that the words are almost as inseparable as “island” and “paradise”.
… for islophobes, no island can ever be pretty, sunny, or friendly enough to outweigh its baggage of exile and confinement. For them, an island’s small population promises a hell of repetitive social encounters, its silence is worse than tinnitus, its insulation from the mainland a painful exile, and its limited space an Alcatraz cell writ large.
If all islands, by virtue of their geography, echo Devil’s Island and Alcatraz, then another of their charms may be the curious feeling of escape and liberation that sometimes accompanies your departure from them.
Cruise liners are the most fearsome attack dogs the leisure industry looses on islands.
Before I began traveling, there had been numerous jokes about my “never-ending vacation” and “Carnival Cruise route.” In reply I had argued, without entirely believing it, that an all-island journey was as logical as a trip down a great river, across a desert, or through any region unified by culture and language. Now I knew this was true. I also knew that not only did islands share similar traits and face similar threats, but islanders themselves were a distinct psychological race.
My islands had all been interesting individualists, yet all shared certain characteristics. They were silent and wild, so they encouraged reflection or, as Marietta would say, “hearing yourself”. They had preserved their relics and history, and their rocks “remained in the same place”. They left indelible memories, and were friendly places that encouraged their inhabitants to becomes, as Tamil had said, “better people”.
QUOTATIONS
Jose Maria
Remember that on an island everyone waits for something: for mail, passengers, love … and the wisest, they wait for death.
Marietta
Shhh … listen, and you will hear the birds, and the ocean, and finally, yourself.
Thomas Merton
I want to find a really quiet, isolated place … where I can get down to the thing I really want to do and need to do – from which, if necessary, I can come out to help others.
EXCERPTS
Crusoe persuades us that islands are more liberating than confining, more contemplative than lonely, and that they are holy ground where we meet God more easily because we have been, like him, “removed from all the wickedness of the world.”
… an islomane, someone who, according to that famous island-lover Lawrence Durrell, experiences, an “indescribable intoxication” at finding himself in “a little world surrounded by the sea.”
Before Selkirk marooned himself and Defoe marooned his fictional Crusoe, tropical islands had been considered fearful places where sailors risked the lonely death of a castaway or the spears of hostile natives. After Selkirk and Crusoe, they were seen as places of redemption and improvement, where you could escape the wickedness of the world, build Utopia, and find God.
“Here, I have time to think, to listen to what is in here,” [Marietta] said, touching her chest.
I had never been anywhere where people lived so lightly on the land and took up so little psychological space. They were not unfriendly, just living so deeply within themselves that every conversation felt like an interruption, and even when I was among them, I felt alone.
Islands are so self-contained, and even ones within sight of one another so different, they demand comparison. When I land on a new one I weight it against others I know, asking what it would take to send me seeking refuge on it. Would I make it my home if I had lost everyone I loved? An insoluble more dilemma, an unforgivable crime? Barren Greek islands are for minor romantic setbacks and midlife crises. Tropical South Pacific islands are for longer sojourns and larger calamites: a bankruptcy ruining your closest friends, a wife falling in love with your brother, a traffic accident killing a child. But Isla Crusoe was in island where you could disappear forever, one to reserve for the most shattering catastrophe.
Most of the marooned passengers went through a predicable emotional trajectory. They were furious, then resigned. Finally they relaxed, and “allowed the island to redirect their emotions.”
Being marooned on an uninhabited and unvisited island outside the polar circles, and remaining undetected and unrescued for Crusoe’s twenty-eight years, or Selkirk’s four, is no longer possible. Castaway records are not like four-minute miles, records begging to be broken, and islands like this one have become places where people come to find, or lose, themselves.
Back in Santiago I experienced the same tenderness and inability to decide which was the dream, the island or the mainland, that follows my departure from remote islands.
The colors were so brilliant my eyes ached, the lagoon so smooth I could imagine skating across it, the forests dense enough to hide tigers.
Bora-Bora is Bali-ha’i because Michener called it “the most beautiful island in the world … as close to paradise as men in this world ever get.”
… an island whose horizon is empty in every direction resembles a self-contained universe, floating in water instead of space and capable of setting its own rules … But however they do it, some remote islands can provide the ultimate freedom, from time itself.
The assumption that any impact would be negative, at least for the Maldivians, may be justifiable, considering the assault on island cultures elsewhere by mass tourism. But it has to discourage anyone who struggles to believe travel can sometimes enrich visitor and host.
She is the right person for an island: self-sufficient, frugal, an avid reader, comfortable with solitude, and greedy for small pleasures.
[George Orwell] predicted the Pleasure Spots of the future would be outfitted with sunlight lamps, pools with artificial waves, and amplified music, and would follow five principles:
1. One is never alone.
2. One never does anything for oneself.
3. One is never within sight of wild vegetation or natural objects of any kind.
4. Light and temperature are always artificially regulated.
5. One is never out of the sound of artificial music.
To this last principle he added: “The function of the music is to prevent thought and conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude.”
From the deck of my ferry it looked so bleak and forbidding I imagined travelers changing their minds when they saw it and continuing to the next island. Like all the best islands, Tilos was a complete and self-contained world.
The Polynesians’ myths say they traveled to escape overpopulation, land disputes, and warfare – the usual island plagues. But anyone mesmerized by an empty horizon knows they must also have been restless and curious, sailing beyond their reef for the same reason boys who grow up hearing train whistles in prairie towns head for Chicago.
[Russell] Kirk blamed Eigg’s perilous condition on the preference of big governments for big mainland institutions. He argued that small and cantankerous islands represented a symbolic criticism of the centralized and industrialized mainland, and he predicted their eventual depopulation and abandonment. He never imagined the phenomenon of Nantucket, Key West, and other Pleasure Spot islands, of mainland culture annexing and taming islands, or that a half century later, Eigg itself would symbolize a rare triumph for the small and eccentric.
A diagram showing how, when and where everyone interacted during an average week on an island like Eigg would be a confusing blur of crisscrossing lines. But it would be a good representation of the kind of freedom people find on such an island – the freedom to pursue a number of interests, fill a number of jobs, use a number of talents, and become, like Crusoe, accomplished in many fields.
… incomers remained separated from natives by the fundamental fact that natives bore the isolation and material privations of an island in order to live where they had been born and raised, while incomers were free spirits who, by coming to an island, had cut precisely the kind of geographic, community, and family ties that island natives prized.
Eigg really was a Utopia where no one was very rich or poor, and where everyone ate a similar diet, lived in similar dwellings, and acted like members of an extended family. Castaways face the horror of solitude without community …, but community without solitude could be a Sartrean No Exit of people trapped for eternity in a brightly lit room. Eigg’s inhabitants enjoyed the balance of community and solitude Robert Lax found on Patmos, living in a landscape as wild as Jura’s and as beautiful as the Bandas, yet shaking hands every day.
The Odyssey contains some of the greatest island horror stories of all time, and bears some responsibility for the notions that an island’s temptations are more fabulous than those of a continent and its dangers more terrifying, but that even a frightening island can be seductive.
It is astonishing how many islands, particularly beautiful tropical ones, have a horror story in their past. Many of these stories involve shipwrecked sailors who attempt to subjugate the natives and are murdered by them, or romantics who come searching for paradise and become mortal enemies.
The cannibals may be gone, but most of us have prison lands in our backyards. The same isolation and freedom from mainland scrutiny that make islands so appealing also make them great places for a prison. In fact, so many islands have served as prisons that the words are almost as inseparable as “island” and “paradise”.
… for islophobes, no island can ever be pretty, sunny, or friendly enough to outweigh its baggage of exile and confinement. For them, an island’s small population promises a hell of repetitive social encounters, its silence is worse than tinnitus, its insulation from the mainland a painful exile, and its limited space an Alcatraz cell writ large.
If all islands, by virtue of their geography, echo Devil’s Island and Alcatraz, then another of their charms may be the curious feeling of escape and liberation that sometimes accompanies your departure from them.
Cruise liners are the most fearsome attack dogs the leisure industry looses on islands.
Before I began traveling, there had been numerous jokes about my “never-ending vacation” and “Carnival Cruise route.” In reply I had argued, without entirely believing it, that an all-island journey was as logical as a trip down a great river, across a desert, or through any region unified by culture and language. Now I knew this was true. I also knew that not only did islands share similar traits and face similar threats, but islanders themselves were a distinct psychological race.
My islands had all been interesting individualists, yet all shared certain characteristics. They were silent and wild, so they encouraged reflection or, as Marietta would say, “hearing yourself”. They had preserved their relics and history, and their rocks “remained in the same place”. They left indelible memories, and were friendly places that encouraged their inhabitants to becomes, as Tamil had said, “better people”.
QUOTATIONS
Jose Maria
Remember that on an island everyone waits for something: for mail, passengers, love … and the wisest, they wait for death.
Marietta
Shhh … listen, and you will hear the birds, and the ocean, and finally, yourself.
Thomas Merton
I want to find a really quiet, isolated place … where I can get down to the thing I really want to do and need to do – from which, if necessary, I can come out to help others.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
John Muir Quotations
Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Ispwo Mukika Crowfoot Quotation
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is a breath of a buffalo in the winter time.
It is the little shadow that runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Jules Renard Quotation
There are places and moments
in which one is so completely alone
that one sees the world entire.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
St. Augustine Quotation
The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page.
[And those who travel only as tourists only look at the pictures. - MC]
Monday, March 17, 2008
Wilton Robert Abbott Quotation
To understand the place of humans in the universe is to solve a complex problem. Therefore I find it impossible to believe that an understanding based entirely on science or one based entirely on religion can be correct.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Wandering/Seeing Definitions
It is an interesting approach to solving problems to go for a walk on the beach, perhaps with someone else to discuss the issues with. There is comforting background noise of the waves and perhaps wind, big expansive views so your eye lenses can relax a good bit, and the normal distractions of the office or study can be left behind. There is considerable soothing from walking on sand, whether barefoot or shod, and whether you stay dry or dip your toes in the edge of the waves. There is also a sense of expanded time in that there is no clock on the wall, and you can walk as far down the beach as you feel appropriate, before heading back. In fact, in reversing directions and heading back, you sort of indicate to yourself that you are through stating the problem, and are now ready to consider solutions on the way back, in hopes of having something of an action plan by the time you return. And you can walk as slowly as you like out and back.
But … this is NOT Wandering/Seeing. It is bringing your everyday troubles and issues along with you, and using the natural setting as a better locale for addressing them. Clearly a quite valuable approach to solving these problems, but not at all related to the intent of Wandering/Seeing.
Wandering/Seeing means to wander and to see. It means to fully engage your perceptive consciousness and to disengage your conscious judging and classifying. Issues and problems from your normal life, almost all of which are caused by judging, are to be shed along the way as quickly as possible. Until they are, your consciousness will be pre-occupied, and will not be free to wander wherever there is to go and to see what is there to be seen. In shedding your problems, you also shed a good measure of your self-concern and self-focus, which lead you to intensely and continuously judge, evaluate, and classify. These are largely habits you develop in dealing with the civilized world of work, family, and society – but are only habits, which can be set aside. To fully wander and to clearly see, these MUST be set aside.
A corporate retreat can have one of two emphases. In the first, business as usual is transferred from the office to the natural setting. The same relationships and issues are brought along to be addressed in a more comfortable and congenial setting. Team-building, issues clarification, and envisioning are typical objectives for such retreats.
In the second, all business is left behind and forbidden to intrude. Especially, all posturing, positioning, and other personal work-related habits are to be set aside. In their place, there is wandering and seeing. No scheduled and especially no competitive activities are “made available”. The participants instead have some minimal rules, such as meal times, and a few toys, such as hiking sticks, trail maps, and taxonomic guides. But they are encouraged to get out and about, just to look at things as they go by.
There are several concepts involved here.
· Getting back out into the real world is a matter of getting back to one’s roots, EVERYONE’s roots. From the earth we all sprang, and to the earth we will all return. No matter what facades we might erect in our civilized daily lives, these are the basic facts of life. Getting back to nature, in the REAL world where our food and water and energy and resources come from, is a profound reminder to us about from whence we came. Whether you believe we evolved on the plains of Africa or were created in the Garden of Eden, the natural world is our natural habitat. Compare the artificially landscaped urban habitats evident at the zoo and in neighborhoods – are there any significant differences?
· Getting back into the rhythm of the natural world, where, as diurnal animals, we wake at dawn and sleep at dusk, approximately, is to remind ourselves that there are other rhythms that can be adapted besides those typical of civilized culture. There are internal rhythms and clocks that can be re-set to function according to physiological rather than cultural or career needs. Many of us have forgotten about them, or chosen to ignore them. You get up whenever you wake up, eat whenever you feel hunger, relieve yourself whenever you feel the urge, nap whenever you feel sleepy and for as long as you stay asleep, huddle next to the fire or under wraps when you are cold, retire to shade and breeze whenever you are hot, wander and walk about whenever you feel energized and ready, stop and examine whatever strikes your fancy, and retire whenever you are ready to sleep for the night.
· There are as many sensory inputs available in the natural world as in the civilized world, but they do not scream and demand attention. In the civilized world, our consciousness ceaselessly struggles to filter out these inputs, to protect our attention from the hysterical media pressures (“I can’t hear myself think!”). In the natural world, our filtering can and must be set aside so that we can again see what there is to be seen, hear what there is to be heard, smell what there is to be smelled, touch what there is to be touched.
· In wandering and seeing, you wander according to what you find in front of you. There are no conceptual destinations laid out on maps for you to follow blindly, largely relegating the route to mere milestones and landmarks. What you find in front of you IS the destination.
· In wandering and seeing, you see what is in front of you, hear what is around, feel what comes in contact with your skin. There are no artificial realities provided by TV, iPods, and air conditioning.
· In wandering and seeing, you set aside instantaneous mental classification and learn to embrace childlike wonder again. Instead of declaring, “This IS such-and-such”, we pose, “What is this?” Instead of rapidly surveying the setting then acting and accomplishing, we let our eyes linger on what catches our attention, listen for a while to catch intermittent sounds and calls, stoop to pick up and examine, heft and caress with our finger tips, bring to our noses and inhale.
In short, the idea is to return to experiencing the world again, rather than defending ourselves against experiences and barricading ourselves behind artificial experience.
Wandering/Seeing Notes
There is a remarkable draw to the open road that I have sensed just about all my life. Certainly for the whole of my adult life, and perhaps in childhood as well – as we moved from town to town. There has certainly been nothing like permanence, or even stability in my life, ever. Keep moving, don’t get overly comfortable anywhere, and above all, don’t get comfortable with people.
This is the ideal itinerant American life, I guess. Keep us moving, so that the only constants left in our lives is The System. Everywhere are McDonalds and Wal-Marts, so you can get a fair amount of your expectations addressed and mollified at any time – same uniforms, same behaviors, just different faces. But this isn’t the open road – it is just town life, every town just the same, another mile marker down the road.
The road is going somewhere – towards a big horizon. Deep forest is no help – going here is to essentially hide yourself away, which may suit some people well. No, it is the big open skies of the American Plains and West that beckons. From West Texas north and east to Minnesota, then west to Eastern Washington, down to Southern California, and back across Arizona and New Mexico. Big open spaces, some flat, some vertical, but just about everywhere, you can get out of your vehicle and look around you, and usually see for miles and miles in at least one direction.
All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance. - V.V. Rozanov
What is it about looking into the distance, at horizons, clouds, faraway mountains, from high across wide plains, out onto a featureless ocean? Is there some physiological comfort in letting the eye lenses relax into long-distance focus? Is it the transcendence of looking past your immediate surroundings off to some future location in time, represented by some distance point to be reached after simple, concentrated effort? Can we in this way escape the cares of ourselves, by looking beyond our small spheres of petty concerns? To lose focus on oneself is to forget oneself. To expand our focus to far distances is to take in all in between, and to expand ourselves out that far.
What is to be actually done out on the road? So many of us travel a distance each day to our jobs, but it is the same old route, the same old jostling for lanes and paths, the same old commanding intersections impeding our progress, the same old destination. Out on the road, the real new and, to us, unknown road, all is new. Some familiar landmarks perhaps, yet another Dairy Queen or Denny’s, but also new and unknown retail, different churches, different fronts but the same old liquor store adds for Budweiser and Bud Lite, odd shaped houses with unusual landscaping. Between towns, the same yellow and white stripes, concrete or asphalt or gravel, telephone and fence poles flashing by.
We don’t go anywhere. Going someplace is for squares. We just go. - Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones
This is the ideal itinerant American life, I guess. Keep us moving, so that the only constants left in our lives is The System. Everywhere are McDonalds and Wal-Marts, so you can get a fair amount of your expectations addressed and mollified at any time – same uniforms, same behaviors, just different faces. But this isn’t the open road – it is just town life, every town just the same, another mile marker down the road.
The road is going somewhere – towards a big horizon. Deep forest is no help – going here is to essentially hide yourself away, which may suit some people well. No, it is the big open skies of the American Plains and West that beckons. From West Texas north and east to Minnesota, then west to Eastern Washington, down to Southern California, and back across Arizona and New Mexico. Big open spaces, some flat, some vertical, but just about everywhere, you can get out of your vehicle and look around you, and usually see for miles and miles in at least one direction.
All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance. - V.V. Rozanov
What is it about looking into the distance, at horizons, clouds, faraway mountains, from high across wide plains, out onto a featureless ocean? Is there some physiological comfort in letting the eye lenses relax into long-distance focus? Is it the transcendence of looking past your immediate surroundings off to some future location in time, represented by some distance point to be reached after simple, concentrated effort? Can we in this way escape the cares of ourselves, by looking beyond our small spheres of petty concerns? To lose focus on oneself is to forget oneself. To expand our focus to far distances is to take in all in between, and to expand ourselves out that far.
What is to be actually done out on the road? So many of us travel a distance each day to our jobs, but it is the same old route, the same old jostling for lanes and paths, the same old commanding intersections impeding our progress, the same old destination. Out on the road, the real new and, to us, unknown road, all is new. Some familiar landmarks perhaps, yet another Dairy Queen or Denny’s, but also new and unknown retail, different churches, different fronts but the same old liquor store adds for Budweiser and Bud Lite, odd shaped houses with unusual landscaping. Between towns, the same yellow and white stripes, concrete or asphalt or gravel, telephone and fence poles flashing by.
We don’t go anywhere. Going someplace is for squares. We just go. - Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones
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