Wednesday, 2 January 2008
The term “wilderness” usually
conjures up images of places far removed from ordinary human habitation, great
rocky crags in mountainous terrain or desert landscapes or deep swampy lagoons
or thick jungle growth barely allowing passage. Places where “wild
things” are found. It is a romantic image of places “far from the madding
crowd.” For me the term refers to the more swampy terrain of southeast Georgia,
the Ogeechee River area near which I grew up. We lived about ten miles
southwest of Savannah after moving out of the city when I was about four years
old. People who only know my scholarly habits, hanging out in libraries
and bookstores or cafes with my nose in a book have no idea how much my life is
connected to these ‘wild’ places—even now in the middle of my sixth
decade. In fact, the deep woods of Georgia was my favorite place to
read. Nobody could find me there and I never had to worry about being
interrupted.
Even now, more than four decades
later, I can see and feel the texture of Loblolly pine bark, remember exactly
how it felt to brush stinging nettle with a bare ankle, or notice the
distressing sound of snapping tendrils as a huge jungle vine decided to dump me
into a swampy pool of brackish water as I was imitating Tarzan swinging across
a forest clearing. I carried a machete or a long WWI bayonette with me
most of the time, along with a Bowie hunting knife and a .22 rifle for the
possible dangers of meeting unpleasant two-legged characters.
Fortunately, I moved with too much stealth for anyone to hear me.
With a poor sense of direction, I somehow rarely got lost, “feeling” my way
instinctively through the labyrinthine byways. I was tuned to a different
frequency when I was in the woods. Only when I tried to reason my way
around the woods, using sun directions or moss on trees, did I ever get lost.
Then I had to walk till I came out to a railroad track or highway to find my
way home. Sometimes that required passing through quite a few miles of
thorny, insect-plagued territory.
For my father the rivers and tidal
creeks were his places to get away, to commune with the universe, to keep in
touch with the God who was as evident in Nature as in the Bible of his preacher
father. Not long after taking out cosmic insurance at a local Baptist church
during a Revival meeting, I was baptized behind the pulpit in a pool for that
purpose. But reading Spinoza somewhat later, I took my father’s path and sought
out the God of Nature—“Nature’s God”—in my swamp wandering and reading and
notebook scribbling. I reasoned that if God could not be found outside
the walls of churches, then “God” was only an empty term of little interest. I
was reading Sir James Jeans and Einstein’s essays and Fred Hoyle and books with
titles like The Oscillating Universe. I struggled with Alfred North
Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, even Alfred Tarski’s forays into logical
conundrums. It was “overreaching,” to be sure, but it was utterly
intoxicating. It was my version of what I later encountered in the works of
Emerson and Thoreau. I muddled centuries and authors, lost in time and
space then as now. (I am never quite sure to what century I belong or
even whether it matters very much. How little “the deep down unteachable
part” of me has changed!) “Wilderness,” for me, was always a place which
included the stars above as well as the microcosmos in the ponds and
soil. “Nature,” for me, included and transcended human beings. Even
as I write I realize how close my thinking still is to the text of Spinoza I
first encountered in an old bookshop in downtown Savannah, especially his
description of “God.” It was far more attractive to me than what I
discerned in the arrogant speculations of Descartes. In that way, I
suppose, I escaped the point of Toqueville’s famously’) jest about Americans being
naïve Cartesians. If Spinoza was really an atheist, as some geniuses have
suggested, it certainly escaped my notice. I’m sure God escapes confinement to
Spinoza’s geometrical speculations but I like the ‘poetry’ of Spinoza’s philosophical
statements on “divinity.” God cannot be confined to churches or temples
of any sort. In that way, the “wisdom” that seeks guidance from thoughts
of “the highest things” is found in this larger framework of Nature or
Wilderness.
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