Surrounded by paradise,
we first recognize it and then turn against it.
Terry Tempest Williams uses the word “erotic” in reference to wild landscapes, and I find that intriguing. I often have feelings on mountaintops, beside rivers, and in wildflower meadows that routine language fails to capture. “Erotic” has a bite to it that might do justice to those feelings. But, when I read further, I’m troubled by some of what Williams writes. She makes note of the way erotic often degrades into pornographic. Referring to the Erotic Museum in Denmark, she writes: “As I watch these images of men and women simultaneously moving from one position to the next, I wonder about our notion of the erotic—why is it so often aligned with the pornographic, the limited view of the voyeur watching the act of intercourse without any interest in the relationship itself” [Williams 2002: 105]. Williams associates that with the widespread attitude among nature lovers that nature should only be looked at. Rather than participate in nature, Williams writes, we are seduced “into believing that our place in the wild is as spectator, onlooker. A society of individuals who only observe a landscape from behind the lens of a camera or the window of an automobile without entering in is perhaps no different from the persons who obtain sexual gratification from looking at the sexual play of others” [106]. Reacting against such a one-dimensional connection with nature, Williams tells of surrendering to a desire to “climb into the arms” of a tree, reporting that she “had forgotten what it felt like to be really held” [107].
I have two responses to this. The first is that there’s nothing wrong with merely looking at nature. We are participants in a civilization whose modus operandi is too often a violent assault on nature. In that light, confining ourselves to looking at it, or otherwise treating it very gently, does not seem to be a bad idea. Although climbing into the arms of a tree is a fairly harmless form of participation, we’ve certainly seen trees that have suffered from too many people climbing into them or trampling the ground beneath them. Worse than that, I worry about people repeating arguments like Williams’s in order to justify activities like hunting, food gathering, gardening, and building a house in the woods. Such activities, though desirable from some perspectives, can easily go beyond what nature can tolerate, given our human numbers and the power of our technology.
The second reaction that I have is that Williams must not be a photographer. Otherwise, she would know that “merely looking” doesn’t necessarily mean being voyeuristically detached. I have looked at wildflowers through the viewfinder of my camera and experienced feelings which I can only describe as affection. I have photographed scenery and felt such a love for it that I’ve thought of photographers who photograph people and assumed that many of them must feel the same way about their subjects. Undoubtedly, there are people who limit their connection with nature to viewing it through the windshield and hopping out for two minutes to snap a photograph before driving on. But there’s a lot of territory between that on the one hand and the active manipulation of nature on the other. You don’t need to climb into a tree, and you certainly don’t need to build a house in the woods, in order to listen, and feel, and meditate, and learn, as well as to look. On rare occasions, I’ve taken my clothes off and done those things naked. Like many others who’ve tried it, I’ve enjoyed it immensely. Thinking about it afterwards, I’ve tried to figure out why it’s so pleasurable. For one thing, it exposes even more of our senses to our surroundings. As Charles Daney has written on the internet: “Wearing clothes when we don’t need them is like wearing a blindfold over our eyes or earplugs in our ears” [Daney 2003]. Even more importantly, I’ve realized that the desire to be naked in the presence of wild nature needs no more explanation that the desire to be naked in the presence of someone we love.
Williams’s term, “erotic landscape,” reminds me of such feelings and prompts me to think, “That’s what I want to photograph and write about.” Can I communicate in words and images the feelings that I’ve had? Can I depict an erotic landscape? But then I wonder if “erotic” is the right word. My dictionary defines erotic as “of, relating to, or tending to arouse sexual desire or excitement.” It’s true that I’m looking for a stronger word than ordinary language, but “erotic” might be a little too strong, hinting of fornication with wild beasts or masturbating in a meadow of wildflowers. Not that sex and nature are unrelated, of course! Jay Griffiths: “The forests of the world hum up the erotic…. To every monkey an erection; to every insect, sackfuls of eggs; flowers bloom in smirking shapes of visual innuendo; leaves are protuberant; mushrooms conjugally fungal; every parrot on the squawk for it; every peccary rutting for it; every tendril internally sprung for it. Nothing unthrust. Nothing unfecund” [Griffiths 2006: 47-48]. But Griffiths is describing what species do with their own kind; it’s hardly what I have in mind when I’m photographing a wildflower.
If “erotic” is too strong a word, what about “romantic”? “Inclined toward or suggestive of the feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love,” says my dictionary. That’s more accurate, it seems to me, but I fear that “romantic” is too weak a word, at least in light of what it’s come to connote. The romantic movement of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a rebellion against destructive industrialization and urbanization, and it helped to revolutionize attitudes about wild nature. Indeed, many of our current positive attitudes toward nature are products of the romantic movement. Unfortunately, however, “romantic” no longer suggests anything so revolutionary. My dictionary also says: “of, characterized by, or suggestive of an idealized view of reality.” Thus, a person who’s “romantic” is likely to be seen as one possessing a sweetness or delicacy that’s phony, or naïve, or oblivious to hard reality.
In the eighteenth century, the Romantics made a distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
was interested in our psychic responses to things—a rushing cataract, say, a dark vault or a cliff-face—that seized, terrified, and yet also somehow pleased the mind by dint of being too big, too high, too fast, too obscured, too powerful, too something, to be properly comprehended. These were sublime sights—hectic, intimidating, uncontrollable—and they inspired in the observer, said Burke, a heady blend of pleasure and terror. Beauty, by contrast, was inspired by the visually regular, the proportioned, the predictable…. In Burke’s psychological terms, beauty had a relaxing effect on the “fibres” of the body, whereas sublimity tightened these “fibres.” … At the core of Burke’s thesis was the proposal that these sublime sights caused terror, and terror was a passion which, he wrote, “always produces delight if it does not press too close.” … So it would be impossible to appreciate the Sublime if one were, say, hanging by a handhold from a cliff-face. But if you came just near enough to a waterfall or a cliff-edge to suggest to your imagination the possibility of self-destruction, then you would feel a sublime rush. It was the suggestion of harm, melded with the knowledge that no harm was likely to come, which induced the delightful terror… [Macfarlane 2003: 74-75].It has not escaped my attention (speaking of “erotic”) that a feeling of terror while nonetheless knowing that one is safe is a pretty good description of the pleasures of bondage and masochism. Tied up by one’s lover, one realizes that the lover can tease, torment, hurt, or even do serious damage. But one also knows that the lover can be trusted, and that’s what makes the experience … well … sublime.
Lynda Nead draws a parallel between the dichotomies of art and pornography on the one hand and the beautiful and the sublime on the other. Drawing from Immanuel Kant, she says “the beautiful is characterized by the finitude of its formal contours. The sublime, on the contrary, is presented in terms of excess, of the infinite; it cannot be framed and is therefore almost beyond presentation (in a quite literal sense, then, obscene)” [Nead 1992: 26]. She reminds us that Kant’s interpretation is different from Burke’s idea of the sublime as awesome or uplifting. For Kant, the sublime was associated with an outrage of the imagination, a loss of the power of human agency. In regard to landscapes, the sublime describes places where we’re not comfortable. Some landscapes “look” comfortable: meadows to walk through, a placid or rippling stream to sit beside, lush grass to roll around in, a sandy beach. Others “look” uncomfortable: rocks, cliffs, pounding waterfalls, surf boiling and crashing among rocks, a vast expanse of sand dunes. In a somewhat parallel way, some landscapes look usable, cultivatable, “a good place to raise children.” Others appear “useless”—resistant or hostile to human use.
Similarly, depictions of nudity and sex when we’re comfortable with them are regarded as “art,” whereas, if they make us uncomfortable, we call it “pornography.” Consider Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of naked gay men, for example. I don’t care for them, but not because they’re naked gay men. I don’t like the exclusive choice of classically muscular models, the artificial poses, or the studio lighting. For me, naked is natural, and ought to look that way. But what if Mapplethorpe’s purpose was to change our ideas of beauty, to teach us that naked gay men are beautiful? If that was his purpose, the project, at least for me, was a failure, but it had an admirable purpose. Throughout the centuries, art has often taught us what’s beautiful and helped to change our ideas of beauty. This has been true of subject matter ranging from mountains and other wild landscapes to ordinary people (as opposed to saints, royalty, and aristocrats).
The idea of the sublime interests me primarily for this potential to change our views of what’s beautiful, or important, or valuable. It’s not surprising that sublimity would play such a role. The merely beautiful is familiar, and the familiar—because it’s familiar—doesn’t change us. The sublime, by contrast, grabs our attention, and, even if we rebel against it at first, we may come to terms with it in time, and those are the occasions when our attitudes and feelings change. Early seventeenth-century crossers of the Alps “experienced all the fear of later travelers, yet never for a moment their ‘rapture’ or ‘ecstasy’” [Nicholson 1959: 60]. In 1621, James Howell called the Alps “hideous” [61]. By 1688, John Dennis, influenced by notions of the sublime, had mixed feelings, describing “a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy,” and saying, “at the same time that I was infinitely pleased, I trembled” [277]. Less than a dozen years later, Thomas Addison was already armed with the “conventional [vocabulary] of the time”: “rude prospects,” “rocks rising one above the other,” “confusions of mountains and hollows” [305].
I recall from an earlier life as a professor of political science an interesting parallel in studies of the way public opinion is influenced by the news media [Graber 1988]. In general, people scan newspapers or pay passing attention to TV news programs, looking, watching, or listening for things that affect them or that otherwise seem interesting. Much of what they read, see, or hear fits comfortably with their background of beliefs and assumptions about the world, so they move on. When a news item doesn’t quite fit, people sometimes, as skeptics would predict, reinterpret or misinterpret the new information in order to make it fit. But, in still other cases, contrary to the skeptics, it’s the items that don’t fit that people find most interesting. They look again at those items; think about them; discuss them; and sometimes they change their minds. That’s how significant shifts in public opinion occur. News stories that led to such changes included ones about Vietnam, Watergate, the civil rights movement, pollution, and AIDS. When we confront something unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and stick with it long enough to come to accept it, and especially if we come to love it, that’s when we change. We grow. Our lives become larger. I don’t mean to imply that there’s anything wrong with familiar things. Heaven knows, we need comfort and beauty. If our lives were always being made larger, they might explode. All I mean to say is that, when we experience only the familiar and comfortable, we fail to change, and our lives remain small.
What people find comfortable or uncomfortable is relative, of course. In the realm of eroticism, some people will be uncomfortable with anything beyond petting and gentle intercourse. For others, anal sex is sublime; for others, bondage; for still others, spanking and whipping. The same is true of landscapes. Simply looking at an uncomfortable landscape was sublime for eighteenth-century travelers in the Alps, and remains so for many people now, whereas others need to hike in it, climb it, run through it, “fastpack” across it, risk dying in it. Landscape masochism.
An even more important interpersonal difference is in reactions to sublime experiences. For some, the experience, or at least the reaction, is positive. People who initially found the mountains terrifying concluded that they were awe-inspiring and came to love them. The same has been true of other landscapes: forests, prairies, deserts, and swamps. But other people, who presumably also found the landscapes terrifying, continue to see them as enemies and are never satisfied until the landscapes are tamed or subdued. Mountains in that regard have perhaps been the most resistant. Forests have been cleared, prairies plowed, deserts irrigated, and swamps drained. It’s one thing for a species to do whatever is necessary to survive, and a certain amount of clearing, plowing, irrigating, and draining is necessary for that purpose. But the human assault on the environment has gone way beyond necessity. Jay Griffiths: “All creatures have a drive to procreate and survive, and they don’t hesitate to kill members of other species in order to do so. But there’s no indication that they hold grudges against other species. Why is it different with humans?” [Griffiths 2006: 122].
Responses to other people are as diverse as responses to landscapes. Mapplethorpe’s homosexual nudes are beautiful to some people, intriguing to others, and the nadir of depravity to still others. The history of Western contact with indigenous cultures is full of revelations of cultural differences sufficiently large and unexpected to qualify as sublime. Reactions have varied all the way from attraction—think of Rousseau or Gauguin—to shock and hatred. In the end, the most common response is to compare newly discovered people to ourselves, find them inferior, and either eliminate them or force them to change. By and large, the same has been true of landscapes.
In connection with this, a pattern that I find particularly interesting is the tendency, evident in many examples, to be attracted initially to something sublime and then to turn against it. I call it the Petrarch Effect. In 1336, Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux and wrote one of the first known accounts of mountain climbing. At first, he was favorably impressed with the view from the summit: “The great sweep of view spread out before me. I stood like one dazed” [Coates 1998: 65]. But then he opened Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which he always carried with him, and came across a passage warning men to concentrate on their salvation instead of being seduced by scenery. “I was abashed,” Petrarch wrote, “and … I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things, who might long ago have learned … that nothing is wonderful but the soul” [65-66]. He immediately hastened down from the mountain. Since then, we’ve had generation after generation of Petrarchs falling in love with landscapes—or people—and then pulling up short, saying, “Oh, no, we can’t feel this way.” The landscapes or the people, at one moment tempting, become despicable or useless, and needing improvement.
Many of the first Europeans to come to America described the continent as a paradise. Robert Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia (1705) is a very early example of emphasis on the sensory beauty of nature [Marx 1964: 75]. Beverley described the sky, the sun, the groves, the fruit, the mockingbird, the hummingbird, the lady’s slipper. The eyes of the British, he wrote, “are ravished with the Beauties of naked Nature” [82]. Beverley portrayed the Indians as “gay, gentle, loving, generous, and faithful” and attributed their charm to the “natural Production of the Country” [80]. But then his tone changed. Historian Leo Marx writes:
Given his assumptions about the inescapable influence of the natural environment upon the character and fortune of men, we are led to expect that the Europeans, as a result of their removal to this virgin land, quickly will be redeemed…. But that is not what happens at all. On the contrary, as Beverley approaches the end [of his book] he is overcome by a sense of disappointment, disgruntlement, and shame…. [H]e is impatient with all those Virginians and agents of the Crown who stand in the way of improvements—especially the development of towns, trades, and manufactures [81].Marx says Beverley’s confusion “arises from an inner conflict. On the one hand he is drawn to the Indians and all that they represent: a simple, effortless, spontaneous existence…. But on the other hand he remains an Englishman, product of a culture that values discipline, work, performance. He knows perfectly how dangerous it is for the eyes of Europeans to be ravished by the beauties of naked nature” [85-86]. As we know, the Indians were soon transposed from admirable people to despicable savages, and European settlers were equally despised unless they set about conquering the wilderness and subduing the Indians along with it.
Once the seaboard was settled, the same pattern was repeated on the frontier. Men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett lived among the Indians, fought with them, traded with them, intermarried with them, and achieved a degree of mutual admiration and respect. But run-of-the-mill settlers who supplemented their meager farming with hunting and gathering in the manner of the Indians were looked down upon rather than honored. “[O]nce hunters, farewell to the plow,” lamented Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. “The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsocial” [Cox 2005: 39]. No doubt, many of the frontiersmen were a brutish lot, but the “civilized” elements were too prone to look to Europe or the eastern cities for their values to see the country around them as anything but needing improvement [Wright 1955]. Even the Indian tribes that were held in high esteem were treated in the end no better than the others [museum exhibits, Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, Alabama]. Historian Wilma Dykeman describes Boone “blaz[ing] a path by which the civilization [he] so desperately shunned could come to possess the wilderness he so fervently cherished” [Dykeman 1984: 43].
In California and the Southwest, relations between Anglos and Hispanics followed similar patterns. Although Anglos in Texas tended to remain aloof from Hispanic settlements, American trappers and traders in California “often marr[ied] into Hispanic families, adopt[ed] Spanish as their principal language, and at least start[ed] to become Mexicanized Americans” [Limerick 1987: 231]. All that changed with the Gold Rush and the coming of the railroads, and Hispanic people soon found themselves treated as “foreigners” in their own land [239]. Even in New Mexico, where Hispanics remained a numerical majority, wealthy Hispanics often sided with the Anglos in marginalizing their less well off compatriots [239]. Just as with landscapes and the Indians, Anglos found something attractive in Hispanic culture, but very soon it was as if they realized they were being seduced by something sinful. Warning lights went on, and a reaction set in. In descriptions of Hispanic culture, “rich” became “extravagant,” “leisurely” became “lazy,” and “seductive” became “immoral.” Charles Lummis argued that, whereas Anglos could teach other cultures about achievement, Hispanic culture could teach Anglos about enjoying life [Thompson 2001: 181]. But Lummis was unusual. The typical reaction to Indians and Hispanics—and also to African-Americans, as well as to heroic nature itself—was to be tempted by them and then to overreact against them.
I find the California story especially interesting. When I was growing up in the Midwest, California was a magical place in our imaginations. We longed to go there and envied people who did. But, in time, our attitudes changed. It seemed that California was spoiled before we had a chance to see it. Joan Didion’s memoir reminds me that the story I experienced is an old one [Didion 2003]. It’s always been that way in California. People were awestruck by it, fell passionately in love with it, and then spoiled it. “We lived in a fantastic but real world of our own discovery,” wrote the daughter of an early rancher: “square miles of impassable terrain, wild cattle threatening on the trail, single coyotes caterwauling like a pack, pumas screaming, storms felling giant oaks, washouts that marooned us for days, wildfires that lasted weeks and scorched whole mountain ranges” [56]. As Didion writes: “To be a Californian was to see oneself, if one believed the lessons the place seemed most immediately to offer, as affected only by ‘nature’ …” [66]. The landscape—“the redwoods …, the Mojave …, the coast at Big Sur, Mono Lake, the great vistas of the Sierra, especially those of the Yosemite Valley” [66]—seemed to inspire bold undertakings and simultaneously to suggest that the land could survive anything.
Where does this pattern of initial attraction and subsequent aggression come from? What prevents people from continuing to see a landscape as something beautiful from which they can take what they need and leave the rest alone? What prevents them from continuing to see another culture as something worthy of respect, coexistence, and mutual learning? Why such a fear or hatred of the Indians or Hispanics for enjoying life? For taking it easy? For being satisfied with simple pleasures? For working as much as necessary to meet one’s needs and then kicking back? Why did such things seem so evil or so dangerous that they needed to be demonized and eradicated? The Petrarch Effect appears to be a psychological perversion—a civilization-wide psychological perversion. What deep-seated trauma in the collective consciousness is responsible for it? What is it about European history—or, more specifically, northern European history—that might explain this?
The most persuasive analysis that I’ve seen is Susan Griffin’s in her book The Eros of Everyday Life [Griffin 1995]. In Europe’s contact with new continents, Griffin writes, “[t]he closure of mind was … so quick, so final, so aggressive, that … I cannot help but think the European psyche was in some way afraid of what it saw” [101]. It was only shortly afterward, she points out, that Copernicus showed that the sun and not the earth was the center of the solar system. “But the discovery of the Americas had already shaken the security of the sinecure by which the European mind had supposed itself the center of the universe” [101]. Griffin describes the nightmare: “Stripped of crown, church, and all its social scaffolding, the self makes a terrifying descent. What lies below is the stuff of nightmares. Mortality, the great power of nature in and outside of the body, all that [European culture had obscured] becomes once more visible, if only instantaneously, brought to consciousness by this meeting with a new continent” [102].
Significantly, that challenge to the mistaken assumption that Europe was the center of the universe is being repeated today—if anything, on an even bigger scale—by the ecological idea that humans, rather than standing above nature, are simply part and parcel of it. A truly ecological worldview threatens today’s illusion of knowledge and power in the same way that Copernicus threatened the church-dominated illusion of knowledge and power in 1543. Like the Alps to eighteenth-century travelers, the ecological perspective is simultaneously tantalizing, but also unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and fearsome. We could, like the Romantics, expose ourselves to it, absorb it, think about it, come to terms with it, and ultimately embrace it. But, sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the common pattern. Instead, we approach the unfamiliar with what Griffin calls the
dreamlike desire for the power to define reality.... And what is the interior landscape of this dream? Here there is no easy posture of receiving. No casual meeting. No subtlety or free play. No sultry slow descent to an erotic knowledge by which, just as one takes in knowledge, one is entered by the known, capsized, transformed. Rather the motion is all swift, driven, edged by anxiety, aimed like a weapon is aimed, aggressive, conquering [136].
The assumption seems to be that we need to know everything so we can control everything. The only choice we see is control or chaos. Either we’re in charge or we’re at the mercy of other forces. We win or we lose. There’s no perception that we’re enmeshed in an immensely complicated web of relationships which we can learn about incrementally and manage in a give-and-take manner by being alert and adaptable. What stands out for me is a seemingly overwhelming need to make judgments, to reach conclusions, to pretend to be certain even when we’re not. Anything unfamiliar seems to need to be fit fairly quickly into categories. Whether it’s landscapes or people—Indians, Hispanics, African Americans, women, or homosexuals—they have to be either “good” or “bad,” “useful” or “useless.” Why can’t they simply be “interesting”? Why can’t we, for more than a moment, respect the unfamiliar, using it or changing it no more than necessary until we’re sure we know what we’re doing? Why the assumption that, if we don’t love something, we have to hate it? Why not “a sultry slow descent to an erotic knowledge” of both people and landscapes, allowing our judgments—if any are necessary—to emerge in their own good time?
Griffin’s analysis was on my mind while I walked home from a coffeehouse where I had been working on this essay. It seemed that to me that Griffin had diagnosed the problem very well. I felt that I had a much better understanding of the reasons for such profound negative responses to landscapes and people. But I still had no idea the cure might be.
Beyond that, the only thing of significance on my home was an aster that caught my eye, blooming in a vacant lot behind our apartment building. It was an uncommonly beautiful plant, robust and symmetrical, and filled with purple flowers. When I got home, I picked up my camera and walked back to the aster to consummate a relationship.
SOURCES
Coates, Peter. Nature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Cox, John D. Traveling South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.
Daney, Charles. “Nakedness and Nature.” http://cgd.best.vwh.net/home/ naturism/nudity19.htm.
Didion, Joan. Where I Was From. New York: Knopf, 2003.
Dykeman, Wilma. Tennessee: A History. Newport, TN: Wakestone, 1984.
Graber, Doris A. Processing the News. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 1988.
Griffin, Susan. The Eros of Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 1995.
Griffiths, Jay. Wild. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest. New York: Norton, 1987.
Macfarlane, Robert. Mountains of the Mind. New York: Pantheon, 2003.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Nead, Lynda. The Female Nude. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. New York: Norton, 1959.
Thompson, Mark. American Character. New York: Arcade, 2001.
Williams, Terry Tempest. Red. New York: Vintage, 2002.
Wright, Louis B. Culture on the Moving Frontier. New York: Harper & Row, 1955.
1 comment:
Fascinating exploration Alan
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