Lens to the Natural World. Kenneth H. Olson
of objects that don’t know each other.
Thus, distracted by the pace, clutter, and din of a congested society, as well as by our own individual preoccupations, the primal world is, for us, opaque and mute. In such a culture, to relate with any sensitivity to nature does not come naturally; rather, one must put forth a conscious, deliberate effort to be aware of the wider world beyond our utilitarian purposes.
In the process, however, anyone who observes the world of nature also must struggle against the compulsion to label and categorize. It is more than easy to think that such lists and logs represent understanding. Instead, mere identities penned and collated distract us from, say, the grace of the hawk on the wing or the heron’s arrowed thrust.
Imposing our own framework on the natural world hinders seeing what is there, such as when people “see” things in the clouds or in rock formations. The bedrock, the foundation of the world, protrudes. We observe it, climb it, mine it, but, sooner or later, we must use words, and we often do so to make the unfamiliar overly familiar. A sandstone cliff becomes a face in profile or a rocky spire a “castle,” a horizon is entitled “the Sleeping Giant.” Think of the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, which were named by mountain men. (There is consensus that they had definitely been in the woods too long.)
Go on a tour through a cavern filled with limestone forms built by the slow accretion of minerals in the trickle of water. The well-intentioned guide will point to the stalagmites and stalactites with a well-rehearsed monologue on how they resemble cartoon characters. Cheap chatter fills the silence between the glistening forms, as though we should not be allowed to be uneasy when confronted by such mystery. In the words of geologist David Leveson, “The guide’s patter can only be distracting—but perhaps it is meant to be, for we have lost our sense of the religious, the numinous. Somehow we never let ourselves get beyond being uncomfortable when faced with the mysterious or powerful—we giggle nervously and try to reduce it to the mundane.” Some message other than the one prepared for us in advance may reach us, a message from the earth itself.
We can be insulated from that message also by our relative affluence. Ordinary people in the western world are wealthy beyond what most in former ages could even begin to imagine. It need not be the case, but this fact alone so often shields us from beholding nature. The old rhyme has it that “The world is so full of a number of things / I’m sure we should all be happy as kings.” The trouble with that statement is that kings have never been known for their happiness, and mere power or control over things has never guaranteed it. In 1689, King Louis XIV of France ordered for his garden at Versailles, among many other items, 83,000 narcissus and 87,000 tulips to go with his 1200 fountains. We may make, if not the same mistake, at least the same kind of mistake with other things, using material goods as a way to measure our supposed status. Not many are of the mind of Socrates, who, by tradition, while strolling in the marketplace of ancient Athens, threw up his hands and exclaimed, “O, gods, who would have dreamed there are so many things I do not want!” Yes, who really needs so many of the things we buy? In the assessment by J. W. Krutch, the desire to be envied is almost surely what King Louis had in mind: ‘“It will be evident to all,’ so he said to himself, ‘that no one else in all the world can have as many tulips as I can, and they will envy me—though God knows, the whole eighty-seven thousand of them look dull enough to me!’”
We easily become jaded by more than we need. Shakespeare, in King Henry IV, described the syndrome in relation to the public seeing too much of Richard II, but it has a wider application, does it not?
They surfeited with honey and began
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.
In addition, in a culture of abundance, the perfectionist mentality lies close at hand. I recall a concert performed by a large city’s symphony orchestra. It was a marvelous program of several pieces of classical music of great difficulty, and it was performed almost flawlessly. I say “almost” because midway through the clarinet solo of Brahms’s First Symphony the reed in the instrument stuck, and the result was a sour note. After that, the soloist and the rest of the orchestra went on to play expertly for more than two hours. Following the concert, my wife and I went out looking for a place for dinner; almost every restaurant was filled with people who had been at the same event. It was interesting—amazing, really—that most of the overheard conversations were not about the superb renditions of the score and of how, with precision, timing and true finesse, several dozen men and women had produced for our enjoyment some of the world’s greatest music. Instead, out of the hundreds of thousands or millions of notes, that which captured people’s attention was the single one that was slightly “off.” The object of one’s focus does make a difference.
Something similar happens to many of the affluent millions who live in the suburbs and who take to the road to “experience nature,” led to do so by the advertising that presents the land as a commodity, a package providing entertainment. Many of the 3 million people who visit Yellowstone National Parking Lot each year are disillusioned. Nature, as visualized on glossy and oversaturated photos on calendars, cannot live up to expectations. Barry Lopez summed it up: “People only able to venture into the countryside on annual vacations are, increasingly, schooled in the belief that wild land will, and should, provide thrills and exceptional scenery on a timely basis. If it does not, something is wrong, either with the land itself or possibly with the company outfitting the trip.”
When you travel on a train, you can sometimes watch small children peering out the windows and saying, “Look, Mom, a cow! Look, Mom, a horse!” Parents are often tempted to apologize for that attitude, as did one by saying to the other passengers, “You know, she still thinks everything is wonderful.” Well, not everything is wonderful, but many things are.
There was a person who was tired of living in the same place for many years and decided to move. She wrote an advertisement to put her house up for sale, in the process listing its attributes. She described its convenient features, a great location, the view, and so forth. When the newspaper came out, she read the ad and decided that it described a place as good as any she could ever imagine, and she cancelled it. All it took was a fresh pair of eyes, something that surely holds in relationship to the wider world around us.
If we can simply perceive things for what they are, even the most ordinary part of the world is far from ordinary. Ronald Reagan said, quite famously, “When you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” We can give thanks that he did not speak for everyone. Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees takes off his shoes.” Emerson, in his essay on art: “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
In, with, and under the ordinary is the extraordinary. There is an entire literature of mystical experience that speaks of a deeper perception called enlightenment. Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, says that “although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always . . . a gift and a total surprise.” She described an experience thus:
I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame . . . The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
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