I have often wondered whether this love for the landscape, this ardent longing I feel for dissolution into the wild is not a symptom of some ancient hurt, a way to salve wounds that should have healed long ago.
I speak of kinship, of the shared ancestry we each of us possess human and horned lizard and Hosta, I think about lines of descent in the kind of reverent awe in which an Essene might intone the first verses of the book of Matthew about Phares begetting Esrom who begat Aram who begat Aminadab; Aminadab begat Naasson; Naasson begat Salmon; Salmon begat Coho and Chinook and Rainbow Trout. My kinship with the wild things is of profound importance to me, and yet I have much closer kin with whom my relationship is, to put it mildly, strained.
I declaim about the kinship of all life and yet it’s been more than a year since I’ve seen anyone in my family. Were I to healthily revere kinship in its multifarious forms, wouldn’t it make sense that I’d spend time with, you know, my kin? But I don’t.
I don’t have any trouble admitting, to myself or to my friends or to the world at large, that my relationship with my family is broken. I love them, to the degree I am capable. I love the rocks and ocotillos more. Every once in a while it occurs to me that most would consider that an inversion of the natural order, and then I sit back and wonder at myself for a while. Is this nature worship mere palliative for the family drama, which sometimes seems destined to repeat endlessly in my close human relationships? Is it to me what I imagine Family With A Capital F is for other, happier people? A refuge in which you are for the most part accepted? Frost famously and cynically defined home as “the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” That sounds like the wilderness to me: nowhere else in my life fits the description.
I do recognize that this is a failing in me. I’m a romantic, after all: I ardently believe in the redemptive power of love, the notion that deep learning about another person inevitably brings with it compassion, and that compassion is the antidote for almost every human evil you can name, which is why conservatives hope so desperately to keep compassion far away from the Supreme Court. Never mind my recent realization that redemption through compassion comes much more rarely than I had hoped, that most of the Cheneys of the world will go to their graves utterly persuaded of their evils’ full justification.
It is love that causes us (though ever imperfectly) to care that others are hungry or ill-treated, that prompts us to anger at needless suffering, that pains us when we see others’ grief. That some die unredeemed by its power doesn’t change this.
What small hope we have in this world takes root in love.
I say that having learned abundantly in the last year and a half that whatever love is, I am not much good at it. Whatever amative capital I have possessed I have squandered. I am a little surprised to have survived the last year. There were long weeks in the desert I spent trying to will my heart to stop its beating. Reeling from the disintegration of a marriage of two decades, retching up pieces of an ill-advised and toxic rebound assignation, loaded down with unseemly missing of a dog dead more than a year, I cursed the odd stamina that kept me breathing, that woke me each morning, and my writing over those months near flung itself at the landscape, my participation in my own storytelling opaque.
The harder it got the more the desert held me up, as an arborist’s cement plug will hold up a cored, heart-rotted tree.
I know, in other words, what it is to take that place in your soul where a putatively healthy person would hold the relationships most dear to her and fill it with the non-human, the in-human, the rocks and spines and fleeting drafts of dusty wind and other quintessentially non-nourishing objects of deferred ardency with which we wilderness lovers metaphorically tryst. It is fulfilling, or at least it can be. It can be sublime in a way a human lover cannot hope to match. There are deficits there, too, but they are of the feature-not-bug sort. The desert offers the same range of deaths, from parching starvation to the kind that comes from a thousand cuts, as one can find in unhappy human love: it offers angry, rattling venom in a fashion that fits that previous metaphor a little too cleanly, in fact. The desert does not, however, manipulate. It does not proclaim its disappointment, nor does it make dark intimations about your soul.
Most of all, no matter how ardent your longing for it, the desert will never offer love for you in return.
And so I come back into the world of people. It is a split life, seeking to indulge my imperfect ability to love and seeking to insulate myself from the pain that springs from the imperfections in my ability to love, but I am beginning to accept the conflict.
Because really, it could be worse. I could plaster over the hole in my heart with a substance far more toxic than the need for wilderness communion with my cousins the tortoises and lichens. At least the rocks exist; at least the Joshua trees are really there, and by their very existence resist my forcing them into service as metaphor to reinforce my prejudices. At least there is nothing in the desert that sends me back to the world of human concerns persuaded that certain kinds of compassion are immoral. The desert does not claim that any two individuals’ love for each other is wrong or shameful. The desert does not claim that the desert is the only thing there is.
I could be spackling over that flaw in me with something far more toxic than any desert snake’s venom, and far less amenable to self-correction.
I would have far too much company if I did. There are those who salve their own flaws with toxic ideology, their own prejudices projected onto a character who, being fictional, is unlikely to protest their slander of him. They set this fictional character up as the ultimate arbiter of their worth, the lodestone of proper conduct, the definition of real love.
There is much to reject in the ideology to which Christianity has been debased, but that last troubles me the most these days.
Love is a diverse thing. One can love a book and one can love a man, the two emotional relationships sufficiently distinct that the word “love” stretches awkwardly to cover both. A book is a fine amalgam with which to patch a broken, eroded heart, though Christian fundamentalists choose a title I find generally uncompelling. Why not Duncan’s The River Why or Abbey’s Desert Solitaire or Tempest-Williams’ Refuge? Still, there is no accounting for taste — people find a salve in watching American Idol. If Christians’ actions ended with their choice of fiction, that would be fine.
But they tell us we must love one another in precisely the same way in which they love their book, and that’s where they lose me.
Our planet is unraveling. There are far too many of us, and far too many of us wanting. We face massive shifts in the ways in which we live, and if we resist those lifestyle changes many others will die, not all of them other humans. We will either bring our best selves to this task, or we will fail.
What blunts one’s best self more thoroughly than unhappiness? The worst bigots are the closet cases, the fearful and deprived and jealous. Insecurity drives pathology. Unhappy people consume profligately, drive off-road vehicles over cryptobiotic soil crusts, toss disposable diapers out their SUV windows, vote creationists and fascists into office.
Contrariwise, the happier people are with the people they love, the more likely they are to show their best faces to the rest of us.
What small hope we have in this world takes root in love, and those who would prevent love place themselves athwart hope. If there is such a thing as evil, that’s it.
Beautiful. I couldn’t agree more with that last sentence.
Brilliant post, oh kindred spirit. So eloquently written.
Just know you are not alone.
I love the wilderness. It takes you as you are. It expects you to uphold your end of the relationship, to pull your own weight. It doesn’t pity or enable. It allows you to see your true self.
Family? Er, not so much.
I am incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by many of my furry brethren, and to wake each morning to gaze into the depths of wilderness in my benevolent dog’s eyes.
Beautiful and moving and powerful.
Yes. Most eloquent, potent, and Truthful. May we be In and Of Love. Thanks for these words.
*shows best face*
Thank you for once again eloquently putting what I have been feeling into words.
The only “issue” out that that has the power to provoke me into yelling at my car radio is “gay marriage.” Your last two sentences encapsulate exactly why.
Did Faulkner actually write that love is the emotion that exists in spite of, not because, or did Hentoff just pretend he did? Either way the line has resonated with me since I was a college freshman, reading the back of Blood on the Tracksfor the first time.
Beautiful essay, thank you.
Beautifully said.
Lovely essay Chris - much food for thought here.
Your story mirrors my son’s story—-he lost two dogs within a year, his wife, unable to deal with his depression, left him—-so much that when I read your essays, it’s almost as if I’m looking into his soul. He, too, finds his peace in wildness. I keep referring him to your site, so he will know that others experience his pain. Thank-you for putting your heart out there so eloquently.
Wow. Such a compelling piece, Chris. I can only aspire to the beauty and power of your writing.
I do recognize that this is a failing in me.
Why?
I have been thinking lately about my own chosen solitude, and why I’ve chosen it despite hundreds of friends and a family that seems like hundreds, people that I do love - in my way. And I simply disagree that it’s a failing. Where’s the law, natural or otherwise, that you must love anyone?
I have a sister-in-law that I love but don’t like being around. She’s painfully energetic, her values - while not at odds - are vastly different from mine, and the conversation always devolves into her trying to fix me up with guys who live near her (a day’s drive from me) because she feels I must surely want to be dating someone. I gave up on dating in 2005, after the last pointless attempt to maintain a relationship with someone I did and do respect and like and find attractive. It’s just not in me. And it’s just not in me to get overenthused about seeing people who make me uncomfortable, no matter how strong the biological or legal connection.
In other words, I don’t have to like you to care about you. If that’s all I’ve got, why can’t it be enough?
Good points all, MAL.
One of the most powerful and compelling pieces of writing on this subject I have read anywhere - sent it far and wide and got lots of positive feedback from friends. All were touched to the heart; and isn’t that where most important changes occur?
I appreciate the risks you take in your writing - thank you.
Many of the motivations that drove me to Australia are in this post, and every weekend they drive me into the sandstone bushlands to look ever more closely at the exuberant little geometries of banksia and grevillea, and to feel the austere always-turning-away that eucalpyts do, at least in their native environment where they’re not drugged by over-rich soils.
But when you critique unhappiness in the end after confessing to it in the beginning, I wonder how we can will ourselves to happiness. There’s a clear Buddhist line on this: Happiness is a distraction. Treasure awareness instead. Because (they say) if you just become more and more aware, you’ll find compassion at the heart of the barest facts of existence.
Do you believe that? I am still not sure I do, but I keep meditating, hoping it will come.
This is a lyrical and poignant post, Chris, truly gorgeous. Perhaps the hetero-normative man-made standards for “love” will always leave us wanting ... because they originated in the longest war of dominance and subordination. Love cannot live there.
I found your writing after visiting “I Blame the Patriarchy.” Like you, I love the best in us and in the world to which we have come. Therefore I hope for womankind to see the tough truth about the longest war, as it plays out every day before us, so those who can really love might detach from the war-makers of piece, not peace, and find their own way.
Any day you’re tempted to wear a veil of denial, you can know that I cared enough to keep blogging the truth,
http://thelongestwar.wordpress.com/