Taking a break from educating the public at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
I’ve been quiet here for a little bit. Some of the reason is that I’ve been busy with a couple of other projects, one of which I’ll be saying more about here in a few days. Some of the reason is jobhunting. Some of the reason is writer’s block, though it’s been an odd kind that allows me to write the things I’ve been procrastinating on and not so much on the blog posts.
And some of it is the sense that I’ve gotten, these last few weeks, that trying to express how I feel is close to futile. I have enough trouble talking sometimes. A few weeks ago The Raven and I were driving after sunset through the West Mojave. We watched the sky turn indigo, then violet, then ultraviolet behind the silhouetted Joshua trees. I tried to explain to her just how poignant and important the moment was, the way my heart felt itself wanting to open up and pour itself out onto the creosote, but I couldn’t. I mumbled something about feeling viscerally at home, and she nodded, and what I said wasn’t inaccurate but it didn’t even come close.
I have spent so much of my life waiting for my life to start. When the school day ends or the semester comes to a close, when that longed-for time off work arrives, then I’ll start the important stuff: the fire-sitting, the star-counting. I sat alone once tending a fire on the east side of the Sierra Nevada and remembering the fire before, some months earlier in the desert, and all the intervening meetings and trips to the hardware store, all the evenings spent agonizing over deadlines seemed evanescent, dream-stuff. It was as if I awoke every few months to my real life, tending small campfires twenty miles from the next-nearest person, and all the intervening business of keeping my economic soul afloat a mere vapor, dissipating, dissolving in the piñon smoke.
I suppose that means I’m a solipsist at heart. Fortunately I’m reasonably sure I’m not the only solipsist here. And what a healthy solipsism it is compared to the solipsism instilled by the onlife life, if you can call it that. I stood far off in the sidelines last week and watched a few people flame out in response to a post written by a woman who was remembering the value of life offline. Little by little our lives contract, each of us confined to a smaller space, and eventually we cease to strain against our tethers. A while later we rage against anyone who would remind us we are bound at all.
It’s not that the people we talk to online aren’t real: almost all of them are. It’s that we do that talking sitting alone, asses in chairs staring at a screen, in a limbo with neither company nor solitude.
The Raven and I went to Tucson this past weekend, lying awake nights listening to the coyotes singing as they hunted the Easter Bunny. I took the photo above at a zoo there. It’s a fine zoo, perhaps the best in the world, with an emphasis on habitat restoration and native species, a good enough zoo that you don’t think of it as one. The animals are kept in habitats far more capacious than most zoo enclosures, with opportunities for privacy and exercise. The wolves in particular are participants in the coordinated attempt to maintain a breeding population, without which the subspecies would almost certainly have vanished by now.
Still, they’re zoo wolves. I framed the shot above as naturalistically as possible, enough so that one could easily imagine I’d snuck up on her as she snoozed in a high-mountain bosque somewhere, shade dappling her gorgeous fur. I like the image, even though I’d have centered her if I had it to do over again. I’m pleased to have the shot to share with you, and I think it looks nice there at the top of the page, a deserty, heartbreakingly familiar image. And yet the image is two-dimensional. It shows someone in confinement whose natural state is utterly unconfined. It’s a flat website image of a truncated life, comfortable and healthy and well-loved and nonetheless deprived of the integral life she could have had in the wild, and that wild itself a trammeled, dismembered version of what it ought to be, what it deserves to be.
That resonates with me for some reason.
“with neither company nor solitude”—beautifully put. It doesn’t always feel that way to me. But certainly the net facilitates that sort of restless interior small-talk—it can be like dawdling in a tavern with people you don’t particularly like, saying things you don’t particularly mean, because you don’t want to go home.
It sounds like you’re feeling a bit like a zoo denizen yourself, Chris.
I wonder many times if this is true or a romantic image nurtured to deal with the oppression of confinement. Would the wolf (or I) in the wild be any less confined by the incessant need for food, shelter, protection; pain from injury, toothache, broken bones, old age, death…Maybe I’m too young to have experienced how oppressive confinement feels. Or maybe I’m just chicken.
I felt that same resonance this morning reading a couple paragraphs in an old Charles Bowden book, so much so that I felt the need to copy them on my blog.
Chris, if you figure out how to express these things, let me know. It’s been 30+ years and, when asked what it’s like to spend extensive amounts of time in the wilderness, the only thing I’ve been able to find to say is: “It’s different. Completely different.”
If I say anything else, I usually end up running down saying “It’s about time. Time is really…different. You have time enough to see and think in ways that are hard to explain.”
Lame, isn’t it?
I take your point, in that spending a lot of time in front of the terminal is voluntarily rendering oneself “differently abled”.
Two things, though -
possibly a parallel to “There is no frigate like a book” = imagination may expand with physical limitations.
Life its own self has always imposed and continually imposes the quotidian over the marvellous. It does tend to make one value the marvellous when it occurs.
Your reflections here really resonate for me. I too have that nagging sense of waiting for life to begin, even though more and more I have everything I once thought I wanted. But there’s always something else to want and being online seems to make that worse. After reading this, I’m seeing myself kind of like a wolf pacing in the zoo. But next week, I get to go hang out with wild coyotes in NE Oregon. I hope that will help. I love to hear them howling at night.