tom m wilson

[For those not from Western Australia, the Swan River is a broad and slow flowing river which winds through Perth and out to the sea at Fremantle.]

A SILENCE UNHEARD ON YOUR FURROWED CHANNELS

I throw down my bike, and I’m here.

The flowing Swan, soothing broth for my head.
Drinking in the cooler shadows, I look down on my pass, never fled.
High above the water, amongst the needles of the trees.
I pause for a moment and sigh, not being charged any fees.

Anger at Four Wheel Drivers slips out in a rasp.
Blood moves through me, the currents of flow yet out of my grasp.
Casuarina trees mat my ground with their flax,
This pause elongates, then disbands incremental emotional tax.

Nothing is demanded by the dimensions of my local river bank,
The palimpsest of the Paper-bark has only a history of evolution in its tussled flank.
The waving Zamia palm’s government is the risen sun,
The only land-lord of this Marri is the afternoon wind and its sometimes squalling run.

The slope of this sandy earth was not a grandstand in 1829,
And you can hear no querulous Wattlebird report upon those whose questing navy was of Lime.
Prior events were more cyclic, a thousand years contained the morning’s news.
The khaki colour of my sentinel’s leaves, a leached detail any day would not fear to lose.

The morning of this quiet, greener millennia is here.
I look around this river bank, now my Today has dispensed with fear.
I stand upon the grassy river’s edge and am complete,
Let us pray for others yet to rise to their feet.

This morning I was at Leighton for some clean, two foot barrels, all to myself.  I caught myself enjoying the moments on the face, and then being a word-hoarder, I wanted to verbalize why I like this experience. Read on…

Forward comes the scintillating bank of green water. You paddle and then, you are:

Free. Freed from the contraints of being a slow, land-dwelling mammal. Liquid. All motion buffered by gentle and forgiving silk. Effortless. Pollution-free, you float along the edge of one of nature’s rhythms. Moving. Hericlitus was right to say that stasis is death. Absorbed in the Now. Rousseau’s Noble Savages play on the Australian littoral. Out-racing the breaking lip. Tim Winton was pleased to see men do something pointless and elegant.

What have you accomplished?

Freedom-drenched liquid under the sun.

In case you’re interested, I’ve recently added short, paragraph-long reviews of Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress, of Lester R. Brown’s Plan B 3.0 and Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food to the page on this website entitled ‘Wisdom’ (my suggested reading list).  It isn’t often that reading a book influences my view of the world.  All three of these books have managed to do just that.

Half of humankind now lives in an urban environment, me included. Recently I’ve been pining for some more nature in my life. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

I think these lines from a poem by Wendell Berry beautifully illuminate our predicament:

THE THOUGHT OF SOMETHING ELSE

By Wendell Berry

A spring wind blowing
the smell of the ground
through the intersections of traffic,
the mind turns, seeks a new
nativity-another place,
simpler, less weighted
by what has already been.

...

-a place where thought
can take its shape
as quietly in the mind
as water in a pitcher,
or a man can be
safely without thought
-see the day begin
and lean back,
a simple wakefulness filling
perfectly
the spaces among the leaves.

We have all encountered political apathy and pessimism in those around us. Here I imagine a conversation between Citizen X and an environmentally unconcerned relative of his.  Let’s see what happens…

Wealthy relative [folding his arms across his chest proprietarily]: ‘Well, I’m not doing too badly [in fact he is rich], so I’m not too worried about all that doom-and-gloom talk.’

Citizen X: ‘Remember that you eat the same food and breathe the same air as the rest of us. Living disproportionately high on the food chain, where toxic substances become concentrated, you are at more, rather than less risk of reproductive impairment.’

Wealthy relative: ‘I’ll be dead by the time all these environmental problems become really serious.’

Citizen X: ‘I don’t see why you are paying through the nose for your kids private school education with the goal of helping them enjoy their lives 40 years from now, while simultaneously undermining the world they will be living in at that time. Surely you’ll want your kids to have a stable climate, living forests and living oceans to enjoy? It is a basic moral obligation to help pass on to your children a planet that is inhabitable.’

Wealthy relative: ‘Ok, but as an individual I can’t stop things going the way they are going. So I won’t do anything.’

Citizen X: ‘The second step in your argument doesn’t work. You are right to say that alone you can’t save the world. However, if you do your little bit to fight climate change you will be helping. It is like paying taxes – a small contribution multiplied millions of times becomes a large amount. And totally apart from this, altruistic action feels good, something which makes sense considering our species’ evolutionary history of living in small bands of hunter-gatherers who needed to co-operate. Only your hopelessness is an indulgence we cannot afford.’

Whenever somebody has the courage to disagree with a defender of the status quo, whenever somebody joins the Green movement for revolutionary change, whenever somebody stands up and speaks out, somewhere, in the background, horns of Victory are blowing.

[These are a few lines I wrote a little while back about the divide between culture and nature.]

NATURE AND THE BREAKFAST TABLE IN AN AUSTRALIAN GARDEN

I’m let free from my mooring in the night.
Stretch into the morning without a fight.
Step down the hall.

But then, sick to my stomach of flat, human crafted surfaces,
Tired of synthetic tables and silent curses.
I walk out into my garden.
No, I go out the back door, into a green then.

In my right hand I carry an old handsaw,
Used by my grandfather and disused a lot more.
I walk towards an offending trunk and leaves,
Non-native, invasive, bringer of luxuriant thieves.

Place the teeth to the bark,
Place my right foot to the ground among the twigs.
Then I move and find I’m dynamic among the verdure,
Far from that breakfast table.

A cat watches me from the distant grass,
His eyes glisten and
My spirit glistens.

The year was 1969… the back to the land movement was underway. People were heading off to build little wooden cabins in forest clearings and Gary Snyder published his poem Smokey the Bear Sutra:

SMOKEY THE BEAR SUTRA

Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the West, symbolic of forces that guard the Wilderness, which is the natural state of the Dharma and the True Path of man on earth; all true paths lead through mountains-

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs;

smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism;

Indicating the Task: his followers, becoming free of cars, houses, canned food, universities, and shoes, master the Three Mysteries of their own Body, Speech, and Mind; and fearlessly chop down the rotten trees and prune out the sick limbs of this country.

Can you imagine such a politically spirited, slightly naive but powerful eco-manifesto having followers today? Where is Smokey the Bear in 2008?

I don’t know.

The recently deceased American poet Stanley J. Kunitz once wrote a poem called ‘Layers’. I want to quote some lines from this poem, as they seem to me to perfectly capture the experience of loss that is part of being human. Despite the heart’s ‘feast of losses’, we mostly manage to continue onwards down the road. With poetry like this to bring into speech the reality of loss, somehow such experiences seem more tractable.  With his language Kunitz makes it easier for us to continue on down the road.  Here are a few lines from ‘Layers’:

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.