thomas m wilson

Take one.

Lights, camera, action.

You and your friends are unrelated in any meaningful sense to the birds in the trees that you occasionally see when driving to work in the morning. You and the people you know or see on television are Human. You and your human kin have created art, written love letters, driven cars, earned incomes, built houses, and voted in federal elections. And that vast gap between you and that dog barking down the road, or that cat sitting on the sofa over there, doesn’t need any commentary. It’s big. It isn’t just a matter of a difference in scale, but an absolute change in quality. We are the elect, we are spirits and minds, we are Human.

Take two.

Lights, camera, action!

You are an incredibly complex biological organism. Your mind is the flow of scenarios that presents itself through the workings of a neo-cortex situated in your head and is constantly interrelating with thousands of chemical reactions in the rest of your body. The emotions you feel, the things that make you bother getting up in the morning at all, have a physical presence and evolved with you over the millennia, on the savannas of tropical Africa, your ancestral home. Like every other organism, you prosper when you experience many of the things available in your native habitat. These include a wide range of unprocessed foods, water, shelter, the love provided by a lover and family, the community of your tribe, some sun light, physical exercise, purpose, sleep, and the habitat itself: an ecosystem with trees, grasslands, sun, wind, rain and other forms of life, scurrying, roaming and gliding about the place.

If you think you are a smooth, urban, go-getter, who can jump in the car, buy goods and services, find full time employment, watch commercial tv, drink a beer and then put your feet up on the sofa, all the while disregarding the state of the natural world, then I suggest you reconfigure the script.

Christianity was wrong to tell us that we are transcendent souls inconveniently clothed in flesh. That gap between you and the dog barking round the corner or the cat sitting across the way is not immeasurable. Like theirs, your body, mind and spirit have been evolved over many millenia as adaptations to living in nature. Nature gives us clean food, water and air, and its diversity of colours, shapes and motions can feed our sense of wonder and mystery. We are primates. If you start to think in this manner then you’ll agree that our ancestral home has more than marginal significance.

Yes, nature is more than a lawn briefly noticed on a bold walk towards concrete and glass.

The other morning I was in King’s Park.  There was a grey sky with a warm, soft breeze passing over the heathland around me.  I stood there amongst the light navy greens of the plants, studded with the vivid reds and yellows of blooming flowers.  My eye took in the spiky leaf of a hakea, and then moved right and outwards to notice kangaroo paws and acacia flowers and macrozamias and other lives.  I crouched down and took the time to pause and look.  I remembered where I’m from. I’m from this land, this sandy, spiky, colourful and warm part of the planet.  If I don’t come here to a bit of real, natural Australia at least once a week and pause and look around myself and see the ancient and constantly renewed colours and shapes of my home, then I, slowly but surely, become a deracinated and spiritually empty dupe of technologically bolstered globalization.

And who wants that?

This light, navy green ground, splashed with colour each spring, is my frame.  It is part of my identity.  In some ways I’m a colonial fellow, speaking English, owning a ninth edition Brittanica, a bespoken linen suit, appreciating the farming methodology of the Duke of Cornwall, drinking gin and tonic on the veranda in the heat of the southern hemisphere.  But like other southern gentlemen, such as, Edward O. Wilson wandering through the forests of Alabama and northern Florida in the 1940s, I have a deep interest in understanding and loving the wilds of a new world.  My cultural heritage comes from afar, but this land is my home.

Would you like to characterize my political position?

Here’s something to go on.  I believe that unions help out the workers and provide needed balance to the greed of the rich.  I believe in the supreme importance of education as a light to shine into a world of dangerous ignorance.  I believe that there is an important discrepancy between the probing and educated voices of academics in universities and the ambient noise made by the mainstream media each day.  I believe that you should not derive your system of values from the advertisers book of dreams.  I believe that, due to its political quietism, postmodernism is the handmaiden of consumerism. I believe that our natural urges to eat sugary food come from our ancestor’s lives on the African savannah and that today we have to discipline ourselves to avoid these foods.  I believe that through practice you can rearrange your neural networks and become good at most things, and this includes meditating on love and peace.  I believe that our sedentary Western lifestyle is not what our bodies were designed for, and that we have to disclipline ourselves to move our bodies more.  I believe that part of citizenship should involve bioregional consciousness of the place you call home.  I believe that if you are going to eat meat in Australia it is environmentally irresponsible to not buy kangaroo.  I believe that if you buy goods made in first world Western nations you are also buying built-in trade unions, health insurance for workers, and many of the other things we value in the West as part of the package (and if you buy them from elsewhere, like China, you’re not getting those built-in features).  I believe that social capital, trust between people, is the glue that keeps a society together.  I believe that, because of the link between caring adults and exposure to good attachment figures in early childhood, we need to pay workers in day care centres more money if we want to live in society with more compassionate voters and more social capital.  I believe that because of the human propensity to compare, there are more stress hormones eroding perfectly good nervous systems in more inegalitarian societies.  I believe that politicians and beurocrats in positions of power have a vested interest to perpetuate the impression that they are in control of the way society is going, but that the reality is that, on the major trends, they are not and that social inequality and environmental destruction is on the rise.  I believe that this is the make or break century for the human species.  I believe that global oil production will peak, food prices will spiral upwards, and that there will be a significant economic recession in the coming few years.  I believe that most of our environmental problems can be fixed easily by rearranging the taxation system to tax environmentally destructive activities while reducing income tax.  I believe that we must provide more slack (build more autonomous units of energy and food production) in global and domestic systems in order to avoid a seventy car pile up on the highway (a cascading catastrophe) if something goes badly wrong somewhere along the line.  I believe in the virtues of frugality, as practiced, for example, in the few years after the second world war in England.  I believe that politicians are human beings and that they are susceptible to being shamed and influenced, sometimes more and sometimes less, by the actions and words of those that protest in the name of the environment and social equality.  I believe that because of our ancestors living in information-poor environments where it was an advantage to have a herd mentality, today most people acquiece to commonly held beliefs.  I believe in the unforced force of the better argument.  I believe in the virtues of being a gentleman, being kind, educated, compassionate, aware of one’s cultural history, curious about the very different cultural histories of others and the natural histories of other species, and being measured in one’s criticisms.  I believe in the importance of family planning in the developing world to prevent the increase in the number of failed states.  I believe that the twentieth century Western world has brought some good things, for example less physical violence, modern medicine, libraries full of books, and the mobility of the bicycle spread to millions of people.  I believe that the twentieth century Western world has also brought bad things such as the legal position of a corporation as a legal person, the conversion of ancient sunlight frozen in the form of fossil fuels into greenhouse causing gases, the conversion of urban citizens into eco-illiterate feed-lot cattle in terms of the amount of knowledge they have of the origins and nature of the food, water and energy they rely on each day for life, and plenty of loneliness for all those people in their little boxes.  I believe in the importance of being grateful and giving thanks for the good things in life.  I believe in the importance of play and laughter for mental health.  I believe that play and laughter (not to mention wider reflection on society) need lacunaes of idleness in which to flourish, and that a society obsessed with material wealth and time urgency discounts the importance of these lacunaes of idleness.  I believe that the wonders of the ancient diversity of species of non-human life on planet earth, the Creation, are a great source of spiritual reverence.

What do you think?

I recently wrote a review of The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers for an American journal called Organization and Environment. While reading the book – I wasn’t that impressed by the way – I came upon a poem by Judith Wright, and it sparked the following thoughts…

Often the state of the world gets me down. With habitat being cleared and pollution being belched from so many quarters one searches for a light at the end of the tunnel. This is where the Australian poet Judith Wright and her poem ‘Flame-tree in a Quarry’ come to the rescue. The flame tree is endemic to the rainforests of south-east Queensland (around half way up the east coast of the Australian continent). When a flame tree is in bloom it literally looks like it is aflame: its holds up a profusion of bright red flowers up into the sky. The flowers have an especial vividness of colour and density of coral-like petals. In Wright’s poem we are introduced to a flame tree growing in the middle of an abandoned quarry. But as we read the poem we see more than a tree in a quarry. In the eyes of the poet we see ‘the old cry of praise’ coming out of ‘the torn earth’s mouth’. Wright:

Out of the very wound
springs up this scarlet breath –
this fountain of hot joy,
the living ghost of death. (1971: 62) (p.190)

In the midst of human-caused destruction of the planet, right in the earth’s ‘torn mouth’, up comes life. The key line of the whole poem is the last one from the above quotation: nature’s triumph is to be ‘the living ghost of death’. That is to say, nature’s triumph is to be the presence that taunts death with its return. While there might be much destruction of nature in the twenty-first century, with this image of the red flowers of the flame-tree standing boldly in a quarry, making themselves a ‘living ghost of death’, I am reminded of the regenerative power of the natural world. And with such an image planted boldly in my mind, I forget woeful introspections and am heartened by nature’s victorious beauty in the living present.

I recently watched Lawrence of Arabia projected onto a big screen for the first time.  I loved some of the early scenes in the film. To see camels and the Bedu, and the esthetic Englishman’s white robes high on the camel’s back, to hear the gentle roar of the ungulates early in the morning, and to sense the air of philosophical desolation over all… the sun’s anvil, the red rocky mountains rising from the sands.. It all made me want to know more. I then read Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, a classic about travels through Saudi Arabia in the forties with the Bedu, but was unimpressed by Thesiger’s prose style and his lack of emotional affectivity and poeticism (of course the man is to be praised for his championing tradition modes of travel and for his great spirit of adventure). Still, give me white robes, a camel to ride, a desert and an mystic resolve and I’ll be happy, I mused. The scene where T. E. Lawrence walks into the English sergeant’s mess after traveling through the desert with his Bedu friends stayed in my mind, the stark contrast between the artificial and over-civilized Englishmen and their tedious customs, and the still grand, mobile, familial, looking-towards-the-land Bedu, made me much more impressed and interested by the traditional nomadic cultures of the middle east than I ever had been before.

Continuing this trajectory of interest, I’ve just read Tracks by Robyn Davidson. This young Australian woman walks from new Alice Springs across the Gibson desert to south of Carnarvon with four camels and her dog in 1977. It is an Australia my parents knew, not I. But Davidson goes truly into Australia. She walks across its sands with the company of her intimately known and loved animals, naked to the waist, dark brown, and having shed the routines of domestic life in the suburbs of Queensland. Australia was more ocker at that time, especially in some of the towns she went through, like Alice Springs, and it reminded me of those with a literary sensibility feeling alienated from this culture – almost as though Davidson is not Australian and is looking in on the ocker culture from outside of it (actually she was as she wrote the actual book while living in London). But the main thing is walking under the sun and sleeping in the freezing cold of the desert, and knowing the ways of camels, and meeting Aboriginal elders and speaking some of their languages, and being nomadic. It really is something to have done: unlike suburban modes of existence in Australia such months under the desert sun would truly teach an urban, white coastal dweller a thing or too about the ancient identity of this nation. So I was impressed by the book. It is not great literature by any means, but it recounts an original and quite deep acquaintance with a hitherto unsung landscape in my part of the world.

However, interestingly enough, I did notice that at one point in the narrative Davidson lets slip the following: ‘I wouldn’t want it getting around… but I’m just a weensy bit tired of this adventure. In fact, to be quite honest, fantasies are beginning to worm their way between the spinifex clumps, skeletons and rocks – fantasies pertaining to where I’d like to be right now. Somewhere cool clover comes almost to your crutch, where there are no stray meteors, camels, nasty night noises, blaring thrumming cancer-producing sun, no heat shimmer and raw rocks, no spinifex, no flies, somewhere where there’s lots of avocados, water, friendly people who bring cups of tea in the morning, pineapples, swaying palms, sea breezes, puffy little clouds and mirrored streamlets’ (p.203, 1980, Penguin). This made me think, Yes, the Western Australian deserts with a company of camels and a dog and some forward movement would be a profound experience, but ultimately I too dream of much more verdant places, a mossy granite shrine on a terraced hill in Bali, or a surf strewn bay in the Mentawai Islands off the West coast of Sumatra, or the green and undulating highlands of Papua New Guinea, for example. Reading Tracks was also refreshing in the sense that it is about my corner of the globe, and not the Oregon of Barry Lopez, or the mid-west of Scott Russell Sanders, or any number of other North American places the predominantly North American tradition of environmentally attuned writers usually write about and I have often read.

Much of Western Australia is desert and there are many hundreds of thousands of wild camels roaming about it. Lawrence of Arabia appears exotic to most Westerners, but there are tracks leading from that sandy and beautiful world to my own.

And so last weekend I went to unearth some of these tracks.  In the above photo you can see my left leg swinging along in the bottom of the frame.  I did indeed find some camels to ride through the Darling Ranges east of Perth.  These camels used to live in the wilds of Western Australia’s deserts, but these days they carry curious and paying folk such as myself and three of my friends along winding paths through jarrah forests near Kalamunda.  A camel is one part of an ancient ecological jigsaw puzzle that was assembled thousands of kms to my west.  As such, when I looked at these camels on the weekend I was looking into the sands of Arabia.  The male I was riding goes by the sobriquet Major.  Say hallo Major.

The experience of riding domesticated camels is surprisingly calming.  They are such large animals that compared to humans their walking gait is noticeably languid and smooth.  As the animal moves forward with you on its back the rhythmic swing of your body in the saddle is a long one, and easier to get accustomed to than the faster jolting backwards and forwards of riding horse-back.  The motion of the long stride, the slow turn of the head to make sure they’re still close to the single file of their fellows, the deep tones of their roar when they want to make themselves heard, the huge, nonchalant and dark brown eyes… these beings exude a sense of calming might and majesty.  I can see why they make good travelling companions.  What is more, when sitting on top of a full grown camel you find yourself a long way off the ground, and the good thing about this is that you get a really nice vantage point from which to survey the surrounding landscape.  Having a gentle, sensitive and quite intelligent mammal as your mode of transport, rather than an anoymous, inert, and metallic vehicle, is something hundreds of generations of humans have taken for granted.  It is something I can only wonder about.