Wild Animal Joy

I get a letter from a fellow poet younger than me by a few decades, how many I’m not sure, but his exuberance and preference for rap rather than rock indicates at least several. I’m drifting into my late 70s now, unthinkable that’s happening, even though it’s been happening for over 60 years, and I’ve had time to adjust, but haven’t, every day gets a little weirder.

My young friend mentions John Muir in a discussion about class conflict and the obscenely rich befouling our planet with their yachts and wars and private jets.

John Muir, yes, a consciousness detached from worldly pursuits and devoted to the sanctities of the forest, à la Thoreau & Edward Abbey. People like Abbey, Muir and Thoreau are antidotes to the popularity of the prosperity gospel in the U.S., which dates back to the 17^th century New England Calvinists, and their twisted notions of material success, and fear of the forest, except – of course – as potential wealth to extract. Wilderness terrifies that mindset. They get a kick out of calling experimental writing “word salad.” Word salad being, in their minds, a put-down. But I love word salad. Especially with Roquefort and semantic rebellions in my lettuce.

Muir (the name doesn’t come up often) reminds me of my hippy-dippy days in California in the 60s. Bay Area. Muir was on everyone’s lips, and most everyone was familiar with the poetry scene, even teenage girls in well-heeled neighborhoods south of San Francisco like Cupertino and Saratoga. Poets had the status of rock stars. A few months ago, while culling through mountains of memorabilia, I came across a letter from a girlfriend, 15 at the time (I was 17) raving about Allen Ginsberg. Can you imagine an average 15 yr old today raving about Allen Ginsberg? What do they rave about? Taylor Swift? 

I never got around to reading John Muir. I order an ebook from the public library, My First Summer in the Sierra. It’s marvelous. Full of wild animal joy, to borrow a phrase from Muir. Muir's language is vibrant and alive, "mountan manuscripts," "icy cold, delicious, champagne water" of a mountain creek, or the glassy surface of a still pond mirroring Muir across the Yosemite of my imagination.

Muir’s prose is vigorous and highly detailed, constellated with botanical specimens and gorgeous descriptions of the wilderness that call Albert Bierstadt to mind, open vistas of pristine grandeur, a turbulence of paint reflecting the violence of creation itself. He describes Yosemite Creek in a plethora of botanical enthusiasm:

Calm, beautiful, and nearly silent, it [Yosemite Creek] glides with stately gestures, a dense growth of the slender two-leaved pine along its banks, and a fringe of willow, purple spirea, sedges, daisies, lilies, and columbines. Some of the sedges and willow boughs dip into the current, and just outside of the close ranks of trees there is a sunny float of washed gravelly sand which seems to have been deposited by some ancient flood. It is covered with millions of erethrea, eriogonum, and oxytheca, with with more flowers than leaves, forming an even growth, slightly dimpled and ruffled here and there by rosettes of Spraguea umbellate.

A single raindrop explodes into a cosmological garden of Edenic exuberance; he reads the terrain like a divine manuscript.

How interesting to trace the history of a single raindrop…Some, falling on meadows and bogs, creep silently out of sight to the grass roots, hiding softly as in a nest, slipping, oozing, hither, thither, seeking and finding their appointed work. Some, descending through the spires of the woods, sift spray through the shining needles, whispering peace and good cheer to each one of them.

He converts the wilderness of rock and fern to the wilderness of the word, the towering architecture of the forest to the spiraling associations among words.

His real purpose for being in the Sierra that summer (June through September of 1869) was to guide a flock of sheep through the meadows of the Sierra abounding in rich green grass. He notes an instance of phantasmagoric revelation: “This evening the show made by the circle of fire was very fine, bringing out the surrounding trees in most impressive relief, and making the thousands of sheep eyes glow like a glorious bed of diamonds.”

Muir – like Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman – offered a vision of the United States utterly untainted by the sordid extractions of mining and industry, the worship of technology and industry and the deathly obsessions with capital and property. To think of the Sierra as property, as private real estate, is an abomination. Muir’s writing was instrumental in getting Yosemite to be declared a federally administered park. Yosemite National Park became a reality in 1890.

What didn’t become a park is the fullness of being an immersion in the wilderness can induce. You can’t market the sublime. It’s not for sale. Not up for private ownership. Fewer and fewer people seem to understand that vital connection. We’re all accustomed to a culture that elevates the quantifiable over the immeasurable, the incalculable, the indefinable. Most seem quite well-adapted to it. A suite of luxury apartments for zombie consumers is worth more than a park or wilderness. How do you get that juggernaut to turn around after 700 hundred years of plundering resources? Fortunately, the wilderness is a lot slipperier than people think. It’s not always where you expect it to be. Sometimes it’s just a moment of reverie. Although I hear employers may begin implanting chips in the brain to more rigorously manage those moments stolen from corporate profit. I don’t see that working. You can’t suppress a wilderness. It’s not always a matter of trees and ski resorts. It’s a matter of listening. The mountains are a calling. And their language is in the phosphor of your bones and the ecstasies of your breath.