For there are bad moments, or were, especially at the beginning of my life here, when I would sit down at the table for supper inside the housetrailer and discover with a sudden shock that I was alone. There was nobody, nobody at all, on the other side of the table. Alone-ness became loneliness and the sensation was strong enough to remind me (how could I have forgotten?) that the one thing better than solitude, the only thing better than solitude, is society.
…
Strange as it might seem, I found that eating my supper out back made a difference. Inside the trailer, surrounded by the artifacture of America, I was reminded instantly of all that I had, for a season, left behind; the plywood walls and the dusty venetian blinds and the light bulbs and the smell of butane made me think of Albuquerque. But taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the fireplace with more desert and mountains than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to the human kind. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes in the sand I made contact with that larger world – an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. Certainly I was still by myself, so to speak – there were no other people around and still are none – but in the midst of such a grand tableau it was impossible to give full and serious consideration to Albuquerque. All that is human melted with the sky and faded out beyond the mountain and I felt, as I feel – is it a paradox – that a man can never find or need better companionship than that of himself.
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (p.97)
I am sitting “out back,” at a picnic table at a bush campsite about one-third of the way through my 1000km run/walk from Blinman in the north, through the Flinders Ranges, then down and down through the Barossa Valley and finally the Adelaide Hills into the city of Adelaide itself. It is a journey I’m sharing with Lily and with, at the moment, a horde of hungry mosquitoes. I can’t type a sentence without having to slap at myself or flick a biting ant off my arm or chase a fly out of one of my eyes or ears. I’m eating mouthfuls of scroggin as a kind of never-ending afternoon tea. It’s late afternoon, which you would know well enough if I simply described the sun shining through the gums. I am surrounded by some Stringybark, some Peppermint, some River Redgums and one that looks to me like a Manna Gum (orange-tinged bark lower down and a kind of candelabra look to it), or so I would like to think, but I have no confidence in my labelling, and nor should you. There are lots of trees and clearly the signs that this place was logged. There are plenty of thin trees all ten or twelve metres high, but nothing is particularly old; there are very few trees I couldn’t wrap with one arm, and only two out of the hundreds I can see from where I’m sitting that I couldn’t reach around with both arms.
That’s one thing reading Abbey makes me want to do: to be able to name things. Or maybe, because I’m lazy, I can simply live with admiration for his ability to list all of the trees, flowers, rocks and animals he encounters, and be inspired simply to be more observant. He is impressively well read and fluent in his ability to include in his rambling discussions a range of philosophers (by name and idea) as well as poets and classical composers. But he also pulls back from and criticizes not just their ideas but also the very act of reading and thinking about ideas. He suggests a few times that these are just ways to get confused and forget what is real. “To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist” he says, “all you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he’s a liar.” (p.97) Or, I think, scratching my forehead: let him sit outside and be eaten by mosquitoes. If he scratches his forehead (where he now has four bites) he must surely believe that reality exists and deserves attention. But how should we look at it, or relate to it?
The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade for a while the clamour and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities. (p.6)
But if Abbey is supposed to confront things exactly as they are, “devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities” then how can he write it down? Surely language is the most basic way we ascribe anything? As expected, Abbey gets caught in this at one point. He learns the names and histories of everything he can see around him, but when he and his friend Waterman are faced with four unnamed formations in a part of the canyonlands which he calls “The Maze” he wonders how naming things changes them, or us:
Through naming comes knowing; we grasp an object, mentally, by giving it a name – hension, prehension, apprehension. And thus through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other world out there. Or we trust that it corresponds. Or perhaps, like a German poet, we cease to care, becoming more concerned with the naming than with the things named; the former becomes more real than the latter. And so in the end the world is lost again. No, the world remains – those unique, particular, incorrigibly individual junipers and sandstone monoliths – and it is we who are lost. Again. Round and round, through the endless labyrinth of thought – the maze.
Amazing, says Waterman, going to sleep. (p.257)
If we name it, we lose our ability to really confront it, to see it for the first time and simply look, hard, at what it is. Four kookaburras just landed in the trees around me, then moved on and a big black bird (halfway between a crow and a wattlebird) swooped by and stayed only long enough to do an enormous poo before moving on. The insects are out and it’s a good time for a bird to be busy. Desert Solitaire is full of lists of names of things: “I pack fruit, nuts, cheese and raisins into the rucksack, take my cherrywood stick and start up the mountain… I hear and see a few birds – woodpecker, flicker, bluejay, phainopepla – but see no sign of any animal life except squirrel and deer.” (p.222) In these lists I cling on to understanding – nuts and raisins I know – but eventually I loose my grip: I don’t know what cherrywood is but I know that his cherrywood is a no doubt sturdy walking stick, but a “flicker” or a “phainopepla”? I have no idea. They’re just words, names. I sort of slide over them, knowing that he knows, knowing that something is conjured up in his memory when he writes those words – something as exact and sharp-edged as the kookaburras and mosquitoes around me now – but I don’t see it. I wish I had the patience to search for photos and histories and to learn to see what he sees, or saw, but even then I probably wouldn’t “get it,” not really. But how could I, if the only way to get it would be something only understood in a kind of silent, direct communication?
The answer, I think, is simply to get out the back, sink my bare feet into the sand, and get bitten by mosquitoes.
But alone? Why the desire for alone-ness? I think the answer is typically Abbey-esque in that it is a paradox. Alone-ness leads naturally to the sickness of solipsistic thinking, of spiralling deeper and deeper into thinking about oneself and one’s feelings and hurts and depredations, getting sadder and sadder and more miserable until you write a long sad book about it and die, or something like that. Being sick leads one to find a cure. The simple cure is to stop being alone, but that is not the cure, it is merely treating the symptom. The cure is to get outside and look at the world. This is the trick Abbey learns, or perhaps has already mastered and so is able to survive the sickness he gives himself.
Whether the solitude of the wilderness or the society of the city is more or less desirable or preferable is definitely the text of the book. He is firm and passionate in his dislike of the city and of “progress” (until he relents in the final chapter and gets ready to return for a different kind of season, in New York). One quote will hopefully suffice to describe his attitude:
Consider the sentiments of Charles Marion Russell, the cowboy artist, as quoted in John Hutchens’ One Man’s Montana:
“I have been called a pioneer. In my book a pioneer is a man who comes to virgin country, traps off all the fur, kills off all the wild meat, cuts down all the trees, grazes off all the grass, plows the roots up and strings ten million miles of wire. A pioneer destroys things and calls it civilization.” (p.168)
This and its pair – the glory of “the wilderness” – are the book’s text and thesis, but the way into it all is through the deeper message: that humans are better when looking outward. The cure for solipsism, selfishness, destruction, idiocy, lunacy and all things associated both with spending too long on your own and with progress, is simply to look outwards and try to see, touch, feel, taste, scratch, bump and otherwise interact in some way with what is real.
What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener. Look here, I want to say, for god-sake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! For chrissake folks what is this life full of care we have no time to stand and stare? Eh? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that good raw rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not? Jesus Christ, lady, roll that window down! You can’t see the desert if you can’t smell it. Dusty? Of course it’s dusty – this is Utah! But it’s good dust, good red Utah dust, rich in iron, rich in irony. Turn that motor off. Get out of that piece of iron and stretch your varicose veins, take off your brassiere and get some hot sun on your old wrinkled dugs! You sir, squinting at the map with your radiator boiling over and your fuel pump vapor-locked, crawl out of that shiny hunk of GM junk and talk a walk – yes, leave the old lady and those squawling brats behind for a while, turn your back on them and take a long quiet walk straight into the canyons, get lost for a while, come back when you damn well feel like it, it’ll do you and her and them a world of good. Give the kids a break too, let them out of the car, let them go scrambling over the rocks hunting for rattlesnakes and scorpions and anthills – yes sir, let them out, turn them loose; how dare you imprison little children in your goddamned upholstered horseless hearse? Yes sir, yes madam, I entreat you, get out of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! Like women! Like human beings! And walk – walk – WALK upon our sweet and blessed land! (p.233)
As much as it would pain him, I’ll do it tomorrow. Right now I have to put some socks on. These mosquitoes are eating me alive.
Juniper smoke, cactus flower, arsenic water and canyon rock.
Or, as the waiter said to the time-traveller: come back yesterday.
17/10/2011