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Abstracting nature

It's Christmas today, and raining.

This afternoon I set out on my evening walk just as a wave of rain passed over and before the next moved in. I walked in the hills behind the house where I grew up. I know each little copse of trees, hill, and valley there, and all the footpaths that snake through stands of bay and beneath the huge old oaks.

As I walked, I thought about a passage in a book I was reading this morning, called The Three Cornered World by Natsume Soseki.

There in the mountains, close to the delights of Nature, everything you see and hear is a joy. It is a joy unspoiled by and real discomfort. Your legs may possibly ache, or you may feel the lack of something really good to eat, but that is all.

I wonder why this should be? I suppose the reason is that, looking at the landscape, it is as though you were looking at a picture unrolled before you, or reading a poem on a scroll. The whole area is yours, but since it is just like a painting or a poem, it never occurs to you to try and develop it, or make your fortune by running a railway line there from the city. You are free from any care or worry because you accept the fact that this scenery will help neither to fill your belly, nor add a penny to your salary and are content to enjoy it just as scenery. This is the great charm of Nature, that it can in an instant, discipline men's heats and minds, and removing all that is base, lead them into the pure unsullied world of poetry.

Of course, I am only human. Therefore, however dear to me this sublime detachment from the world may be, there is a limit to how much of it I can stand at any one time. I do not suppose that even Tao Yuan-ming gazed continuously at the Southern hills year in and year out. Nor can I imagine Wang Wei sleeping in his beloved bamboo grove without a mosquito net. In all probability Tao sold any chrysanthemums he did not need to a florist, and Wang made money out of the government by selling bamboo shoots to the local greengrocer. That is the sort of person I am. However much I may be enthralled by the lark and the rape blossoms, I am still mortal enough to have no desire to camp out in the middle of the mountains.

The 'Southern hills' and the 'bamboo grove', the skylark and the rape-blossom possess a character all their own, which is vastly different from that of humanity. Nevertheless, I should like, as nearly as possible, to view people from the same standpoint as I view the world of pure poetry. Bassho found ever the sight of a horse urinating near his pillow elegant enough to write a Hokku about. I too from now on will regard everyone I meet, farmer, tradesman, village clerk, old man and old woman alike, as no more than a component feature of the overall canvas of Nature.

Naturally I found Soseki's characterization of the relationship between us and nature to be spot on. We are, after all, the same thing as nature (the conclusion to the aptly named thought Who are we?[1] I wrote a little while ago), and thinking of the human world as so separate from the natural one seems to lead to all sorts of unfortunate consequences.

And yet, there is an interesting distinction between what is the human world and what is not. A distinction that's mental, and therefore as real as any mental thing can be[2]--very real. We live in houses, drive in cars, work in an economy of people, mostly never stepping outside a world that has been constructed for us by other humans. Our thoughts, our digital artifacts, our conversations, our work. All human-centric.

It is not such a surprise, then, that we view nature as something distinct, something outside our daily lives. We drive up mountains to go for a walk in nature, then get back in the car when we're done and drive back home. Nature is a place we visit, where we find some respite from the human-centric world. It is not everything, but rather something specific, something small in the otherwise sprawling socially-constructed world we inhabit day-to-day.

But, as everyone who has found something in the outdoors knows, nature is spiritually significant. It does something to us; it is, as Soseki describes, a kind of poetry. When our lives are so full of social complication and abstracted away from the real, anything that allows us to step back and experience the pure poetry and authentic truth[3] of the world is a magical thing.

It's not so surprising, then, that nature has been turned into a sort of tonic or drug, a spiritual commodity. Living lives that have been optimized in all the wrong ways, we find ourselves in nature and think to ourselves "I need to do this more often." Like everything else, we then try to optimize for nature-time. The problem is that the basic physical processes of living have been abstracted away, leaving us with homes and cars that are cocoons, keeping us at the same constant level of comfort at all times. Rather than optimizing for a kind of spiritual harmony, we've optimized for convenience and base pleasure. So of course we drive to nature and take it in, then go back home and sink into the comfort of the digital and human.

So there's a perennial division there, between nature and human. Maybe it's worse now, but Soseki identifies it too; there's a limit to how much of the natural world he can take before returning to the familiar and human. But we know that there's no real division, it's a mental one. We're all the same stuff. And so, like Soseki, I want to overcome that, to see the world as one thing and somehow find the balance between the pulls of our two worlds. How?

It's a question that doesn't yet have a clear answer for me. I can feel these two worlds and recognize when I am becoming overly involved with one[4], and using the other as a tonic. I've felt the balance before and see it in little things, in certain moments.

...

Eventually I got to a creek. For the past few days I'd walked the same path and got to the same creek, each time walking down its bank until I could find a place narrow enough to jump over or shallow enough to hop from rock to rock. Today the creek was swollen with the recent rain, and the jump was further. Successfully on the other side of the bank, I crouched under a bay tree's wet leaves and crept my way back to the path.

I started to walk up the path up the hill on the other side of the creek and my mind began to return inwards. I glanced over at a piece of a log wedged between a fallen tree branch and the thought suddenly entered my head: build a crossing.

So I pulled the log from the fallen tree and kicked it down the hill towards the creek. It sunk into the mud and I leaned down to roll it out. Eventually I got it to the side of the creek, and I pushed it in, then rolled it up so the cut end faced up. To combat its wobbliness, I squatted down and pulled some stones from under the water up and around the log. In the process, I accidentally stepped into the water, soaking my shoe.

At this point, I was all in. I stepped into the creek without reservation and wrestled the log into position. I found another log and brought it down to the creek, orienting it up like the last and bracing it with rocks. I went back and fourth stepping across the creek on the logs, adjusting them until they didn't tilt so ominously. They eventually settled down in just the right place--where each log's shape and the rocks underwater fit together in just the way they should.

Once I'd stepped all the way into the creek, I was having fun. I enjoyed the cold water around my feet, the challenge of getting the logs to stand without wobbling, the sourcing of logs from the nearby hill and rolling them down. There was nobody around but me, the creek, and the logs.

After a bit more adjustment, the logs were well-placed in the creek. Looking from the bank they seemed correct, like solid spots to place your feet, just so.

This particular place in the creek was about eight to nine inches deep, and the water rushed around the logs quite quickly. It seemed like adding some rocks on the upstream side of the logs might help prevent the from being washed away, so I waded up and down the creek collecting larger rocks, then bringing them back and stacking them in from of the logs. This created a nice break so the water moved around the log without actually hitting it, perhaps reducing the erosion around the log that could eventually cause it to tip from the weight of some unsuspecting log-stepper.

Satisfied with the rock placement, I walked back and forth across the logs a few times. I stepped back on the bank. It was done.

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I built the crossing because the path seemed like it needed a crossing. I did not just build it for myself, or for the other walkers. I built it for the path. It happened that our goals were in alignment; both I and the path needed the crossing so we both benefit from it.

And so I had found an answer to my question. In building the crossing, I was acting as an extension of nature. Though I was in my own human world, as I worked I was engaging with the non-human parts of nature, contending with the shapes of the logs, the force of the water, the arrangement of rocks at the bottom of the creek. It was a kind of conversation between me and those forces, pushing the design of the crossing into just what it should have been. I did not sit down and design a bridge over a theoretical creek, I designed a crossing through this particular section of the creek, for this path. That design was not mine, but the environment's through me. Maybe the crossing will get washed away the next time it rains, maybe it will last. It doesn't really matter.

...

I will continue visiting nature, finding something in it I cannot find elsewhere in my life. I'll drive to trailheads, go for a hike, then drive home. I'll go camping, backpacking. I'll climb mountains--I can't stop that. It's ingrained in all of us, the wonder of the non-human. Living in a time and a place that has pushed nature so far from the day-to day, those moments are definitely a tonic.

For the most part, the division between these two worlds will remain. But over time I need to find more ways to bridge that division, to bring the two into a whole.

One way to do that is by interacting with the natural world by gently shaping it, speaking with its parts and forming them into something new. This is a humbling way to work, not from a purely theoretical, "correct" way to approach building something, but rather from an intuitive, negotiated approach with a place.

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An incredibly skillful craftsman who constructed dry-fit rock walls once said to me that he "talks to the rocks." He'd ask each rock where it wanted to go in the wall and put it there. The wall took shape without much effort beyond the lifting of the rocks and it stood without any concrete or mortar to keep it together. By simply listening to the pieces and putting them in their places, he was able to extend the natural world, not just the human one.

Last updated Sun Dec 26 2021 in San Anselmo, CA

Links

1: /thought/who-are-we.gmi

2: /thought/what-exists.gmi

3: /thought/the-nature-of-something.gmi

4: /thought/society-man.gmi

Backlinks

/thought/passages.gmi

/thought/a-place.gmi