Relationships
Part of my goal for this blog is to articulate for myself some of the principles underlying our vision for a "sustainable culture". The concept of ecological "sustainability" has become something of a catch-phrase in eco-circles, and I'm concerned that it might be in danger of slipping into vague half-meaning at best, utter meaninglessness at worst, through overuse (see "postmodern" for an example).
To that end, I hope to address from time to time elements of a healthy vision of culture that I believe to be of crucial importance. These won't be surprising to anyone with any degree of cultural sensitivity, but I hope to perhaps be able to offer a fresh perspective on some of them. They are not offered in any particular order, but simply as they occur to me. All of them are, of course, completely interconnected and interdependent.
The first principle of sustainability for me is relationship. Barry Lopez has written a fascinating essay titled "Landscape and Narrative", published in his book Crossing Open Ground, in which he describes interdependence - the idea that everything in creation exists in relationship with everything else. This is also the principle underlying the neo-calvinist idea of "sphere-sovereignty".
I think of two landscapes - one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see - not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology, the record of its climate and evolution... Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush - the resiliency of the twig under the bird, that precise shade of yellowish-green against the milk-blue sky, the fluttering whir of the arriving sparrow, are what I mean by "the landscape"... These are all elements of the land, and what makes the landscape comprehensible are the relationships between them. One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it - like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events.
When we consciously develop the ability to perceive relationships in a landscape, it becomes more and more difficult to behave in a haphazard manner, as though the consequences of our actions were somehow contained by some non-existent principle of detachment. Once we understand, and care about, the relationship between the sparrow and the twig it becomes easier to care about the relationship between the twig and the root, the root and the ground, the ground and the river, the river and the municipal dump, or dam, or factory, or the gasoline that we accidentally spilled while filling our motorboat.
Power often has a vested interest in denying relationship. People in power often try to tell us that there is no relationship between ourselves and a "flat, white nothingness" (Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton's description of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) way up north that just may have fossil fuels underneath it.
The following quote is excerpted from a story on Orion Online about the fate of an exhibit of the "stunning Arctic Refuge photographs of Subhankar Banerjee" at the Smithsonian.
Banerjee's talent and access to the remotest wilderness captured the attention of a Smithsonian curator. Originally arranged as an exhibit in the museum's prestigious Hall 10 gallery, poetic captions were penned and, very typically, fervent opinions clashed. But after the "Boxer rebellion," mysteriously, Banerjee's debut was relocated to a hallway leading to a loading dock, with revised didactic captions replacing the poetic and ardent legends originally conceived.
Banerjee prepared this caption before Senator Boxer's debate to accompany a photograph of a buff-breasted sandpiper on the coastal plain of the Jago River: "This species, a long-distance traveler that migrates each year from Argentina to the Arctic Refuge coastal plain to nest and rear their young, is one of the top five bird species at greatest risk if their habitat is disturbed."
After the Senate vote, the Smithsonian edited the caption to read: "Buff-Breasted Sandpiper / Coastal Plain of the Jago River."
To deny the relationship between aspects of creation is to deny the relationship between ourselves and the earth, one another, and with our creator. It is a destructive and inhibiting mindset that led to a pronounced and pervasive expression of alienation in twentieth century culture. The first step to healing ouselves and our culture is to affirm the importance of relationships, because the relationships we see expressed in the external landscape, urban or rural or wild, are reflected in our "interior landscapes" as Lopez describes them.
Similarly, the speculations, intuitions, and formal ideas we refer to as "mind" are a set of relationships in the interior landscape with purpose and order; some of these are obvious, many impenetrably subtle. The shape and character of these relationships in a person's thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature - the intricate history of one's life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one's moral, intellectual, and spiritual development.
Lopez's point regarding interior relationships is true also in the metaphorical landscape of culture. The anthropologist Wade Davis uses the term "ethnosphere" to refer to the oneness of human culture, just as "biosphere" refers to the oneness of the physical world. What we tend to forget is that the metaphorical, imaginative world of story is inseperable from our experience of the physical world, a relationship which Lopez affirms in his essay. Metaphor expresses the relationship between our imagination and the landscape, and in large part the reading and study of literature is engaged in recognizing recurring patterns of relationship that express the oneness of the world. These are sometimes referred to as "archetypes" or "correspondences".
With certain stories certain individuals may experience a deeper, more profound sense of well-being. This latter phenomenon, in my understanding, rests at the heart of storytelling as an elevated experience among aboriginal peoples. It results from bringing two landscapes together. The exterior landscape is organized according to principles or laws or tendencies beyond human control. It is understood to contain an integrity that is beyond human analysis and unimpeachable.
The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) argued that we can place ourselves outside of any of our modes for understanding culture - philosophy, theology, mathematics - except story. We can imagine a time when human beings lived without these other, more rational, constructs, indeed we can imagine that many people still live without them today, but we can not imagine a time when humans lived without story, a time before myth. The mythical framework is the catch-all of human culture. The fact that ours is the first culture that has broadly considered myth of every kind to be frivolous explains a lot about the alienation of many people. It is no accident either, that a culture divorced from story is also a culture largely divorced from its landscape. I believe that the hard work of cultural renewal begins with an affirmation of the relationship between story, landscape, the arrangement of our lives, and the way all these elements combine to form the sphere over which God is sovereign.