News
I’ve been immersing myself in the world of Auslan as I wrote a new story for Australian Geographic - it’s far richer and more interesting than I could have imagined. And I got just a tiny glimpse of what life can be like for people of different abilities. Interviewing a deaf person over Zoom with the aid of an interpreter was an interesting but exhausting experience. I’ll let you know (of course!) when the story comes out.
I loved this virtual tour of Mannahatta in 1609, the island now known as Lower Manhattan, which is a tour de force (ha) of urban nature. “Times Square was a forest with a beaver pond…” I love the idea of learning how to feel the contours of the land beneath our feet, even if they’re now covered in concrete. I wonder if anyone’s done something similar for Sydney? I feel the recent downpours have alerted me to some waterways I wasn’t previously aware existed - which I’ve usually discovered by stepping in them when out walking…
What I’m reading
In the spirit of my comments last time about the impossibility of being “late to the party” when it comes to books, I just finished The Tree by John Fowles (yes, The French Lieutenant’s Woman John Fowles), which was first published in 1979. Hot take follows! Actually it is quite hot, because, like all the best hot takes, I suspect my reaction doesn’t fully grapple with all the complexities involved. However.
The Tree is a brief, 90-page essay about creativity and nature. My edition, happily, has an introduction by nature writer Barry Lopez, who highlights how central Fowles’s relationship with nature was to his fiction (which reliably sold its socks off throughout the latter part of the 20th century and was critically acclaimed, too). I don’t think of Fowles as a nature writer at all, but part of his lovely, rambling thesis in this essay is that fiction and the forest (both the metaphorical and literal forest) have all sorts of things in common: freedom; wildness; a multiplicity of forms and possibilities; inexplicable processes at their heart.
Opening with a description of his typically Edwardian father’s relationship to nature (“crimped and cramped” apple and pear trees carefully cultivated into hyper-productivity and judged on yield alone), Fowles says his own is completely the opposite: at the time of writing, he owned 30 acres of land that he’s allowed to go wild, to his father’s horror.
“His chaos happens to be my order.”
Gardens, it turns out, aren’t exactly Fowles’s favourite things - he visits Linnaeus’s garden at Uppsala and is unimpressed by its tamed, ordered simplicity. He expands this observation into a meditation on the ways in which Linnaeus’s legacy of scientific thinking, with its focus on categorisation, is opposed to art and to nature (which are “branches of the one tree”). Trying to categorise nature, he believes, creates “a major human alienation” from it. The scientific approach means we demand “that our relations with [nature] must be purposive, industrious, always seeking greater knowledge”.
I absolutely love this part of the essay because it gently highlights the failings of a lot of the nature writing that was to follow this book, including some of my favourite books (which is fine - everything is complex, as Fowles would agree). We risk, Fowles warns:
“turning [nature] into a therapy, a free clinic for admirers of their own sensitivity. The subtlest of our alienations from it, the most difficult to comprehend, is our need to use it in some way, to derive some personal yield. We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability – however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.”
“General uselessness” - that’s EXACTLY what I love about being out there, not the ticking off goals of kilometres walked or wildflowers spotted or even spirits soothed. Nature does not exist for our benefit. That’s what Fowles calls “green chaos”, the essential unknowability of nature - an unknowability it shares with the creative process.
He’s particularly interesting about the way time works in the woods (time in the garden or in the wild never fails to interest me):
“Trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times: here dense and abrupt, there calm and sinuous – never plodding, mechanical, inescapably monotonous.”
Nature exists in a continuous, ever-changing present, which is another challenge to our thinking, another source of our hostility towards nature. That hostility, despite the rise of the conservation movement, hasn’t substantially changed since the medieval conflation of wilderness with evil (when the forest, Fowles writes, was seen as “an immense green cloak for Satan” - what a great image).
In trying to summarise his argument, I notice it loops and rambles, and occasionally returns to where it started. Parts are, inevitably, outdated (he argues that our biggest problem is our alienation from, rather than destruction of, nature. That might have been the case in 1979 but sadly isn’t now). But he’s always arresting and thought-provoking, forcing you to reassess ideas you take for granted.
My notes from this slender book are almost as long as the book itself - I had to stop writing down direct quotes when I realised I might easily end up copying the whole thing out, given its exact overlap with everything I love to think about. But allow me one more quote: “What I gain most from nature is beyond words,” Fowles says. Trying to write about nature, however pure your intentions, entails separating yourself from it – “it exiles me from what I most need to learn”. And our separation from nature is at the root of our destruction of the natural world.
Of course he then ends the essay with pages of the most transporting and exquisite nature writing about the eerie beauty of Wistman’s Woods on Dartmoor (so I think I can continue reading nature books with a clear conscience). His ultimate point, however, is that to really connect with nature, you need to get out and experience it for yourself. Which we can probably all agree with.
Since none of us can travel to Wistman’s Woods at the moment, though, I include this picture of them, and urge you to read Fowles’s description, too.
Photo by Neil Burnell, whose lovely Instagram is here.
The Tree was book #51 of 2020. Other books I read this past fortnight:
Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall
Pico Iyer, The Man Within My Head
Dervla Murphy, The Island That Dared: Journeys in Cuba
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet
Patti Miller, Writing True Stories
John Bell, On Shakespeare
See you in two weeks!