For a country blessed with immense environmental and cultural diversity we drastically undershoot the mark with adventurous (brave, edgy, exciting, fun) and insightful (rips at the scabs of natural/emotional/human conditions) writing about nature and life on this continent.
Why is this so?
Maybe I just don’t read widely enough or subscribe to the right kind of micro-journals in order to find what passes as quality or new writing on our relationships with this country.
I would welcome any suggestions or reading lists that you might have to enlighten me.
Two recent collections of nature writing sparked my interest in this issue.
The first is the Summer 2008 edition of Lapham’s Quarterly, simply entitled the Book of Nature and which contains, apart from Editor Lewis H. Lapham’s Introductory Preamble and a number of essays, over one hundred excerpts – some snippets of a few lines, many several pages long – gathered in the broad categories of ‘Howling Wilderness’, ‘Gardens of Earthly Delight’ and ‘Terra Incognita’.
These excerpts come from a varied and luminous crew – Matsuo Basho’s transformative haikus, John Steinbeck’s Oklahoma dust bowl from The Grapes of Wrath, Chris Rose reporting from a crime scene in post-Katrina New Orleans, and one of my favourites, a dessicated slice of Edward Abbey from Desert Solitaire where he riffs on water, and the wanting of it, in a high American desert. And there is more, much more.
Lapham says that the texts chosen for the Book of Nature:
…go in search of an understanding of what we mean by nature, ask where to mark the boundaries between mind and matter, body and soul, the human and the nonhuman, between whats out there in the woods and whats in here with the endorphins and the organelles.
Lapham told MIN magazine online that content for the eponymous Quarterly (he had previously been a long-term editor of, and remains a contributor to, Harpers Magazine) is chosen on the basis of:
I choose texts that are fun to read. That is my criteria. It is not academic or comprehensive, but here we find ourselves confronted by the great topics which have confronted human beings for as long as they’ve been around-the war, education, nature, what they now call the environment. There is wonderful historical writing in all of these areas, and my opinion is that good writing doesn’t go out of fashion and that you can learn just as much from reading Seneca or Shakespeare as you can The New York Times’ Best Sellers List.
And, perhaps because I’m writing from another desert, one of my favourite pieces from the Book of Nature is the first, a passage from Charles Bowden’s Inferno that explores his experiences in the Mexican Sonoran Desert:
Grasping, clawing the air and the dirt for that kernel-yes, insist there lurks this kernel-of vitality and hunger and drive and meaning within the barren rags of nature, nature writing, ecology, environmentalism, biodiversity, DNA, FBI, IRS, Transcendentalism, that fucking pond reeking with the scum of Walden’s safe pages, the ‘ol territorial imperative, the clocks ticking to Charlie Darwin’s time, that moronic vehicle without a driver labeled Spaceship Earth, the hummingbirds hanging in the window and screaming to escape the death of their stained-glass tombs, the zoos where life makes pretty, nature trails, nature guides, the natural-that lying, fucking word-the natural stinking up the world with soaps, teas, smoothies, safe sex and dead dicks, the organic, that slayer of good food, that killer of chefs, the passion of bulimia and, by God, khaki, the drab uniform of the faithful as armies stomp past in hot pursuit of the wild, yes, spinning, and within the spinning the hand flailing, fingers like talons reaching for just a touch of the coarse skin, the tongue lapping out for a taste of all the slime and ooze.
Fun to read indeed.
But more seriously, and I am unsure if this reflects the dearth of (quality?) Australian writing about nature and the natural conditions or Lapham’s personal choices, but of all of the words and images in the Book of Nature there is but one reference that I can readily find to Australia – and that is to identify our misshapen blob at the bottom of the world as the place where twenty-five meteors have landed.
The other collection of nature writing that got me thinking about how we do this kind of writing here is also from the northern summer of 2008.
Granta 102 bears the title The New Nature Writing.
This collection is nature in the broad and the raw – none of the eighteen contributions concerns a world or places without humans or their works – but all contain an essence of a nature that persists despite, because of, or affected by, humans and our actions.
In his Editor’s Letter, Jason Crowley says that when putting this collection together:
…we were interested less in what might be called old nature writing-by which I mean the lyrical pastoral tradition of the romantic wanderer-than in writers who approached their subject in heterodox and experimental ways. We also wanted the contributions to be voice-driven, narratives told in the first person, for the writer to be present in the story, if sometimes only bashfully.
Among the best pieces in Granta 102 is a loving tribute to a now-abandoned and decaying housing estate at Netherley on the fringes of the city of Liverpool in the UK by the poet Paul Farley and novelist Niall Griffiths.
Farley & Griffiths grew up at Netherley and met again by chance many years late. Here they collaborate on a memoir of life and lives in the housing estate of Netherley in the seventies and eighties – a place that they’d both fled from as soon as possible but for which they now have fond, if cautious, memories.
Griffiths remembers:
…no one I knew had their place of work over the yard or so of sluggish brook; all worked in the city, or in the factories that lined the arterial roads into it, or down towards Speke or Garston or Halewood. The rural was there, close enough to smell, touch and taste; one bound over the brook or six paces over the bridge and you’d land in that world. Yet it remained very, very far away.
For Farley the bridge is at once both a link and a barrier to a foreign world:
…and the white bridge is like the border between us and another world. This was a prime hang-out, well away from the main road, and a good place to swig cider or smoke hash or sniff solvents. Beyond it lay open country, impossible places like Tarbock or Cronton where they spoke completely differently. Farmers were feared. Open country appealed, but was circumscribed by anxieties; hounds with mantrap jaws, bird-scarers, barbed wire. The urban had crept up on the rural and something of a siege mentality prevailed.
And I like this passage from Granta editor Crowley’s introduction – as much because it points the way to a revival of nature writing as much for it’s message about what may be wrong with a lot of what has previously passed as nature writing, both in this country and elsewhere:
The best new nature writing is also an experiment in forms: the field report, the essay, the memoir, the travelogue. If travel writing can often seem like a debased and exhausted genre, nature writing is its opposite, something urgent, vital and alert to the defining particulars of our times.
Is there anyone in Australia writing with this urgency and vitality?
Alert – not just to the defining particulars of present times, but also to the rich, varied and wonderful past in this old dusty rag of a country.
