Nature & Memory

The remembrance of nature, of our having inhabited it or having been subsumed by it, strikes a curious note. The Wordsworthian notion of memory as a reanimating force adheres but slightly, paling against the scope of detail backdropping or prefiguring each recollection. What was the color of the entire sky the day you fell in love? Which stars were laid out against what moon when your child was brought into this world? The leaves, what color & kind were they, & how did they sound in the wind as you stood graveside? The taste of the air, the chill in it, or softness, or turbidity. We have the language to fill a human memory, & can perform a sort of ventriloquism should we lack the clarity we’d prefer, but the world seems to convey itself viscerally, sensually, without the rudder of a script or syntax. How can we reanimate what we did not animate in the first? 

This morning at the breakfast table we read Wordsworth & then Hopkins & it occurred to me how often & recurringly we have taken a stab at fitting the world into our feeble language. How we feel & what we see & how we have come to inhabit a piece of soil, though, will always have already informed how the world comes to us. It will always interfere & interject on the quiet transactions of the natural elements about us. The notion of Romantic sublimity itself is a repositioning of what is as something greater, closer to a divinity that is itself another of our fictions. Recognition is taxonomy. Even in the throes of adulation, the world reports to us, veers about the circumference described by our center, a sort of looming monolith in possession of a language capacious & caring & exacting enough to provide a syllabary of & from the world’s own multitude of beings. 

What language, then? Would the world permit me to call it snow or nieve? Althalj or theluji or nutaryik? & when I say snow, does it indicate snow falling or snow having fallen? & if it fell, did it land upon open water, on land, on a snowbank? Just as Quine’s gavagai opened out unto every iteration of a rabbit’s presence, from individuated specimen to the event of the species entire, the process of delimiting that a word impresses upon its world of origin is necessarily oppressive, truncated, neuter, shorthand. Language is the dream of efficiency in a world that resoundingly declares its complexities. 

The marvel, then, is that we keep trying. That under the shadow of all of our manufacture, a flowing current of unvoiced wonder mirrors back the world to itself as it is. Perhaps all of our summits, all of our circumnavigations, the entire history of human exploration has amounted to a hope that we could speak the world’s language, or hear it, or feel it. But the mountain top does not describe the end of the world, only the collision of a stone with a sky. The river from source to mouth spelled itself out millenia before the cartographer undertook its meandering script. & each ocean has always known where one shore gave out & where the other took up again, relaying life from one to the other for untold epochs. 

We call this the anthropocene because our species is everywhere in evidence. We picture the earth & see a mapped overlay, hear our placenames as authoritative, think its entire sphere & depth & cover known unto us. We are clever in the degrees of our delusion, & when one generation has devised a hypothesis of the world, it takes only the next to take it as gospel. We have ossified around the old trajectories & narratives of whoever was in power last, codified them as laws, forgotten their malleability in ratification. 

& meanwhile, the world has gone on being the world, bucking at our advances & generally responding tenderly, in spite of how far-reaching & dumbfoundingly myopic our rapacious tendency as a species has proven. We have done so many offenses that the belittling violence of language can seem insignificant among them, but by itself, denuded of praxis, it may be the only among them that engages in reverence, precisely by operating in the limn between a sort of funneling-toward precision on one end & an opening unto the infinite on the other. It walks on the thinnest of ice, & the trail knows no overland alternative. 

Someday, we will falter. The ice will give, our language will be choked & drowned with us, & the world will cover us over in root & soil & rain & fallen leaf. It will swallow us & belch out our methane & feed our bones to whatever it is that succeeds us in deep time, & each syllable we expended trying to forge our intimacies with it will fall, an old skin on an old species that the world shook from itself & forgot. But how not to advance in wonderment at every turn? How not to want after that equanimity & power & grace everywhere in evidence? How not to love the world, even when costumed in the threadbare garments of our language? There is simply nothing else to do.