Housing the Environmental Imagination : Politics, Beauty, and Refuge in American Nature Writing [1 ed.] 9781443834759, 9781443834469

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Housing the Environmental Imagination

Housing the Environmental Imagination: Politics, Beauty, and Refuge in American Nature Writing By

Peter Quigley

Housing the Environmental Imagination: Politics, Beauty, and Refuge in American Nature Writing, by Peter Quigley This book first published 2012 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Peter Quigley All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-3446-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3446-9

For Polly, Daniel, Dylan: the foundation and the windows of my imagination

“It is vain…to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow…The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical, wooden, dull to read…” “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is…” —Thoreau “Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the ideal place. …that solid house of rock and wood…” —Ed Abbey ”Chop wood. Make things. Play with your child. Share with your friends. Grow something. Moderate your wrath, moderate your anger, pacify your hatred. Build a cabin in the woods or a hut in the desert. Avoid the cities.” —Ed Abbey “The house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being.” —Bachelard, The Poetics of Space “…language is the house of Being.” —Heidegger “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” —Melville “The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths…” —Bachelard “Pardon me, if when I want to tell the story of my life it’s the land I talk about.” —Neruda “I am heaping the bones of the old mother To build us a hold…” “How do we dare to live In so great and tameless a land? We dare; we are here.” “It would be better for men/ To be few and live far apart.” —Jeffers “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes.” —Marcel Proust

TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiii Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 Modernism and Our Discontents: “A landscape of scary places… a nation of scary people” Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 95 Henry Thoreau: “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is…” Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 125 Robinson Jeffers: “I am heaping the bones of the old mother/ To build us a hold…” Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 171 Variations on the Theme: “Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the ideal place” Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 193 Gary Snyder: “I see my role as trying to present some alternative” Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 223 Wendell Berry: “The house set snug/As a stone in the hill’s flank” Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 235 Scott Russell Sanders: “The house dwells in us as surely as we dwell in the house” Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 247 Conclusion: Alternative Futures Works Cited............................................................................................. 261 Index........................................................................................................ 271

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1-1. Permission granted by Carole Cable and CartoonStock Ltd. Fig. 1-2. 1964 VW bus; photo by author. Fig. 1-3. Tree house in northern California. Photo by the author, ca. 1971. Fig. 1-4. Excerpted from Shelter, ©1973, Shelter Publications, Bolinas, Calif. Reprinted by permission. Fig. 1-5. Berkeley Then and Now. From The Berkeley Tribe. Source Unknown. Multiple attempts to locate source failed. Fig. 1-6. “Join the Action Army,” The Berkeley Tribe. Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society, WHi-50263. Fig. 1-7. Permission granted for Le Corbusier “Radiant City” © 2011 from Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / FLC. Fig. 1-8. Koyaanisqatsi in Honolulu. Photo and permission from Dylan Quigley. Fig. 1-9. Koyaanisqatsi in Honolulu. Photo and permission from Dylan Quigley. Fig. 1-10. Le Corbusier’s hand built shack, Le Cabanon. Courtesy of Jason Schmidt, photographer. Fig. 1-11. Golf Ball House I-40 AZ. Photo by the author, ca. 2002. Fig. 1-12. Piñon pines and oaks in AZ. Photo by the author, ca. 1998. Fig. 1-13. Houses going in after cleared land. Photo by the author, ca. 1998. Fig. 1-14. Aerial shot of Simi Valley, CA, 1/1994. Photo courtesy of Jim Wark. Fig. 1-15. Boys looking through window to the world of mystery. Photo by the author, ca, 1994. Fig. 1-16. Pathway in Carmel, CA, 6/2011. Photo by the author. Fig. 1-17. Peter Zapffe at writing table. Picture taken by Peter Zapffe. Permission courtesy of Hans Jørgen Stang, Managing Director UNÌFOR, administrating organization for the Peter Zapffe Foundation. These pictures appeared in Zapffe’s biography, Naken under kosmos: Peter Wessel Zapffe, en biografi, written by Jørgen Haave and published by PAX in 1999. Fig. 1-18. Peter Zapffe’s writing table. Ibid. Fig. 1-19. Rush of time photos. With permission from Sarah Clarkson, CO. Fig. 2-1. Real estate ads. No responses to permission queries. Fig. 2-2. From INDUSTRIAL DESIGN by Raymond Loewy. Copyright © 1979 by Raymond Loewy, published in 1979. Permission granted by The Overlook Press, New York, NY. All rights reserved. Also from Stuart Ewen’s “Encyclopedia Billboardica” in All Consuming Images. Courtesy of Stuart Ewen. Fig. 2-3. Asian print found on Wikipedia and labeled as a public domain photo. It’s also used on the website Yamgruel at .

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List of Illustrations

Fig. 2-4. Thoreau’s replica cabin. Photo and permission from Polly Quigley, 6/2011. Fig. 2-5. Thoreau’s replica cabin. Photo and permission from Polly Quigley, 6/2011. Fig. 2-6. Northwest Cove, Walden, train in distance. Courtesy Concord Free Public Library. Fig. 2-7. Sketch of Thoreau’s cabin by Sophia Thoreau. Courtesy Concord Free Public Library. Fig. 2-8. Country house from Andrew Jackson Downing’s pattern book. Permission from Dover Press. Fig. 2-9. Inside of Thoreau’s cabin. Photo and permission from Polly Quigley, 6/2011. Fig. 2-10. Price list from Thoreau and from Downing’s pattern book. Permission from Dover Press. Fig. 3-1. Keystone over the entrance to Hawk Tower. Photo by the author, 6/ 2011. Fig. 3-2. Jeffers with Salvadore Dali and Ginger Rogers. Permission from the Monterey Herald. Fig. 3-3. Northern California coast, by the author 6/2011. Fig. 3-4. Carmel Bay, by the author, 6/2011. Fig. 3-5. Aerial photo of Tor House and Hawk Tower, Carmel, 1940. Permission from Pat Hathaway Collection of California Views. Fig. 3-6. Jeffers hammering stone, 1937. Horace Lyon, photographer. Kind permission granted by the Tor House Foundation. BJ802p.038. Fig. 3-7. Jeffers and twins receiving rock gift from Harry Teabolt, 1920. Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Fig. 3-8. Cornerstone of Tor House. Photo by the author, 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-9. Continent’s End. Taken by the author, 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-10. Side of Hawk Tower. Photo by the author 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-11. Top of Hawk Tower. Photo by the author 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-12. The living room of Tor House. Photo by the author 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-13. Hawk Tower. Photo by the author 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-14. Building Hawk Tower with the twins, 1923. DO362. Kind permission granted by the Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-15. Hawk water drain on the Tower. Photo by the author 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-16. Stones surrounding windows. Photo by the author 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-17. “America First” poster. Public domain. Fig. 3-18. Tower almost finished in 1923. Lewis Josselyn photo, 1923. THF#34. Kind permission granted by the Tor House Foundation.

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Fig. 3-19. Spiral staircase of Hawk Tower. By the author, 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-20. Front door entrance to Tor House. By the author, 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-21. Heavy stones shape the entrance to Hawk Tower. By the author, 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-22. Angles and windows of Hawk Tower. By the author, 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-23. Next to Hawk Tower looking out to sea. By the author, 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 3-24. Jeffers and Edna St. Vincent Millay next to Tower, 1930s. Courtesy of Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Fig. 3-25. Out the back gate of Tor House. Taken by the author 6/201. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 4-1. Keys inside front door of Tor House. By the author, 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation. Fig. 4-2. Henry Beston's Outermost House, a.k.a. "The Fo'castle," as it appeared on Eastham's Coast Guard Beach, probably sometime between 1965-75. Permission and credit: Nan Turner Waldron/Henry Beston Society Archives. Fig. 4-3. Mary Austin’s tree study Wick-I-Up, 1908. Fig. 4-4. Hawthorne’s tree “study” in Concord. From painting on postcard. Unknown source. There is also an image in American Literature by Roy Bennett Pace. Fig. 4-5. Zane Grey’s house on Catalina Island. Photo by author, ca. 1998. Fig. 4-6. Model of Jack London’s Wolf House. Website and park officials are unaware of photo source. Fig. 4-7. Arne Naess. Permission from Kit Fai Naess, wife of Naess. Fig. 4-8. View from above Naess’s place at Tvergastein. Photo courtesy Rolf Steinar Bjørnstad, Hallingskarvet, Norway. Fig. 4-9. Closer view above Tvergastein. Photo courtesy Rolf Steinar Bjørnstad, Hallingskarvet, Norway. Fig. 4-10. Naess’s place and Hallingskarvet snowed in. Photo courtesy Rolf Steinar Bjørnstad, Hallingskarvet, Norway. Fig. 4-11. Tvergastein dwarfed by Hallingskarvet. Photo courtesy Rolf Steinar Bjørnstad, Hallingskarvet, Norway. Fig. 4-12. Inside Tvergastein. Photo courtesy Rolf Steinar Bjørnstad, Hallingskarvet, Norway. Fig. 4-13. Inside Tvergastein. Photo courtesy Rolf Steinar Bjørnstad, Hallingskarvet, Norway. Fig. 5-1. Female Combatants. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Fig. 5-2. Sourdough Mountain Lookout, 1917. Courtesy of Bob Jenkins Collection. Fig. 5-3. Sourdough Lookout in 2003. Courtesy of Todd Burley, “Sourdough Sunset.” Fig. 5-4. Indian Rock Lookout. Permission granted by Brain McCamish, photographer. http://www.brian894x4.com/images/bluemtn140.jpg

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List of Illustrations

Fig. 5-5. Gary Snyder in the trees at Kitkitdizze. Courtesy of Terry Husebye, photographer. Fig. 5-6. Snyder and Carole sitting zazen. Permission, Ed Kashi/ VII. Fig. 5-7. Sketch of Japanese farmhouse. Unknown source. Fig. 5-8. Photo on interior of Japanese farmhouse redone as a modern home. Unknown source. Fig. 6-1. Scott Russell Sanders’ writing desk. Photo by Ruth Sanders. Permission granted by Ruth and Scott Russell Sanders. Fig. 6-2. Permission granted by Ruth and Scott Russell Sanders. Fig. 6-3. Front of Sanders’ house. Photo by Ruth Sanders. Permission granted by Ruth and Scott Russell Sanders. Fig. 8-1. The backyard gate at Tor House. By the author, 6/2011. Permission from Tor House Foundation.

Color Plates Color Plate 1. “Waiting.” Edwards Air Force Base. © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York. Color Plate 2. Hawk Tower and Tor House. Color Plate 3. Snyder was at Sourdough; Kerouac stayed at Desolation Lookout where this was taken. Courtesy of Todd Burley, photographer. 2002. Color Plate 4. Snyder’s Kitkitdizze. Permission granted from Ed Kashi/VII. Color Plate 5. Snyder’s writing cabin at Kitkitdizze. Courtesy of Terry Husebye, photographer.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many folks over the years that have encouraged me to continue with this project recognizing that by and large the topic had not been discussed in this way. David Rothman, from the University of Colorado, has always been a strong advocate and counselor for me as I worked through issues in the book. Equally David Morris at the University of Washington endured lengthy discussions with me on the limits of current theory and the state of literary studies. These two scholars are two of the most well read, thoughtful and balanced figures I have met in the field and I thank them both. They are as well valued friends. John Suiter was very helpful in discussing issues related to Thoreau, lookouts, Snyder and more. His book Poets on the Peaks is a fantastic contribution. Stuart Ewen provided some crucial exchanges on his book All Consuming Images. Arne Naess was helpful when I interviewed him in the 90s and in follow up discussions that were taking place even shortly before his passing. Gary Snyder has been a generous companion on email on and off over the past few years regarding the topic of his home and the aesthetics and politics of place. It’s a shame that our calendars and our travels sabotaged several attempts for me to take advantage of his invite to Kitkitdizze. Scott Russell Sanders has been, as well, very generous and truly engaged with my questions about place and the meaning of intimate space. The Tor House Foundation receives my highest regard, not only for the preservation work they do for Tor House, but also for the unselfish aid they provided me in preparing the Jeffers material. I will never forget that morning in June walking the grounds of Tor House. Thanks in particular to President Vince Huth and his lovely wife Ripple Huth for their kindness and help and to Joan Hendrickson, Photo Collection Archivist, at Tor House. Also James Karman is due many thanks for his scholarship on Jeffers (particularly the biography) as well as his recently published Collected Letters. In addition, he took time from his work on the letters to answer what had to be disruptive emails from me as I sorted out the history of Jeffers’ move to Carmel. Under the heading of responding to detailed questions, Rob Kafka, a long term Jeffers scholar and guiding hand of the RJA, has been helpful. Tim Hunt simply must be thanked for the monumental job of bringing

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Acknowledgements

out the multi-volume Stanford edition of The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers and the Selected poetry edition as well. Robert Brophy deserves thanks and gratitude for maintaining the light of Jeffers scholarship through some dark times; he brought many of us along into Jeffers studies over the years. Frank Stewart at the University of Hawaii has been a vital coffee companion on issues related to ecocriticism or the politics of theory; this is especially the case when I felt I was being swallowed by the sometimessolipsistic world of the author. Thanks to Jeff Muse for good conversations on Snyder, lookouts, and building. I wanted to thank some photographers who offered up their pictures for the book, Jim Wark, Terry Husebye, Ed Kashi, Lloyd Kahn, Jason Schmidt, Todd Burley, Rolf Steinar Bjørnstad, Ruth Sanders, Brian McCamish, Dylan Quigley, and Polly Quigley. I thought my son’s pictures from downtown Honolulu were impressive. Thanks also to Eric Shaffer and especially to Patricia J. Adams for helpful editorial comments and thanks to Dave Roy for some technical assistance with photo preparation. I am in debt to Lars Saetre at the University of Bergen for clarifying some Norwegian translations. Also thanks to Linda Briscoe Myers, Assistant Curator of Photography at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin for digging for Jeffers pictures and Sue Walker, from The Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University.

CHAPTER ONE MODERNISM AND OUR DISCONTENTS: “A LANDSCAPE OF SCARY PLACES… A NATION OF SCARY PEOPLE”

In the introduction to The Norton Book of Nature Writing, John Elder and Robert Finch make the case for the significance of literature, and nature related literature in particular: All literature, by illuminating the full nature of human existence, asks a single question: how shall we live? In our age that question has taken its most urgent form in relation to the natural environment. (28)

This question—“How shall we live?”—is, in essence, the foundation for this book. For that reason, I have chosen to look at a few major nature writers who committed their writing and their life to a place and to developing the notion of a sense of place. In addition to thinking about ways of living, this book will attempt to examine the process of establishing home, especially in a natural or wild setting, and engaging in an inseparably related writing process. Writing in The Columbia History of American Poetry, it is John Elder again who touches on the theme of the process of finding and defining home. He comments that one of the central impulses of American nature poetry is to seek retreat, but a retreat that is also a return (707). This is my most pressing theme in this book: the journey of escape and rejection; the journey outward that leads back, to home.1 As Dana Phillips documents in The Truth of Ecology, referencing Scheese and Fitch, the typical form in nature writing is a physical journey outward from civilization into nature/wilderness (with an accompanying inner journey) and then “the return to home both literal and figurative…which completes the narrative movement of most nature writing” (186). While it is true that the voyage from urban life to nature always must end somewhere—either by inhabiting a home in nature or by returning to the city—in the instances under examination in this book, there is no return to the city. What transpires is the building of home, an

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inhabitation process, a commitment to a wild landscape, all of which are inescapably, inseparably connected to a writing project. This book is about journeys outward that are also about finding home, finding a voice, finding a way, finding a place. In its broadest terms, this book charts our current and long-standing need for a meaningful life and examines the way this happens through the pursuit of meaningful space. A recently published, nonacademic web site serves as a measure of how current this issue is for many folks. Hermitary is dedicated to solitude, refuge, hermits, and silence. The subtitle expands on the purpose of the site: “resources and reflections on hermits and solitude.” There is a link on the site that connects it with a popular alternative culture magazine, Utne Reader, which suggests the trendy and popular nature of the site and the topic: UTNE READER's MEDIA BLOG on HERMITARY… "Want to get away? Far away? Feel like disappearing for a time, even if only vicariously? Hermitary is a one-stop resource for your inner hermit. One of the most consistently wondrous sites on the internet.” (Meng-hu)

There is, interestingly enough, an article on this site about Robinson Jeffers, who figures large in this present study. Therefore, more than a mere academic exercise, this book intends to connect with current sentiments and energies that are driving the imaginations as well as the choices of babyboomers, environmentally oriented folks, down shifters, and others. In addition, this book examines the profile of this journey, the patterns of living that constitute a commitment to place, and the binding and interwoven activity of writing in place, about place. The poetry and writing examined here confirm that the move to “refuge” is the beginning of a process that does not end. This journey has no final script, takes many forms, and is constantly under revision; in addition, it is not a journey to a romantic world elsewhere. The initial gesture may be one of rejection, a willful, sometimes destructive and reckless separation, along with an attraction to a sublime seduction portending seclusion, a fiery departure aimed at a dreamy relocation. For all of the stomping out the door, however, the writers discussed in these pages who reject “culture” and “civilization” stay purposely and intimately connected, through writing mostly, with that which they have supposedly rejected. Perhaps “rejected” is the wrong word; the relationship is more like an ongoing argument or conversation. There is a vital and vigorous contact, conversation, and connection with the world, the city, the culture in general, as a reformulation of home, nature, and existence is sought, found, and written about.

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The fact that such a recognizable pattern exists—i.e., rejection and reestablishment—makes some critics nervous. Today, there is a cynical alert mechanism that is always on “ready” to deny any action or idea a claim to freshness or, dare I say, originality. Because there is a recognizable pattern in these works, it is stated that “nature writing is socially and culturally constructed” (Philips 186). Some of these directions in critical theory threaten to undermine, hijack, and unnecessarily politicize the retreat to nature, and these directions must be addressed. Brooke Libby, for instance, opposes the nature writing tradition and wonders aloud “Can we save nature from the cultural construction and absorption of self?” (252). This dissolution of the concept of the individual is seen as research progress, and it unfolds shaped by its own historical moment and political weight, for its own ends. This judgment of constructedness puts the critic in full control and relieves him or her from reading with the writer, from assessing the particular motivations and creativity associated with an individual example. Constructed activity is assumed to be mindless absorption in powers of which the writer or sojourner is unaware.2 If everything is constructed, or received, or repeated (`a la The Matrix) everything needs to be contested, deconstructed, revealed, and reformulated (except the act of revelation and re-formulation). It is a critical approach frequently associated with contempt for capitalism and other Western cultural trends. Constructed reality is a reality one feels little respect for; whatever is constructed is totally a human creation with layers and a history that can be unpacked by the theorist. Sometimes the story is illuminating; mostly, it is a story of power and deception heroically revealed. And, of course, after the unwanted construction is done away with or exposed, one needs to ask, “What happens next?” Terry Eagleton has some trenchant observations on this approach: The point of this judicious importation of structuralist concepts is to keep literary criticism in a job. It has been evident for some time that it is a little short on ideas…blind both to new theories and to the implications of its own. …[Sturcturalism] promises to put the whole literary academic enterprise on a firmer footing, thus permitting it to surmount the so-called “crisis in the humanities.” It provides a new answer to the question: “What is it that we are teaching/studying?” (Literary Theory 107)

We don’t want yet another interpretation of King Lear says Eagleton. Instead, structuralism offers us the ability to take a step back from interpretative commentary and ask questions about “the whole system of codes, genres, and conventions by which we identify and interpret literary works in the first place” (LT 107). And the fog begins. Apparently we are

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looking for more serious work to do since “Structuralism is a way of refurbishing the literary institution, providing it with a raison d’etre more respectable and compelling than gush about sunsets” (LT 207). My argument will be that this approach is an extension of crisis not salvation from it, and as I will explore, this may just be the point. Also, a word of caution at this point: gushing at sunsets is embraced by this book as an essential need for humans and worthy of study. The recognition of structure doesn’t mean, however, that there is negative, devious artifice or that we must abandon gushing about sunsets. While it is true that much behavior in society is thoughtless repetitious action driven by powerful socio-historical forces, all instances of pattern do not immediately indicate mechanically produced, colonizing, social reproduction needing disruption theorists/activists. Knowing the pagan connections between the passing of the winter solstice and the celebration of Christmas may make the date more interesting, but it need not negate nor diminish the holiday for those who practice it today. It is interesting to know such contextual and historical origins of things, but it is not the “gotcha” hoped for by some in this field of study. The existence of blind, repetitive behavior discovered in one venue does not allow for extrapolation of condemnation of all pattern everywhere: this, of course, is the assumption driving new historicism, post-structuralism, and the other and various postmodern approaches. There is the belief that, once all is exposed as contrived, we can get on with building a real society with proper social and power relations.3 However, animals migrate, butterflies, wildebeests, birds, whales all perform migratory patterns associated with food and mating. Do such repeated patterns diminish the desire, dreams, effort, nobility and travail of these animals or the beauty and majesty of their journeys? Indeed not. The same is true for the human search for intimate, meaningful space and a home in the wild. A friend of mine is a falconer, and when I lived in the mountains in Arizona, he pointed out all the hawks and falcons that live and thrive there. Although I had lived there for many years, I hadn’t noticed before, but suddenly, for me, the sky, fence lines, and telephone poles were full of kestrels, peregrines, red-tails, sharp-shinned and cooper hawks. My perceptual habits now always included a sweep of the sky and a close look at the top of piñon pines and ponderosa pines. I guess we might say my vision, now equipped with a pattern of activity, was “constructed” by that falconer, but this hardly seems like the right phrase. We might instead say that my vision was enlarged or enriched. Since the appreciation and noting of hawks emerged as pattern in my experience introduced by someone else, should we consider this perceptual habit suspect or “artificial”? I was

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influenced but certainly not diminished. Ever on guard against being trapped, suckered or seduced, critics, such as William Cronon, feel that the attraction to nature in general is a structure or a “discourse” in culture, a manufactured, scripted, program, or episteme. The impact of such an observation is to remove notions of originality, uniqueness, or special experience, and this diminishes if not changes our sense of this attraction to and experience of nature. Cronon states, for example, that if one goes “back 250 years” one does not “find nearly so many people wandering around remote corners of the planet looking for ‘the wilderness experience’” (70). In addition, the sense is that once a pattern is established (watching hawks for instance or going into the wilderness to encounter the wild) then nothing good can come from it. We then need theorists to hover, ponder, deconstruct, reveal, expose and interrogate such disturbing and apparently unconscious acts of unthoughtful participation. All influences should not be a cause of anxiety or alarm. Over the last three decades, however, critics have been quite clear in the way they characterize influences on perception and ideas. They have been obsessed with the notion that context and influences are pervasive, sinister and seductively political. William Cronon, for instance, is convinced that nature appreciation was something that only emerged in the 19th century and became a pursuit of the rich and privileged. This observation quickly morphs into the problem I am trying to clarify here. He reveals his agenda with his rhetorical choices by categorizing nature lovers as “elite tourists”: he claims, “One went to the wilderness not as a producer but as a consumer, hiring guides and other backcountry residents…employees and servants of the rich” (78). Cronon also attempts to associate Thoreau with this historical trend. The overall goal here is to render the unique individual, and the perceptions, curiosities, imagination, and thoughts of the individual—foundations of the much-maligned Enlightenment— impotent by seeing these as part of larger forces that render claims to uniqueness quaint at best. As we shall see, this has largely been a Marxist project (although sometimes a green and zen focus) and has been a staple in literary criticism for years now. It has been mostly relegated to the rarefied rooms of evening graduate courses and dense essays, but, of late, it is bubbling to the surface in popular culture as well. In a recent opinion piece on an similar issue in current political discourse, George Will identifies this issue in the current resurgence of the heretofore out of favor collectivist sentiment: The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual’s zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism’s instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the

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Chapter One individual’s own good, it says…. Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual…. The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government—including such public goods as roads, schools and police—is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. (Will)

For Marxist critics, the individual is a cultural production of a selfish and exploitive capitalism. In the following pages, although acknowledging the pleasures and the necessities of social and collective energies, I will resist the claim regarding the illusion and subsequent diminishment of the individual by arguing that this reading is willfully narrow, ideologically distorting, and ultimately disingenuous. For years, when I was concerned all was listing to the right, I was an avid reader and teacher of books like Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, It Did Happen Here, Democracy for the Few, People’s History, and magazines like The Nation. I used texts from historians and political scientists like Zinn and Parenti. Now, the populist vertigo swings in another direction, it seems. I have discovered that I am pulling back from ideological commitments and demands to align oneself on one or the other side of the so-called debate; I reject the headlong plunge that insists that one be in the tank one way or another. This present study is testimony to a more independent trajectory. As Mark Van Proyen will expand upon below, I’m exploring in these pages the possibilities of achieving a physically and “psychically selfsufficient moment of…isolation from an insane world…overdetermined by…the rote groupthinks which are bred from an endless and irresolvable contest of cultural politics” (Van Proyen). The fact is that, as with our political discourse, our intellectual discourse lacks balance and grace. We do live with others, and we owe our relations with others thoughtful consideration and respect, but we also do have a unique individual life that deserves more than current sublimation tactics allow. In truth, the critique of the individual is a red herring because a larger agenda is at stake. In addition to some classic class warfare, Cronon makes use of the new social movements as well by adding another set of unsettling and sinister motivations associated with landscape, beauty, and open space: The mythic frontier individualist was almost always masculine in gender: here, in the wilderness, a man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity. (78)

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The tabloids have increased readership by suggesting every kind of plot, rumor, and sensational headline. Of late, certain critical energies, as well, never grow tired of uncovering and exposing the plot of the sinister “ruling class” malevolently veiled behind every formidable forest grove, desert expanse, or well-maintained front lawn. Such reductionistic readings do not inspire or compel. While true that there are examples of arrogant, John Wayne-like characters in our westerns and other narratives, certainly, it is nonetheless possible to imagine a personal sojourn into natural surroundings to seek healing or retreat from a frenzied world without assuming this individual is a testosterone-puffed cartoon character. Notions of the individual may be complex, but to abandon, dissolve, and universally dismiss concepts like beauty and the individual show a failure of nerve and a penchant for doubt all of which outweighs a willingness to build, listen, discuss, clarify, hope, suspend judgment, and assume the best not the worst. In Cronon’s description above, one could have as easily applauded these narratives for observing and reacting to the excesses and challenges of modernism. Ed Abbey, for instance, took this issue on in The Brave Cowboy, a novel Kirk Douglass made into the movie Lonely Are the Brave. Abbey used the western cowboy figure as a vehicle to discuss power issues and anarchism. Uncovering the alleged seductive machinations of Western culture is a constant aim of this approach. Critics seem to discover “new” accusations all at once and repeat these positions in a viral fashion.4 For instance, similar to Cronon’s complaint, other critics jumped on insisting on seeing the move to isolation, solitude, and individualism as part of a “`male wilderness romance’” (Armbruster 8). On the other hand, as Lawrence Buell illustrates, to the extent that the person seeking refuge also “remains always in dialogue…with the community one rejects,” this is deemed a more community oriented and, therefore, an approved activity (The Environmental Imagination 49). The irony here, of course, is that every writer in this field (even those so called masculine wilderness writers) is writing to a community: this feature—community— constitutes the act of writing! If these writers were the misanthropic isolatoes (to use Melville’s term) they are made out to be, I doubt if they’d work so hard at publishing. Bottom line: There is a lot of silly nit-picking, and worse, in today’s ecocritical discourse. Simon Estok recently addressed this concern in an ISLE article, beginning with quoting a piece I wrote a while ago: “Theorizing within this space—one that Peter Quigley has called a `dangerous space’—has become a bit of a risky business, one that potentially threatens the peace of the ecocritical community” (Estok 203). Although many moved to the “country” (i.e. the study of nature literature)

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because of abiding interests but also to gravitate away from the internecine wars in critical studies, things have gotten crowded, and campers are factionalizing and becoming rigidly ensconced. Unhappily, we must return to this topic in a short bit. In the late 60s, a friend and I were hitchhiking up the California coast through the Big Sur region. As luck would have it, a local fellow pulled up in his VW bus headed in the same direction as we were: San Francisco. We soon discovered that heavy rains had saturated this redwood watershed and caused a mudslide that blocked the Pacific Coast Highway. Consequently, the local resident dropped us off at his cliff-side cabin and headed back south to see friends. This was my first overwhelming, intoxicating, transporting experience of place; that is, my first overwhelmingly pleasant experience. These were heady and halcyon days when all accidents, side trips, and detours were viewed as fortuitous, designed, portending new horizons and possibilities for growth and selfdiscovery. Being young and possessing little reference to a lifetime of contextual experience, I guess this assumption has a certain truth to it. In sum, when we are young, everything is new and exciting. Until this moment, my sense of space/place had been defined by the spectacles of modernist America: Disneyland, LA urban sprawl, Sav-On Drugs (although the Friday night drive for chocolate-chip ice cream cones at Sav-On with my dad persists as one of the best memories of my young years), huge, block-cubed, department stores, endless strip malls running alongside congested streets, multi-lane freeways, sprawling suburbia, clear-cutting of orange groves, smog-filled, hazy afternoons.5 I watched over the fence in my backyard as the trees were plowed and the Riverside Freeway (91) was laid in. One Sunday I hopped the fence and walked out to cleared land and looked up and down at a long black ribbon of asphalt that went to the horizon in both directions. Ferlinghetti spoke for a generation when he characterized the developing scene in California and other growing cities as a careening trajectory towards …freeways fifty lanes wide on a concrete continent spaced with bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness… (67)

Growing up in southern California, I came of age driving these frenetic freeways that were spreading out in all directions. And to be honest, the experience of careening down these speed lanes is a complex set of recollected emotions, everything from a sense of accelerating progress (getting places; getting things done) to hair-raising terror. We are

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simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the exhilaration of urban frenzy. The freeways, their speed, their near-death close calls keep our senses stimulated and jagged; but so does a root canal or electroshock. Those coming of age in the 60s grew up trying to craft a response to this sprawling, urban landscape. Never, however, had I experienced a “nestled” structure that didn’t impose, a structure that seemed to be “sympathetic,” an organic part of something larger, constructed from natural, unprocessed materials, covered in morning glory vines and filled with beams of sunlight, pooling on the worn wood flooring. Descending the wooden steps and over the wood plank walkway, the cabin appeared below as a humble and yet brilliant affair. Of course, the view of the Pacific sun melting into the horizon, its long, blazing trail of light surrounded by dark, engulfing, blue-black water, helped the overall sense of well-being and majesty. I can still feel the warmth of that sun beaming up from the ocean hundreds of feet below, lighting my face and bathing the wooden ceiling, walls, floor, and covered porch. Long before ever reading Wordsworth, I felt “something far more deeply interfused” in that scene “whose dwelling is the light of setting suns” (210). The fact that all of this was a generous gift of a stranger framed the context as well. Romantic? Sure. Part of me is embarrassed for such a retelling, noting the romantic features. The better part of my sense of this experience is linked forever in fidelity to the undeniable beauty and peace of that place. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, makes a strong case for the idea that the house can reveal the “topography of our intimate being” (xxxvi), a place where we invest much of ourselves in identifying and communing with the surfaces, the corners, the light in the window, the views from the window out to the world and into ourselves. Since, as Bachelard goes on to say, “there is ground for taking the house as a tool for analysis of the human soul” (xxxvii), we should take this discussion of houses seriously. “They are in us,” Bachelard states, “as much as we are in them” (xxxvii). Bachelard argues against becoming “`beings whose towers have been destroyed’” (xxxvii). We must rediscover the intimacy of vital space and reclaim it; we must reclaim meaningful space located in a wild place. Therefore, in addition to discussing the journey to nature to rediscover home as mentioned above, this book examines the importance of the house for writing and for placing oneself at the center of vital forces. Over the last few years, much has been written about sense of place, but no one has looked closely at those who have set up home in these places. There have been many collections published, studies written, and conferences held on the topic of sense of place. There have been books

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such as The Earth at Our Doorstep: Contemporary Writers Celebrate the Landscape of Home; At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place; The Solace of Open Spaces; “Horizontal Grandeur,” and more. Few, if any, of the reflections in these books and articles discuss having a home in these landscapes where the poet or writer resides and makes a life. Even Linda Hogan’s chapter “Dwellings,” in At Home on the Earth, is about the nests and hives of birds and bees. I am interested in the importance of the house—in fact, the house, nature, and the writing project make an inseparable triad—for the writing project and for enhancing and reinforcing the values of the writer. As will be detailed in these pages, the house is placed within the radical forces of nonhuman energy, and as a result, it acts as the exchange and a nexus bringing the human and the nonhuman together in the writing of the poet. The house of the poet and the writing exhibit the beauty that comes from the meeting and merging of these worlds of nature, writing, and culture. Context is important for the presence, perception, and presentation of beauty. It is a physical element of the experience, one that provides perspective and depth; it is also a psychological framework. A humble, mobile home or cabin in the New Hampshire woods will have significantly more charm than one in the revealing, unforgiving Arizona desert (although Abbey took on the desert as a much disabused treasure of beauty).6 The desert scene, with its all-pervading brazen light, exposes the discarded engine blocks and rusting tricycles, whereas in New Hampshire, the maples, the oaks, and the underbrush keep all of this hidden as they embrace the otherwise unsightly prefab house and detritus. In The Architecture of Country Houses, the famous architect of nineteenthcentury New England, Andrew Jackson Downing, agrees about this kind of context: If we analyze the charm of a large part of the rural cottages of England— the finest in the world—we shall find, that strip them of the wealth of flowing vines that adorn them, and their peculiar poetry and feeling have more than half departed. (48)

Artifice? Indeed, if you must; but isn’t all perception the result of contextual framing, previous experience, sociohistorical forces, intellectual modeling, and education? A question that drives my discussion in these pages is, “Is it possible today to also say that context is defined by nonpolitically affiliated feeling, by a pre-ideological sensual impact of materials and visual angles, in addition to the many other elements of history and biography that may add dimension?” Most critics in critical theory studies will say, “No.” Because there is context and framing, this

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does not make the experience sinister or less “real”; it simply means that there’s more to think about. Much of this book will be focused on the power, and the politics, of an enriching environment, whether it is thought contrived/constructed or natural. This issue of contrivance and context, however, haunts current academic discourse challenging traditional sensibilities involving authenticity, believability, feeling, and sincerity. Although this book will refuse to get sucked down the endless rabbit hole of theoretical issues surrounding foundations of truth, beauty, taste, and the attendant paranoia, the issue will come up from time to time, and so I must set out a few things in these opening pages. I, therefore, need to beg the reader’s indulgence for a few pages to engage this issue. Frankly, this book’s focus on grounded-living-in-place, on “houses” which have “foundations,” has been purposely chosen to confront the reflexive, corrosive, smugly ironic, and undermining nature of the theoretical trajectories which have dominated these discussions for decades now. Therefore, in the following pages, keep in mind that I largely imagine this exploration of “grounded living and writing” as a corrective to, but not a complete rejection of, the direction of current theoretical interests. A few lines ago, I compared the “excitement” (i.e. noise, dirt, violence) of the city as something commensurate to a root canal, as though what is negative, unhealthy, and painful or degrading in our surroundings is obvious, agreed upon, and pre-determined. Current criticism, which has been so influenced by postmodern theory, insists that we ask the following question: “Why should we assume we all share the same judgment on the urban-built landscape not to mention nature?” Relativity theorists insist that there is no basis for an undisputed claim for beauty or for ugliness. The Kantian claim for the “disinterested” aspect of the aesthetic experience is viewed with high suspicion and is rejected by current critical trajectories. Today’s critical approach regarding the complications of defining beauty sees more at stake than quibbling about beauty as a means for clarifying or profiling the merits of differing positions. This new critical posture seeks an opening in the form of any intellectual difficulty or irregularity to incite definitional warfare. To what end? The end is, on face value, to assert that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder; more specifically, particularly the beholder’s eyes that filter for a set of issues focused on political and oppositional themes: these are the constituting elements of sight, according to this critical perspective. The goal seems to be not characterized by a mild form of relativity, one that would discern differing senses of beauty from these sociopolitical points of view. The goal seems simply designed to disabuse one of the notion that beauty exists, to undo the generic concept, and to get folks to think about

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sociopolitical categories only and always. The goal is to move from beauty to a prescriptive political agenda. I do not mean to deny the existence of difficulties and tensions in our collective context such as wars, emancipation, democracy, territorial expansion, civil rights, women's rights, bank failures, immigration issues, and other negative and challenging aspects of history when considering language and art (see Reiss). I do object to a thinking process that narrows the discussion of literature to only these topics and does so by some sketchy intellectual methods. This is a pattern clearly established by today’s critical approaches.7 However, a wide-open agenda considers all these things and much more, including individual uniqueness and brilliance; including the successes, bright promise, and attractiveness of U.S. culture (not just an agenda of opposition); including the mystery and beauty of nature as well as architecture, science and technology, human innovation, initiators, inventors, the admirable aspects of the marketplace, of ambition, as well as its dangers: in other words, the full depth of unedited context. The opening sentences of this first chapter referenced the introduction to The Norton Book of Nature Writing where John Elder and Robert Finch make the case for the significance of literature, and nature related literature in particular: All literature, by illuminating the full nature of human existence, asks a single question: how shall we live? In our age that question has taken its most urgent form in relation to the natural environment. (28)

Note the phrase “full nature of human existence.” One does not edit history nor pre-shape context and still claim to be supporting, promoting, or teaching critical thinking. In shaping context, conservatives ignore the bad news and the unpleasant failures of Western history and focus on tradition, individual success, and duty, while liberals focus exclusively on a progressive agenda, a litany of failures and wrongs, labor movements, and other instances of mass and communal activities. Context includes the whole, broad-ranging sense and experience of life and history. This more inclusive view of context is terribly lacking in much of what passes for literary studies today. One shouldn’t decide and edit context; one should open these doors wide. Give students a fair look at all of it; trust that they can decide for themselves. Assume they will change their minds as well.8 A selected and agenda-driven context distorts the art object and, therefore, distorts and mishandles the story at the center of this book: the value of the experiences of living in the wild.

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On the relativity front, one might argue that plenty of folks “like” the noise, grit, and grime of city life. Even Ed Abbey—the opponent of the urban machine; the poet of open, arid, zen-empty desert space—talked positively about some of the seedier sections of Hoboken N.J. However, arguing for the appreciation of one kind of beauty over another, where the nuances of your beauty vs. arguments for mine, or where canyon lands vs. New Jersey waterfront bar rooms are articulated and compared, has been replaced by another kind of narrative which assumes there is no there there. Beauty, or a sense of place, is a veneer covering the issues of distribution of wealth, an illicit promotion of the individual, and other issues associated with material and social justice. This relativity is designed to open a pathway for discussing progressive and sociopolitical issues at every juncture.9 The error here occurs when postmodern relativists take a helpful insight—i.e., truth can change, morph, be adjusted, be argued over, have differing manifestations—and then they never move on. They petulantly stay focused on that one aspect and thereby enter a uroboric loop. They also end up in a bit of a philosophical dead end: they assert that truth is constructed and biased; that is, except the truth that there is no unconstructed, unbiased truth! A Dionysian orgy of tearing apart and tearing down ensues. A recent article by Peter Wood in The Chronicle of Higher Education states that the “critical thinker who is deaf to culture’s deeper appeals is impoverished in some profound ways. He is equipped to take everything apart but not to put anything together. We need more minds capable of moving at ease and grasping the whole” (Wood). To move on from this position is impossible because it is the end, it is one’s job: permanent, unrelenting skeptic and gadfly, leveling every foe in the field. Thoughtful questioning can lapse into an obsessive, all or nothing, neurosis. Although healthy as a check against hubris and arbitrary authority in all fields (tongue out to all power that wants our unthoughtful, immediate acceptance and allegiance), if skepticism is taken too far and is an unrelenting end unto itself, one ends up in a paralyzing, corrosive, nihilist, realm of the absurd, looping endlessly on a draining, politically obsessed, hamster wheel. Haven’t the French brought us to this smoky, self-absorbed alley bar once before? How far removed is the nihilism of postmodernism from some aspects of existentialism? And further, worse than a philosophical dead end, it is clear that this method is used to draw constant outlines of misdeeds associated with the current political and economic system. One might ask, using the lens of this book’s focus, “What houses do such theories build?” In summary, the deployment of relativism and the associated and unrelenting charges of a variety of injustices seem to be the petulant

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rebellion of a teenager: if we can’t have the world our way, this position seems to say, no one will have it their way either. Dana Philips, in The Truth of Ecology, has characterized this as a self-defeating and unproductive strategy. He summarizes my concerns by stating that constructivists, or radical relativists, “deploy this theory in so heavyhanded a fashion that they seem to be less interested in mounting a plausible critique…than in pursuing a Mutually Assured Destruction” (87). The impact of this on this present study revolves around a concern that the image of Thoreau building a cabin in the woods becomes an occasion for current theoretical practice to have a narrow and negative set of responses. It is not that these responses might not be written about or should not be written about; it is that so much gets left out as a result of an unrelieved focus in this area. This also raises questions about intellectual integrity, fairness, and, as mentioned already, critical thinking. If the large, but unassociated, group of readings in this new field of Critical Theory has anything in common, it seems to be that the focus is on undoing the “Enlightenment project” and its associated economic structure, capitalism, both of which have assumed a pesky “social, cultural, and political rationality” (Ross xiv). This theoretical thrust and the associated readings have in word and deed lived out Andrew Ross’s original program proposal: “everything is contestable; nothing is off limits; and no outcomes are guaranteed” (xv). Everything is questioned all the time, forever.10 Too often, the goal seems not to lay a foundation or build or help make the current system better. The goal is to tear things apart. The May Day parade of articles in Cultural Studies is looking for a way to bring a disparate group of interests and issues under one banner of protest, because, as Ross laments, “there are no necessary links…between the interests of women and the interests of workers. These links have to be articulated” (xiv).11 Of course, although relativism is the key to the entrance into the discussion, there is a pattern to what gets questioned and to what end. Capitalism is the boogieman here,12 and the project seems to be characterized by a fragmented, petulant but determined attack on the supposed inarguable assumption that “popular culture and the everyday life” are disagreeable affairs, “saturated as they are with the effects of commodification” (Ross, xv). Supposedly if one accepts this assumption, then the only help for this is critical theory. Seductive context is everywhere, and it remains a deluding, seductive soup unless theory can remove and uncover the ideological machinations of context, freeing the reader/student and lionizing the critic. Sounds much like the old Marxism, interpreting the historical moment for the masses.13 A small voice of

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discontent with this approach started asserting itself in the 80s with comments such as the following from Robert Scholes in The Rise and Fall of English. Moving forward “means giving up any claim to be revolutionary opponents of `the system.’ We are in it and of it, and we had better admit this to ourselves and others, just to clear the air” (85). At the moment Ross wrote the article from which his quote was taken (1988), many on the left were grappling with the clear philosophical and historical collapse of Marxism. As a result, one sees Ross (and many others were doing the same thing) separating himself and the “new social movements” from Marxism, since ultimately Marxism shares, according to the new, anti-modernist theories, the same Enlightenment errors as the global capitalist energies Ross objects to. In addition, Marxism had suffered a theoretical and real world implosion in the 70s, 80s, and 90s and, therefore, was no longer a legitimate point of departure. Since a frontal assault on capitalism via socialism had failed, “these new movements have transformed the agenda of opposition” from marxist economic issues to a set of social issues that oppose an array of “institutions of oppression” (xiv, my emphasis). Again, my argument here isn’t that such issues don’t have a need to be addressed; my argument is concerned with the intellectual process that raises these within literary studies, and the fact that there is another agenda beyond these issues driving the criticism. Terry Eagleton has also noted that as the Paris political battle failed to win Marxist victories, the desire to break down the authority structure got repositioned in academia and focused on language studies and the text.14 David Banash makes this connection between thwarted revolutionary politics of the 60s and academic disciplines: No doubt when Eagleton says that politics were taken off the streets he is referring largely to the failures of 1968. In this reading, poststructuralism is simply the defeated and impotent heir of the Situationists. For Eagleton, a committed Marxist, this is the great failure of both the Situationists and theory as a whole. While theory does provide a space for revolutionary desire, it also confines that desire. Would-be revolutionaries become the manipulators and bureaucrats of academic institutions because they cannot translate theory into an instrumental revolutionary force. As Eagleton puts it, left to the theorists “the power of capital” will remain “so drearily familiar” that those who espouse its critique or transformation only “succeeded in naturalizing it” (23). Given Eagleton's Marxist position, there is nothing surprising in his critique of poststructuralism's seeming inability to actualize political change. What is far more interesting is that Eagleton's position is repeated and developed even more strenuously by cultural critics with stronger allegiances to poststructuralism. In their book Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (1991), Steven Best and

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Chapter One Douglas Kellner argue that the value of any theory is the possibility it offers to actualize “radical social transformation” (298). Like Eagleton, Best and Kellner argue that theory must develop an immediate relationship to practice or remain “just another specialized discourse” whose members accumulate cultural capital and theorize “just for the fun of it” (298).

The problem isn’t the act of identifying certain problem areas in American culture; the problem comes when 1) these areas are the exclusive focus of study with a destructive, unproven end as the goal, and when 2) there is an educational insistence on seeing one’s identity exclusively through one of these fragmented post/neo-Marxist lenses.15 The plan consists of “dismantling reason’s fictions” and then create a “postphilosophical culture…shuttling back and forth between criticism and construction” (Rapp). And we have been here before. In The Unusable Past (1986), Russell Reising laments that there have been too many failed attempts to “define the `radical’ or `oppositional’ nature of American literature” or “in Bercovitch’s case, its complicity.” Unfortunately in the late 80s, according to Reising, critics had not yet yoked literature into service towards gaining a progressive political horizon; we had not fully and successfully placed literary concerns within an arena that allowed for “truly critical thinking on matters of political significance” (39). There has been throughout the 20th century and into the 21st a battle over the referential vs. the reflexive use of literature. More specifically, this battle has been about reading literature 1) to consider themes under the heading of “living life,” the contemplation of language, or 2) to advance a political program. (For years the first person nature essay was spared in these battles), Many of these issues can be traced to the opening of the 20th century in Russia as well. As Russian Formalism emerged during the Revolution, it advanced a definition of literature as that which undoes the grip (defamiliarization) of our normal perceptions and language: Subverting the particular patterns of thought or perception imposed on reality by…ordinary language, by dominant ideological forms…literature is thus said to make such forms strange and, in so doing, to weaken their grip on the ways in which we perceive the world. (Bennett 24)

Here we may have a definition of literature as that which provokes critical thinking in any number of directions, making the common and the everyday worth another and more reflective look. Certainly, the move from urban life to the wilderness to build a house is a way to rethink (defamiliarize) prior living habits and values. However, the politics of the

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day wouldn’t be satisfied with this definition. The Formalists soon found themselves in “conflict with the developing schools of post-Revolutionary Marxist criticism which…were increasingly dominated by the concern of ‘reflection theory’” (25). In sum, as with current theoretical trends, the approach towards literature was “judged according to the extent to which [it] succeeded in accurately depicting or `reflecting’ the underlying logic and direction of historical development” (26). It is important to note that as the “revolution” gained more eyes over all production, “Formalism was effectively dead, and, by 1934, had become a mere synonym for the concepts of bourgeois decadence and escapism within the ideology of socialist realism” (Bennett 26). Although politically out of fashion within literary studies, I still enjoy both of the following passages that depict a unique experience, a heightened sense of what the Russian Formalists called defamiliarization. These passages were frequently referred to in my undergraduate English courses in the early and mid-1970s. Walter Pater subscribed to an intellectual course of study that outlined a perceptual habit keeping the observer alert to nuanced levels of psychological atmosphere, as well as color, light, and facial expressions, all of which increased the richness of one’s few allotted moments: The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, --for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. (Pater 249-50)

Henry James had a similar position statement on the cultivated senses: Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne

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Chapter One particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative--much more when it happens to be that of a man [sic] of genius--it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. (James 10)

Critical approaches that have emerged since the 70s judge such statements as a kind of “bourgeois decadence” as did the Russians when the Revolution took hold. Such statements are now considered elitist (the focus is on the individual not a mass movement); ahistorical (Whose sensibility? In what age? From what social standing? For whose advantage?); imperial (it assumes a ruling class sensibility and a singular, universal experience of how to sample the world); and sexist, and that’s just for starters. It’s not that such a program might not discuss or engage with political and sociological elements; the complaint, I assume, is that this was not the exclusive focus. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton made the argument, from an avowedly Marxist point of view, that aesthetics must be unpacked and exposed for its collaborative and capitulating positioning in support of capitalist values. “As radical thought has…insisted,” considerations of beauty separate from class issues, according to Eagleton, are designed to sequester art “from all other social practices” in order for it to become an isolated enclave within which the dominant social order can find an idealized refuge from its own actual values of competiveness, exploitation and material possessiveness. (9)

From these lights, any story of refuge, any individual’s move to the wilderness, or any lovely painting of landscape is an example of a calculated bourgeois trap designed to keep us from thinking about what a certain group of critics demand we address. Therefore, a painting needs to be discussed in terms of its underlying political energies, primarily, or else the intellectual discourse is in bad faith. The painting is a cultural artifact that allows for a deep read of the social and political issues of the times. Discussions of beauty or meaning of the painting are irrelevant in the face of an assessment of what socioeconomic conditions produced the painting, and an assessment of the “gaze” of the upper class consumer the painting was purportedly meant to satisfy. If discussions of the value of the painting lapse into allegedly irrelevant comments about color, composition, sensibility, love of landscape and open spaces, then one has, apparently, succumbed to hopelessly flawed discussions that are perpetuating conditions of social injustice and serving as obstacles to a proper judgment.

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An important example of this critical process is W.J.T. Mitchell’s interesting proposition that landscape painting has a much more terrifying genesis than anyone imagined: “Is it possible that landscape, understood as the historical `invention’ of a new visual/pictorial, is integrally connected to imperialism?” (9). In a classic example that illustrates the issues I have been discussing and leads us back to our focus on nature, Mitchell goes on to connect a lovely painting with imperial energies: “…representation of landscape is not only a matter of internal politics and national or class ideology but also an international, global phenomenon, intimately bound up with the discourses of imperialism” (9). Note the two-stage process: 1) identify the narrative, pattern, or in this case a painting as “constructed”; 2) then assert an accusation about the object that indicts it as part of a larger set of controlling forces that must be resisted. Mitchell reigns himself in a bit by saying all of this might just be “provocation to an inquiry.” After this one moment of critical self-reflection, he launches again into the salacious possibility that landscape is the “ ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism” (10). Such reductionistic assessments are finally being countered here and there. Mark Van Proyen (using some academese) addresses Mitchell’s assumptions about landscape and imperialism: Of course, statements like this can also be taken as the artifacts of another kind of dreamwork; that being the casting of academia’s relationship to late 20th century history as a wishful attempt to re-determine the corporately controlled present via an exegetical framing of the not-so-mythical past. As such, it can be said to evade the important—indeed, the crucial issue of our time, that being the one which asks how we might most fully inhabit our own moment in our own time, disengaged from the pull of superordinating presuppositions and in un-ambivalent possession of a psychically selfsufficient moment of temporary isolation from an insane world overdetermined by policy mandates and the rote groupthinks which are bred from an endless and irresolvable contest of cultural politics. (Van Proyen)

Van Proyen’s commitment to a “sufficient moment of…isolation from an insane world” is a more positive and compelling sense of the appeal of landscape. Eagleton, of course, will say that the attraction we feel to this beauty is simply the forestalled need for revolution. This book pushes back on such a calculated and reductionistic view. It is interesting to note that to make his point, Eagleton asserts that the isolated enclave or refuge is antithetical to the value system (liberal, western, capitalism) that proposes just such a seductive possibility. He, therefore, injects his own perception of a fissure into his own characterization of the aesthetic, and by doing so he “discovers” the contradiction in

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bourgeois thinking that Marxists are forever insisting exists at the heart of capitalist thinking. Other treatments or observations about the painting are historically wrong, reactionary, or deluded.16 These other forms (i.e. nonMarxist) of discussion are sinister cloaking devices creating fatally flawed delusions. As Philips suggested above, this is the argumentative tactic of mutually assured destruction. One interesting question here would be what value does “refuge” possess in Eagleton’s vision of a just and reconciled social state? If as defined in his analysis, refuge is a kind of dreamy, impossible but hoped-for release from capitalism, then one presumes the word would lose all value in a Marxist utopia where, supposedly, one has negated the need to escape from the injustices of capitalism.17 Hopefully the reader can see why I have needed to sidetrack the discussion a bit into this discussion of the politics of beauty and possibility of refuge. Today’s critical positionings have made the act of establishing a life in nature a philosophically and politically nettled affair. Instead of the aesthetic point of departure, we now have an impossibly arrogant lexicon that has spun out of counter cultural studies over the last few decades: aporia, logocentricity, the cyborg, agency, referent, transcendental signified, the trace, reified, subaltern, hegemony, agency, essentialist, and on and on. When one is ushered into this special language, one actually comes to believe one is working within a rare and exacting field. Most of these terms have their origins in Marxist theory. They have been rescued, rehabilitated, reconstructed and have been reborn in “post” modern, “post” structural, or “post” colonial theories. The illusion that important and complicated work is occurring in these fields shields an attempt to 1) reassert the humanities as something on par with or theoretically encapsulating the sciences; 2) reform discredited approaches (Marxism) in a new skin; and 3) and usher these theories in without question regarding the underlying ideological assumptions. Some critics in this movement, for example, have postulated that science is just another text (another attack on the possibility of discourses of fact or disinterestedness), thereby neutralizing the postmodern fear of rational power or objective truth; some constructivists have taken a different tack and attempted to use science as a means to advance the postmodern program. Katherine Hayles’ article, “Simulated Nature and Natural Simulations” illustrates the attempt to ground the epistemological skepticism at the root of the new humanities studies using science as a foundation. Similar to my own foray (“Rethinking Resistance”) into this sport of undermining any and all certainties, Hayles points up the “problem with the attempt to create a black and white distinction between simulation and nature” (411), for after all, if it quacks like a duck, it is one.

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Ms. Hayles attempts to provide a scientific foundation for relativism (there’s more than one way to skin the objectivist cat) by referencing the work of Chilean neurobiologist Humberto Maturana. Maturana’s frog research shows that frog sensory receptors “speak to the brain in a language highly processed and species specific. If every species constructs for itself a different world, which is the world?” Therefore, in Maturana’s world, no information comes into the system from the outside. …Say I slap you. In Maturana’s world, my slap does not cause you to get angry, or elated, or anything else. It is rather the triggering event for a structural change determined by your organization…Consider how you would react to a slap in the face, compared to a masochist. (Hayles 413-415)

Thus all reality is human made (or frog made), constructed, and subject to revision and change. Now it is true that the turn towards language and discourse, as defined by Critical Theory over the last 30 years, has opened up new areas of analysis. The “narrative power” of culture writ large, of institutions such as the prison or mental hospital, of practices such as sexuality and science, have all have become fertile ground for students of language to expand their scope and reach, but also perhaps to overreach. The Alan Sokal affair stands as a striking example of this overreaching. Sokal, of course, published an article on the social construction of quantum gravity only to later publish another article confessing he was just kidding. In “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” where Sokal revealed his hoax, he described his plan: “Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?” (Sokal). As my colleagues in engineering and physics mentioned to me at the time, someone from their field could perpetrate such a hoax in the humanities, but they boasted, “We’d love to see one of you folks do that in our field.” It should be noted that the right has made equally reckless jaunts into science with the hysterical counters made against climate change, evolution, etc.18 In a gesture similar as Hayles’, Terry Eagleton, in The Idea of Culture, wants to pay lip service to the new focus on constructedness while not letting go of his Marxist loyalty to materiality. He can only go with the denaturalization of meaning (i.e., cutting meaning off from an external, determining referent) so far before grounding it somewhere:

22

Chapter One Political protesters have been known to set themselves on fire without feeling a thing, their pain blocked out by the intensity of their passion. Someone may smack a child quite lightly for some offense and he will cry, but you may smack him harder much harder in the course of a game only to evoke a delighted laugh…Meanings can mould physical responses, but they are constrained by them too. …People who set themselves on fire may feel no pain, but if they burn themselves badly enough they will perish even so. In this sense, nature has the final victory over culture. … Culturally speaking, death is almost limitlessly interpretable, as martyrdom, ritual sacrifice, blessed release from agony, joyous freedom for one’s long suffering kinsfolk, natural biological end, union with the cosmos, symbol of ultimate futility and the like. But we still die, however we make sense of it. Death is the limit of discourse, not a product of it. (87)

Poets and philosophers have been tossing this one around for a while. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge settled on different levels of “in between” positioning between the world and the individual. Speaking of the “eye and ear,” Wordsworth states that they “half create” and half “perceive” the world (210). In other places, he referred to this as the “correspondent breeze” (213). Coleridge would sometimes push this a bit further asserting that there is One Life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul… And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (400)

But postmodernists tend to ratchet this out to the “constructed” end of the Likert scale that places constructedness on the political and epistemological left side of the scale and unconstructed (or natural) on the naïve or right side of things. Constructed reality is a purposely unsettling and disorienting proposition. And, of course, it is exciting to consider such things. Spiral galaxies, red shift, situational reality constructs, multiple epistemological discourses constructing the individual shattering the idea of a coherent identity, cyborg theory; all very exciting, but then, “Smell the coffee? What’s for breakfast? Onions, peppers and eggs? Ahh, feel the finish on that wood table; look at the oak grain; run your hand down that solid, maple banister! Look out the window at the light shimmering on the water.” Writers like Snyder and Abbey are quick to remind us of the

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essentials of contact. Abbey, in his best impersonation of George Carlin as naturalist, put it this way: “You can’t see the desert if you can’t smell it…Turn that motor off. Get out of that piece of iron and stretch...take off your brassiere and get some hot sun on your old wrinkled dugs…get lost for a while, come back when you damn well feel like it…Give the kids a break too, let them out of the car, let them go scrambling over the rocks… let them out turn them loose; how dare you imprison little children in your god damned upholstered horseless hearse?” (Desert 233).

Abbey enjoyed trips down philosophical alleyways, but he was clear about his concern about insulated and insular solipsism and would have nothing to do with it. Snyder is less theatrical but to the point: the idea that the external world is our invention is a) not new and b) in the current version, Snyder says, “leads to a totally weird…position… since the proponents are academic `meta-Marxists,’ [this position] might be called `materialist solipsism.’ But they are just talk” (A Place in Space, 167). Wendell Berry had his own comment on this topic of usurping and parasitic critical theories in the opening of his novel Jayber Crow: NOTICE Persons attempting to find a “text” in his book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a “subtext” in it will be banished; persons attempting to…deconstruct, or otherwise “understand” it will be exiled…(epigram page)

Ed Abbey had an antidote for radical solipsism: if you think you are dreaming, if you don’t think any of this is real, then don’t duck when I throw this rock at your head! Many current theorists want aesthetics or beauty to work for a specific political agenda. I have always had sympathy for a practical aesthetics, but not an ideologically pre-determined aesthetics. In the mid-twentieth century some New Critics made the argument that beauty was to be measured relative to its “uselessness.” Worried about the utilitarian values of use and practicality, and other lower forms of the aesthetic aspect of life, critics such as W.K. Wimsatt and John Crowe Ransom defended the formalist notion of the totally isolated art object: i.e., art for art’s sake. The work had to stand on its own without additional and limiting contexts such as the author’s biography or the historical moment, and, as a result, as Archibald MacLeisch’s famous line put it, “A poem should not mean/But be”:

Chapter One

24 A poem should be equal to: Not true.

For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf. For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea— A poem should not mean But be. (577)

My position is opposed to an isolated, purely formalistic definition as an exclusive understanding of the art object, but I am equally opposed to reducing the success of a work, or one’s interest in a work, or the critic’s take on a work to assessing the degree to which the object or the critic’s approach is advancing or retarding a specific, political horizon.19 My position applies to the houses and the living/writing projects studied in these pages as well. This book celebrates Snyder’s communal approach as equally as Jeffers’s independence and isolation. This book is about contact, immediacy, solitude, grace, risk, wonder, beauty, and texture, not as a means to indulge a hedonistic playground of surfaces (although that may be part of it), nor as a means to gain a political victory in U.S. culture, but as a means to gain quality of living, health, and peace, to enhance depth, intensity and richness of the moment, and the next moment, for the individual, the family, or as many beyond who care to join. In addition, I want to free stone, glass, and wood and the landscapes these are placed in from a politically narrow set of restrictions. Thoreau puts his faith in the world of contact and action, and he connects this to his writing project. It is “`vain,’ he said, `to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live’” (qtd. in Stewart 4). In this quote is a refreshing connection between a vision of the written word and the life lived. In these pages I will hang on to this vital connection between living in nature (creating a house and a lifestyle) and writing. Dwelling on relativity is a petulant act if one choses to stay at that perceptual, philosophical, political, and social level without pivoting off to live, to act, to build. It is true that the background to our lives is galactic and, therefore, provisional, but we must still decide, act, live. Jeffers, for instance, was very schooled in spiral galaxies and issues of the day such as Red Shift.20 This influenced him but did not keep him from stacking stones and writing lines. In the late 1940s, the Invisible Man put it quite beautifully in Ellison’s novel by that same name: “The mind that has formed a pattern for living must never lose sight of the chaos against

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which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals” (580). Or as Henri Lefebvre put it: "We are surrounded by emptiness but it is an emptiness filled with signs" (135).21 However, after this realization of the larger contexts, one still gets on with life and moves, decides, and commits. One may allow these realizations to impinge on or touch the everyday, but one doesn’t stay and live at that initial realization.22 A few years ago, as the agenda of opposition theories were making their way through all fields, the debate was soon raging in nature studies. Weary of the internecine wars in literary studies, many scholars had turned to nature literature because of interest, but also because it was far away from the noise of a largely “urban” debate over the reality of reality. An end run was being sought. In short order, however, nature was attacked as a concept in need of deconstruction23 and in need of a more thorough vetting along political lines of inquiry. Karla Armbruster, for instance, promotes (or should we say, “valorizes”) the idea of bioregionalism and integrated human living with ecosystems. All well and good. But what typifies current theoretical “insurgencies” is the need to smoke out, demonize, and unmask other ideas that should simply be, also available. While considering the benefits of bioregionalism, Armbruster finds it helpful to condense the experiences of many others who have gone to the wilderness for refuge as part of a “masculine wilderness romance.” The nature-writing tradition, says Armbruster, “emphasizes the individual as autonomous and ahistorical and presents nature in its purest form as a wilderness separate from culture and thus as a place one cannot remain” (8). First, of course, one must push back on such a homogeneous and sweeping set of claims, and one must demand evidence that’s compelling. And one must be suspicious of critics setting up straw men to be knocked down so a new paradigm can be bravely asserted, writing over what was apparently previously there. In addition, it is always difficult to tell in these critical forays whether the writer is talking about, say, Thoreau in particular, or the way Thoreau has been valued and discussed. Sometimes it seems the goal in postmodern criticism is not careful thinking but a scorched earth approach regarding what was previously there to be followed by an advancement of a new jargon and a new set of values.

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Fig. 1-1. “I’d forgotten how non-textual nature could be.”

In The Future of Environmental Criticism,24 Lawrence Buell got it right when he saw these two orientations beginning to collide. Resurrecting some tools and themes from a dismantled Marxism, some urban ecocritics find fault with what they highlight as a selfish individualism and want to foreground constructed space and sociopolitical thematics. “It remains to be seen how far the discourse of urbanism and environmental justice can be coordinated with the discourses of nature and the protectionist agendas they seem to imply” (23). He further teases out the differences in tone and focus of these groups: According to the former way of thinking the prototypical human figure is a solitary human and the experience in question activates a primordial link between human and nonhuman. According to the latter, the prototypical human figure is defined by social category and the environmental is artificially constructed. (23)

In this study, I will continually object to such either/or accounts; even Buell himself goes on to suggest there’s more overlapping here than not. I will also suggest that the constructivist/justice argument should not occur at the expense of these “apparently” other directed writers. I will take pains to point out the fallacy here. Today we are not generous enough to say there is merit and value in either seeing nature as 1) a la Armbruster, a bioregion with cultural dimensions to be respected and understood and to be approached with humble stewardship and a communal and socially responsible value system; and/or seeing nature as 2) a transcendent, transhuman arena of power and beauty encountered by a poet or individual

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in reclusion. It’s ironic that peace-focused and justice-seeking critics on the left today “interrogate,” not read, the texts of others as they explicate and root out vestiges of “suspicious” thinking. To give a sense of the linguistic state of things, I’ll clarify these observations with a quote from another critic who is defending Armbruster’s reading of Terry Tempest Williams: “Karla Armbruster also interrogates William’s reconfiguration of autobiographical subjectivity and defends Refuge’s ecofeminist teleology against charges of essentialism by positioning the text’s relational theory of identity within poststructural accounts of the constructedness of identity and narrative” (Libby 253). My spellcheck underlined almost the whole sentence.25 Some have criticized what they see, in such instances, as a jargon-ridden display of pseudo-knowledge. Dismissing by indicting the individual sojourn into nature; by indicting the concept of “nature” with overburdened “philosophical” discussions; by indicting the alleged dark engines of landscape painting; and by marginalizing writers such as Thoreau, Abbey, and Jeffers, reveals a troubled sociopolitical agenda.26 One of the best and most respected critics in the field, Patrick Murphy is usually tracking far ahead of the critical trends in his field, but some of the concerns I have mentioned above are found in his work as well. For example, in Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies, which in the main is a fine review of various genres containing environmental themes, focuses on a familiar dismissal of Thoreau.27 First, however, it is worth noting an issue in one of his previous articles from his prolific list of publications: “Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics.” Like Armbruster’s apologist referenced above, Murphy produces some dense rhetoric, typical of the genre of high theory.28 “Dialogics enables the differential unification of ecology and feminisms, which is to say a conjoining that does not conflate particularities or subordinate one to the other” (3). (In his defense, Murphy has mentioned that he was very focused during this period on the rush into theory). Further, Murphy also laments in this essay that we do not have enough “`real disagreement’” that leads to proper “`confrontation’” (3). A “wellrounded” person is not the goal, but someone with a political edge. There is no doubt that a goal for higher education must be to insure that graduates have a sense of civic responsibility and political awareness. Less clear is whether our institutions should produce students with a hair-trigger confrontational assessment of market economics and political institutions. In the “Prolegomenon” article, Murphy argues that pluralistic humanism, once thought to foster “individual growth and intellectual diversity” (3), has run its course and, has fostered “nonjudgmental or `undecidability’ postures” (3) in political life. With the accusation of “indecisiveness,” we

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see the calculated opening of a fissure where the new/old agenda gets slipped in. The lack of decidability is then given direction with charges of ahistoricism, imperialism, indecisiveness. With variations on this method, the new/old left has been pushing to get back in the game. As a result, readers of literature or culture get some “deciding” done for them. At this juncture, literature itself is dismantled as a concept, pushed aside and replaced by discourse theory. Discourse theory allows folks who once studied poetry and novels to range widely with abandon through all of culture—since everything is text—rooting out and overturning power wherever they find it. Like the Marxism of Terry Eagleton in Why Marx Was Right, the trajectory of this criticism attacks “those sad, self-deceived characters” who don’t understand that a “deadly clash of forces” is needed to cure what ails capitalism. A clash is required because “What is needed to repair society is beyond the powers of the prevailing system” (78). Only by abandoning the talk of an indecisive “phony harmony” (liberal education’s traditional sense of a well-rounded person one presumes), perpetrated by the non-judgmental folks, can we create “a society beyond self-interest” (78). Advocating a deadly clash, Eagleton sounds like Ted Kaczynski who, convinced of the needed end goals, thought that …what has to be done is not to try and convince or persuade the majority of people that we are right, as much as try to increase tensions in society to the point where things start to break down. To create a situation where people get uncomfortable enough that they’re going to rebel. (Kaczynski)

Kaczynski’s solution was a cynical, murderous terrorism. Other approaches are much less extreme but are, nevertheless, designed to pit us against each other with an agenda of opposition.29 Conflating Eagleton and ecocriticism is not my goal here. But I do want to suggest how so much of this criticism shares similar themes and goals. The first move is to usher a traditional figure or sentiment aside, in the manner of Armbruster or Mitchell, with charges. The list of possible infractions is a long one, but whether the charge is logocentricity, androcentrism, reification, patriarchy, imperialism, ahistoricism, essentialism, or indecisiveness, all of these injustices are always a thinly veiled criticism of the death star, capitalism, the boogieman behind all that is not right with the world.30 One of the attractive aspects of Murphy’s scholarship is the way he is interested in overlooked, unknown, and international writers. Like Lawrence Buell, Murphy seems to have read everything in print, globally. So it is no surprise that he says in this most recent book that he wants “to consider…some of the diverse styles and positions” in American literature

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regarding the simple life. He has to admit that Thoreau is the reference point for many of the writers he wishes to consider. Nevertheless, Murphy states that he doesn’t “want to spend much time on Thoreau himself, except to observe that Walden omits some crucial details that must be taken into account…” (20).31 Why, one might ask, doesn’t Murphy simply discuss the various writers he wishes to foreground? One of the more essential complaints Murphy has about Thoreau follows: “I believe that environmental writing and ecological understanding require a fundamental grounding not in autonomy or self reliance but in interdependence and mutual aid” (20). These are the same indictments leveled by Armbruster and other critics writing from contemporary theory’s orientation: ahistoricism, individualism, etc. Interdependence is important but can be advanced without dismissing Thoreau: Why this need to dismiss, to marginalize, to insist on deficits, to hold Thoreau accountable for anachronistic issues? In another section, Murphy complains that Thoreau visited Emerson and, therefore, didn’t live at Walden full time. So, which is it, one wonders? Thoreau either emphasized a politically incorrect, noncommunal solitude, or Thoreau wasn’t consistently in a state of solitude: one can’t have it both ways. In addition, Murphy must contend with the fact that Thoreau influenced many of his writers of interest. They revere Thoreau, and yet Murphy expresses concerns and doesn’t want to spend time on him or Walden: “I have to complain that it lacks sufficient reference to certain pivotal concepts” (20).32 Luckily, as note #32 points out, many critics still value Thoreau. I believe this marginalizing energy is part of a recognizable pattern in scholarship with a sociopolitical horizon: boldly dismiss the familiar for the partisan, complexly conceived. The fact is that every book (including this one of course), poem, or essay can be found wanting, fails terribly in one or more crucial ways, and will lack some perspective or attention to some issue.33 I recall a critical spirit not too long ago when one would understand a work on its own terms being aware, of course, that there may be issues to add or draw attention to.34 Now, the attention is, frequently, on the extra-textual issues that are about the critic’s interests at the expense of the target text. Critics with these orientations go easy on writers like Snyder or Wendell Berry, since these writers make their criticism of capitalism and their interest in community (where community means a group sharing the same values as the critic) clear and pronounced.35 The transition from Marxism to the new social movements has occurred, but the agenda is the same: an assumed and dismissive approach to capitalism, free markets, individualism. I don’t mean to claim that market-based culture doesn’t have significant issues. Nor do I wish to argue for unchecked,

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irresponsible behavior of individuals ignorant of environmental or social needs and urgencies. I do object to an edited, scripted context that violates the first principles of critical thinking. Also, to simply assume a more collectivist vision because it sounds better, without discussing the potential losses and downsides and without acknowledging the benefits associated with the energies of that which got us here, is irresponsible. For instance, many new ecocritics use bioregionalism, not as a useful and more beneficial agricultural practice, but as a means to pivot towards alternative political ventures. Thinking Wendell Berry doesn’t carry the point of bioregionalism far enough, Murphy, for instance, sees value in Snyder’s comment that bioregionalism “`would be a small step toward the deconstruction of America into seven or eight natural nations—none of which has a budget big enough to support missiles’” (Explorations 42-43). Whether we think we can or should use these values as a way to redesign the whole country is an idea worth some pause, reflection, and refinement before it is blithely accepted.36 The environment and community are good, essential, and crucial elements in our collective lives, no doubt. Ed Abbey, however, I’m sure, would be a disruptive problem at the People’s Bioregional Regulatory Council. As my professor of Utopian Visions of Modern Society said to me and a classmate during our 1974 class at the University of California, Santa Cruz: “Quigley, your lovely vision of an eco-based political and social culture left out one thing: deviance.” Playing the role, he added, “I don’t like your vision, so to what Gulag are you going to send me?” I never forgot his point. Those who think they own oppositional ideas forget that deviance or opposition has a 360-degree political radius. All too often, the alternative political visions rooted in the 60s do not account for this fact; they do not account for legitimate competing visions. The assumption is “We do the deviance and radical recrafting thing. What could anyone object to?” Our culture is probably characterized by the likes of Steve Jobs and Ed Abbey, and other go-yourown-way folks as much as, if not more so, than submission to a collective or a community. There are two energies in our originating documents after all: the centralized, centripetal government of the Constitution and the centrifugal, individualism of the Bill of Rights. In sum, one may legitimately want a society based on bioregional agricultural and political practice, and in addition, one may want a society with many/all voices finding their way into dialogue with respect and equal weight. However, one cannot get there by demanding that every instance of cultural production reflects one’s own vision, nor can one get there by ignoring serious political practices currently in place. If one assumes a revolutionary

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as opposed to an evolutionary posture, then, indeed, one can look at all current and past practice as that which needs to be swept away. Bioregionalism will, without a doubt, impact our view of how to change our lives. I am currently sitting at a Governor’s Institute on Community Design. The focus is on sustainability, and it’s shocking to learn that Colorado imports its food supply at the same rate (approx. 95%) as Hawaii (the most remote archipelago in the world). Clearly this is not defendable or sustainable. Learning to live within the carrying capacity of a region and thinking of new ways to transport resources is sorely needed. Whether this involves the kind of cultural and political re-casting suggested by the collectivist visions of Snyder and Murphy is up for question. Politically driven folks frequently conflate technical or logistical challenges with large scale social visions and extrapolate towards psychosocial and cultural revolutions.37 As my footnote discusses here, the 1975 Three Days of the Condor provides a look at these kinds of tensions associated with resource policy.38 Another example of the attack on solitude I’m speaking of is easily found. Tom Lynch, for instance, in “Nativity, Domesticity, and Exile in Edward Abbey’s `One True Home,’” sets Abbey up for the conventional take down. First, Lynch correctly reports that Abbey wrote while doing lonely work as a park ranger in the desert. However, the fact that Abbey glories in the “`one-man station some twenty miles back,’” and declares that this is `”The way I wanted it’” (Lynch 89) seems to be the pivot point of criticism for Lynch. The hard left has never been much enamored with individualism as a rule (although the leftwing cultural movements of the 60s and 70s promoted the individual), and this accounts to a large extent for the wide-ranging attack on “the individual” at the hands of discourse theorists and other critical theorists with this agenda.39 Lynch places Abbey in this individualist tradition of writing that Lynch is setting up for dismissal: His stance here seems well sanctioned by the tradition of literary natural history composition of which he is an heir (Thoreau’s removal to Walden Pond, though often construed as more anti social than it was, serves as a paradigm), and in turn Abbey’s solitary experience has influenced the way others conceptualize their relationship to the land. (89)

It’s instructive to note that Thoreau is saddled with being the source of these ill-formed narratives, as Murphy seems to indicate as well. Lynch seems sensitive and alert to the shape of the idea he is carving. This accounts for his caveat about Thoreau’s activity above (“construed as being more anti-social than it was”), and the fact that he gives this ground:

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It is not necessary, of course, that the vision of a newcomer to the Southwest, such as Abbey, conform in all ways to the vision of the region’s native people, but still…(90)

The caveat notwithstanding, Lynch telegraphs where he is heading. Although “wary of drawing too sharp a contrast between Abbey” and other local inhabitants (92), he, nevertheless, pushes on, trotting out the rest of the indictment to its either/or conclusion. In sum, to honor and appreciate other cultures may not always require hatred of self as a condition for that gesture. Time in residence and attachment to place are valued qualities in ecocriticism and in this study, but certainly this is not the only dimension or lens for understanding the value of cultures, peoples, or individuals regarding their relations with the environment. There even is, as Lawrence Buell points out, a localness, a regionalism, which can be very insular and non self-critical. This relation with the environment may well be long term, solitary, or communal, but it may not necessarily “guarantee respect” for the “natural environment as a value independent of the values assigned to it by the community of human inhabitants” (EI 253). Therefore, to repeat this charge against individualism does seem to betray a kind of conditioned response. It makes one suspect that there is more requirement here, than independent analysis. Much of what passes for power analysis in postmodernt theory lives at an unexamined level. Wendell Berry provided a vision that 1) championed an individual kind of knowledge and experience and 2) cautioned against attachments to regions that become too insular, defensive, and narrow. Buell points out that Berry …distinguishes between unself-conscious, insular regionalism and “local life aware of itself,” which “would tend to substitute for the myths and stereotypes of a region a particular knowledge of the life of the place one lives in and intends to continue to live in.” (EI 253)

Such “particular,” “non-insular” experience should include the writer’s alert sensitivity to the lives of others, events in the world, and, as Snyder has it, the “plants—ponderosa pine, black oak, and associates—well enough to know what the rainfall and climate would be, and I knew I liked their company” (Place 253). The either/or as opposed to a both/and issue can be seen in popular cultural productions as well. Today we continue in this vein with movies such as The Last Samurai, Dances with Wolves, and Avatar. In each, the hero disparages European and Western inheritance, is absorbed with self-loathing, hatred, a uniform, uncomplicated rejection of modernism while finding impossible refuge in a kind of fantasy absorbtion

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as refuge from the unambiguously depicted barbarousness of the hero’s culture. I love the movies, but this either/or narrative wears thin. An additional problem with Abbey is that he finds the land exotic and alluring, and he, therefore, as some critical perspectives would necessarily have it, wants to possess the land and worse: “it is precisely this exotic, alien sense of the desert Abbey loves” (91).40 Worse, “Abbey values the desert for its ability to filter out the family matrix and liberate him as an individual” (91). It’s interesting the way this criticism rejects an interest in family values except when it serves to undermine issues perceived to be or construed as part of a capitalist value system. In sum, Abbey’s love of place is misguided, since its underlying motivation—a focus on the self at the exclusion of family—is the basis for Abbey’s land ethic according to Lynch, giving rise to Abbey’s position that “`the wilderness is worth saving’” (91). The fact that one wants time alone to gather one’s thoughts, to assess one’s place in life, to assess the engines of one’s culture, was, in the 60s and before, viewed as an intelligent, admirable gesture and even, sometimes, subversive. Today this same gesture is construed as the symbol of authority and blind allegiance to destructive value systems. Interesting. Cautioning against an extravagant, narcissistic, ego-driven set of priorities is one thing; dissolving the individual is a mutually assured destruction technique that is ultimately not productive or believable, and it reveals, as I have been suggesting, another agenda. No one, I feel, puts the issues and tensions of the self in nature better than Jeffers. In his poems, he dramatizes the tensions between the individual and nature, between the individual and political power, the individual and others, and one’s own evolutionary impulses. The individual is far from being a constant and a given: hence the “drama.” Only a preconceived political horizon would “gloat over” any “failure to go all the way” (EI 167) with a dissolution of self in poets such as Jeffers. Certainly a reconsideration of self in light of our developing sense of the environment is a useful and interesting project. The key is not to insist on a single version of this project driven by a set of other driving sociopolitical engines. As Buell states, “The point is to underscore the heroic difficulty of achieving a…redefinition of self in environmental terms” (EI 167). Let’s return to Thoreau to take a closer look at the charge of misanthropic isolation, or ahistoricism, that leads to and informs the glossing label of the “masculine wilderness narrative.” As Murphy inadvertently admits regarding Thoreau, Thoreau did have a network of contacts and relations. In other words, Thoreau was not an isolated asocial, apolitical, self-indulgent recluse. In fact, Rebecca Solnit makes a strong case for Thoreau as a fully engaged citizen even while carrying on with his

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experiment at Walden. It is useful, as I have suggested, for some critics to suggest that these individuals who go to the woods or wild places ignore social and political issues, ignore issues of justice associated with the world of gender and family, ignore the previous indigenous population(s) and, therefore, deserve the charge of racism, ahistoricism, imperilaism, and more. Solnit is refreshing on the topic: One more thing that can be said in favor of Thoreau is that he spent a lot of time imaginatively repopulating the woods around Concord with Indians and even prepared quantities of notes for a never attempted history of Native America (and the third section of his The Maine Woods is mostly a portrait of the Native guide Joe Polis). (6)

In addition, she notes that Thoreau …hosted Concord’s most important abolitionist group, the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, at a meeting in his Walden Pond hut. (Solnit 7)

She also nicely complicates Thoreau by observing that although his love of wild lands made him speak ill of the one who first surveys wildness, he himself was a surveyor: “He knew that what exists as landscape for one kind of experience exists as real estate for another” (7). As opposed to seeing Jeffers as participating in a masculine wilderness narrative, I assert he was far from being a solitary curmudgeon in retreat. Jeffers created a domestic space in a wild place. He too thought about the future of the land he had committed himself to. Jeffers lived with his wife (she was very involved and central to his writing/living project which is reflected in Jeffers’s poems and in the Collected Letters) and raised twins at Tor House; he engaged in civic issues and addressed Carmel city authorities regarding sewer assessment fees and the fact that the sewer “shockingly defiles the river mouth” (Ridgeway 319). He was socially connected to thinkers and personalities such as D.H. Lawrence, Jaime de Angulo, Georgia O’Keefe, Mary Austin, Jack London, Charlie Chaplin, Mable Dodge Luhan, George Sterling, and many others in the artistic world and in the local Carmel community. Jeffers, like Thoreau, imagined and discussed the native peoples who had been there before him. A beautiful 1962 Ward Ritchie book, California Heritage, edited by John and LaRee Caughey, contains a collection of essays and other writings attempting to capture the spirit and history of California. It leads off with a chapter on California indigenous populations. The first item in that chapter is Jeffers’s poem “Hands” (7). This is a beautiful poem where Jeffers

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acknowledges the people before him. The handprints on the wall left by previous inhabitants say to Jeffers “`we also were human’” (7). In addition, his poetry provides some of the most extensive treatment of politics and the issues of the day of any writer I am aware of. And Snyder has been nothing if not politically oriented, drawing no distinctions between art, politics, and daily practice. Berry raised a family, engaged with community, and placed farming squarely within social and political contexts and as a frequent basis for his poetry. Abbey as well was very socially and politically networked, and he gave most of his life’s energy to the protection of the desert from policies and directions that would ruin the West. Abbey wrote essays (many published in popular magazines), wrote many letters, and he wrote fiction, all of which was thoroughly engaged with the issues of the day. In sum, the charge that these sorts of writers need to be ushered from the scene, or stand forever pilloried, because of a dismissive and marginalizing list of alleged inexcusable and political faux pas is troubling. Are there going to be new ways to think about and talk about environmental issues? Indeed. Does this by definition involve the need to castigate others? No. Critics today are free to roam and explore outside any canonical requirements; burning the house down on the way out the door, however, is not necessary. Can’t we all just get along? In this book, I submit that the house stands in a fruitful position within these forces of language, work, immediacy and materiality, culture, and nature. The house as a focal point balances and arbitrates between these forces, and each writer calibrates these elements a bit differently. Although situated in a rough and changing world—naturally and culturally speaking—the house has a foundation, and it is firmly settled and uniquely nestled in a place. It comes with a complicated origination story. It provides writers the refuge they seek and the stage to engage with nature as well as culture. The beauty of these houses and the beauty of the writing result from these connections and the productive outcomes of being the nexus point between nature and culture. In addition, there is a connection to the peace in body and mind. Rick Bass suggests his move to Yaak Valley changed everything: Is it too much to imagine that the pulsings of our blood, and our emotions, follow the rough profile of the days of light in this valley? the short summers of long days followed by the long winters of short days? the play of light in these strange forests, and even the sound of its creeks, somehow a place and sound that has almost always existed, which mirrors the sounds and rhythms inside us? Not a direct overlay but a predisposition, so that our settling in was not so much work and effort as it was relief, pleasure and peace. (Bass 3)

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The authors examined here use the house as a pivot point, a lens, a filter, a perspective, a refuge with which to engage nature and the world of culture. The house is a foundation, but the house is constantly changing, degrading, settling, and the watershed or bioregion is full of change and interconnections. The house in many respects serves as an exchange point between change and permanence, between individual and a larger culture, between nature and culture. Wendell Berry, for example, sets up the two major pieces, nature and culture/human perception, of this equation when he sees house and nature in relation: The frame is a black grid beyond which the world flings up the wild… (Selected 35)

All of this brings us back to the cabin at Big Sur, with its rich, rough, wood textures, its simple and solid design features, its nook and cranny tropes, its unvarnished and unpretentious materials and design. All of this created a feeling I have never forgotten. It was the world in reverse for me; instead of human will, in the form of cement and steel structures and electrical lighting, imposing itself in all directions, here the natural world was the context, and the quiet and calm were startling. This new world had a sense of balance and belonging. The house actually felt like it fit me, and it seemed to fit within its setting. The fact that one was conscious of these issues is itself worth noting. Was this simply my naïve experience of a narrative that was pre-deposited in my cranial discourse system? Was there a constructed, nostalgic, post card in my discourse-storage drive waiting to be matched with external corollaries? Or was I responding as a living thing that finds noise, filth, and violence less nurturing than quiet, natural rhythm, dappled light, and mindful focus? I recall the importance of the materials (wood, stone, glass), the way the sun cascaded onto the wood floor, the way the breeze blew a dipping branch up against the house, the way the sun refracted from the ocean and lit the ceiling, the way I was able to fall asleep on the porch in short order. Because it was nestled in and not dropped from the sky, heavy and sprawling like a Wal-Mart, Costco, or a subdivision, it fostered a connection to and acknowledgement of the worlds around it. In this way, one is tempted to advance a theory of pagan (out of the earth) as opposed to sky-god (dropped from above) architecture. Indeed, the place in Big Sur was “picture perfect,” and for those who have grown suspicious of any pleasure—supposing it a sinister, ideological construct masquerading as a given “natural,” a sweet marketing seduction or nostalgia, or psychological

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delusion—what response should we have to this picture of harmony and pastoral simplicity? “Reading against the text,” as I have been suggesting, has caused current readers of theory to become incapable of experiencing any text, proposed solution, utterance, image or experience without “interrogating” it for its hidden ideological designs. When Jeffers, for instance, suggests we need a counter to “all this excess energy,” the reader must decide what to do with the following suggestion: …take a walk, for instance, and admire the landscape: that is better than killing one’s brother in war or trying to be superior to one’s neighbor in time of peace. We could dig our gardens…We could, according to our abilities, give ourselves to science or art; not to impress somebody, but for love of the beauty each discloses. We could even be quiet occasionally … (CP 4: 419)

Is Jeffers’s trying to pull us away from the “agenda of opposition with no solutions”? Instead of insisting on a hyper-paranoid approach to this passage, it would be helpful and instructive to discuss some of the pertinent biographical qualities relative to Jeffers: e.g., his stern minister father, who tutored Jeffers in Greek, Latin and modern languages, all before the age of 10. In addition, the picture would be more complete by researching patterns of Carmel domesticate life. The account of Jeffers’s move to Carmel can take several contextual framings and could shed light on the passage. He can be seen as a trailblazer, making his way out of the southern California morass to the beautiful, blue-green, wild, cerebral, bohemian community in the north. Taking the stagecoach from Monterey to Carmel, he and Una declared this stormy coast to be their “inevitable place.” Is this a sign of victory over mass movement forces? A dedication to beauty and personal quests? Or is this to be assessed as the end result of imperial trajectories rolling over Hispanic and indigenous worlds? Or one might consider that the Carmel Development Company sent its first advert out to academics and intellectuals in 1902: “the marketing brochure was addressed `To the School Teachers of California and other Brain Workers at Indoor Employment.’ An invitation to escape the city or the Stanford or Berkeley campuses, for the sea-salt air of Carmel Bay couldn’t have been more enticing” (Paul 24). As a result, should we see Jeffers as simply a consumer seduced by the marketing image of bohemian ease? Or should he be seen as a unique, original individual drawn to a tribe of other originals escaping the growing disaster that was to be southern California, so like other modernist, mechanistic, frenzied, urban centers? Of course, the answer is that all of these elements should be entertained, and one is not required to drive one of these contexts to the exclusion of the others.

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Cultural context is endless and, if added as a service to clarify, provide richness, and open up possibilities, it is useful and welcome. But the current theoretical impetus to resist the “nonjudgmental or ‘undecidability’ postures” (“Prolegomena” 3), to resist the text’s alleged designs on us, control the text’s much-feared attempt to seduce us by “embarrassing” or “interrogating” the text, is short sighted. Theory’s attempt to liberate the reader from the alleged grip of the text diminishes the richness and pleasures of the text. We lose much by never reading “with” the text, especially when we have a poet like Jeffers, who fully understands the seductions of his culture’s call to duty, to arms, to conformity. Always reading like a paranoid, cultural warrior is corrosive, exhausting, and betrays a kind of churlish and infantile 60s rebellion against power that never matures. Instead, we should be confident and serene, yet alert, and just take a walk with Jeffers: listening, thinking, and looking at the sun blaze into gold on the surface of the big Pacific blue. “Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music…” (CP 2: 410). Such a direction doesn’t mean one is now a dupe and stooge of “the system,” gushing about sunsets as Eagleton commented. It simply presents reading and thinking as a larger enterprise with more options, one being the promise of more health and fullness. The longing for, appreciation of, and even realization of a pastoral mode were very much a part of American cultural history and experience, even before commercial and media forces held sway over our pastoral imagination. As David Shi points out in The Simple Life, we err if we think the gesture of seeking alternative lifestyles is a reaction against Western traditions. Shi makes the compelling case that these gestures form a strong tradition within American culture. The fact is, as a people, we have taken these issues on for generations. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, a new strain of the old search for the simple life emerged. As a generation sought to define its aesthetics, politics, and worldview against the backdrop of an increasingly insulting strip mall culture, many others were having the same aesthetic realization and epiphanies I recounted above. My experiences seem personal to me, and, of course, they are, but many others in their own way also shared these events. And there were many explorations of intimate space occurring in these years. The Big Sur cabin obviously made its impression on me. The next, best place, however, was the privacy of my VW camper: small, tight, nooks and crannies; special views out draped, louvered, windows; intact, self-sustained, mine. The camper was a sleeping space, with a stove, refrigeration, storage, and it let me explore the serpentine Pacific Coast Highway through the mountains and hills and up the coast. Standing

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beside this bus on the coastal precipice of the Big Sur area, I drank in many a sunset while settling in for a night.

Fig. 1-2. Surfboard on top and well stocked, the 1964 VW bus resting for the evening along the Russian River, ca. 1972.

And it was while traveling the back roads in northern California in my bus in the early 70s that I came across a remarkable house that immediately intrigued me. I saw it in the side view mirror and stopped the bus. There it was rising above a stand of trees and mimicking these trees in its design.

Fig. 1-3 My original photo from 1972.

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Recently, while turning the pages of the classic book on houses, Shelter, I saw the same house featured on one of the pages (Kahn 154). The idea of a house that carried on a sympathetic conversation with its surroundings, therefore, occurred to me, and many others, early on.

Fig. 1-4. The same house I drove by in the 70s featured in Shelter magazine. This photo also taken in the 70s. Validation that the interest in natural housing was alive and well early on.

It is true that we fashion our responses to life, not always or necessarily from purely new, original, forms of living, but from the cultural, political, historical detritus lying about or energized by current events and rearranged in new and interesting ways. An interesting example of some rethinking and rearranging of the “way things are” can be seen in an article published by The Berkeley Tribe in the late 60s (Roszak). This article laid out, in theory and in drawings, a blueprint for the redesign of living space in Berkeley.

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Fig. 1-5. An early 70s era reconsideration of living conditions in Berkeley. Plant food in the street, bridge buildings together, greenways, etc.

Echoing Emerson’s “All outdoors seems a marketplace,” the Tribe article laments that “all land in Berkeley is treated as a marketable commodity” (Roszak 399). It would take years for these cultural forces of rejection and rebellion to make peace with the marketplace and find an ally where an opponent first appeared. And even at the book’s publishing, the editor and counter culture professor, Theodore Roszak, knew that progress would be incremental: "The technocracy will not be overthrown. It will be displaced— inch by inch—by alternative realities imaginatively embodied" (xxii). Ultimately, market forces helped along the revitalization of the charming but eroding old neighborhoods more so than People’s Committees. Opposing the forces perceived as misshaping Berkeley (and all other American cities), the article in the Tribe emphasized planting the streets, alternative energy, no fences, bridge-ways between houses instead of fences, organic communal gardening. As we engage with the need for a post-oil, sustainable future, many of these issues regarding reforming food and energy production and consumption are now becoming commonplace, although a bit transformed by technology and the pragmatics of implementation and market forces. The communal patterns of living never made it, but with dwindling resources and new pressures on energy reserves, this as well may have new life.

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The Tribe article was reprinted in Theodore Roszak’s 1972 book, Sources: An Anthology of Contemporary Materials Useful for Preserving Personal Sanity While Braving the Great Technological Wilderness, and it was placed right next to an article by Gary Snyder. The counter culture movement was looking for a way to counter-propose an approach to the everyday; it attempted to carve out a humble, understated, and foundbeauty that formed the basis for a redesign of consciousness, community, beauty, intelligence, and daily priorities. In addition to a redesign of the everyday, this movement also deployed an unrelenting attack on commercial culture, competitive culture, the “military industrial complex,” etc, so much so that insights on materials, energy, food, and more got lost amidst the swirl of a petulant and, frequently, hateful and violent politics. The Berkeley Tribe, for instance, was a radical, breakaway publication (1969-72) led by upstarts who left the Berkeley Barb. In its short existence, it quickly distinguished itself by advocating violence and supporting the politics of the Weathermen (a breakaway group of SDS that advocated the overthrow of the US government) and the Black Panthers. (In the 1969 cover photo below (Fig. 1-6), note that the both father and mother are armed. The baby on the hip of the hip mother is an odd attempt to domesticate a violent opposition to the “system.”). One of its managers, Les Felsenstein, left the Tribe as the call to violence increased; he went back to school at UC Berkeley, finished an E.E. degree and designed one of the first personal computers. He is well known for his pioneering work in this field. Felsenstein’s story is typical of many “revolutionary” biographies of this period. It is easy to see the more valuable interests of this period being absorbed into the mainstream today: green jobs, food security, wind, solar, zen aesthetics, rustic simplicity, slowing down, and geothermal and other alternative power supplies. Many of the insights of the 60s and 70s were written off at the time as a kind of tofu politics because they were packaged alongside frenzied political agendas that distorted these more useful issues. But many aspects of this cultural moment have survived. In addition to the alternative energy and food production ideas, other more subtle and nuanced issues have survived as well: the concern over the feel and the aesthetics of the everyday, the patterns of living, the sounds in our homes and communities (damn the leaf blower!), work that inspires us, toxic-free food, air and water, our proximity to rural resources and wild spaces, the pace and rhythm derived from less hysterical and frenetic priorities, the materials we brush our hands over, the moments for staring out a window in repose or reverie: these elements have been illusive but not abandoned. These are valuable directions that need to be preserved and

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Fig. 1-6. Join the action army. The get-back-to-nature and natural housing movement got back-grounded by the political militancy of the 60s-70s.

rethought because, as James Kunstler bluntly laments in a recent book, Geography of Nowhere, we have “created a landscape of scary places and become a nation of scary people” (G 273).

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One thing in this discussion stands at the center of this book. Although the political energies of the last 30-40 years are suspect and improbable guides, the aesthetics of the material and present moment have survived with a bit more credibility. Lloyd Kahn put it this way in Homework: Handbuilt Shelter: In the early 70s, after building geodesic domes and experimenting with plastic building materials, I came to the conclusion that the less molecular rearranging a particular building material has, the better it feels to be around. The key word is feels: wood, adobe, straw, earth, stone, bamboo–– these materials feel good. (73)

Robinson Jeffers was on to all of these issues regarding epistemology, political power, the senses and more. He wouldn’t let it swamp his boat though, and he kept his focus on the immediacy of things. In “Advice to Pilgrims,” he states it clean: That our senses lie and our minds trick us is true, but in general They are honest rustics; trust them a little; The senses more than the mind, and your own mind more than another man’s… (CP 3: 118)

In “Return,” Jeffers makes this point again but more strongly: I will go to the lovely Sur Rivers And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders. I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers In the ocean wind over the river boulders. I will touch things and things and no more thoughts, That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky… (CP 2: 409 )

Ed Abbey also testified to his commitment to the immediacy of experience. He abandons a focus or obsession “about the true underlying reality”: For my part I am pleased enough with surfaces…the grasp of a child’s hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of friend or lover, the silk of a girl’s thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool. The face of the wind—what else is there? What else do we need?” (Desert Solitaire xiii)

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Wendell Berry sings this same song of praise for the aesthetics of humble appreciation and immediacy when he observes a natural pattern in his locale and declares, what we need is here: Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here…to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here. (Selected Poems 90, my emphasis)

Much like Abbey and Jeffers, Berry makes a strong statement regarding his adherence to the immediate: “Better than any argument is to rise at dawn/and pick dew-wet berries in a cup” (Selected Poems 73). In sum, I am focused in these pages on Van Proyen’s commitment discussed above to capturing the health and fullness that rests in each moment. To this end, Proyen asks how we might most fully inhabit our own moment in our own time, disengaged from the pull of superordinating presuppositions and in unambivalent possession of a psychically self-sufficient moment of temporary isolation from an insane world overdetermined by…the rote groupthinks which are bred from an endless and irresolvable contest of cultural politics. (Van Proyen)

As the 60s rolled out, young people, their parents, and others were caught in a wide ranging set of disturbing conditions: the Vietnam War, unchecked pollution (e.g., lead in the gas, smog alerts in L.A.), urban sprawl, and other acute conditions causing unrest. A specific element in this experience was an architectural conversation that had been going on for years. Standardization was the key. In 1912, says Peter Rowe in Modernity and Housing, “Christine Frederick applied Taylor’s principles to the home and published her Scientific Management of the Home” (83). “By the 1920s,” Rowe continues, “the practice of standardization in order to achieve efficiency was almost fully accepted. …The architect Alexander Klein…conducted an extensive quasi-mathematical analysis of numerous house plans using principles from graph theory in order to determine the most efficient layouts” (83-84). In other words, in addition to the political and social issues of the times, there was the issue of space and how it was constructed, defined, and experienced. Many were feeling the squeeze,

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sandwiched between the Greek Revival rolling out since the Revolution, thrown together with a Gothic bid at nostalgia, and all finally encircled by an annihilating onslaught of Le Corbusier skyscrapers and Bauhaus minimalist boxes. Le Corbusier is the consummate modernist with his attraction to American factory organizational energies (i.e., Ford and Taylor), and his interest in reorganizing modern cities as machines made with steel and concrete. “Seeing the city as a perfect expression of man’s ability to master his environment. Le Corbusier exulted: ‘A City! It is the grip of man on nature. It is a human operation directed against nature’” (Evenson 11).

Fig. 1-7. Le Corbusier’s Radiant City.

He was not ill intentioned; his architectural impetus was meant to avoid the social consequences of the sprawling, chaotic, filthy patterns of living clearly exhibited by and brought about by the industrial revolution. Le Corbusier presumes that without relief, this construction of urban living space would foment discontent and rebellion. His consistent theme was “Architecture or Revolution.” He totally gave himself to the principles of the machine age believing in its inevitability and its necessity. His thinking about the evolution of the modern house, for instance, was to hope that “we shall arrive at the `House Machine,’ the mass production house, …beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful” (New Architecture 7). The machinelike qualities of the “Radiant City” struck a negative chord with many. As Norma Evenson has put it,

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the proposed city appeared to some an audacious and compelling vision of a brave new world, and to others a frigid megalomaniacally scaled negation of the familiar urban ambient. (7)

The film Koyaanisqatsi depicts the result in stunning visual terms. For much of the film, the city is seen as a skyline of skyscrapers fed by freeways, a machine that refuses to acknowledge history, humanity, or even the weather (clouds reflect off from the glassy building). Satellite photos of the city are juxtaposed with pictures of circuit boards; the effect is alarming, as the comparisons seem identical. Clouds are reflected and seemingly refused as they irrelevantly blow over the skyline and race across the glassy surface of the towering buildings (all reality is contained inside).

Fig. 1-8. Koyaanisqatsi in downtown Honolulu, by Dylan Quigley.

When the camera finally makes it into the city, the people there seem like the walking dead, moving in and out of vehicles and commercial buildings, transported haplessly on escalators, elevators, and subways. These scenes are frequently juxtaposed to hot dogs and Twinkies being moved around on conveyor belts in the midst of being processed. These city dwellers are the clowns, the fools, the meat of a machine-driven, commercial culture; their facial expressions denote that they are hopelessly ajar as they attempt to negotiate the discontinuities and ceaseless demands

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of the modernist machine. Close-ups on faces reveal terror, isolation, or a silly empty-headed acceptance of the chaotic and exuberant energy. This is indeed the Matrix as depicted in the film of that title. It is a self contained, reflexive reality built to create, control, and satisfy all needs.

Fig. 1-9. Dylan Quigley took some Koyaanisqatsi building shots in downtown Honolulu. This one has that Bauhaus, depression modern feel. Photo taken 8/2011.

All of the above combine to make for some intimidating and alienating environments. Kunstler, for example, outlines the tenets of the Bauhaus program: The aesthetic-social dogmas of the Bauhaus were wildly reductive. Anything but a flat roof was verboten, because towers, cupolas, et cetera, symbolized crowns worn by monarchs. Anything but an absolutely plain sheer façade was show-offy and, worse, dishonest, because it disguised a building’s true structure. Ornament was a voluptuary indulgence only the rich could afford, and in the coming utopia there would be no rich people, or everybody would be equally rich, or equally poor, or something like that, so ornament was out. Color was banned. The post war avant-garde scaled new heights of puritanism. The naked brutality of industry was the most difficult thing to reconcile with any new theory of the utopian future. …The avant-garde’s solution to this dilemma was a bit of intellectual jujitsu, the old if you can’t beat ’em join ’em gambit. They romanticized the machine and embraced the growing mechanization of life as a wonderful development….But the greatest romancer of the machine was Le Corbusier. (G 71)

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A small but interesting piece of irony must be mentioned here. While Le Corbusier was designing the great modernist city of the 20th century, the Radiant City, he did so in a charming little log cabin in the south of France. And in good rustic style—like several of the writers to be discussed in this book—he built it himself and named it, “Le Cabanon.” In the 2001 spring issue of the New York Times Magazine: Home Design Part 2, Le Corbusier is pictured, charmingly and sans shirt, in his rustic setting. Apparently, the calm and tranquility needed to create the vision of the city-as-machine required such a rustic retreat for the needed creativity.

Fig. 1-10. Le Corbusier’s hand built shack, Le Cabanon, a rustic retreat to plan the modern hyper city.

Modernist architecture was supposed to be liberating, democratic, energetic and bold; instead it became an oppressive, deadening, alienating nightmare. Kunstler goes on to document how such ideologies get rolled out and accepted. In the accidents that history produces, these modernist architectural ideas were resisted by Hitler and Stalin, both of whom had neoclassical tastes (G 76). Therefore, logic dictates that if tyrants dislike this architecture, it must, by definition, embody the opposite set of principles from tyranny: freedom and liberation. This seems to be how

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“modern” architecture got its association with advancing a democratic society.41 We end up settling for our environment because a) it’s the opposite of something else (not that) or b) because we just don’t think there are options. As so many cultural theorists have pointed out, this is what makes ideology, ideology. It is an obdurate and governing context. As in the movie The Matrix, such an enveloping context is so thorough, we won’t believe it unless someone finds a dramatic and epistemologically violent way to shift our perception. The bottom line here is that the “norm” can be a powerful and stealthy force. As the phrase goes, “the coin of the realm erases its own figure” (John Carlos Rowe 134). In other words, awful and contrived things can and do often appear as “just the way things are”: freeways, murder, war, fast food, strip malls, humiliating jobs and social relations, stupid and corrupt politics. Earlier in this discussion, I defended pattern (e.g., migratory behavior of animals) as not necessarily a sign of contrivance, seduction, or belittling routine. Current critical theorists tend to make sweeping claims about the seductions of the text (and everything is text) to advance their own agenda. In these pages, I am insisting that pattern be not seen as monolithic. Pattern does not always signal contrivance and seduction. On the other hand, there is a power to culture that allows a social construction (e.g., racism, polluting habits, cruelty) to run unabated, unchallenged, unconscious, and unseen. Therefore, although I suggest that the postmodern critiques have over-reached in a number of areas, this does not mean that there is never any seduction or nuanced language or behavior or authority that requires assessment and counter-strategies. The Enlightenment, however, prepared us for a rational inquiry into such phenomenon. One doesn’t need to abandon the rational in order to properly look into cultural theatre, nuance, and power. My point is to move away from the wall to wall, no escape, sense of things that one often gets from postmodern theory: “there’s nothing outside of the text,” as Derrida would have it. However, as I have been taking pains to state, although I refuse to fall prey to some of the assumptions of current theory, this does not mean that taking on issues of power is not an issue. I simply insist in these pages that it is not a hopeless project and that rational discourse and analysis can provide avenues and pathways in and around obstacles. Things like architecture, and other elements that make up the “everyday,” come about because of a material conversation going on in history and culture. These conversations have echoes into the past and designs on the present and the future. Many don’t “hear” the conversation or the argument, although at some level some can

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“feel” its consequences; things are too often accepted (and this is especially the effect of modernism) as just the way things are; the insistence on the unassailable, brazen present obliterates the conversation. Explaining this phenomenon to my students, I would ask them to look at pictures or films from the 1950s, or their own 6th, 7th, and 8th grade yearbook pictures. One’s reaction to these pictures is a mix of embarrassment and laughter. What changed from the initial moment when the camera caught that image, when we thought we looked pretty slick, and now? Time and perspective have allowed us to see what victims we were/are to social, commercial, and hormonal forces. As Shirley Bassey and the Propellerheads put it: “It’s all just a little bit of history repeating.” We thought we were constructing a highly idiosyncratic identity, making determined choices (parting our hair in just that way). In short, sooner or later history catches up with the breakaway freshness of many “new” movements, and these become recognizable (some more; some less) as having a structured order, a shape that was the result of time, conformity, and other determining forces. In Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton has discussed how social issues and values act as a form of nature, at least for a time: It is one of the functions of ideology to naturalize social reality, to make it seem innocent and unchangeable as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into Nature...Ideology in this sense is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility. (117).

The appearance of things as inevitable and unassailably “there” occurs through language, through advertising and image control, and through other social structuring devices. It also occurs because we are probably hard-wired to seek and cultivate routine. Planting seasons, foraging grounds, nurturing of the young, all require a routine and belief in a predictable cycle of traditional events. Because of these evolutionary forces, we may be pre-programmed to seek and accept patterns or paradigms that structure our behavior. These are not all bad things. of course. It’s important to have a traditional approach to the seasons to prevent starvation or exposure. It’s when this attention to pattern, ritual, and habit gets put into overdrive that we have to go on the offensive, especially if the routine involves brutality and injustice. It is then that we recognize that we are programmed to want, seek, and receive an answer. Sometimes this simply takes the form of repetitious behavior, a whistling in the dark. Our stories are structured with a beginning, middle, and end. We repeat stories, jokes, memories, parables (as we get older we repeat the

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same story over and over in the same day: a futile desperate attempt to simulate the sense of order we are losing). Little rhymes consume our brains for days even. We like the notion of the Bible as “answer” (it’s all in there). We like the regimen of the uniform, the synchronicity of marching, and saluting in concert together. We respect and adhere to “tradition.” Even the predictable daily grind is something we long for in retirement. As the movie The Matrix pointed out, 99% of the humans accept the program. We do so because we are so inclined that way. However, acceptance comes better packaged with the illusion that choice was seriously part of the process. Kunstler sketches the architectural version of this issue as folks in the 20th century came to terms with their surroundings: Ordinary citizens soon figured out how badly these projects were designed, but they were not guided by any intelligent public discussion of the issues involved. Very few architects or planners challenged the idea that this was the architecture of decency, freedom and democracy…. (G, 79)…And intellectually bankrupt or not, Modernism still wore its moral armor: It was the architecture that had stood up to Hitler, whatever its other failures. Yet people didn’t like it very much. Even if they had an inkling why, they were embarrassed to challenge it, to question the Formgivers as the aging Bauhauslers now liked to characterize themselves… (G 81)

In short, we are caught in the web of large cultural forces that seem to have a life of their own. Although we feel we are part of the conversation, the fact is, in many respects, we enter into a world that is already made, and, therefore, we make “choices” that ultimately support what already exists (we choose between jobs; not whether to have one). Many folks have an inkling of this situation and sport bumper stickers that proclaim that we should “subvert the dominant paradigm.” The irony is that one reads that bumper sticker while both drivers are on their way to work. But if we are programmed to take on programs, where is there any possible escape? How could we even be discussing it now? This is the intriguing area of thinking about “freedom.” Many writers discussed in this book focus on the instance and the nature of this potential moment of release, fleeting though it may be, infiltrated as it may be. The house and the lifestyle the house launches are always in some measure dedicated to this possibility. These writers are aware of the danger of the illusion of easy alternatives to the “mainstream.” In addition, many are aware that impatient desires for utopias can be worse than what they oppose. Therefore, some religions, such as some aspects of Buddhism, emphasize a quieting of the will,

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sensing that all urgings, utopian, revolutionary, or imperial, are dangerous. Therefore, there are risks in any attempt to seek change; it is fascinating, therefore, to watch the way these writers “build” their approach away from the conventional and the norm. Each writer is colored to some extent by the times and the passing issues of the day (e.g., world wars, social upheavals), but each also reaches out for other traditions, other cultures, and out of the fabric of possibilities each forms a distinct “foundation” to live a life of distinction. Thoreau put it clearly: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours” (Walden 190). What I am interested in capturing in this book is this process of imagining a life into being, with all the pitfalls and the potential alleys and seductions acknowledged. Fleeting glimpses of the world free from cultural ordering occur after much study, meditation, a life changing experience, or other abrupt interruptions of the apparently normal. It takes focus, knowledge of the way the world works and the way humans think, and exquisite alertness to get a view on imprisoning structures and creative openings and pivot points. As Emerson suggested, “Power resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim” (158). In this momentary glimpse between “states,” or what we might call paradigms, exists possibility: Emerson perhaps overstates this opening but nevertheless characterizes it as, “the way…shall be wholly strange and new” (158).42 This vision of liberation from norms, from assumptions, from the overarching superego, from guilt, from fear, from the tyranny of the normal and the now, from the sense that authority knows better, is hard won and harder to live out in some patterned manner. Nevertheless, it is this that drives much of the journey and the project discussed in these pages. Ultimately, as Thoreau suggested, the lifestyle written and lived may just be one way to “live deliberately” (60), and perhaps in a temporary way, to solve the problem of fixation, stagnation, and burdensome authority and routine. As opposed to trying to settle issues, the writers here seem to be looking for an approach that keeps things open as well. The house appears as the “app” for negotiating between these forces. I will explore the different ways this happens in each writer. The art of oppositional or creative gestures then, is to realize that one should not attempt to settle the issue for everyone else. Assertion of truth, on the right or left, can constitute or be associated with violence, suppression, and willful imposition. John Ellis provides a good example of turning this issue. When the French Revolution finally got rid of the social institutions that

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supposedly blocked the emergence of the natural and the good man, “the vacuum left…was filled not by the resplendent goodness of human beings but, quite the reverse, by the cruel tyrant Robespierre and his minions” (17). This is why the door to openness to seeing between the paradigms must always be left ajar. Snyder has an apt image for this sentiment: …plank shutter set Half-open on eternity…” (Regarding Wave 28)

And Jeffers speaks to this concern directly in “Advice to Pilgrims”: Finally I say let demagogues and world-redeemers babble their emptiness To empty ears… (CP 3: 118)

Ideologues and true believers are not only dangerous, current relativists say, but they are also boring. On this, I agree. Play, if it is like nature’s play, is positive in that it brings more life and diversity. Left wing anarchists and Derridean poststructuralists have been dominating these discussions and have laid claim to the anti-power, “play,” or the dissolution of power themes. However, some conservative thinkers might agree: “Exactly! This is what we mean by Liberty! And this is why we are opposed to restrictions, regulations, government impositions and social engineering.” Either one of these positions could launch a move into nature to construct a house. In sum, a lot of different folks have a sense of this need to be free of imposing mental machinery. So, there is this other side to us; in addition to being drawn to order, routine, and predictive programs, perhaps we are also, as Pico Della Mirandola had it in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, drawn to unrestricted, undefined, unlimited possibilities. In grand Renaissance tradition, Mirandola expanded the notion of a Christian person beyond the structured and ordered spiritual psychology of the day. Mirandola asserted that we are capable of becoming anything: of course, as the more governing Christian paradigm worried, and as Ellis points out above, this includes a range from monster to angel. Since our theme here is habitation, it is worth noting that Neal Evernden sees this polymorphous flexibility positively: we are, he says, “natural aliens,” since we can locate ourselves anywhere under most any conditions (Evernden 103-24). Out on I-40 in northern Arizona, there is some polymorphous “play” taking place. As one careens down the open Arizona highway, there suddenly appears a bizarre structure. Here stands a huge geodesic dome stuck on a pole in the middle of “nowhere.” It is, well, “different”; it is a

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terribly abrupt scene, of course, and the dome makes no gesture to sympathetically mix with the flat desert landscape. The “conversation” is theatrical, at best.

Fig. 1-11. Golf Ball House, I-40 in AZ.

The space-age dome (why do alien and space themes get associated with the desert?) seems to speak to some urgent if not desperate need to deviate, however eccentrically, from the perceived norm, from the expected. The fact that, for the most part, play and deviation are in these pages approached as positive things doesn’t mean one has to accept all forms of difference as equally good. In the same way that there is pattern that is enriching as well as damaging and deadening, there is “freedom” that is reckless and insulting. But the fact remains that close examination of houses, and the lives and lifestyles that they help deploy, allow us to be part of a cultural conversation, and, as Kunstler states, the house has begun “to broadcast information about itself and its owners” (G 167). In a particularly odd variation on these themes, I have been fascinated (and I am delighted to see that Kunstler as well is fascinated) with an interesting manifestation of this “play” and this “broadcasting.” Some folks with modest to meager resources find the need to “say” something that varies from the “language” expectations of the ranch style, track home, or the mobile home. What I have been fascinated by is what I have come to call “butterfly houses.” These are houses that add outrageous

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garish scenes to the house. In some houses, the front yard will have a miniature windmill or a wagon wheel with perhaps a steer skull half buried. On the East Coast, one finds more subdued versions of this, mostly consisting of ceramic forest animals (lately large star shapes in muted colors with no apparent signifying energy have appeared on the sides of houses in the East). Other houses will have clay deer wandering through the yard and clay squirrels scooting up the side of the house. Still other yards have “humorous painted plywood cutouts on the front lawn” (G 166). The typical one is of a woman bending over to garden, and in the process of doing so, she reveals her chubby legs and undergarments. My favorite, however, is the practice of nailing three or more huge wooden butterflies to the side of the house or to the side of the garage. In an attempt to use humor (one can only assume) to fend off the dreariness of life and these dreary boxy structures, this addition is an eye catcher for sure. Kunstler thinks the technique goes too far suggesting the “homeowner had surpassed his own humorous intentions. This is what comes of living in houses without dignity” (Kunstler Geography 167). I agree with Kunstler, but I am also on guard for the smug judgment of a class-motivated aesthetic here (yes, class considerations can be useful; I have objected to their obligatory use for every contextual discussion). One doesn’t want to fall into the trap that Thoreauresisted: the one that equates a kind of regulated and uniform appearance that supposedly controls morality. Certainly from one perspective, it is possible to imagine that the joke is not on those apparently without dignity, but on the rest of us who seem too terribly earnest and concerned about appearances. On the whole, however, Kunstler seems to be on target. What he details is the impact of modernism on our visual landscape, an increasingly populist, commercialized and trivialized culture. Don’t get me wrong here; I am not smugly denying the need for or benefit of marketplace values, but as opposed to Andrew Ross or Terry Eagleton, I do not assume that a collectivist agenda of opposition or a deadly clash of forces is called for. I don’t pretend that without marketplace values things would be more satisfactory. I’m suggesting that as with anything, there can be negative effects. This populist, commercialized, cultural moment of modernism has certainly yielded a blow against the “tyranny of taste,” but also it has given us “pink flamingoes, velvet art, and Liberace” (Kunstler 82). One might add track homes, zoning from hell, and endless freeways to this list. Worse, however, we are quickly moving from silly, kitsch culture to hypercriminal/rap culture, hyper-military culture, and World Wide Wrestling and Extreme Fighting culture. Given this context, a move towards an earnest and understated aesthetic (a rustic, woodsy, Asian aesthetic)

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doesn’t seem like a staid, uptight, tweed coat gesture, but more like a serious antidote if not viable alternative. Although at first blush, the writers showcased here appear to be part of a radical gesture, quite the contrary could also be argued. Jeffers, for instance, was attracted to the life at Carmel because of its traditional and timeless patterns, not its radical features: For the first time in my life I could see people living—amidst magnificent unspoiled scenery—Here was life purged of ephemeral accretions. Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white seagulls, as they have done for thousands of years, and will for thousands of years to come. Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life. (CP 4: 392)

Snyder as well identifies with “tradition,” and he is suspicious of the constant push to be new, trendy and different. Too often, he says, this means that craftsmen “think they must dismiss the work of the generation before…” (Practice 147). In sum, it seems clear that the house has become one of those areas or sites that embody contested values and visions for a whole host of political and cultural arguments that have been going on for some time. Bachelard referred to the cultural energy associated with a house by saying that the house provides a place for self-creation, redefinition, and for daydreaming (6). The house is a refuge to absorb, reshape, embody, and resist, to counter the cacophony of cultural energies as well as the profound natural forces that attempt to overwhelm one with cold, hunger, myth, fear, beauty and more. So the house points inward and also points outward. In defiance of all that smothers our creative well being, humans will still attempt to foster some sense of integrity, of identity, and to connect with natural surroundings. As Emerson put it: “Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world…” (qtd. in Sweeting 124). As already discussed, there are some clumsy versions of this impulse of positioning ourselves in nature. Well known are the suburbs that attempt to recreate a world that was destroyed to bring new houses and streets into being. The housing tracts are named after what used to be there. To the question, “And where do you reside?,” one can utter poetic answers such as “Coyote Springs,” “Deer Run,” “Oak Groves,” “Pleasant Hills Estates.” All are all testimonies and epitaphs to what is no more. One of my favorites went up in Prescott AZ, next to the University where I was teaching. The area was defined by piñon pine, juniper, and scrub oak that grow at the 4,000-7,000 ft. level in the mountains of the Southwest.

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Fig. 1-12. The landscape before the construction. Pines and scrub oaks dominate the terrain.

Fig. 1-13. Housing projects are frequently named after the landscape that has been swept away.

The development was named “Piñon Oaks: A Street of Dreams.” Of course, one is quite deep in Disney dreamland at this point since this name is a conflation of the two trees growing in the area. There are piñon pines and oaks of various kinds; there are no “piñon oaks.” When Emerson commanded us at the end of Nature to “Build therefore your own world” (56), I’m not certain he would have approved DNA re-splicing, or phytoremediation, as part of that vision. In addition to misnaming the trees that supposedly inspired the subdivision, most all of the trees were cleared to make room for the houses. The current web site, however, makes the following claim: “This subdivision was created with the intent of

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preserving the natural vegetation and views.”43 True, some native trees were left standing, but as the pictures reveal, the scene is mostly one of devastation. After a geometrical orgy occurred on the drafting table and after the crisscrossed streets were laid in with graph paper precision, colored gravel and one or two non-native trees were planted in the front yards. The authors of Suburban Nation point out other examples of this by stating, “Housing subdivisions are not the only components of sprawl with ridiculous names. Our favorite is a new section of Atlanta called Perimeter Center, a moniker that aptly sums up the confusion inherent in the suburban landscape” (5). Suburbs like “Piñon Oaks” are notoriously homogenous in design and, therefore, shopping has been removed and is located at some distance from the home. Modern zoning forbids the intermingling of commercial and residential that used to mark the charm of some small communities and towns. Kunstler suggests that the “place that results from zoning is suburban sprawl. …Its chief characteristics are the strict separation of human activities (or uses), mandatory driving to get from one use to the other, and huge supplies of free parking” (Home from Nowhere 110). Here one is far removed from the sense of a village where home, work, and market are intermingled. In this world of separate, discontinuous, and zoned existences, a kind of vertigo sets in and one begins to name things in a fantasy manner. In a larger context, there is even a more governing overarching contradiction. Peter Calthorpe, a San Francisco architect, points out that the oddity about the development and the “intense urbanization” of the west is that it has been “based on images and aspirations that are nonurban” (qtd. in Kunstler 260). Like housing developments that name the suburb after what used to be there (e.g., oaks, coyotes), Calthorpe suggests that the entire west was built with cowboy and country living imagery in mind while quickly eliminating such lifestyles.44 I wonder how many other families from California, in addition to mine, have the odd family photo from the 50s with everyone wearing striped western shirts with pearl snap buttons and sporting cowboy hats? In an ironic twist of narrative, the 60s suggested that we undo what has been brought into being by returning to nature. So, a version of the wilderness myth (western cowboys) helped create the end of wilderness and then another version of the wilderness myth (“back to nature”) attempts to undo this “pioneering” direction of progress and modernization. With the advent of the urban centers propelled by modernist rhythms, writers since Thoreau have been moving into the hills, mountains, and coasts in an attempt to engage alternative possibilities associated with living with nature.

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Modernism. It is a word easily tossed about by academics and others. What does it mean for our discussion here? The discontent with what I refer to as modernism is associated with a way of life dominated by speed, homogenization, repetition, cement sprawl, and unrelenting cacophony of commercialization in every quarter of physical space and psychological terrain. What accompanies this, of course, is a monumental diminishment of uniqueness, difference, and quirky creativity. All of the advantages to modern environments notwithstanding, there is an abiding concern about prefabricated materials on the one hand or incredibly alienating solid and massive financial and business buildings on the other, dominating our tactile and visual experience. In addition, with modernist energies comes an amazing erasure of history through the loss of physical remnants of the past. Another way of thinking about this modernist experience is to see that we are experiencing the replacement of “place” with “space.” In the color plate section of this book, Richard Misrach’s photo (from the cover of Baudrillard’s America), “Waiting, Edwards Air Force Base,” provides an excellent illustration of the concept of space versus place. Depicted there is the modern American family with its stuff. The space vs. place sensibility is enhanced when one juxtaposes that picture to the images of houses in place. This is what current philosophers describe as the psychic and political terrain created by the new globalism: space replaces place. In The Matrix, the concept of space, totally void of place, is explored as Neo finds himself in a train station (inside the system/matrix) where he speaks to an Indian family. For him, the station platform has no departure or arrival portals. This suggests a condition where his mind is totally severed from his body: space but no place. Peter Rowe discusses this issue in Modernity and Housing: …with modern transportation and communication we find ourselves capable of maintaining a network of social and business contacts based more on personal and individual affinities than upon geography…We are more likely to live in what has been dubbed a “non-place urban realm” than we were in the past. (26)

Scott Russell Sanders discusses the issue of the lack of rootedness from another perspective in Staying Put. He quotes John Berryman’s reply to a question regarding his roots. Berryman “ridiculed those who asked about his `roots’ (`as if I were a plant’), and he articulated something like a credo for…rootlessness”: “Exile is in our time like blood. Depend on Interior journeys taken anywhere.

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I’d rather live in Venice or Kyoto…but O really I don’t care where I live or have lived. …my wits about me, memory blazing, I’ll cope and make do.” (qtd. in Sanders103)

Sanders comments on Berryman’s claim: “It is a bold claim from modernist, psychic bravado, but also a hazardous one. For all of his wits, Berryman in the end failed to cope well enough to stave off suicide” (Sanders 103). As in the arena of identity, globalization/modernization seems to dilute and make quaint the notion of “a place.” “Google Earth” lets us take in the world with a sweep of our cursor. We can zoom in or out and find ourselves on the sidewalk in front of a house thousands of miles from our “current location.” We can take fly-overs through vast amounts of landscape in a few moments. In a similar manner, modern, multi or transnational corporations abandon any adherence to being “located” anywhere; currencies fly through cyber space; Airbus has created an airliner that will speed a small floating city of 800 travelers (three or four times current airliner capacity) at a time anywhere in the world; and jobs are moved around the globe with a click of the computer. In the face of all this, however, one needs to be careful of a rigid nostalgia for the “simple life” and the “way things were” before modernist energies unfolded, however. In addition, one needs to caution against wholesale diatribes against the modern and the new: it’s boring, and it’s hypocritical. The city, after all, has much to offer, and the “country” would probably have no meaning without it. Ultimately, we are talking about recasting a balance and a proportion and a vibrancy that we have lost or that we are about to lose. This book retraces some steps of noted practitioners and profiles the dance they enacted between, house, word, place, people, politics, and nature. Many writers, however, do feel that the pace of life under modernism’s sway becomes obsessively driven. Thoreau saw and felt it coming: “Why should we live with such worry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry” (W 61). In another Kunstler book, Home From Nowhere, he sums up the impact of modernism in this way: Our cities arose out of a wilderness practically overnight. Chicago grew like an algae bloom from a frontier outpost to ….a colossus of nearly 2 million in fifty years…These cities were laid out strictly for the convenience of real estate speculators with hardly a thought to civic art. They were then built…to accommodate industry of increasingly large scale, and large-scale industry was not a pretty thing. It invariable defeated the human scale, and in doing so, it degraded the human spirit. (Home 25)

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In All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, Stuart Ewen also characterizes the implications of the emerging modern environment. In Ewen’s analysis of the 1931 Century of Progress Exposition, he notes that on one end was a prototype of today’s suburb: these homes were technologically appointed homes of the future. The suburb would become a promise to be realized emerging as a substitute for the failing urban centers. Suburbs represented a rush to the country but in a mass industrialized, serialized fashion. At the other end of the exhibition, there was another display. This one was of a modern chicken farm with small house-like structures lined up next to one another. The photo of the chicken coops can’t help but reveal the way suburbs evolved. As Ewen states, the chicken farm “provided fairgoers with a truer crystal ball” than the optimistic future on display at the track home scene (228). It is interesting to note that the suburbs as well as chicken coop farms were both designed for laying eggs in an industrial manner. In addition, the baby boom needed chickens in the pot to fuel the production of a new generation.

Fig. 1-14. Aerial photo of Semi Valley, stacked and racked.

This book assumes a certain failure of judgment regarding our current modernist trajectory. I don’t mean to be smug about this or elitist. I have logged my share of guilt-free hours in Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart

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(and will again). And we have all benefitted from the advances in food production, medical research, mass production, and so many other aspects of “modern” life. So let’s be clear about this. We all enjoy the conveniences, benefits, and relative ease of modernist life (and our European friends, complaints notwithstanding, are total consumers of this lifestyle). It is the construction of space I am focusing on here, and the exploration of what alternatives we may need to find within and in spite of the successes and excesses of modernist energies. All in all, therefore, when I examine the evidence from writers, social critics, and environmentalists, I tend to agree that we have constructed a world that is increasingly dangerous, overly consumptive, ephemeral, and untenable. So I begin where Kunstler and so many others leave off. I begin by accepting, in large measure—while still acknowledging all that modernism has provided us—, the judgment regarding the speed, the nervous neuroticism, the danger, the brutality, rudeness, crassness, pollution, and, rapacious of our time. The physical environment with its strip malls and towering glass monoliths characterize this world. But from this point, I pivot to other considerations surrounding the question, “How should we live”? Kunstler devotes a few pages towards the end of his book to this issue. He notes a “few lonely figures around the country” who have “sent out intelligent signals about redesigning the human habitat in America” (249). The list is thin and suggests how little comes to mind when we ask, “How do we give meaningful, realistic alternative shape to our own lives”? One of the more interesting aspects of this topic is the spirit of rejection that informs the initial stage. The act of rebellion is very attractive in American and Western culture. The rebel, the unique individual, the wild-eyed artist have all played well in U.S. cultural narratives. Even conservative, country music culture enjoys swilling beer while listening to the lyrics of “Take This Job and Shove It.” The western film genre, of course, has been obsessed with the lonely and isolated cowboy figure. James Dean and alienated beat culture plugged into a version of the same theme. So, whether it’s a relationship, a job, a country, a town, a group, or a political allegiance, the act of chucking it all, of flipping off the norm, feels liberating and exhilarating. Left at this juncture, the exhilarating act might seem juvenile; for after all, doesn’t all departure have a return associated with it?45 In other words, with every departure, there is an arrival somewhere else. What happens there? Staying at the rejection phase is the charge I make against current critical approaches. Whatever you got; they’re against it. There is a step after this.

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Setting up home is our main focus in this book, but the initial act of defiance is crucial, for it is the catalyst that shapes the end. Departure has its own profile, energy, and aesthetic. In “Poetry of Departures,” Philip Larkin puts forward this gesture nicely: Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand, As epitaph: He chucked up everything And just cleared off, And always the voice will sound Certain you approve This audacious, purifying, Elemental move. And they are right, I think. We all hate home And having to be there: I detest my room, It's specially-chosen junk, The good books, the good bed, And my life, in perfect order: So to hear it said He walked out on the whole crowd Leaves me flushed and stirred, Like Then she undid her dress Or Take that you bastard; Surely I can, if he did? And that helps me to stay Sober and industrious. But I'd go today, Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads, Crouch in the fo'c'sle Stubbly with goodness, if It weren't so artificial, Such a deliberate step backwards To create an object: Books; china; a life Reprehensibly perfect. (86)

Philip Larkin’s poem points to two central issues that are at the heart of this book: 1) there exists in our collective culture a strong attraction to rejection of authority and retreat to nature as a healthy and renewing alternative to the ills, evils and, failures of modern life; 2) but, as Larkin’s line—“if/It weren’t so artificial”—suggests, there is also the strong sense

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that the move to another alternative has to occur with care, given the potential traps within the illusions of liberation. Questions remain about the haunting doubt in Larkin’s poem: Is the voice in the poem cowardly, afraid of renewal and rebirth? Or is the voice too corrupt and cynical for a turn back to seek rejuvenation and health? Perhaps the poem maps the thoughts of someone trying to rationalize his way towards acceptance of the mundane and the apparently unassailable routine of norms? Or is the poem demonstrating that we seek imaginary alternatives that can’t really fulfill us, but that act as momentary palliatives? Larkin’s poem gestures at an important issue in the discussion about alternative lifestyles. Is nature a refuge, a source of physical, spiritual, communal health and wisdom; or is it a dream as Eagleton suggested above? His poem asks the question, “What is the nature of escape, of refuge? Is it possible?” In addition to the Larkin poem, it is worth considering that this theme comes up in all of the writers under examination here. Wendell Berry expresses this yearning in “The Thought of Something Else.” Stuck in a life dominated by routine, a life that can’t measure up to what he imagines should be his lifestyle, the voice in Berry’s poem thinks of “something else.” Berry thinks about “another place” (55) while braving the “intersections of traffic” (55). In this poem, Berry celebrates “the old dream of going” to “another place, simpler, less weighted” (55). He seeks “a simple wakefulness filling/perfectly/the spaces among the leaves” (56). Knowing Berry, one imagines this tone as sincere, reliable non-ironic. There are many expressions of departure in recent cultural history. There are, of course, Joni Mitchell’s haunting lines from “Urge for Going.” In her treatment of the concept, “going” seems natural, seasonal, but the voice in the song can’t leave: I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down When the sun turns traitor cold And shivering trees are standing in a naked row I get the urge for going but I never seem to go I get the urge for going When the meadow grass is turning brown Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in Urge for going. (Joni Mitchell)

Also, during the Vietnam War, David Crosby put the sentiment into sociopolitical terms in “Wooden Ships”:

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Chapter One Wooden ships on the water, very free, and easy Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be Silver people on the shoreline let us be Talkin 'bout very free, and easy Horror grips us as we watch you die All we can do is echo your anguished cries Stare as all human feelings die We are leaving, you don't need us… (Crosby)

And finally, there is the timeless poem of departure and resettlement, “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” by William Butler Yeats. This piece was to put to song in the 60s by singers such as Judy Collins: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. … I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core. (Yeats 39)

Walt Whitman loved the work of Henry Thoreau because of his “lawlessness—his dissent—his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all that it chooses” (qtd. in Stewart 62). David Rothenberg expresses his appreciation for Edward Abbey, the nature writer, because Abbey actually “did it. He turned away from the institutions that had spawned him. Rothenberg notes that when academia “invited him to their inner sanctum, he walked” (75). Berry as well left academia for the farm and the writing table. Jeffers went straight to the work of stacking stones and crafting long lines.

Cultural Constructs In Escapism, Yi Fu Tuan asks the question: “[H]aven’t people always found it pleasing to stand on an eminence and to look at a composition of hills, and valleys, woods and meadows?” (109). He answers his own question: “Apparently not. Aesthetic appreciation of a panoramic scene appears to be an acquired taste…Rarer still is the desire to capture the scene in a work of art” (109). Yi Fu Tuan discusses the multiple centuries that Europeans have focused on this art and he pinpoints, as W.J.T.

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Mitchell does, moments in history when landscape painting coincided with European and Asian imperialism. This may be an interesting coincidence —between landscape painting and historical moments—but, as previously argued, a) this should not detract from our interest or appreciation for landscape, and b) this should not allow for a reductionist view of the paintings (or literature) in this genre. Ultimately, paintings can be made more interesting but cannot be reduced to history, nor can seeking refuge be reduced to the charge of being seduced by cultural forces. Appreciation for artistic artifacts and social gestures can be enhanced by cultural and historical contexts but cannot and should not be reduced by these contexts for the ideological ends of some argument. There is a long history of reclusion and a variety of motivations and inspirations associated with the act. I stated earlier that there are many websites devoted to the topic currently, and I mentioned Hermitary as an example. Ann Cline, in A Hut of One’s Own, states that the first recorded recluses were Po-i and Shu-chi from China (1000 BCE).46 It seems their main motivation was political. Retreating from the reign of Emperor Wu Wang, the recluses noted, .

He [Wu Wang] does not know he is “substituting tyranny for tyranny.” Since the “times are hopelessly decadent,” the recluses ascended “West Mountain” where “we pick its wild ferns. (Cline 3)

Political context is a classic motivation for an act of rejection. This act is frequently more than rejection; it is also an attempt to preserve and rejuvenate values lost, embattled, or in need of invention. Seeking a simpler, more pristine and sane world, individuals and groups may seek another avenue of existence. Therefore, according to Cline, as opposed to worldly pursuits, Chinese recluses like Lao Tzu would simply seek the ordinary. “The pursuit of ordinariness is interesting culturally when extraordinary people do it” (4). Leonard Koren has recently authored Wabi Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, where he lays out this complex combination of aesthetics and simplicity. The popularity of such books testifies to the ongoing attraction to and need for these values. It is this lifestyle and aesthetic that Kerouac admired in Japanese living patterns: I marvel at the calm of the Japanese haiku poets who just enjoy the passage of days and live in what they call “Do-Nothing-Huts” and are sad, then gay, then sad, then gay, like sparrows and burros and nervous American writers. (qtd. in Suiter 190)

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Thoreau moved to Walden at a time when there were many individuals pursuing similar kinds of forays into the wilderness. And, as Cline states, “What began after Lao Tzu as a trickle of gentlemen recluses had, a thousand years later, turned into a steady stream. Educated cosmopolites retired to the mountains and there recorded their lives in verse and painting” (Cline 4). And it is at this point, in that act of writing or expression, that we see this act not as rejection and separation but as resettlement, dialogue, and engagement. Although the recluse is “living apart form the world,” this isolated person “would eventually extend his influence not only back to the cities he abandoned but to distant shores” (Cline 4). Writing is the predominant form for having this connection and influence. Therefore, there have been many attempts at this lifestyle for a multitude of reasons in all kinds of times and social circumstances. Roderick Nash in Wilderness and the American Mind records one of the more interesting examples of this signaling, in this case, a commitment to isolation and nature worship. Nash relates a story that begins with headlines in the Boston Post: “NAKED HE PLUNGES INTO MAINE WOODS.” Nash then sketches in the basic story: The…article told how six days previously a husky, part time illustrator in his mid-forties named Joseph Knowles had disrobed in a cold drizzle at the edge of a lake in northeastern Maine, smoked a final cigarette, shaken hands around a group of sportsmen and reporters, and trudged off into the wilderness. There was even a photograph of an unclothed Knowles, discreetly shielded by underbrush, waving farewell to civilization. (141)

Knowles’ story was a huge success and news about his experiment traveled far and wide. Clearly the cultural forces were well at work. The upshot of the gesture seems to have been: Bathing in the refreshing rejuvenating waters of the primitive and the natural could wash away a life of excess, neurotic bad habits, and meaningless city life. Nash recounts the moment when on “October 4, 1913, a disheveled but healthy Knowles finally emerged from the Maine woods extolling the values of a primitive way of life, he was swept up in a wave of public enthusiasm” (Nash 142). The interest in primitivism as a cure for modern ills at the turn of the century is well known. This sentiment continued on in popular imagination with the strong interest in Tarzan and figures such as Davy Crockett. But the fact that we may step back and see a pattern makes these gestures no less real, important, or essential for the individuals involved and for those interested. These “places” of refuge and rejuvenation constitute more than space, as one can see. They are filled with artistic and political activities and

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nuanced psychological associations and states of being. There are frequently no maps to some of these refuges and places, which are gazed at or longed for from a hilltop; otherwise they wouldn’t be what they are. As Melville has Ishmael put it, such places are “not down on any map; true places never are” (56). Therefore, gestures in this direction often look awkward, pretentious, and even bizarre. These spaces are often inadvertently discovered and seem to survive because they are not directly defined, or they are only known for more than a generation or even less. For instance, Erik Davis has recently reported on an unintentional community called Druid Heights. This “community” has been in existence for about 50 years, and after its initial discovery, it would soon blaze into a hidden hearth of bohemian culture, a "beatnik" enclave years before the term was born or needed, and later a party spot for famous freaks. Scores of sculptors, sex rebels, stars and seekers lived or visited the spot over the decades, including Gary Snyder, Dizzy Gillespie, John Handy, Alan Watts, Neil Young, Tom Robbins, Catherine McKinnon and the colorful prostitute activist Margo St. James. Too anarchic and happenstance to count as a commune, Druid Heights became what Gidlow jokingly called "an unintentional community:" a vortex of social and artistic energy that bloomed out of nowhere, did its wild and sometimes destructive thing, and, for the most part, moved on. (27)

Davis describes the Heights using the same “off the map” metaphor Melville mentioned. The “off the map” distinction suggests a competing reality that is unsanctioned, not easily understood, and is wonderfully characterized by the Buddhist-like phrase “known but not known”: “The Heights was and is one of those rare places that is known, but not known. It was the site of hundreds of amazing parties over the last fifty years and yet remained tucked beneath some freaky beatnik cone of silence, its muddy dirt road still unmarked on many maps” (27). In The Simple Life, David Shi advises us to take the sometimes-awkward gestures of dreamers and hopeful utopians seriously: It is always easy to poke fun at utopians. But focusing only on the youthful follies of the hippies does not do justice to the complexity and the momentousness of the issues with which they were wrestling. Their quest for a more meaningful life that transcended materialism and embodied a personalist sense of community was indeed genuine, and in their effort to change things for the better, many communalists showed both courage and fortitude. Their search for the good life…represented a profound stirring of youthful souls responding to intolerable social developments. (Shi 259)

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The writers under consideration in this book needed to redefine place as a result of rejecting some aspects of modernist directions. Everything is at stake in the questions they put to themselves: When and how does a place become a place? What does it mean to be in a place? What’s the difference between inhabiting the land (or as Gary Snyder would have it, “reinhabiting”) and having an address and a zip code? Wallace Stegner once made a special claim for how a place comes about; a place is not a place until it has had a poet: No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry. What Frost did for New Hampshire and Vermont,…and Steinbeck for the Salinas valley, Wendell Berry is doing for his family corner of Kentucky, and hundreds of other place-loving people…are doing for places they were born in…or have adopted and made their own. (205)

Perhaps we need to look at what these writers made of their places as opposed to what else is happening to place in the general culture. To call a place into being, real places as Melville calls them, requires a driven sort of individual with heightened political and aesthetic sensibilities. This book explores the attempt to depict nature and the attempt to live intentionally (“deliberately,” says Thoreau) in and with nature. I want to explore the great need and urgency that humans, and particularly 21st century humans, have for a place. In his final paragraph, Kunstler puts it this way: There is a reason that human beings long for a sense of permanence. This longing is not limited to children, for it touches the profoundest aspects of our existence: that life is short, fraught with uncertainty, and sometimes tragic. We know not where we come from, still less where we are going, and to keep from going crazy while we are here, we want to feel that we truly belong to a specific part of the world. (G 275)

And I would add that this need gets satisfied not just by being in any place. I believe that the location matters, and the design and the materials in the house matter as well. In a recent email, Gary Snyder had an interesting way of thinking about site selection: “I believe for long-term mental health and creativity that one should not try to build a home in a place that you would not want to camp at. A good site should be livable year round” (Snyder, personal communication, 6/27/11). Kunstler decries the impact of urban living, the car, and dehumanizing architecture that attends all of this. Watching TV, he says, only approximates real relations with people.

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In a similar manner, he suggests that as with relationships so “it is with the places where we spend our days on earth”: An approximation of a neighborhood or a town is not enough—and tragically that is what every American subdivision is. We long for the real thing but have lost the means to provide it for ourselves. (Home 24)

Worse than this, according to Kunstler, is that we know we are living in these half-hearted approximations. We simply get by, exploring various versions of numbness such as alcohol, “success,” our jobs. And finally “it chips away at our dignity until after a few years have gone by, and our sensibilities are too worn down to register the discomfort of this loss” (Home 24). But most interesting is the powerful sense of “nowhere” writers like Kunstler say our modern living spaces have created. This is the result of the city as machine designed by Le Corbusier at the beginning of the 20th century. The suburb and the office park are pastoral, air-brushed, scripted, geometrically symmetrical, antiseptic spaces. These spaces are “homogenizing and intolerant of diversity…failing to provide odd little corners for people with odd little lives” (Home 260). My sons, Daniel and Dylan, always liked playing in their grandparents’ turn of the century farmhouse in New Hampshire because there were nooks and crannies everywhere. Odd turns down long hallways led to places like upstairs to the attic. There one finds an octagon shaped window where they could look three stories down and overhear conversations, watch the cat stalk a grasshopper, smell the pines, the dry leaves, and the mysterious woods just beyond. The luminous world of childhood locates itself clearly, intimately, and tightly within the surrounding environment. We seek and re-seek these special corners that aren’t scripted, that allow for exceedingly private spatial comfort and nuance. We seek them because we need them. Children know they need these spaces. They know intuitively what we later discuss in intellectual terms as adults: that there is a crucial relationship between our creativity, our rejuvenation, our sense of health and the spaces we inhabit. Space either reinforces the deadening routine, or it creates the possibility for rejuvenation and freedom. Surely there are powerful cultural forces that shape our lives; but when one sees children move instinctively to intimate and creative space, one tends to side with a force of nature here.

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Fig. 1-15 My two boys looking expectantly out the winter cabin windows in Ustaoset, Norway. The mysterious, wondrous world framed by a window.

Bachelard agrees when he suggests that the “hut dream,” or the dream we all have for an intimate space, is essential to our nature, not an artifice or a socially constructed notion. If we agree that the house is for dreaming, for strengthening our inner lives so we may go out and forward, then, as Bachelard says, it is “our corner of the world…our first universe” (4). Bachelard goes on to say that the chief purpose of the house is to “protect the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace” (6). It is in our human and well-known dream for a refuge, a “hut,” that Bachelard says reveals our “hope to live elsewhere, far from the over-crowded house, far from the city cares. We flee in thought in search of a real refuge” (31). Years ago I read a charming article in Utne Reader where D. Price connects his current need for simple and personalized living space with youthful dreams of a “hobbit house.” It was good to see that this article is still on the web. As an adolescent, he built his “first hideaway” and spent “every spare hour…sawing, chopping, and nailing it together….After much hand wringing I broke the secret to my family and they helped me finish off the roof” (2). As an adult, he “got swept away into adulthood, marriage, jobs, and cars, but I kept dreaming” (2). Price leads off his article by taking the reader back to a special place: But by far my most enduring memories are of the forts I built. What is it about kids and forts anyway? Why do children construct raggedy tree houses, blanket forts, and snow igloos? Do we share a basic need to make cozy, private spaces where we are free to be ourselves? (1)

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The story ends with a tribute to Thoreau and the successful realization of a simple life in a “9-foot by 12-foot red-willow hut” next to a river in Oregon. “Less can be more,” says D. Price, “and is sometimes much better” (3). Therefore, from Thoreau to Jeffers to Snyder and with many folks along the way, there has been a long discussion in American culture regarding resistance to the seductions of deadening environments. This accounts for the long and noble (if not at times wayward) tradition of dissent and rejection in American culture and then the coming home of reinhabitation.

Reinhabitation In a general sense, we have all awakened to the need for a meaningful place, a safe place and a clean place at this moment of 21st Century industrial and commercial culture.47 Whether it is the hut of an Asian poet/recluse, a Celtic hut of a Christian father, the cabin of the Romantic writer Thoreau, or a counter cultural abode of a poet such as Gary Snyder, these gestures speak loudly about the need for a living gesture that advances our sense of beauty, purpose, and justice, as well as our sense of identity, ecology and economy. As Bachelard put it: “The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths” (6). Thoreau embodies this kind of life style in a direct and instructive manner: I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. (W 72)

Bachelard’s daydreaming, as exhibited by Thoreau, can take a number of different shapes. It’s important to underline that nature, like many refuges, is a physical place but also serves social and political purposes. Nature can function as, what Foucault characterizes, a “heterotopia.” Michael Foucault calls places that are sought out as relief from cultural pressures, heterotopias. These places are useful for reconsidering the way one has thought of the world, the assumptions, left, right, or otherwise, one might have clung to for decades. As opposed to the left-oriented critical approaches outlined above, Foucault’s space is a place free from a preordained political horizon. It is a space, like the retreat explored in these

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pages, for rethinking. Foucault states that these places can be recognized as such because certain things happen there and not other things. These places provide alternative space to rethink our relations with the world:

Fig. 1-16. Pathway to an alternative life: Carmel, CA 6/2011. There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. (24)

Quite suddenly, it seems urgent to look at these unique ways of living that have been carved out in defiance, or at least as exceptions to the perceived grinding uniformity of modernity. In other words, it is not enough to reject what we know is not affirming. We need guides to show us how re-integration and re-inhabitation occur. These “experiments” are precious mutations, offered to us as alternative pathways. Such an examination seems warranted given the sense of fullness, elegance, simplicity, and grace claimed or at least sought after and honored. But perhaps more importantly, given our current and continuing ecological crisis, it seems imperative to examine the houses and lives of writers who

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have invested so much energy into the theme of place. By living differently, they have consciously been carrying on a conversation with their fellow citizens. This book is intended to turn up the volume of that conversation.

Fig. 1-17 The nature writer at work. Peter Zapffe (1899-1990) working at his desk. A Norwegian mountaineer and writer.

These writers separated themselves from the forces associated with modernism and carved out a different pathway. This search for a place that one honors with commitment, writing, and humility seems central and primal to the human experience. As opposed to the arguments advanced earlier around “constructed” living, perhaps there is something here about home that we have lost and need to re-find. Perhaps the same voices that call the salmon upstream, the birds and sea turtles towards migration patterns of birth, mating, and feeding are at work here as well, calling us home. Perhaps there are voices echoing in us that make this gesture necessary for some people, but certainly recognizable by so many more who would like to join in. Surely, we all sense a kind of biological and primal “imprinting” regarding place. Some people say they are drawn to the mountains; others to the coast and the sea; still others to the open, serenely stark deserts. Critics like W.J.T. Mitchell and Yi Fu Tuan suggest these affinities are constructed by culture. But Lawrence Buell recently was struck by E.O. Wilson’s claim regarding the “three ingredients of humanity’s putative primal habitat and their persistence for shaping the taste for landscape”:

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Chapter One “It seems that whenever people are given a free choice,” Wilson observes, “they move to open tree studded land on prominences overlooking water.” Before my Thoreauvian eyes immediately flashed an image of the Walden cabin site. (Buell 256)

Ed Abbey, in a passage at the beginning of Desert Solitaire, suggests an even broader set of imprinting possibilities: This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront….there’s no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment…For myself, I’ll take Moab, Utah. I don’t mean the town but the country that surrounds it—the canyonlands….all that which lies beyond the end of the roads. (1-2)

Several writers in the 20th century have been so compelled by the opportunities within the sociopolitical terrain of “nature” that they have shaped their writing projects, their houses, and their very lives around the concept. The writers who are the focus of this book have mapped out this territory for the rest of us. They are the foundation for a cultural movement that seems to be gaining some degree of traction. In the face of seductive cultural forces pulling in other directions, Thoreau, Jeffers, Snyder, Berry, Sanders, and others have taken the large leap away from the safe, the approved, the expected, the assumed, into new lands. The importance of contemplating these projects is manifold. First it is interesting to see how the house is another form of expression as humans try to invest in a life of meaning, paying tribute to beauty and purpose by making it part of the ritual of our daily routine. These are not shrines or museums however; they are living structures with associated rituals and patterns of behavior that are meant to be part of a larger project. Houses are physical, palpable manifestations of the values that are also being built into the writing and the poetry. I am interested in the relation between a house, a writer’s life, and the writing project that bring all together. Because these writers make a conscious connection between writing and the life lived, they form a unique grouping. Thoreau gets at this issue when he distinguishes between writers who live the life associated with writing and those who do not. He states that it is

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…vain…to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow…The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical, wooden, dull to read. (qtd. in Stewart 4)

Fig. 1-18 The nature writer’s desk. Peter Zapffe’s (1899-1990) writing desk. A Norwegian mountaineer and writer.

The direction is towards a cultivation of the intensity of place, the brilliance of simplicity, the creativity of self-sufficiency, the challenge of long periods of solitude, and the wonder of texture, color, shape and heft. In what might be called the aesthetics of immediacy, Ed Abbey (in a quote used already in this discussion) was leading us away from mystery and fog back to the world when he said “I know nothing whatever about a true underlying reality, having never met any….For my part I am pleased enough with surfaces” (xiii). This is what is contained in Mark Van Proyen’s insistence that we be allowed to “most fully inhabit our own moment in our own time” free from “an insane world overdetermined by …the rote groupthinks which are bred from an endless and irresolvable contest of cultural politics” (Van Proyen). An early title for this book was to be taken straight from Thoreau: “Live the Life You Have Imagined” (W 190). Don’t simply indulge the imagination in passive fantasy; use it as a first step towards moving in the world. I was drawn to that line as a possible title because it speaks directly to my interests in these pages. Snyder is totally focused on putting his life into the watershed, the trees, the animals, his tools, his neighbors, his family, the weather patterns, and the energy systems all of these intertwine with. Jeffers moves into the world of rock, ocean, spiral galaxies, and

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hawks as he feels the miracle of time, creation, and power in the rough surface of the granite stone and the crashing ocean waves; he listens to the inhuman cry of the hawk, and he locates himself on a shore, with an ocean, near a valley and a river in Carmel. For Scott Russell Sanders, Wendell Berry and others, the story is the same. And in each case, this sense of place is memorialized and embodied by the house and the act of writing, which “brings it all home.” Even Ed Abbey, who never built his own house, had this image of the house in his mind: I am resolved therefore to continue on my present course; to compose somehow the one good novel; to try and be good to my wife; to run Cataract Canyon in a kayak; to raze more billboards; to build that solid house of rock and wood far out somewhere where my sons and grandsons can find at least a temporary refuge from the nightmare world… (qtd. in Loeffler 90 my emphasis)

Although Abbey never built a house of rock and wood, Jack London did. In The Iron Heel, London described a Socialist hideout on a ranch. He was describing his own ranch, Beauty Ranch, bought in 1905 “for beauty,” in Sonoma County, northern California. The house project was really memorialized, however, in the novel The Valley of the Moon. The ranch was an attempt to create an agricultural paradise, although it was a bottomless pit where he poured most of his earnings. The $70,000 “Wolf House” took three years to build and burned to the ground as he was preparing to move in. A quote from London featured prominently on the website “Jack London’s Ranch Album,” reveals to what degree the ranch project consumed him: I have long since decided to buy land in the woods, somewhere, and build. For over a year, I have been planning this home proposition, and now I am just beginning to see my way clear to it. I am really going to throw out an anchor so big and so heavy that all hell could never get it up again. In fact, it’s going to be a prodigious, ponderous sort of anchor. (Jack London’s Ranch Album)

In this sense, houses serve writers as more than shelter against the literal storms. The house is part of a general project to make beauty and value systems become visible. The ideas, hopes, and subtle sensibilities that linger in the silent spaces inside each one of us struggle and strain to find their way into the world of form and matter. Jeffers makes this a strong connection when he compares stonemasons with poets. Considering the futility of building monuments or poems, Jeffers decides that, in spite

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of the fact that all crumbles and fades, it is worth it to be a stone-cutter and a word crafter: …stones have stood for a thousand years and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems. (CP 1: 5)

In this way, we try and bring our identity, our sense of appreciation for our short time on Earth, our deeply felt sense of fine untranslatable beauty, into relief, into some observable, intelligible form.48 According to Jeffers, this is all we have: And this is bitter counsel, but required and convenient; for, beyond the horror, When the imbecility, betrayal and disappointments become apparent,-what will you have, but to have Admired the beauty? (CP 3: 132 “Invasion” my emphasis)

In addition to admiring the beauty, many feel compelled to capture the fleeting moments of people, moments, and hues (Thoreau calls this the “rainbow rush”) in words, paint, music, or, as this book suggests, in intertwined triad of words, houses (wood, stone, glass, light), and lifestyles. What’s at stake? Well, one answer comes from John Updike in “Perfection Wasted.” He laments in this poem “the ceasing of your own brand of magic,/which took a whole life” to build. He contemplates “The whole act” and wonders who could replace him: Who will do it again? That’s it: no one; Imitators and descendants aren’t the same. (231)

As one glances out of a window, there is a long beam of sunset light on a seascape, or speeding along a highway we may appreciate the long, autumnal, shadows running away from trees over a plowed field, or as we scurry to a meeting downtown, we note a cloud drifting by in the glassy surface of a skyscraper. As we look up with heightened senses to freeze frame any compelling landscape, we often have a sense of our own mortality, our own joy for our existence, and our deep desire to communicate these momentary urgent episodes in a way that outlasts the fleeting nature of such singular experiences in a harried life.

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Fig. 1-19. The speed of modern experience is fleeting and hard to capture.

So, there is the rush of time that corrodes moments of heightened experience; these moments, the very best of our lives, are eroded by the details and demands of a demanding world. Recall Bachelard: the house protects the dreamer. A house is an embodiment of our values, and it can serve as a staging ground to conduct the business of establishing a life of beauty and purpose: “stones have stood a thousand years” (CP 1: 5), says Jeffers. A house, therefore, is a way to take a stand, a way to preserve values, a way to say something, a way to remind ourselves and others what we care about. In The Practice of the Wild, Snyder makes a strong statement for the home as centerpiece: "The heart of a place is the home, and the heart of the home is the firepit. All tentative explorations go out from there" (26). And in a related tone, Arne Naess suggested similar sentiments about the importance of place: It is one of the first ways we begin to try and “live out our priorities” (“Tvergastein: An Example of Place” 1).

Notes 1

Ursula Le Guin’s eco/political/ philosophical novel, called The Dispossessed, is essentially about this issue as well: this novel dwells on and ponders the idea that all journeys outward are inevitably a coming home. 2 Of course, difficulties arise when we imagine how a “constructed” self becomes aware of anything; and, one asks, is that awareness constructed? The concept, in sum, is conflicted. 3 In some socialist versions of historical determinism, the last phase of all of this, communism is not a paradigm; it is, awkwardly, the resolution of paradigms. 4 This behavior tempts one to level the charge of constructedness and negatively repetitious action. 5 See “Waiting,” in the color plate section. This photo, which appeared on the cover of Baudrillard’s America, illustrates the sense of space vs. place I am

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referring to. The American family with its amassed Wal-Mart purchases stands next to flag and pickup seemingly dazed and disoriented. Although they are not surrounded by track homes, strip malls and freeways, this photo is meant to suggest the psychocultural sense of that experience. 6 See my “Introduction” to The Coyote in the Maze for Abbey’s definition of desert beauty. 7 Patrick Murphy puts this assumption of teaching duty quite emphatically: The cry of protest must always be heard and supported and must always be made available for students to understand the crises, the issues, the problems that beset people. In particular, as teachers, citizens, and parents, we must work hard to bring continuously, before the majority, before the dominant, the protests of the disenfranchised, the exploited, the oppressed, the imperiled. (Explorations 59) Even though Murphy argues that solutions must be proposed with protests, I must say after teaching from this perspective for over 30 years, I counter that this is a narrow focus of literary studies, and teaching literature should consist of more, much more, than this. If advanced as a reductionistic definition of literary studies, it should be debated whether this even makes sense. Isn’t it suspect to select context in this way for students, to bring our political crusades into the reading of “the best [yes I know, “Who decides?”] that has been thought and said”? In addition, in the same way literature studies have changed to reflect these values today, what makes Murphy (an accomplished scholar of change) believe this is the way it will be or should continue to be? The plight of those suffering from injustice may emerge and hopefully will emerge in the course of literary studies (hopefully through the writers of poems and novels we are supposedly focusing on in class), but it is a question whether these studies should be reduced to this activity, solely. 8 Denise Levertov’s wonderful poem, “The Secret,” captures this spirit of nonmanipulated student discovery. See her poem in her 1964 New Directions collection, O Taste and See or see the poem at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178477. 9 The relativity that concerns me is a particular feature of postmodern thinking that insists that whatever constant or truth one might advance (e.g., cities are loud, dirty and oppressive, nature is beautiful and nurturing), it is easy to find a splintering counter example to destabilize acceptance of that judgment as a “normalizing” or legitimate constant in order to turn the discussion to another agenda. The object is not to settle the issue or clarify differing points of view, or to lead someone (and oneself) to a new, or better, more thoughtful, more highly developed sense of beauty; the goal is to undo anyone’s attempt to move towards resolution since a political agenda is always at stake in all arguments. Beauty is something to be endlessly revealed and exposed as a sleepy mist of ideology, where political camps are actually staking out ownership and marching up and down claiming ownership. Some camps are there, so the “radical” story goes, to lull us to sleep and shape us into lotus-eaters in a commodity-ridden Matrix.

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Ross is not an isolated instance on this issue. On the contrary it is a universally stated goal for most postmodern critical theorists “in which everything is contested, everything is contestable” (Sugirtharajah 9). Hair slicked back, sullen, collar turned up, this approach seems not to know what to do other than to oppose something, anything. In this same text, one is told that postcolonialism, for instance, uses “poststructuralism, Marxism, cultural studies” (Sugirtharajah 8), etc. The author, as most of these authors do, does confess that the terms are fuzzy and that the field is fluid. This, I’m afraid, is an understatement. 11 The vision is one of putting rival groups together to defeat a common enemy. But what does the agenda of opposition oppose, one might ask?: apparently it is capitalism anywhere and everywhere. One gift of postmodern political theory, however, is to define power as diffuse (we are all in it and complicit), not something held by a few evil-doers as mid 20th Century critics had it. This insight was part of the mid-century collapse of Marxism. However, the persistence of this unrelenting need to oppose, this approach of obsessive, oppositional politics has caused some like Niall Ferguson (of Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford) to counter with other visions of political trajectories besides a listing of crimes and failings: “The American Dream is about social mobility, not enforced equality. It’s about competition, not public monopoly. It’s also about philanthropy, not confiscatory taxation.” I should note that this “other” view is seldom ever referred to as a competing notion of how to frame the U.S. experience. We should be having such critical thinking exercises in class where we hear from around the political spectrum. See “Yes, Wall Street Helps the Poor,” at http://www.niallferguson.com/site/FERG/Templates/GeneralArticle.aspx?pageid= 438&cc=GB. In this article he makes and argument for charter schools funded partially through donations. The “science” that evaluates how we respond to the quality of external conditions, and further, how we judge and evaluate the world around us, constitutes, today, a large and cumbersome set of theories, critiques and evaluations; this is the rather undefined group of readings and approaches that the social sciences and humanities refer to as Critical Theory or Cultural Theory. It has been noted, more than once, that the field is pulled together more by wish than any particular intellectual thread or defining and culminating element. The back-cover tribute by Dick Hebdige for Cultural Studies makes my point: “the topics range from the genealogy of the trope of race to representations of people with AIDS, from contemporary crime fiction to the erotic fantasies of sci-fi fans.” What pulls it together one asks? The articles are “bound together by a sense of urgency.” What urgency, one further asks? “[H]ow to articulate not just analytical possibilities but those riskier social and political possibilities on the borders between competing institutions and practices.” One is left wanting with this definition. The other plug on the back cover, this time from John Clarke, applauds the collection’s ability to go “a long way forward” to “capturing contemporary cultural studies.” A long way forward to, “capturing”? This is hopeful, expectant, charming, but evasive,

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organizing theory, in search of a raison d’etre. Validating this sense, Clarke proclaims that the mix of articles in the collection demonstrate “the openendedness of cultural studies.” 12 Many signs in the OWS demonstrations declare, “Capitalism is the crisis.” Although there are “regular” people drawn to the protests decrying unfairness, this “movement” is heavily influenced by labor and other groups (anarchists, veterans of WTO demonstrations, Alliance for Global Justice, etc.) desperately trying to push and lead while remaining in the shadows. These groups seem professionally opposed to capitalism. Recently Andrew Ross has emerged as an official supporter of the OWS movement. He has found a way to reintroduce himself into the “agenda of opposition” and to explore the possibility of uniting the disparate groups. He opposes student loans and supports the students’ right to protest against loans. Of course, the irony is that Ross and others want to blame the banks, but at the same time he must admit that there is “a recognition that my own salary is debt financed.” Amazingly, he also recognizes this “brings an element of complicity.” It is colleges after all that have raised tuition not the banks. Although he has admitted he’s complicit, the analysis stops there. Ross’s unsatisfactory answer to the problem is for the U.S. to federally fund colleges. The idea that colleges need to be reinvented and lower their costs never comes up; nor does the issue of Ross’s salary. Personnel costs usually absorb at least 80% or even 90% of college budgets. A recent article in The Chronicle by Jack Stripling and Andrea Fuller, “Pay Gap Widens Between Presidents and Faculty,” is meant to cast shame on the distance between CEOs and faculty, but in comparing the two groups the average faculty salaries should raise eyebrows. The average faculty salary at Ross’s institution, NYU, is $227,000. One might add that institutions like NYU have thousands of faculty, so one can only imagine how this adds up for student debt. Universities have not done an admirable job across the nation explaining why additional costs are being passed on to students, insisting that spending levels must remain at the levels before state cutbacks. The banks do not raise tuition; they provide loans for what the colleges are charging to fund, among other things, the salaries for the likes of Mr. Ross. (See Chronicle of Higher Education, “Protestors Plan a National `Student-Debt Refusal’ Campaign,” 11/16/2011). 13 The conservative response has been to counter this perceived regulatory set of energies with an opposition argument against “government in our lives.” Conservatives point to “liberty” while liberals point to “justice.” As opposed to increasing regulation, conservatives say we ought to let folks find their own independent way and perhaps have a town hall meeting if one needs a larger consensus. Liberals find that this leaves too much to chance wanting a more broadly applied ruling. This describes the social sphere. The conservative response in literary studies has been somewhat muted. Nevertheless, as documented elsewhere in these pages, there have been many counter responses to the current direction. 14 Much has been written about the retreat of radical political elements into academia after the Paris revolts. Eagleton has usually figured large in these discussions. The following is from David Banash’s article “Activist Desire,

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Cultural Criticism, and the Situationist International”: "`Watch Out for Manipulators, Watch out for Bureaucrats’ was the slogan of the Situationists in 1968 as they struggled to realize the revolution in the face of reactionary desires on all sides. Today, unlike many other Situationist slogans, this one has been taken to heart by Anglo-American critics. Consider Terry Eagleton's position on postmodernism and its relationship to theory. According to Eagleton, poststructuralism is simply a displacement of the revolutionary desires of left-oriented groups like the Situationists into the safe and thoroughly bourgeois confines of universities and publishing: `Post-structuralism, which emerged in oblique ways from the political ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and which like some repentant militant became gradually depoliticized...has been among other things a way of keeping warm at the level of discourse a political culture which had been flushed off the streets’ (25). No doubt when Eagleton says that politics were taken off the streets he is referring largely to the failures of 1968. In this reading, poststructuralism is simply the defeated and impotent heir of the Situationists. For Eagleton, a committed Marxist, this is the great failure of both the Situationists and theory as a whole. While theory does provide a space for revolutionary desire, it also confines that desire. Would-be revolutionaries become the manipulators and bureaucrats of academic institutions because they cannot translate theory into an instrumental revolutionary force. As Eagleton puts it, left to the theorists `the power of capital’ will remain `so drearily familiar’ that those who espouse its critique or transformation only `succeeded in naturalizing it’ (23). Given Eagleton's Marxist position, there is nothing surprising in his critique of poststructuralism's seeming inability to actualize political change. What is far more interesting is that Eagleton's position is repeated and developed even more strenuously by cultural critics with stronger allegiances to poststructuralism. In their book Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (1991), Steven Best and Douglas Kellner argue that the value of any theory is the possibility it offers to actualize `radical social transformation’ (298). Like Eagleton, Best and Kellner argue that theory must develop an immediate relationship to practice or remain `just another specialized discourse’ whose members accumulate cultural capital and theorize `just for the fun of it’ (298). In essence, theorists become, again, manipulators and bureaucrats serving only their own reactionary interests. The problem of theory's relationship to practice is embedded in the many articulations of cultural criticism's project, and, as we shall see, it is precisely these urgencies that have powered the resurrection of the S.I” (Banash). 15 Given that the old oppositional movement (Marxism) had failed, this new opposition program continues to assert that we have entered into a new, or post, or post-post period, and within this arena is posited an agenda of opposition with no solution or outcome as a defining characteristic. The end game, it turns out, can’t be stated since 1) this would be an act of totalization (another indictment in the postmodern lexicon), and 2) if stated it would unveil a rather brazen set of stubborn and stale motivations. In sum, folks in this political arena lost the battle but went into hibernation waiting to emerge when a new moment presented itself. What else can an oppositional mind do? Ross goes on in the article to ask some good

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questions, such as, if Marxism is discredited for trying to speak for everyone and theorize everything (using universalist and totalizing language), does the new movement do the same thing? And he asks, “In whose interests is it…to declare the abandonment of universals?” (xiv). These questions are left open, but he has, in good Enlightenment fashion, shown he has a rational mind that can unpack issues with induction and deduction: the very rational processes that the “movement” is suspicious of. Of course, one of the universals (Ross’ book is called Universal Abandon) that must be chucked overboard is beauty. (One might ask, why is fairness or justice any less a “universal” than beauty?). When I was an undergraduate, the two models depicting how a properly “educated” person engaged with the world had a decidedly aesthetic sense. The focus was on how a “developed” individual experienced beauty, or lived fully in the moment. I place ironic quotes around those two terms since as we have seen such “universals” are not allowed to stand without “interrogation” and without acknowledging there is no right or singular answer to the issue of what it means to be educated. Certainly today, however, it is more likely that “educated” means having a firm grasp and focus on sociopolitical issues, not “abstract concepts” such as beauty. Literature as an object of study was moved aside for discourse theory allowing the “critic” to engage in a compete list of political issues. As mentioned, I am not in disagreement with the spirit of questioning and wondering associated with the postmodern enterprise or the traditional values of questioning associated with a liberal education. And I do believe that the humanities needed some freshening along these lines. What I object to are the underlying and unspoken motivations for questioning and wondering, assumptions that shape the discussion and research in a highly scripted and rigid fashion. When this makes its way into the educational process, uncontested, intellectuals committed to critical thinking should be alarmed. 16 History, of course, is the mysterious force of objectivity, inevitability, and reference for Marxists. 17 In the opening years of the growth of critical theory studies, I held a large degree of sympathy and excitement regarding the practice. The fact was that little “political” and “social” thought made its way into literary discussions. One of my best professors, after repeated questions from me about Emerson and economics, finally said, “You’re trying to make a political scientist or sociologist out of me. I teach literature.” We insisted, however, and prevailed in the belief that the field be concerned with the progressive issues many of us wanted to talk about. The field has listed so much in that direction, however, that it is on the verge of imploding from lack of definition and from ideological cooptation. 18 Nevertheless, for all the reckless forays through other professional disciplines, there have been fruitful connections in areas say between computer programming, language and social patterns. The Matrix is a case in point where the combination was enormously fruitful and productive (one recalls the “product placement” of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations in the movie). In addition, perhaps one might make an argument asserting that without the postmodern critique on modernism, one couldn’t regain the interest in the rustic and the authentic that was

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prevalent before modernism. The influence of John Ruskin, William Morris and the arts and crafts movement were displaced as modernist forces gained strength and dominance (Rowe, Modernity and Housing 79). This movement was critical of industrialization, excessive ornateness and championed natural surfaces, truth to materials, and images of local flora and fauna. One of the tensions in recent theoretical discussions has been to reconcile the claims of language, power, and reflexivity vs. the claims of the (sometimes) science based, reference based, experiential based world of nature writing. As my article, “Carrying the Weight: Jeffers’s Role in Preparing the Way for Ecocriticism,” suggests, Jeffers’s work is much more known and used by folks in the sciences than in the humanities. These tensions between the world of stacking stones, feeling textured surfaces, and the immediacy of things vs. the world of language, text and culture studies can be productively approached and understood by examining the lives and writing of the artists studied in these pages. 19 See Tony Bennett’s account of the relation between art for art’s sake and related sociohistorical factors and forces in Formalism and Marxism. 20 Jeffers’s brother was an astronomer at the Lick Observatory, and Jeffers was up to date with all the latest astronomical findings. 21 Too often there is a clear and deliberate agenda to the current destabilizing tactic. The left has for some time been contemplating its re-emergence after Paris 1968 and after the Reagan/Thatcher redeployment of market capitalism, performance culture, and clear opposition (“Take down this wall”) to socialist states such as the USSR, Maoist China, Cuba and the like. The left was noticeably and embarrassingly quiet on criticizing the excesses of these “revolutionary” cultures and has paid a credibility price. In addition, it was silent when it came to recognizing the vitalizing and energizing aspects of capitalism in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Clinton’s policy “compromises” with market forces drew fierce criticism from the base of the left, and Obama has recently experienced similar treatment. America’s victory in the Cold War sent the left deep into insular doubt and resentment. The result was an attack (mostly academic) against “truth” and “foundations” aimed at Western European culture and a radical assertion of relativism aimed in the same direction. New historical periods (postmodernism, the post American world) were announced to frame these new academic studies. This activity has been restricted to an academic exercise, but recent events might allow these energies to capitalize on the U.S.’s weakened condition post 911. Many critics of U.S. culture in the humanities have become amateur socialists over the decades claiming to know much about the secret workings of “power” but providing no data or empirical evidence. On a larger scale, one might see this kind of analysis as part of an ongoing form of attack on a globally distributed capitalism. Current concern over the middle class and the nostalgia for midcentury, union-protected salaries is associated with globalization finally hitting home. We had early signs with the Japanese incursions into the auto industry. Now globalization is restructuring production, consumption, and capital structures. The anarchist riots opposing the WTO stand as evidence to this energy. In addition, other forces such as al-Qaida

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(filling the vacuum left by the USSR) have also registered a reaction against the global economic forces of capitalism. These global-oriented counter movements register a concern that capitalism has made its way out of national borders and is a global phenomenon requiring a global counter strategy. And in the Middle East, it is this global modernity with its anti-medieval economic energy and free flow of ideas that is so threatening. One might assert that the problems in the Middle East have much less to do with America, therefore, than the fact that the population is continuously kept down in an number of ways: 1 out every 2 women are illiterate in that region and that unemployment is chronically 15-20%. Freed Zakaria recently cited the Arab Human Development Report, 2002 as evidence that the existence of violence and al-Qaida exist largely due to the cultivated poverty and lack of education in the region. From the report: An accurate diagnosis of a problem is an important part of the solution. It is precisely for this reason that the Regional Bureau for Arab States has commissioned a group of distinguished Arab intellectuals to produce the Arab Human Development Report. The wealth of unbiased, objective analysis it contains is part of our contribution to Arab peoples and policymakers in the search for a brighter future. The report shows that Arab countries have made significant strides in more than one area of human development in the last three decades. Nevertheless, the predominant characteristic of the current Arab reality seems to be the existence of deeply rooted shortcomings in the Arab institutional structure. These shortcomings are an obstacle to building human development. The report summarizes them as three deficits relating to freedom, empowerment of women, and knowledge. These deficits constitute weighty constraints on human capability that must be lifted. See http://www.arab-hdr.org/publications/other/ahdr/ahdr2002e.pdf. When the marketplace inserted itself into protected and patronized culture in the 19th century, the Romantics developed distaste for things economic (at least in thematics) and headed for the pastoral Waldens, Lake Districts, the South Pacific, and other places, elsewhere. Often, however, these retreats were sought as a means to rethink one’s position to the marketplace not to seek a space where it didn’t exist. All of the writers studied in these pages were aware of economy and its associated engines. They weren’t living in a dreamy world elsewhere. 23 I’m afraid I was a participant in this attack; see my article, “Rethinking Resistance.” Environmental Ethics 14.4 (Winter 1992): 291-306. 24 An odd title given the relative newness of the field. 25 I exaggerate, but enough said. Such a sentence makes one ask if this is a good model for writing in our colleges, and further it makes one ask if we have we lost our social compact commitment to help citizens solve problems and enrich their lives. 26 I recall in graduate school that I was anxious to have a wider area for research; I too wanted a better discussion about politics and environmentalism. What I ask 22

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now is, was opening up that space necessarily going to come with the demonizing of what was previously there and the doctrinaire advancement of the context for studying cultural production? 27 Murphy is an exceptionally bright, eclectic thinker and reads widely and publishes with incredible productivity. He was my dissertation professor, and I am proud to have had that experience. He has been at the forefront of the environmental literature movement, and he started the hugely popular journal, ISLE. He has done much to open up new reading vectors for his students and he has creatively engaged with Chinese and Japanese students and scholars. I read his material for a number of years. I began to pull back from theory when the language and horizon in this field became intolerably doctrinaire and convoluted. 28 Many of us at the time, including this author, were involved in producing dense, jargon-ridden rhetoric that was meant to impress, I believe, more than serve. 29 Labor vs. management, gender vs. gender, 99% vs. 1%, legal vs. illegal immigrants, race against race, e.g. 30 In previous articles and books, Murphy has asserted many of the charges of high theory. In Ecocritical Explorations, he has softened his approach a bit and attempts to wax slightly autobiographical and summarizes some phases and moments in his scholarship: “In 1990…Hwa Yol Jung and I met at a conference in postmodern spirituality held at Cambridge” (68). In this latest book, at some junctures Murphy sounds oddly anachronistic as he retraces old political ground: “Indeed, men do remain too removed from their own emotions, not only because we devalue them but also because we fear them as an indication of weakness and vulnerability” (148). In addition to being an oddly dated observation, such a generalization-especially from a nuanced, postmodern critic—seems to be awfully sweeping regarding gender essence. If one made a comment in the reverse, one ponders in relative alarm what the response would be and should be. Just take a cursory shot at it: “Women are too implicated and consumed by their…” Well, one can see that isn’t going anywhere. Do postmodern theorists generalize in one direction? 31 As I mention in other sections, this criticism is not only judgmental on what is said, it is also critical of what isn’t said. Therefore, one wonders whether the criticism is much more about the critic than it is about the text under review. 32 In an edition of The Concord Saunterer, V.11 (2003), there is an article, “Thoreau’s Walden in the Twenty-first Century,” which catalogues a long of responses to the question posed by the editor: “The following brief essays were written by Thoreau scholars, environmental writers, and Thoreau Society members in response to the question `Why should we read Walden in the twenty-first century?’” The list is an impressive list of folks such Suellen Campbell, Bill McKibben, Robert Sattlemeyer, and E.O. Wilson. See this article at http://www.thoreausociety.org/__activities/cs/twentyfirst.pdf. 33 My rather troublesome contradiction here is that I am asking why is there the need to criticize and demonize when I could be said to be doing the same. I offer no clever resolution except to say that I don’t propose this approach as a method to use over and over but a one-time statement on the state of things to clear the air. I

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try, where appropriate, to concede points and insights worth embracing within the postmodern thinking process. 34 Folks complain that the liberal humanist model in the humanities hasn’t provoked enough direct confrontation, and, therefore, not enough social transformation and impact. But the facts speak differently. Plenty of folks, without the benefits of “theory,” have acted after reading, say, Thoreau or Ed Abbey. Although movements like Earth First! were spawned because of Abbey’s writings, many folks were inspired to change their lifestyles on their own, without a mass movement and without the aid of critical theory. A case in point is Jan Nicolaisen and his family. Check the Abbey quotes and Thoreau-like cabin at coyotecottage.com. This house was also featured on the tiny house web site at http://tinyhouseblog.com/stick-built/coyotecottage/. 35 Although I state it is unfair to cull some of these writers off to the sidelines and center others, there is a fundamental fault line running through American culture and discourse at least since the 1930s that accounts for the tensions between the individual and the group. This can most recently be seen in the populist position advocated by Obama’s consumer advocate officer, now running for the “Kennedy Senate seat” currently occupied by Scott Brown. Elizabeth Warren has recently “gone viral” with a populist vision of society asserting that “no one makes money on his or her own.” Here is a snippet: You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along. Compelling in its call to arms and the populist slogan “the rest of us,” this is what the left has been waiting for. This is the potential glue for Ross’s fragmented “agenda of opposition” discussed in this chapter. I taught from this political positioning for decades, a political agenda that criticized individualism, ambition, and success. Being “against the system” was the only truly suitable kind of “individualism” and success. Frank Burns from MASH was caricatured as the typical square: “I don’t mind individualism as long as we all do it together.” It’s probably the case that the right had it coming and deserved the unrelieved attack and caricaturing during the 60s and 70s. Probably it did, due to its unreflective rigidness if nothing else. But what has been troubling of late is the left’s return to its conflicted sensibility about wealth and success. In particular, this group really stumbles when asked how Apple, which at times has had the same revenue level as

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Exxon, fits into the indictment of the evil, corpulent 1% vs. “the rest of us” (see USA Today 10/7/2011 “For Some Protestors, Jobs was an Exception,” http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/story/2011-10-07/protestersappreciate-jobs/50687458/1). In sum, ideologies on the left or the right resist what may disturb the rightness of the camp’s ideology. There is a quality on the left that seems to be particularly destructive in the manner by which it negates, blurs, and neutralizes the genius, hard work, risk taking, and daring of individual agents. Certainly, as well, there is an element on the right that ignores and distorts social movements, the needs of the truly needy, and discussions around economic fairness. This example was made palpably clear recently by Ron Paul’s disturbing answer to a question regarding his policy position to a hypothetical dying man with no health insurance. He had no answer. When teaching from the left leaning, leveling, populist, and Marxist perspective, I frequently used Michael Parenti’s Democracy for the Few along with other poetic, fictional, and “authoritative” texts. Parenti’s book is a political science text containing a wholesale attack on ambition, individualism, and the profit motive. His main thesis was, of course, “No one makes money on his own.” Parenti’s book and Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States are examples of the political left at its most one sided. The most succinct counter to the protest from the alleged “rest of us” is George Will’s response to Warren’s viral speech: “Elizabeth Warren and Liberalism, Twisting the `Social Contract’” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warrenand-liberalism-twisting-the-social-contract/2011/10/04/gIQAXi5VOL_story.html). Will’s response, calm and measured, will not go viral. I will put forward here two paragraph’s from George Will’s essay: Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession. The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving. Warren’s statement is a footnote to modern liberalism’s more comprehensive disparagement of individualism and the reality of individual autonomy. A particular liberalism, partly incubated at Harvard, intimates the impossibility, for most people, of self-government — of the ability to govern one’s self. This liberalism postulates that, in the modern social context, only a special few people can literally make up their own minds. (Will)

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Today’s political rhetoric is struggling, and it continues to appear dysfunctional because the social contract needs both individualism and collectivist energies, as Will points out; the question we haven’t resolved on the policy and tactical fronts is proportion: how much and in what shape must these two elements be deployed? One might suggest that we need larger revenue contributions from the top 40% (not the demonized 1% alone), and we need more accountability and prioritization regarding the way publically accrued tax revenues are spent. We need cuts and revenue generation in a down turn period like this one. In addition, while tax revenues are increased, the appropriate government role is to incentivize more business growth without excessively increasing the federal payrolls as a solution. 36 Armbrister, Lynch, along woth Glotfelty are co-editing a new book on the topic, The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. I look forward to it. 37 Eagleton expresses this sentiment in Why Marx was Right. He highlights a slogan from the Paris protests of 1968: “Be realistic: demand the impossible.” He suggests this is an appropriate phrase since “What is needed to repair society is beyond the powers of the prevailing system” (78). 38 I am reminded here of a line by Cliff Robertson in Three Days of the Condor. The stodgy, patriotic, humble, CIA officer with working class origins, played by Cliff Robertson, is trying to bridge America’s resource needs with its legal ideals. He, of course, is no match for the bushy haired, jean-clad, irresistible (just ask Faye Dunaway, his love interest in the film) Robert Redford. Redford is an educated (probably an English major), CIA researcher who interprets stories looking for their sinister and coded plots. This is a 1975 version of our attempts to decode al-Qaida web sites and cell phone transmissions today. He inadvertently discovers a renegade part of the US government carrying on its own unsanctioned special ops program. The CIA did not order this action nor did it order that the office (Redford’s) be taken out due to his discovery. This is irrelevant to Redford who goes on a campaign to expose all. A fascinating and oddly contemporary movie. The movie narrative leaves no doubt where it stands (with Redford), and it is totally weighted to his cause and his unassailable character (even when tying up Faye). But there is one exchange at the end of the film that is uneven in its weight towards Redford and the film’s trajectory. Robertson challenges what he perceives as Redford’s rash and dismissive efforts to harm his country’s profile in the world. One might call Redford’s goal noble, as defined by the democracy and free speech movements of the 60s; another might call it naiveté. We seem to have returned to these arguments and choices. Robertson’s lines are compelling though as they portray a realist’s view as opposed to Redford’s idealism: Higgins: “It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?” Joe Turner: “Ask them?” Higgins: “Not now - then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their

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engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!” Some cold dish of realism that. It’s a momentary pause in a film otherwise unrelieved in its support of Redford. Redford was fine working for the CIA until things got complex and complicated. Then, when he finds imperfection, he wants to burn down the whole house. Redford is just too invested in punishing the “company” to seek any other solution. When Redford reveals he has told the story to the NYT, Robertson says, “you’ve done more damage than you know.” Redford replies, “I hope so.” One could argue that Robertson reached out and tried to reconcile and help Redford. Being petulant and inconsolable, Redford dismisses the whole enterprise. While it is possible to imagine a state of affairs where the distance between a nation’s ideals and its practice is intolerably too wide, the question remains whether Redford walks away too soon. If one approached relationships, or jobs, or child rearing like this, not much would get done I’m sure. 39 It is the case that in the 60s and in the period when Thoreau was writing, this focus had political, cultural, and artistic significance. I should note that Lynch’s piece appeared in my edited collection, Coyote, and we did discuss the degree to which Abbey’s individualism was a political and cultural failing. 40 See Suellen Campbell’s “Magpie” in Quigley’s Coyote in the Maze. 41 Sometimes things come about because they are “not” something else: Jimmy Carter’s candidacy was defined first and foremost as, he was not Nixon. Once I teased my son as we got ready in the morning. I suggested he put on the dress his mother had put out. He said “No way, Dad!” I asked, “Why not?” He answered, “Because I am a man.” I asked again “Well, what’s a man?” He replied, “I don’t know, but it’s NOT that.” This was a very revealing exchange that demonstrates that what we think might be substantial areas of content are simply the shadow of a rejected option. 42 This isn’t to assert that living in a paradigm is necessarily an awful experience characterized by obliviousness. One can be aware that one lives in a time when certain assumptions are operational; one can be aware that these assumptions govern the way the world “works” or “seems” at that time. 43 Please see http://www.pinonoaksresidents.com/Community.aspx?communityID=27 44 This is the theme of Abbey’s Brave Cowboy. 45 This is the main theme of Ursula Le Guin’s wonderful novel The Dispossessed. 46 This example flies in the face of Cronon’s constructivist argument discussed earlier in this chapter. 47 As part of field research for this project, my family and I spent 6 months living in this glassy high rise on the coast in Honolulu. I wanted to explore, first hand, the living difference between a nestled cottage and a major, urban high-rise experience. The views were stunning from the 42nd floor, and we were looking forward to experiencing a new way of living. After all, we were downtown in a much sought after and “ideal” location. We were across the street from the beach

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and right next to the famous Ala Moana Mall and the Ward Theatre Center. Restaurants were everywhere in walking distance. After the novelty wore off, the lifestyle became stranger and stranger. I felt like a pigeon living in a hollowed out hole, in the side of a concrete cliff, sealed behind a glass window in the sky; or worse, like a hermetically sealed piece of meat encapsulated in a glassy box and suspended in the air, waiting. All relations were “vertical”; that is, one met people in the elevator, but usually there was no conversation; there were awkward moments of studied silence from the 40th through the 30th, then the 20th and 10th floor until one got out. Getting in and out of the building was exhausting; there were security issues such as electronic swipe key entries, security surveillance cameras, guards constantly asking questions and enforcing the “rules of the building.” In short, I felt like we were living the world of The Matrix. We have since moved to a little cottage, overrun with climbing vines and nestled amidst fan palms and other tropical and flowering trees and plants. The fact that it is nestled into and embraced by the shrubs and trees around it is part of the story. But it is the inside that defines the feel as well. It is a very small place but very interesting to be in. For a small place (900 s.f.), there are a surprising number of pleasing angles, textures, and windows. Particularly important for atmosphere are the materials: a stone counter in the kitchen, wood floors, bamboo shades, ceiling fans turning in a sleepy meditative manner. Breezes flow easily in the many windows. There is also a hatchway to the roof. The hatch gives one access to the roof for a beautiful ocean view. It is a hut, a refuge, a tree house. The small but smartly designed nature of the inside allows for a feeling of intimacy to develop between inhabitants and the inside of the place. It is home. The urban condo was the no-space/place of the train station in Matrix. 48 It’s interesting to see that this building process applies to words as well as buildings. For example, singer/songwriter Jackson Browne attempts to build and shape together the memory and fragments of his youth with words and song: In the calling out to one another Of the lovers up and down the strand In the sound of the waves and the cries Of the seagulls circling the sand In the fragments of the songs Carried down the wind from some radio In the murmuring of the city in the distance Ominous and low I hear the sound of the world where we played And the far too simple beauty Of the promises we made… (Browne) Seeking the honey of peace in the random sounds of the present, Browne hears and reconstructs the world that has gone. He is referring to the artist’s attempt to rebuild subtle and intangible fragments of mental and emotional experience.

CHAPTER TWO HENRY THOREAU: “MOST MEN APPEAR NEVER TO HAVE CONSIDERED WHAT A HOUSE IS…”

While flying across country delivering papers at conferences, I began ripping interesting ads for homes out of the in-flight magazines. My curious flying companion seated all too closely to me couldn’t help but notice the transgression and ask: “something good in there?” Instead of the truth—“I study American culture and I am fascinated by the way we establish ourselves and try to understand our place/space”—, I offered something more consumable: “I think my wife would like this subdivision.” The ads brazenly attempt to appeal to people’s desperate need for meaningful space and meaningful lives. They employ awkward allusions to romantic authenticity as well as offering a promise of place and community. All that the 19th century Romantics and the 60s counter culture communes were seeking can be found, according to the ads, at planned communities that are designed to appeal to our need for meaning and creativity. The ad reads as follows: Customize Your Life Surrounded by the rugged beauty and ideal weather of Scottsdale’s Sonoran Desert, X Subdivision provides you all the options and opportunities you’ll ever need to truly customize your life. At X Subdivision, residents have the freedom to customize their lives. Nestled between its award-winning daily fee golf courses, …Providing more than simply a place to live, the Subdivision also works to build a sense of community. With its exceptional amenities and services, including its two outstanding restaurants, the nearby clubhouse provides an ideal location for community get-togethers.

It’s all here: individuality, freedom, and creativity. In addition, a sense of community is nurtured and cultivated via restaurants. Another ad invited one to discover “The Art of Living.” And yet another states that a move to their development means that “a move from the city should mean leaving

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your cares behind but not your life.” The picture with the ad depicts a family around their clubhouse pool with the wild, desert hills close by surrounding the scene. In the foreground are well-dressed folks at a poolside BBQ with all the high tech accoutrement needed for high-end barbequing. The subtext is pretty clear: we can have it all, a grounded connection with nature, community, authenticity, and modernism’s many delights and comforts. And to be honest, these ads reflect an interesting and longed-for joining of lifestyles and values. The need for authenticity, personal growth, connection with nature, and community has found its way into the marketing of suburbia and subdivisions for good reason: marketers know what we dream about. We long for escape, for connection, for refuge, for peace, for centeredness and home. We just don’t know how to get there; other demands govern our lives.

Fig. 2-1 Customize Your Life; pursue the Art of Living; have it all, the country and “a life.”

Every time I see ads like these, however, I want to reach for my Thoreau. I know he can pull me out of this drain swirl of promised saccharin satisfaction. Thoreau provides the clarifying difference between a home and housing; between healthy, self-actualizing retreat and industrial lounging; between Zen simplicity and a consumptive and commercially defined posing. Thoreau suggests that if one goes “confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success in common hours” (W 190). This promise of a reward for following one’s desire, one’s “bliss,” is a thought we love to entertain. In a

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later chapter, Wendell Berry will admire and envy the geese for their “abandon” as they respond to their needs in nature. We all fear that we are cowards in this life. We are afraid to risk shaping our lives according to our desires and dreams. We give into cynicism and inertia, or we fear extending ourselves because we don’t know how to go about crafting an alternative life; it’s easier to go along with the larger currents. As Fig. 2-2 points up, these larger modern forces have real shaping power.

Fig. 2-2 The forces of modernism and efficiency shape the physical appearance and the feel of the everyday.

Yi Fu Tuan wrote an entire book on Escapism, and it is a well-known human dream to find a place of refuge, finality, peace. It is also well known that modernist forces of mass social dynamics are irresistible and govern the shape of our actions. But there are surprising moments of release and possibility, as we shall see, in these large forces of control. There is “unexpected success” that presents itself, and, if we are ready, we can take advantage of these openings. I like that notion of small breakthroughs, the unforced success that comes from focused determination, a purity, commitment, and fidelity to a vision. As was mentioned in the first chapter, Foucault called such spaces for exploration and rethinking, heterotopias. Thoreau made the effort to keep faith with his vision, to stubbornly push forward. He needed a radical separation from what

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Jeffers would later call the “chirping sirens” of modern culture. “Sirens” are those things that pull us away from wakefulness. Part of the reason Thoreau is refreshing is that he brings an Eastern sense of nuance, calm, and subtlety to his sense of beauty. Certain aspects of Eastern thinking focus on the immediacy and the quality of the moment, on an imperfect, “found” beauty, on humility, on the suspension of judgment, ego, and arrogance, and on proceeding without a reference to ultimate truth, authority, and judgment. Sometimes it seems as though there are those amongst us who harden their thinking and refuse to consider new information that might restructure their mental worlds. This might be the reason why there often seems to be such a divide in thinking practice in American culture. I sometimes wonder whether these differences are genetic. Are some people hard-wired in a way that makes them need ultimate truth and authority, while others can live, and find it richer to live, with a less finished and less defined sense of things? Folks in the later grouping actually appreciate a sense of open-endedness and unfinished ideas and projects. In many books, articles, and web sites, one finds references to Asian aesthetics and lifestyle in connection to Thoreau. W. Barksdale Maynard documents Thoreau’s involvement with Eastern literature at Emerson’s urging. And, Maynard claims, with the Asian readings in his mind, “the place that most embodied those values of ancientness and wisdom was Walden Pond and Woods, to which he would walk in summer” (48-49). Maynard goes on to say that “Henry came naturally to see the pond as the `oriental Asiatic valley of my world’” (49). It was Thoreau’s interest in Asian philosophy which caught Kerouac’s attention as well: “While reading Walden, Kerouac became intrigued with the many Oriental references and began following some of Thoreau’s leads” (Suiter 164). In a recent book, The Wabi-Sabi House, Robyn Lawrence quotes Suzuki who refers to Thoreau as a model for the lifestyle of simplicity (18-19). In addition, Lawrence goes on to say that “In Japan, there is a marked difference between a Thoreau-like wabibito (wabi person), who is free in his heart, and a makoto no hinjin, a more Dickensian character whose poor circumstances make him desperate and pitiful” (19). There is a simplicity that liberates and shines and one that impoverishes and pinches. Later in the book, Lawrence refers to Thoreau as “that wabi-sabi hero” (51). In Wabi-Sabi, Koren defines the concept as a “particular kind of beauty, probably most easily associated with the English word “rustic” (21). This provides but a limited understanding of this sensibility. and other words are offered quickly by Koren to get to this Asian aesthetic of humility, usefulness, impermanence, and imperfection. Koren talks about “objects

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that are earthy, simple, and unpretentious” (21). In addition to an aesthetic quality, the terms wabi and sabi have a long history of being related to a certain lifestyle of solitude and simplicity (Koren 22). This kind of beauty comes from a sense of humility, of things worn and used, of things possessing traces of slight and subtle beauty, or things inadvertently created and found. It is this Asian touch that we see again and again woven through the work and lives of a certain set of Western writers like Thoreau. As Kenneth Champeon states in “The Great American Dharma Bum,” Thoreau’s “masterpiece Walden is peppered with references to Eastern texts like the "Bhagvat-Geeta", the Vedas, the Vishnu Purana, the Sanchya Karika; the Hindu gods Vishnu, Brahma, and Indra; the Indian poet Kalidasa and his drama Shakuntala; the Tartar belief in the transmigration of the soul. Thoreau was a bridge between his `restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century’ America -- which would certainly strike us as none of these things -- and the various Golden Ages of departed Asian civilizations” (Champeon).

Fig. 2-3. Asian print.

Thoreau frequently refers to Eastern texts for guidance: “The Vedas say, ‘All intelligences awake with the morning’” (W 60). Thoreau links wakefulness to being in the moment, to intensity and intellectual power. “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?” (W 60). These habits of perception are not limited to the East, however. In The Renaissance Walter Pater, whom I quoted at length in the first chapter, discussed a similar mind set regarding our optimal potential for aesthetic and mental life:

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Gary Snyder and other counter cultural writers of the 20th century sought out Eastern and Native American culture as alternatives and add-ons to modernism. In addition to being alert and wakeful, Thoreau resisted the work ethic that plagued American health and sanity then and now. This next passage illustrates all of these features, so I put it forward in full: I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day." This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. (W 72-73)

This is a remarkable paragraph. It counters the notion that Thoreau was a scruffy, curmudgeonly, frugal, neurotic, misanthropic, workaholic, Yankee. On the contrary, he embraced what today we call “quality time,” a

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healthy, nurturing sense of living focused on strengthening and repairing consciousness.

Fig. 2-4. Thoreau’s replica cabin, Walden Pond summer of 2011.

Thoreau is dedicated to a life style that reinforces such health, such observation, such attentiveness. My concern in this book is focused on answering questions like, “How can we protect these goals, and foster them in a cultivated, intentional manner to live them daily?” My assumption is that a house is often the centerpiece for preserving, or housing, the environmental imagination which embraces these other considerations of health and attentiveness. Like any good counter cultural or New Age sojourner following in his footsteps 100 years later, Thoreau nurtured the state of his consciousness with religious dedication: I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching Thang to this effect: `Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.’ I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages. (W 60)

In these passages, he commits to refresh himself everyday. He recalls his strength and what Emerson would call his genius. Today we have more sober terms for this; it is our self-confidence, self-esteem, or our spiritual dignity that is at stake and that is threatened by distractions and too much compromise. I like Emerson and Thoreau’s terms better; there is more

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nobility to them, and they track to the feeling more honestly: heroic, renewal, genius. What Thoreau seems to be advocating for is the art of the moment. Forget the world conquering deliriums, the fantasies of mass liberation movements and analyses of or adherence to codes of culture; cleave all of that away and focus on how “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour” (W 60).1 It is easy to see how such a dictum would focus Thoreau on his home, on tea, on the grain of wood on his pine table, on the flowers brought in to lend a slight adornment, on the light slanting in through the window, falling across the floor in a melancholy, faded golden track, on the Cardinal chirping alone and clear, on the hum of the mosquito, on the sound of a distant bell. Attentiveness and wakefulness are the best kind of prayer, the best way to revere the gift of being alive, and the best way to live in the moment and not in some virtual world transmitted through mediating forces. This calm and sanity is easily dissipated by the cacophony of cell phones, ear buds, 7X24 connectivity or the demands of adherence to an ideology. Only when we are “unhurried and wise” do “we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures” (W 63) are distractions. This focus on things permanent and enduring will be the laser focus of Robinson Jeffers as well. Long before the term “burn out” emerged, Thoreau felt what was coming. He knew the biggest challenge was to negotiate with the “chopping sea of civilized life” and the “clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for” (W 61). It is not a surprise to find on this page of Walden the famous quote: “Our life is frittered away by detail” (W 61). As I write these pages, it is the weekend, but I feel the thousand-and-one things coming at me on the shores of Monday morning. In response, Thoreau seemed to have rearranged his life, calmed his mind, cleared his consciousness, adjusted his expectations, and allowed even the smallest detail to resonate finely: I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and fertility of the world. (W 59)

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Wendell Berry, later in this book, talks about how difficult it is to achieve this level of serenity, quietude, retreat and ease. He discovered it as a boy but didn’t know what it meant or how to shape it or contextualize it. Note Berry’s use of the Thoreauvian language “deliberately”:

Fig. 2-5. Thoreau’s cabin (replica) taken at Walden Pond summer of 2011. To be idle, simply to live there in the sunlight…, was something I was not prepared to do deliberately. I tried to stay on…but the spell was broken. That I had nothing to do but what I wanted to do, and what I was in fact doing, had become utterly impotent as an idea. I had to leave. I would have to live to twice that age before I could do consciously what I wanted so much then to do. And even now I can do it only occasionally. (LLH 123 my emphasis)

Berry hadn’t found the house yet that would protect his daydreaming, to borrow from Bachelard. For all of the cultural sirens, distractions, and seductions in 19th century America—evangelical revivals, communes, slavery, bank failures, wars, emergent capitalism, expansion westward — Thoreau seemed to have been on to some early insights about power, nature, lifestyle, grace, and simplicity: Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. (W 61)

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Nature was a key feature in establishing this project: “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself” (W 59). In addition to the focus on beauty and the spiritual dimensions of nature, Thoreau had a very modern sense of nature. In an 1858 journal entry, he contests a provincial sense of one’s yard and advances an interconnected, bioregional perspective: We are wont to see our dooryard as a part of the earth’s surface. The gardener does not perceive that ridge or mount in his garden or lawn is related to yonder hill or the still more distant mountain in the horizon, is, a humble spur of the last. We are wont to look on the earth still as a sort of chaos, formless and lumpish. (J 272)

Many writers in America and England entertained the mysteries of nature and consciousness as did Thoreau, but Thoreau was the practicing poet. He insisted that "To be a philosopher…is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates” (W 16). This is Enlightenment courage of trial and error at its finest. And indeed, his little experiment took place in the face of some troubling trends and peril around him. In The Empire of the Eye, Angela Miller paints a picture, with some aid from a Thoreau journal entry, of the New England countryside that is less than inviting: From the early nineteenth-century on, New England’s predominately rural economy was beset by a series of agricultural depressions precipitated by poor farming methods, soil exhaustion, overpopulation, and the steady increase of competition from fertile new farm lands in New York State and later in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. By the 1830s commercial fertilizers and a system of crop rotation were being widely advocated…to restore the lost productivity of the land. In 1852 Thoreau described a countryside where the “apple trees are decayed, and the cellar holes are more numerous than the houses, and the rails are covered with lichens, and the old maids wish to sell out and move into the village….I say, standing there and seeing these things, I cannot realize that this is that hopeful young America which is famous throughout the world for its activity and enterprise, and this is the most thickly settled and Yankee part of it.” Articles in both northern and southern journals lamented the sterility of the soil and the impoverished and rude quality of rural life. The image of farmers migrating west…was…a flight from exhausted farmlands and economic collapse. (188)

When one considers that Thoreau embarked on his experiment within this social and economic context, one tends to admire him that much more. In

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addition to insisting on independence and experimentation, he did so in the face of daunting surroundings. Emerson criticized himself for not having the courage to act on his principles. He believed in “experiment” but couldn’t bring himself to join others. On the one hand he says that “I approve every wild action of the experimenters.” But he quickly qualifies his enthusiasm by suggesting that his “genius loudly calls me to stay where I am, even with the degradation of owning bank stock and seeing poor men suffer” (Selections 217). Emerson acknowledged the social experiments of the day but chose to remain in the study. In another journal entry, he records a visit from Margaret Fuller and others who came to invite him to join their society. Regardless of how passionate his visitors were in their beliefs, “not once could I be inflamed, but sat aloof and thoughtless” (Selections 145). He claimed it was better to confront essential realities on one’s own, in one’s study as opposed to joining others in experiments. Emerson is easily criticized by a progressive, communal, left wing bias on this issue (I’ve done so in other articles), but I now tend to see him as an honest broker. He admires but does not identify with his communal contemporaries. He preferred to stay focused on his interests and agenda. Thoreau may have agreed with him on the subject of avoiding joining groups, but Thoreau took action in an independent and experimental manner, and, as a result, tourists visit the cabin at Walden thousands of times more often than Emerson’s study. Thoreau agrees with Emerson on experiments in principle, but he also seems to take a little slap at Emerson’s recalcitrance: “I am glad to hear of experiments of this kind being tried….The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds in mills, may be alarmed” (W 45). As is well known, Emerson and Thoreau had a close but sometimes strained relationship. Emerson, it should be noted, was a real cheerleader for Thoreau’s endeavor, encouraging him with conversation, friendship, enthusiasm, and land. It was Thoreau who took action and seemed to have risked everything. He took the ideas seriously enough to write them and live them. He thought that it is “vain…to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live” (qtd. in Stewart 4). This connection between living and writing is crucial. It gives the life and the substance to the essays and poems explored in this book. These notions of renewal and engagement with nature were, of course, inextricably connected with the writing project. It is clear that a set of values has survived from the mid 19th century to the present based on the sense that in “Wildness is the preservation of the world” (Walking Thoreau). The whole enterprise, therefore, of embracing

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a certain lifestyle and teaching the eyes to discern a certain kind of beauty became, as Frank Stewart has noted, a governing attitude that also was “a form of social enlightenment.” Stewart goes on to explain by quoting Emerson: “`Our hunting for the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society’” (in Stewart 47). Therefore, this cultivation of a certain kind of beauty is inseparably intertwined with a lifestyle of independence, a cultivated aesthetic sense, and sociopolitical issues. Motivated by the promises of transcendental idealism as well as his assessment of the misdirection of modernist and commercial forces, Thoreau took action to avoid the condition captured in his famous observation that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation” (W 12). Concerted action was necessary because “The finest qualities of our nature can be preserved only by the most delicate handling.” (W 11). Housing the “finer qualities,” the alert imagination, was the primary act that Thoreau was engaged with at Walden. Interestingly enough, Thoreau seems sure he is on to something here since he believed he may be setting a trend and pattern for future generations: “The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated” (W 55). In this way, he intentionally connects himself to future generations who will be on the prowl and lookout for beauty, for a satisfying glimpse out the window, for a deep connection with nature, and for many “unexpected successes.” Thoreau understood what was at stake and the strength of the forces aligning themselves around and against him. He was on guard against going to sleep (“millions are awake for physical labor but one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion” (W 60)) and becoming a member of the herd (“the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow” (W 28)). His focus is on sunrise: “The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. …and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night” (W 59). Murphy, Armbruster, and Lynch will complain that Thoreau’s focus on self and wakefulness is a simple example of cultural seduction, a betrayal of social justice and of a communal way of life. Thoreau refuses a communal and progressive profile, because, according to certain critics, he is seduced by American mythologies of masculine independence. This is odd because, as most know, in the 60s and 70s Thoreau was held up as a counter cultural symbol of resistance and independence. But there is no need to see Thoreau as politically seduced. As I argued in the first chapter, critics who make this claim unnecessarily foreground the qualities of independence and gender, connecting, as they do, Thoreau’s intentions and actions with unattractive,

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selfish, imperial, and commercial energies. In their light, Thoreau becomes a pitiful dupe to energies he doesn’t understand. However, as observations from other writers such as Rebecca Solnit prove, it is clear one has choices about reading Thoreau, and for Solnit, Thoreau is not a one-dimensional figure simply living out the narratives of a “masculine wilderness narrative.” As I mention in the first chapter, Solnit counters—amongst other claims—the notion that Thoreau was an isolated misanthrope since he, for example, “hosted Concord’s most important abolitionist group, the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, at a meeting in his Walden Pond hut” (Solnit 7). And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention another obvious counter to the claim that he was an isolationist: a whole section of Walden is dedicated to social activity and is called, “Visitors.” All of this evidence and more will not dissuade ideologically invested folks who have deepseated career interests, political interests, or deep-seated psychological interests in battling points to the bitter end from one perspective.

Fig. 2-6. Thoreau was not removed from people or from technology. Picture is taken from the site of Thoreau’s cabin. Fitchburg Railroad steaming along southwest from Thoreau’s cove.

Nature has long assumed a special position in the history of American cultural self-assessment, from Jefferson and Frederick Turner (i.e., “frontier thesis”), to Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, Ed Abbey, and others. Nature was frequently advanced as the force that created a unique American character. As a result, nature had a special political and cultural value and was something to be preserved and cared for in the face of growing

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industrial and city life. The association of nature and a special American character was challenged by the likes of D.H. Lawrence and Leslie Fielder, and then more recently by critics such as Annette Kolodny and Nina Baym. Much of this criticism sought to rewrite the prevailing sense that “wilderness narratives” were embodiments of independence, rebellion, or creativity. On the contrary, it was now stated that these narratives exhibited the worst features of American culture. These narratives, it has been questionably asserted, accomplished the following results: 1) they promoted a vision of an individual running amuck in an androcentric wilderness while wallowing in an immature rejection of civic restraint;2 2) they promoted a romanticism that was an extension and “instrument of imperial conquest” (Buell EI 35). In the previous chapter, I mentioned W.J.T. Mitchell’s claim regarding a connection between landscape painting and imperialism; similarly, critics in the 80s started equating the attraction to nature with imperialism and any representation of “natural sublimity came to be seen as an arm of manifest destiny” (Buell EI 35). However, as I have been arguing throughout this book, these approaches have a most telling and transparent ideological imperative, and they evade so much counter evidence that they need to be taken so much less seriously than when their irrefutable and self-evident indictments are trumpeted in undergrad and graduate courses.3 This is not to deny issues associated with the politics of expansion,4 and certainly writers like Melville were anxious about the issue; but these interests are not the final, essential, defining character of all cultural production from the period, not the absolute definition of a particular artifact. In other words, political reductionism is intellectually unattractive, and it unnecessarily narrows the scope of understanding. As I have mentioned, the almost paranoid obsession with revealing, unveiling, exposing, and deconstructing all voices that assert or utter, or ask to be taken at their word, or on face value, betrays a gargantuan cultural and psychopolitical pathology. All greed, all excessiveness, all corruption in the world can somehow be attributed directly or indirectly to these voices of American cultural persuasion. This unrelieved criticism of U.S. culture, economic character, and foreign policy caused cultural observers in the 80s to accuse the left of a “blame America first” syndrome. The accusation was not without merit. Buell summarized the bias in literary critical sensibility by noting a shift: …a shift from the hermeneutics of empathy that by and large marks pre1970 new critical and myth-symbol American scholarship to a hermeneutics of skepticism that appraises texts more in terms of what they exclude or suppresses. (EI 35)

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A scholarship of the “non-said” opens the door to discuss whatever the critic wants to discuss, usually at the expense of the author or text in question. Certainly there is value in this focus on individual growth, on attention to the intensity and vibrancy of the moment, just as there is value in developing a communal network or assessing the influence of ideology. These are not mutually exclusive and Thoreau did both, as did all authors in this study. Thoreau’s program at Walden was, by his own admission, not a final statement, but it was needed to fight off any number of cultural currents challenging him at that time. Certainly there was encroaching modernism in all its speed and fury. In addition, there was the call to be tasteful, which had been alive and well since the 18th century. He knew he had to cut himself off and wean himself from the restrictive seductions of modern life. Many who read him 100 years later understand: Gandhi was influenced by Thoreau, and M.L. King and a whole generation of youth in the 60s and 70s were inspired by his heroic defiance and his loving attention to the details of existence. In addition, as previously discussed, Thoreau inspired many of the writers Murphy foregrounds in Explorations of Ecocriticism, in spite of Murphy’s concerns about Thoreau’s shortcomings. Thoreau also influenced every writer examined in these pages. Thoreau’s reach has been, in summary, huge. Thoreau influenced many important writers and cabin builders, although, as Buell points out, some, like Beston and Leopold, were at pains to deny it (EI 147). The influence and value of Thoreau are indisputable, and the claim that Thoreau should have written more about this or that issue is a troublesome argument suggesting that the writer should reflect our contemporary ideologies. As a final note on this point, let me quote from a recent book review that examines seven new books but attributes their existence to Thoreau: It's all Thoreau's fault. In the whirring, churning American imagination, that vast and lovely virtual world — fed by books and stories — with territory one can still "light out" for, Thoreau is the guy who showed it was possible to get off the merry-go-round, the constant forward movement, and still walk into town from time to time. Plant yourself within spitting distance of civilization, refuse to participate in the orgy of commercialism, refuse to pay taxes if you don't agree with how they're spent. You don't need everything they tell you that you need. You can do more for yourself than they tell you that you can. The message was political, spiritual, practical and environmental. It contained a fine amount of humor, a pinch of self-doubt and a smidgeon of hypocrisy. Today we would call Thoreau's move to the banks of Walden Pond going off the grid. (Reynolds)

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Thoreau had help in pushing back against governing forces. Thoreau had many influences from the social, political, and cultural forces around him that he adopted. As indicated in the first chapter, Thoreau was certainly aware of the other participants in the “get back to nature” movements in the culture, and, in addition, his own reading frequently touched on Asian and Christian recluses and hermits. And, of course, there was the strong pull of the marketplace which he embraced and modified to advance his Walden project. Thoreau had a special relation to the strong emphasis the period placed on seeing. As with most artistic periods, there was a heavy influence on sight and vision, but these themes were especially pronounced with the Romantics and Transcendentalists. The metaphor of vision and insight, of “seeing” into nature, and of seeing as a means to shape nature, dominated the writing and thinking of Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, and Thoreau. In F.O. Matthiessen’s monumental study, American Renaissance, Matthiessen dedicates a chapter to the theme: “In the Optative Mood.” In this chapter, Matthiessen reviews famous quotes such as the “transparent eyeball” section and countless references to “seeing” beyond the surface to the interwoven organic interconnectedness of all creation. Matthiessen underlines the “special stress the nineteenth century put on sight” (51). In Nature, Emerson says, “the health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough” (27). On October 26th of 1858, as he examined nature around his pond, Thoreau was so taken by the “infinite variety of hues, tints, and shares” that he coined a term that would seem to belong to one of today’s “medical” marijuana brands. When stepping back to contemplate all the living color around him, Thoreau states this has a …singular effect. I call it, therefore, the rainbow rush. When, moreover, you see it reflected in the water, the effect is very much increased. (J, 252)

But “seeing” for the 19th century and for Thoreau had other aspects to it as well, which is why I bring it up here. Matthiessen reminds us that this century saw incredible technical advances associated with seeing: “the perfection of Herschel’s telescope, the invention of photography, the development of open-air painting, the advancing power of the microscope” (51). Like the best writers in this genre, Thoreau was an avid practitioner of the observations required by a scientific mind and eye. Thoreau, Jeffers, Snyder, Sanders, and Berry are all sincere and attentive naturalists. Thoreau always wrestled a balance between the romantic and the scientific. As Frank Stewart notes:

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In his later journals, his scientific observations dominated his writing; he read Darwin’s work enthusiastically as soon as it was published, and he was reading the new discoveries in genetics at the same time he was pushing himself to complete a book length research project on the dispersion of seeds. (48)

Jeffers was similarly engaged in the scientific world. As Ron Olowin, a professional and practicing astronomer, illustrates in a recent article, Jeffers describes a recollection of observing a meteor shower the preceding October, rightly attributing the phenomenon to the interception of a particle stream as the earth passes through the debris trail left in the orbital trajectory of a comet. The passage represents another instance of the poet using actual observations of the sky and celestial phenomena as an element in his work. (51)

In fact, Jeffers includes cutting edge observations of the astronomical issues of the day such as spiral galaxies, red shift and entropy. Is this part of the difference between writers like Emerson or Eliot who seem trapped inside their language and their studies, and the writers who actually live out a vision that gives strength and force to their writing? And is this the difference between nature writers and critics who only write about life in nature as opposed to those who actually build a house, build a life in nature, climb mountains, ski, surf, walk autumn trails, and engage in a writing project that yokes it all together? Thoreau may have defined a new genre when he described a kind of writing that was inseparably connected to living in the world. As referenced earlier, Thoreau thought it is …vain…to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow…The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical, wooden, dull to read. (qtd. in Stewart 4)

This view of writing is at the heart of this book’s focus on writing, housing, and living. The practicality that finds its home in writing about the pond, the house, and nature didn’t just magically emerge with Thoreau. Like Jeffers and Snyder, Thoreau had plenty of practical preparation for his writing project and house building: As a young man he had worked as a handyman for the Emersons, and in the fall of 1844 he helped his father build a new house west of the Concord railroad tracks for which Thoreau’s mother had chosen the site and drawn up the plans. (Chandler 26)

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Is this engagement with the material world and its challenges the additional context needed for understanding what Thoreau meant when he said he wanted to live deliberately? Perhaps so. To live deliberately may very well consist of the following: understand the region you live in (the sense of place, the animals, the water, the whole array of flora and fauna, the history, the seasons, the winds), build your own house, grow your own food. Ed Abbey would add to this: kick in your TV and piss off the porch anytime you please. If one has built one’s own house, there is an undeniable sense of local materials, purpose, intimacy, connection to region, and creativity associated with the act. Thoreau’s Walden experience was a deliberate and intentional attempt to live close to surfaces, close to facts, close to unknowns, close to possibilities, and to pursue an experimental immediacy. It seems, even in the early moments of modernism, someone like Thoreau could feel disconnected, insulated and withdrawn due to the amitotic sack of early “modern” city life. Thoreau’s complaints about the speed of life and the corrosive detail that shreds the wholeness of a day make this more than an idle speculation. And, as I have noted, there was a lot to be distracted and confused about at the time. When Thoreau went into the woods “to live deliberately” (60), he began a social experiment in American life and letters regarding the politics, the aesthetics, as well as the spiritual dimension, of what it means not just to live, but more specifically, to live in a house connected to a special place. Certainly by reading Asian culture and history, Thoreau was inspired by the idea of the life and the hut of a poetic recluse. One cannot discount the influence on Thoreau of frontier living out West for visions of solitary or redefined living styles. And, in fact, the importance of his commitment to place, or, as Scott Russell Sanders puts it, his commitment to “staying put,” is clear in the Journal. Similar to Wendell Berry’s “What We Need is Here,” Thoreau suggests we stay at home and look closely and feel with immediacy: Take the shortest way round and stay at home…Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are. Here is your bride elect, as close to you as she can be got. Here is all the best and all the worst you can imagine. What more do you want?...Foolish people imagine that what they imagine is somewhere else. The stuff is not made in any factory but their own. (J, “Here” 521)

Thoreau performed an amazing balancing act by allowing the house to be integrated with the wildness he was attracted to (which pointed his vision outward), and it functioned as an intimate space to foster inner creativity

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(What Bachelard calls daydreaming). The culminating impact is that the house negotiates the space between these two energies and situates the writing project. The cabin was center stage and foundational. The cabin was, for a time, the vehicle which allowed Thoreau to develop and advocate a principle of freedom. This principle states that one, for “as long as possible,” should “live free and uncommitted” (W 56). One notes the use of the term “bride” in the quote above. Some feminists, of course, have objected to connecting the planet with gender identification; however, many ecofeminsts make reference to the planet as Gaia.5 One must ask what the most important issue is here I suppose, understanding and appreciating a writer or, as discussed in Chapter One, “interrogating.” Is Thoreau seriously attempting to diminish women with such a reference? I think not, but it is a thread one could start pulling on to remake a new sweater. One choses one’s focus, but ultimately one cannot determine the read for others. As the discussion regarding Armbruster, Lynch, and Murphy suggested, it is always assumed that the image of an individual pursuing and talking about his growth and independence comes at great costs to others, occurs without a set of domestic commitments, and is ultimately an anti-social, narcissistic gesture. Much of what has been said and what follows counters these claims. For instance, many critics have noted important representations of domestic life in Walden. Robert Sattelmeyer described it this way: In one sense Walden may be viewed as an alternative model of domestic life that comments upon his contemporaries' concern for bracketing off housekeeping and household work as an exclusively female province. The narrator's presumed local audience, including those "uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out" (p. 103), would have recognized his descriptions of cleaning, furniture, and food preparation as a sly commentary on such popular guidebooks for women as Catharine Beecher's Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841). Even his extended description of baking his own bread alludes to the loss of that skill in contemporary New England, where cheaper processed wheat from the West and commercial baking were replacing the tradition of household bread making and raising questions about the healthiness of the commercial product. (1233)

Now that we have set the stage and engaged with some of the major issues (historical framework, environmental themes, aesthetics, gender issues, political economy, “deliberateness”) that make Thoreau an important figure, let’s focus more clearly on the significance of issues related to the house. The book, the house, and the narrator are tied together from the

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moment Walden opens. Build the cabin, write the book, design and define a lifestyle, all are actions that are tied together and inseparable: When I wrote the following pages…I lived alone in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. (W 9)

Of course, Thoreau’s experiment was not the only one taking place at the time. In fact, the idea of the hut was alive and well in Thoreau’s company of friends in and around Concord. As the coast and woods of Carmel would take on a sacred kind of meaning for Jeffers and the bohemian crowd there, likewise Walden Pond had the same impact for the Emerson crowd. Walden, was confirmed as a sacred, symbolic locus…its surrounding woods a place of inspiration…(Maynard 35)

Thoreau and Emerson discussed isolated hermitages for writing. These conversations, says Maynard, and the general “heady climate of talk about houses…helped eventually point to the Walden experiment” (Maynard 57). William Ellery Channing had discussed Walden Pond as “the ideal literary retreat for himself” (Maynard 51), and Emerson also thought of himself as a builder and had discussed building “a literary retreat on the land he had recently bought at Walden Pond” (Maynard 56). Considering his new land, Emerson wrote the following to his brother: “In this climate what a joy to build! The south side of the house should be almost all window for the advantage of the winter sun.” These musings, harbingers of architectural themes that Thoreau would take up in Walden… (Maynard 56)

Margaret Fuller, Channing’s sister-in-law, discussed the advantages of a cabin removed from the bustle of city life. In addition, she was interested in the possibilities of Thoreau’s plans: In October, Fuller wrote Thoreau, “Let me know whether you go to the lonely hut, and write me about Shakespeare, if you read him there.” By now Henry’s scheme for a woodsy retirement was common knowledge. He wrote decisively on December 24, “I want to go soon and live away by the pond where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds.” (Maynard 49)

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As mentioned, these were heady times, and there were many plans and discussions about retreat and solitude. Maynard summarizes the spirit in the Emerson crowd by saying that “The urge to flee to nature had taken sturdy root among the intimates of the Emerson circle.” This energy was not lost on the visiting Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer who noted these “`attempts by unusual ways to escape from the torment of the common life’” (51). In the midst of a lot of talk and gesturing, Thoreau, however, took concerted action. Solitude, humility, understated beauty, modest material needs, a thoughtful, contemplative life with the soil. These are the values and qualities that Thoreau wanted to establish, and he did so with the establishment of a house. One needs little more confirmation regarding Thoreau’s purpose in focusing on the house than if one contemplates this well known line: “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is…” (27). Marilyn Chandler makes this point regarding the importance of the house in her discussion on Thoreau in Dwelling in the Text: The appropriateness of the cabin as an embodiment of values becomes clear the moment those values are named. Nothing but a house could more adequately and simply demonstrate the importance of economy, simplicity, and autonomy... (25)

Chandler goes on to establish the close relation between the house and Thoreau’s philosophical project. But, finally, the crucial aspect of the house is that it is a philosophical statement that in its medium of wood and stone sidesteps the complexities of language that “building” his house enmeshes him in. (26)

Successful as this activity is for Thoreau, “Building his own house is [just] a step” (Chandler 26) in moving his philosophical enterprise forward. This balance between the practical and the visionary allows Thoreau to maintain independence during times that urged safety and conformity. A crucial question for someone with Thoreau’s vision in mind is how to sustain oneself and how to remain independent: simplicity is a fine art to be cultivated; poverty is to be avoided. The pressures and rewards of the times pushed men and women to live in more orderly, urban, and “acceptable” ways, or, as Miller stated above, they moved West to work it out in new territory. For these reasons, it is remarkable to see Thoreau break away in such a determined manner. And it is clear he had a very specific sense of beauty and style. He observed, for instance, that “The most interesting dwellings in the country

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are the most unpretending” (W 34). Considering the kind of beauty he demanded, perhaps Thoreau asks for too much innocence, spontaneity, and diminished self-consciousness. In his defense, however, he seems to be working hard to understand and elucidate an unintended beauty that follows from sincerity. If one perseveres with an alternative vision, one “will meet with unexpected success” (W 190). Thoreau appears to be alluding to an unexpected, unintended, and, therefore, a superior kind beauty and set of rewards. For after all, it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells [houses] they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the suburban's box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. (W 34)

In another section, he echoes the same position: Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation. (29)

Anchoring Thoreau’s comments within the issues of his day will help recast what might appear as overused, romantic sentiments. Thoreau certainly had been influenced by a strain of Puritanism that insisted on simplicity, and, as we have seen, he was influenced by Asian simplicity, but there was more. His reference to a “sentimental reformer in architecture” (34) is a vital key to his fiery objection to modern architecture and his interest in the design and meaning of his own house. The pattern house books, written by architects like Andrew Jackson Downing, presumed knowledge of what constituted “country living” in the ideal. There is much in Downing’s work that Thoreau would have had to admire. Downing is credited with popularizing the front porch giving, as he thought it did, a gesture of contact between the house and nature. But on a larger theme, Downing associated the site of the country house with political health and individual dignity. An “enfeebled nation” can be “regenerated,” says Downing, through “elemental forces” of “genius and character.” These qualities, Downing continues, can be: …traced back to the farm-house and rural cottage. It is the solitude and freedom of the family home in the country which constantly preserves the purity of the nation, and invigorates its intellectual powers” (xix). This

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lifestyle allows a contact with “nature and the family, where individuality takes its most natural and strongest development. (xix)

Thoreau would have little argument here except for perhaps the piece on the family, but perhaps that would agree with him as well. And further, Downing suggests what has to be thought of as essential to all the writers in this present study. Although Snyder, Jeffers, Sanders, Thoreau, and others would use different language, nevertheless, I submit there would be agreement with the notion that “the hearth is…a central point of the Beautiful and the Good” and that the home become “a little world…where truthfulness, beauty and order have the largest dominion” (xx).

Fig. 2-7. Thoreau’s sister, Sophia, sketched this drawing, and it was included on the title page of the 1854 edition of Walden.

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Fig. 2-8. Symmetrical Bracketed Cottage from Downing’s The Architecture of Country Houses.

One does find a Christian and moralizing quality in Downing that no doubt rankled Thoreau. In addition, Thoreau would have taken issue with the claim by Downing that “the Beautiful is, intrinsically, something quite distinct from the Useful” (8). Most importantly, Thoreau would have objected to the codification of architectural aesthetics as well: “[V]ines on a rural cottage always express domesticity and the presence of heart” (79). Such generalizations were opposed to Thoreau’s more radical, situational, and singular values. Downing would standardize and generalize certain experiences under capitalized headings such as “Rural Architecture” and Cottage Architecture” (47). Thoreau was more situational and radically dedicated to an individual’s choice. For Downing, these choices had strict languages associated with social station, and as a result, “He simply would not tolerate social climbing through what he characterized as gaudy and inappropriate architecture” (Sweeting 97). Downing was ratcheting down the codes emanating from architecture as Thoreau tried to keep these meanings open and subject to the lives and values of those living in these structures. Protesting against such an abstract imposition of pattern on his life, Thoreau makes a point of saying that one cannot design beauty onto a house. It’s not the “look” that makes a place come to life; one must “live” a beautiful life, and the form will follow function. Further, tasteful architecture will not, according to Thoreau, bring about civilization as stated by Downing. Thoreau makes it quite clear that beauty, wisdom,

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intelligence, and all that is extra in life, do not come from well-selected ornamentation but from the strength of our intellectual and imaginative life and from wilderness. The house for Thoreau must remain rustic; the mind must have the space to flourish. In an opposite frame of reasoning from Thoreau, here’s Downing suggesting a social engineering approach to good behavior: So long as men are forced to dwell in log huts and follow a hunter’s life, we must not be surprised at lynch law and the use of a bowie knife. But when smiling lawns and tasteful cottages begin to embellish a country, we know that order and culture are established… (xix)

Thoreau’s answer is to say that roughness and wildness (but certainly not barbarism and boorishness) are intimately related to the graces of civilization. Somewhat similar to our pop-out track homes today, pattern house designs were thought of as an extension of all the principles of goodness and modernity that civilization had acquired up to the moment. People just need to inhabit these pre-designed structures and a meaningful life of substance is sure to follow. Therefore, in the space of architecture, a cultural war of values was being fought. Both Thoreau and Downing were communicating entire visions of nature, morality, aesthetics, and social and political structure through their sense of design. Downing clearly saw homes as part of a mission to “further the progress of morality” and to do so in a way that allowed the “reformers of family life” to hold sway (Sweeting 92). As Sweeting puts it, Downing believed that architectural taste reflected moral health. With his help, the single family rural dwelling, already invested with the power to settle America’s notoriously unsettled population, developed in the 1840s into a structure with an education mission. (93)

Downing and Thoreau agreed that structures possess a social language, and therefore, these possess a story or vision of what values could structure a culture. There seemed to be a strong tension at the time in the language of architecture between modernist uniformity and regional uniqueness. Jack Larkin, for instance, suggests as much when, in The Reshaping of Everyday Life, he asserts that across the United States, in communities in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania or Georgia, neighbors could `read’ each other’s houses without difficulty. (116)

However, this was only within the strict confines of local regions for

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There were of course large-scale regional differences: 1) timber-framed houses, as constructed in England.6 These were heavy wooden posts and beams, held together with interlocking, often intricate joints in which a protruding tenon was carefully cut out of one timber to fit…in the next. (Larkin 106)

This is the method used by Thoreau. “I hewed the main timbers six inches square,” (W 31) Thoreau reports, and each one was “carefully mortised or tenoned by its stump” (W 31 my emphasis); 2) Brick and stone houses were rare but “in eastern Pennsylvania” and parts of Maryland and New Jersey “builders, following German traditions” (107) worked exclusively in brick and stone; 3) log construction was not an English contribution and did not make an appearance in the first settlements in New England and the Chesapeake. Although the Swedes built log houses in their isolated settlements in what later became Delaware, it was the Pennsylvania Germans who were responsible for their wide adoption by American settlers. Passing through eastern Pennsylvania on their way out west, pioneers of English and Scot-Irish origins picked up these techniques and deployed them in the new frontier out west. (107)

4) And then, finally, there was balloon framing, which probably came about because of the “tree-poor Illinois prairie” which couldn’t meet the demands of a quickly growing Chicago. This method resembles today’s framing technique and replaced the massive timber frame with a structural skin of numerous light, weight-bearing members, later standardized as two-by-fours, which were simply nailed together not intricately joined. (109)

In addition to radical variety by region, in the opening years of the 19th century houses were a humble affair: Most American families lived in houses that were much smaller and barer than it is easy to imagine today. Many houses were genuinely squalid,

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starkly reflective of the world of scarcity in which their owners lived. (Larkin 110)

These small houses didn’t survive the years and were not nice enough to invest in their preservation and upkeep. Therefore, mostly only houses of size and houses that were costly to build have survived into present day New England and other regions: “the two story houses that figure so prominently in surviving American architecture were actually relatively uncommon” (112). Larkin goes on to say that “most American dwellings before 1840 have disappeared” (117). And in their place “rapid assembly construction technology, standardized plans and mass-produced and catalog ordered fixtures” (117) gradually began to assume dominance on the visual landscape. As a result American housing began to lose its regional and local character.

Fig. 2-9. Inside of Thoreau’s cabin. The timber framing discussed above can be seen here.

Therefore, although Downing and Thoreau were “reading” the same architectural language and landscape, they disagreed on what was being “said” and what social order and value systems were at stake. By inhabiting a properly structured house, Downing thought the inhabitants could be taught to “worship homes and domesticity” so that they might

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“`attain a nearer view of the Great Master, whose words …are written in the lines of Beauty’” (Sweeting 95). Architecture, when properly partaking of the “greater plan,” could lead inhabitants to God and family. It’s noteworthy to consider that Downing’s beauty is platonic, didactic, top down, dropped from the sky, while Thoreau’s sense of beauty comes from houses that were unintentionally beautiful, growing from the inside out. Here is a classic distinction between wabi-sabi beauty that is found, organic, even inadvertent, and impermanent, as opposed to more contrived and forcefully intentional beauty, which is superimposed.

Fig. 2-10. Thoreau mimics the cost listing of Downing’s pattern house booklets. Thoreau’s is, of course, the cheaper one.

It must be said that the rustic and the organic can also be cultivated, superimposed, and have rigidly intentional features. I met a colleague at a conference recently. The presentation was recognizable: the carefully managed yet disheveled hair; the denim jeans with a crease in the leg and a fabulously understated, but clearly expensive, leather belt; also there was the obligatory $50 work shirt, etc. Contrivance is something Thoreau wanted to work against, so he leaned into the project of working this equation. The most important variable was that it happens one person at a time (this “individualism” is part of what draws criticism from current

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progressive literary critics). Echoing Emerson’s “Build, therefore, your own world” (56), Thoreau resisted the pattern house formulas and embraced the “indivisible fullness of the individual” (Mastellar 501). “`Grow your own house’” (Masteller 501), was Henry’s version of the Emersonian dictum. It is for these reasons that Thoreau clearly engages with what he sees as the prescriptive nature of Downing’s approach. As the Mastellers see it, Thoreau performs a parody of the Downing house by tactics such as parodying the pricing list (Thoreau’s being much cheaper), and by attacking the underlying assumption in Downing that to “cultivate one’s sentiments and sensibility” means “to domesticate” (495) these qualities. In addition, Thoreau critiqued Downing by “attacking the economics of [the] enterprise, the architectural details…and ultimately the fundamental theory underlying the mid-century crusade for rural domestic architecture” (496). Thoreau smelled a rat. He smelled hypocrisy and mass-produced living. Thoreau drew on a Puritan past, the Romantic Movement, Eastern philosophy, wilderness, and a concern over the disruptions of capital and commerce, to counter the initial trajectories of a nation on the way towards Wal-Mart box stores and endless Ferlinghetti freeways. The narrative and the model of carving out space to think and to reconsider is an important one in American life. Thoreau had the same moral and political reaction that has spawned large scale reaction opposing track homes, planned communities, and other forms of modern living. These are rejected because they have the feel of a thinly disguised, cheap and brutal uniformity. Thoreau’s comments on Downingesque ornamentation were meant to cast criticism on the social trajectory as a whole: A great portion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would literally strip them off…without injury to the substantials. (34)

In a similar manner, Jeffers allows nature to serve as a foil for the excesses and trivialities of the inhabitants of Carmel. The ocean will erase the ornaments of fertilizer and garden niceties: How many thousand tons of fertilizer and top-soil Are moved into the village gardens Regularly, and every winter wash out to sea. (CP 3: 451)

Jeffers suggests that the force of the sea is needed to put into relief the trivial excess of a misdirected and self-deluding culture. More specifically, the force of nature ushers in what Jeffers often referred to as earnestness,

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and washes out the excessive crap and twaddle of human sentiment and neurotic overlay. Jeffers stands out in the 20th century as the most important and impressive practitioner of the values and vision at the center of this study.

Notes 1

Yes I know that my pomo colleagues will remind me that this cult of the moment is just another seductive, capitalist “program” needing deconstruction and resistance. I am, however, siding with Jeffers, Snyder and others on a certain lifestyle and value system that keeps an eye on cultish regimented behavior, an eye on exploration and new ideas, and a focus on immediacy and the intensity and value of the moment. 2 It is always amusing and fascinating to witness the left manifesting fingerwagging, doctrinaire positions about decorum and restraint given that its political origins are decidedly from an in-your-face, let it all hang out, anti-authoritarian, days of rage, politics. 3 To see a fuller treatment of this issue with some excellent footnotes to major articles see Buell in Environmental Imagination 33-36. 4 For example, Alan Heimert’s 1963 “Moby Dick and American Political Symbolism” is an early and fine article that connects Melville’s novel with the political issues and parties in 1840-50. Heimert’s article is carefully drawn and maps Melville’s language with the documents and orators of the time. 5 For discussion regarding the use of female imagery for the planet see Julia Martin “Coyote-Mind: An Interview with Gary Snyder,” Triquarterly 79 (Autumn 1990), 148-72. Also see Patrick Murphy, “Sex-Typing the Planet” Environmental Ethics 10 (1988), 155-68. 6 See the discussion of early American timber houses and log cabins, p. 27, in Shelter, edited by Lloyd Kahn.

CHAPTER THREE ROBINSON JEFFERS: “I AM HEAPING THE BONES OF THE OLD MOTHER/TO BUILD US A HOLD…”

Fig. 3-1 The keystone above the entrance to Hawk Tower with Una’s and Robinson’s initials. But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon….. On the corner of La Huerta Road was a miniature Rhine castle with tarpaper turrets…the houses were comic, but he didn’t laugh. Their desire to startle was so eager and guileless. (61) —Day of the Locust, Nathaniel West

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Recently, while looking at pictures of Jeffers looking awkward at a highprofile social gathering and then comparing these pictures to photos of Jeffers inside his house and of him stacking stones, one is taken with the amount of risks associated with fashioning a life that matters.

Fig. 3-2. Jeffers with Salvador Dali and Ginger Rogers. 1941 in Monterey.

There is so much that conspires against getting it right. Like the crafting of a poem, one crafts a life, alone. We do it against all odds, and we do it with the crushing likelihood that the project will evaporate, the profile will be blotted out, the language will blur, and all will be subsumed by some governing paradigm: we will fall in line. Many poets have taken up this subject of crafting a unique identity and protecting it against the tides of a fleeting and demanding life. Earlier in these pages I referred to Updike’s poem dedicated to this issue: And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market-

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the quips, the witticisms, the slant adjusted to a few… …The whole act. Who will do it again? That’s it: no one; imitators and descendants aren’t the same. (231)

The picture of Jeffers talking to Ginger Rodgers and Salvador Dali at a cocktail party is first humorous and then, when you know Jeffers well, painful. He seems lost, ill at ease, and awkward. An interesting addition of the Robinson Jeffers Newsletter is devoted to discussing this picture and other aspects of Jeffers’s social reluctance.1 However, when you look at him standing next to the stone tower, he is relaxed, poised, and confident. What Jeffers carved out early in the dawn of the 20th century was a pattern of living many of us have pursued relentlessly ever since. What seemed odd, random, wild, deviant, and even misanthropic in the early moments of the 20th century, now is seen as a definitive lifestyle choice, easily recognized, sometimes—but not necessarily—expensive, rare, and sought after. Such is the nature of a truly original gesture; or, if “original” carries too much linguistic accelerant for the reader, then we might say Jeffers’s lifestyle became something highly appealing as the sociohistorical forces and alternatives have played themselves out. Jeffers was author and protagonist in the story of discovery in the context of a magnificent, lifechanging, coastal beauty. As a result, he forged a lifestyle of commitment to settle in for the long haul, a lifestyle that danced with and paid daily homage to this beauty for the rest of his life. In the 70s, many of us traveling up and down the California coast were about the same business of discovery and wonder, but many of us wouldn’t encounter Jeffers, if at all, until we got to college. We found spectacular, lonely coves to surf and wander through, and then, later, we found the poet of this region. We sought and encountered the wild, and then we found its poet. I recall scaling down thousand-foot cliffs in Big Sur, surfboard under arm, backpack with wet suit, wine and cheese inside. I didn’t have the voice for this experience until I read Jeffers years later in a little class called “Darwinism and American Literature” taught by Sherwood Cummings. I did have the blood for it though. I was face down in the beauty, the humility, and the danger of encountering large and wild waves in remote and isolated coasts. Recalling this energy and this immediacy, all I have to say to Cronon and the constructivists is, “Paddle out! We will see you at the outside set breaking 15-20 feet. No one there except you, your friends, and large, heaving mountains of beautiful, terrifying, pristine, blue-black water headed for the shore. We will talk constructed experience out there.” Of course, Cronon would argue that he doesn’t deny materiality,

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but that he insists on its political construction. This move, as I have discussed, opens a paralyzing, endless, “interrogation,” and deployment of the contexts for establishing a particular and fixed meaning. The motivation will be to “reveal” the colonizing, sexist, elitist notion of any conception of nature that doesn’t advance the associated political interests of the constructivist’s political agenda.

Fig. 3-3. After a recent trip (2011) to Tor House, I took the slow road (PCH) from Santa Cruz to San Francisco. I was reminded how lonely and brooding this drive used to be. There is still some of that left. It’s Jeffers’s Country.

This taste for discovered, wild beauty is found throughout Jeffers, but also, here and there in other early 20th century western and coastal writers. Jack London, for instance, has a wonderful passage of discovery involving Carmel. This passage always reminds me of Robin and Una discovering their “inevitable place”2 in the fall of 1914 (Karman, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California 23-24). The passage, from the 1913 Valley of the Moon, features two lovers, Billy and Saxon, who are at the center of this novel: They had taken the direct country road across the hills from Monterey, instead of the Seventeen Mile Drive around by the coast, so that Carmel Bay came upon them without any fore-glimmerings of its beauty. Dropping down through the pungent pines, they passed woods-embowered

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cottages, quaint and rustic, of artists and writers, and went on across windblown rolling sandhills held to place by sturdy lupins and nodding with pale California poppies. Saxon screamed in sudden wonder of delight, then caught her breath and gazed at the amazing peacock-blue of a breaker, shot through with golden sunlight, overfalling in a mile long sweep and thundering into white ruin of foam on a crescent beach of sand scarcely less white. (296)

Those who love the northern California coastline and the bold yet nuanced beauty of the Carmel Bay and community will lean into this passage. Every surfer, beach walker, early evening fisherman knows that golden light streaking through a late afternoon, blue-green, crystal wave. The area seduces with its deep, layered, burrowing blues, greens, yellows, browns, its chill breeze offset with a warm sun, its occasional crash of white foam down the beach through mist, the tall pines wrapped in fog, the call of gulls, the silent, gliding pelicans in a line over a quiet, grey, wave.

Fig. 3-4. Carmel Bay, looking south to Pt. Lobos, during a trip to photograph Tor House, 7/2011.

In addition to moving to a wild and remote area, Jeffers also trail-blazed another pattern: moving from southern to northern California. Before moving to the north, Jeffers was living in a southern California that was already showing its predilection for sprawl, gaudiness, brashness, rawness, and a visual pollution to match the industrial poison being spewed into air, water, and soil. The couple met in class at USC when Una Call Kuster was still married. Over the next several years, their mutual attraction never abated,

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and as a result, a well-publicized divorce occurred between Una and her husband, Teddie Kuster, a well-established lawyer. The day after her divorce was official, she married Robin on August 2, 1913.3 Soon after this, they moved to Carmel. Jeffers and his new wife located themselves in a remote town they referred to as their “inevitable place” (Powell 14).4 As their son Donnan writes, in “The Building of Tor House,” the couple was first planning a move to England, but when the war broke out, this forced a change in plan, and, at the suggestion of a friend, they decided to wait “the few months” until the war was over in Carmel. When they arrived there, however, they realized that, as Jeffers wrote in an often quoted passage, they “had come without knowing it to their inevitable place.” (6)

Therefore, his life with Una was focused on the beauty of the northern coast and was punctuated early on with social taboos, as were many of the characters in his long poems. Five years after moving to Carmel, they bought land and started building their stone house and an extraordinary life. As Donnan reports, the lots Robinson bought in 1919— there were 16 in all initially—cost $200 each (20). By 1922, there were 33 lots and eventually they owned 36 lots totaling five acres. Buying the last three lots in 1929, the couple paid $3000 per lot, and, Donnan adds, “today, as I write (1977) a similar one [lot], though lacking quite as good a view, is being offered on the market for $200,000” (21). I haven’t bothered to check what prices look like in 2011, but the reader can guess. In the aerial shot that follows, one can see Tor House and Hawk Tower in the lower right corner. At the time of the 1940 photo in Fig. 3-5, it appears that Jeffers still had a good portion if not all of the original land. Today, of course, Tor House is on a suburban street lined with houses, mailboxes, joggers, cars, the works. A striking place for sure, but so much so that it was unsettling. Jeffers reflects this concern in a poem written in the early days at Carmel. In “Dream of the Future,” Jeffers asks How do we dare to live In so great and tameless a land? (CP 4: 179)

He answers his question in the next breath: “We dare; we are here” (CP 4: 179).

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Fig. 3-5. Tor House and Hawk Tower in the lower right corner, c. 1940. Today, the street that the house is on runs along the tree line to the left of the house. When the population started to encroach on Jeffers, he “planted trees eastward, and the ocean/Secured the west” (CP I: 240).

Reflecting on these lines, James Karman adds another anxious question to the mix. In addition to coping with the sheer power and majesty of this environment, Jeffers, according to Karman, also was wondering, “how he could dare to write there. In fact, at this time in his life he wondered if he could write at all” (Collected Letters 1: 17). Therefore, at the same time that one sees respect and awe for the land and the sea, there is also a hope that this encounter will cause an equal kind of boldness and strength in the humans who nestle into this coastline. Further in “Dream of the Future,” Jeffers hopes that “Our children…may equal the land” (CP 4: 179). Jeffers hoped to be touched and changed by these natural forces and poetry was a vehicle to help with this process of coming to terms with this power. This squares with Tim Hunt’s assessment that “Jeffers believed poetry should bring us to reality rather than transform or replace it” (Selected Poetry 9).

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On the northern coast, Jeffers seems to have found a replacement for the elements lacking in modern, urban life. He found power as well as patterns and rhythms of life that he could respect and that were soothing and reassuring: For the first time in my life I could see people living—amidst magnificent unspoiled scenery—essentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homer’s Ithaca…Here was life purged of ephemeral accretions. Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white seagulls, as they have done for thousands of years, and will for thousands of years to come. Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life. (CP 4: 392)

Jeffers leveled his judgment early on regarding the direction of modern population centers. In “The Purse-Seine,” Jeffers is looking from a “night mountain-top/On a wide city,” and he draws a comparison between the shiny city and the shiny fish caught in the net. Although personally repulsed by the urban lifestyle, he gazes at the “colored splendor” and “galaxies of light” of the L.A. sprawl. In the same way that the fish begin to panic as they realize the determination of their fate in the closing net, …We have geared the machines and locked all …together into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now There is no escape. We have gathered the great populations incapable of free survival, insulated From the strong earth….The circle is closed, and the net Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already. (CP 2: 518)

In this environment, Jeffers fears and forecasts the “inevitable mass disasters” (CP 2: 518), he has been describing. As opposed to this scene, Jeffers locates himself in an isolated and wild coastline environment and builds a life of solitude and reflection. But it is the writing process as well as being in an isolated place that Jeffers sees as his refuge. In “Apology for Bad Dreams,” writing saves him from the overwhelming beauty of the place (although his characters sometimes succumb), and it saves him from a world of war and trouble: This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places… I said in my heart, “Better invent than suffer: imagine victims Lest your own flesh be chosen the agonist, or you

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Martyr some creature to the beauty of the place.” And I said, “Burn sacrifices once a year to magic Horror away from the house, this little house here You have built over the ocean with your own hands…” (CP I: 209)

By being the most prominent extension of the imaginative into the physical realm, houses are full of communication; they are political statements, social commentary, as well as embodied aesthetic projects. The structures Jeffers built on the land at Carmel were an extension of the feelings and values he saw embedded there. As I have been stressing, the impact on the poetry is a crucial aspect on the buildings as well. Regarding Jeffers’s tower, Theodore Ziolkowski stated, “the tower was not the realization of an image long present in his poetry: just the opposite!” (81). According to Ziolkowski, the tower worked to produce the poetry; not the other way around. This grounded connection to the physical world has not been properly documented especially regarding nature writing. How many back-packers, skiers, surfers, photographers, lookout sitters, mountain climbers, or rock-wall builders are associated with this group of folks who write about nature or read nature writers? Ed Abbey’s readership, for instance, has a large membership of folks who are forest rangers, backpackers, wilderness aficionados, skiers, bungee cord jumpers, and more. The Robinson Jeffers Association is populated with all manner of folks with athletic backgrounds and from non-literary disciplines, particularly the sciences.

Fig. 3-6. Jeffers shaping a stone for proper fit with a geologist hammer. Horace Lyon photo, 1937.

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In sum, Jeffers had this clear and vigorous connection between the physical world and his writing. Specifically, Jeffers makes the linkage between his writing and his house in “To the Stone Cutters.” In this poem, Jeffers lays out his poetic program, and it is linked to his daily lifestyle of stacking rocks. He acknowledges that individual lives are doomed to end and even the sun will eventually burn out: Yet stones [like his Tor House] have stood a thousand years and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems. (CP 1: 5)

So far, Tor House has stood, nicely, for over 90 years. Jim Karman contemplates, in Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California, the question of choice of building materials: what if Jeffers had originally built his house out of the “same stone used by Father Junipero Serra’s Carmel mission, which was soft and chalky, velvety to the touch, and ranged in shade from `warm cream to palest amber’” (47). The chosen site would have none of this, however. One is tempted to compare the two rocks with Christian philosophy as opposed to a more pagan orientation. The location, with its rugged “standing stones,” its abundant shoreline granite, and its ocean winds, called out for another approach. Jeffers began to work with granite stones and boulders. The chosen site on the point of the south end of Carmel Bay “reminded Robinson and Una of the rocky promontories called ‘tors’ which they both had seen in Dartmoor, England” (RJ, Karman, 47). Hence the name of the house was “Tor House.” Karman goes on to document the profound change that came over Jeffers. Something happened, reports Karman. “Handling the granite boulders that had rolled in the sea for a thousand years and were now being set in place for shelter deepened and intensified his experience of life” (RJ 48) and certainly his experience of place. Jeffers’s place had the cosmos built into it. Karman also contemplates the trajectory the two choices of materials suggested: An “ivory tower” made of perishable chalkstone and set comfortably in a different, more protected location might have encouraged a detached existence. Such a house might also have inspired Robinson to write conventional poetry… (RJ 47)

In “To the House,” Jeffers characterizes the stones he uses to build the house as “the bones of the old mother” (CP I: 409). This is the very stuff of the life force, of Gaia herself. These stones were “baptized” in primal fires of creation (literally molten lava cooled by ocean waters), and now

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Jeffers stacks them for his house. Suddenly, everything changes for Jeffers as dramatically as everything changed for Melville in the first few pages of Moby Dick. Granite is Jeffers’s Ahab. Genre is stressed to the point of breaking. Thematics are pressurized and layered. A new and striking intensity resides in his life and writing as he imagines his house constructed from sacred materials. The stone house presents him with a means to settle himself within the dynamic processes of the place and the universe. Building and inhabiting become ritualistic in the sense that this allows Jeffers passage into these forces. By touching, handling, shaping, and fitting the granite, Jeffers felt the intensity of the forces of creation, and he built his vision out into the world, in word and stone: not a small thing for a poet. He even baptized the cornerstone of the house in an ancient, pagan ritual. In “To the Rock That Will Be the Cornerstone of the House,” Jeffers baptizes the rock: “the stone endurance that is waiting millions of years to carry/A corner of the house”: …So, I have brought you Wine and white milk and honey for the hundred years of famine And the hundred cold ages of sea-wind. (CP 1: 11)

Fig. 3-7. Donnan and Garth Jeffers with Robinson and friend— Harry Teabolt— and large stone which he had brought as a gift and which was later incorporated into the Tower. Boys look about 4, so probably taken c. 1920.

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Such a ritual associated with his house was not casual to his thinking. His house was a constant focus for his thinking and his poetry and integral to his entire life pattern. In the opening to “The Women at Point Sur,” Jeffers, thinking of the permanent and earnest things in the universe—the big picture—wonders why he bothers with this trifle poetry. He asks himself “why should I make fables again?” He contrasts such apparent frivolousness to The old rock under the house, the hills with their hard roots and the ocean hearted With sacred quietness from here to Asia… (CP 1: 240)

Fig. 3-8. The rock that became the cornerstone of the house, 6/2011.

The rock under the house is equal in importance to the sea and hills. Jeffers had a real understanding of pre-Christian thinking, and this understanding seems to be vibrantly alive here. As David Pearson, in The New Natural House Book, points out, In many cultures, locations with a great focus of energy are known to be “places of power”…but they are also mirrored in the home. To the ancient Greeks, the sacred centre of Earth energy…was known as the omphalos or navel of the world. The foundation stone represented the omphalos, and the birth of the building. Foundation rituals formally asked the Earth Mother to

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allow the building on the soil, to guard it, and to bring the occupants good fortune. (49)

In Wild Angels, Ursula Le Guin published a poem on the omphalos, “Mount St. Helens/Omphalos.” In this poem, she refers to the mountain as the center. It is a beckon “among the stars” that caused the “children on the moon” to come home. It is …hearth, hill, altar, heart’s home, the stone is at the center (43).

It’s interesting to note that the poem that follows “Omphalos” is “For Robinson Jeffers’s Ghost.” This poem alludes to several of Jeffers’s poems and themes such as one finds in “Natural Music” (discussed in detail below). Many writers and thinkers have remarked on this process of easing their way in to the power and energy of a place. Lawrence Buell quotes Muir as Muir meditates on his entrance into Yosemite and the animal communities there: “`shall I be allowed to enter into their midst and dwell with them?’” (Writing for an Endangered World 14). Buell also comments on writers like Muir who realize they must achieve a “bona fide existential embeddedness” (WEW 14) with their environment. Quoting another writer, Buell emphasizes this process of relationship building between people, animals, and living things, all needing “to be content to live quietly side by side with their neighbors, until they grow into a sense of relationship and mutual interests’” (WEW 14).

Fig. 3-9 The continent’s end outside Jeffers’s garden.

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With Jeffers’s new sense of contact and embeddedness, one sees him, suddenly, changing his poetic mission concurrently with the movement into his house project. In “Mal Paso Bridge,” he vows to create a poetry that matches the world of sea and granite, which he has embraced. He intends to …drink wine while I could, Love where I pleased, and feed my eyes With Santa Lucian sea-beauty, and moreover To shear the rhyme-tassels from verse. (CP 4: 253)

The act of writing about this place in the morning and then building with sacred materials in the afternoon, all were part of the interwoven process to create the ritual of “home,” to release his primal health, to establish a life of independence, to change his poetics, and to move Jeffers into the natural forces of the seacoast. In the process of merging with the natural energies of the region, Jeffers brings a house into being that connects Jeffers, his wife, and his sons to the molten beginnings of the earth, the primal rhythms of ocean tides, the trees and animals of the coast range, the movement of stars overhead, and the force of waves that have cooled and shaped, the solid rocks of creation. The action is threefold involving nature, the house, and the writing project. A connection to the mystical sea and the molten, creative fountain, the excitement of sexual and natural energies inside and outside the home, all combine to allow for a writing project and a marital relationship that had uncommon force. The house affords protection, “ a hold against the…air” (CP I: 5), but it is of the earth and located in nature so the forces of natural energy are not removed but imbued throughout the house. Bachelard states that when our houses are “set close one up against the other, we are less afraid. A hurricane in Paris has not the same personal offensiveness towards the dreamer that it has towards the hermit’s house” (27). So, Jeffers felt the intimacy and strength of focus on the inside, but his place opened to the outer world in a vibrant manner as well. As Kirk Glaser explains, “…to build his house out of the earth itself becomes at once a way to wall out and intimately locate himself at the core of violent, elemental creation” (7). He, naturally if you will, works his way into the natural world and it into him. As Glaser has it, “He imagines into poetry an intimate space created `naturally’ from the landscape” (4). And as Thoreau before him and as Snyder after him, Tor House becomes a refuge but also an inspirational space for Jeffers to launch a vision of concentric circles where his location and his life are connected to larger and larger contexts of space and time. In the following poem, notice how Jeffers imagines his home naturally and permanently

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associated with a radiating set of natural formations: the knoll, the lava peninsula, the bay, river, valley. Also there is a note that his fingers played a small part in shaping a piece of that larger vision, by producing stone structures but also by writing poetry: If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes: Perhaps of my planted forest a few May stand yet…but fire and axes are devils. Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant. But if you should look …after ten thousand years: It is the granite knoll on the granite And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel Rivervalley, these four will remain In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind…. (CP 1: 408)

In “Tor House,” Jeffers integrates his house within the larger context of the environment. Later, writers like Snyder will talk about bioregions and watersheds; Thoreau anticipated all of it, however, with his comment, quoted earlier, that we “are wont to see our dooryard as a part of the earth’s surface” (J 272). Jeffers, as Thoreau before and Snyder to follow, understands his life in the context of other presences, other natural forms. In addition, he sees his relation with nature within geologic time and change. The ultimate impact of all of this is to affect a change in character, a change in the way the human being sees identity, being, and surely, how to prioritize one’s time and one’s efforts. For Jeffers, a calm and rhythmic life was the goal. As James Karman points out, Jeffers felt a connection between his life, the environment, and his writing. The rhythm in his writing “came…from many sources: ‘physics, biology…the tidal environments of life’…By ‘tidal environments’ he meant more than the ebb and flow of the ocean; he had in mind the cycles that regulate the deepest aspects of our lives, like the alternation of day and night and the changes in the moon and in the seasons and the bodies of women” (RJ Poet of California 53). The first phase of Tor House was completed in 1919 with the aid of a professional mason, the well-known M.J. Murphy. Murphy’s name is synonymous with the architectural fame of Carmel since he built many of the houses of note featured in Linda Paul’s Cottages by the Sea: The Handmade Homes of Carmel, America’s First Artist Community. Murphy visited in 1902 and brought his family back in 1904 and began a long and influential design and building career. In a note to a letter in Karman’s

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Collected Letters, the bill for the building of the house is mentioned as being $2230 (CL I: 439). As an apprentice to Murphy, Jeffers was very involved, however, learning from the master and picking out each stone: …my fingers had the art To make stone love stone… (“Tor House” CP I: 408)

“Tor House” is an early poem, but in a much later poem, “For Una,” Jeffers reminds us again of the art and mystery of working closely with granite stone: I built it with my hands, I hung Stones in the sky. (CP 3: 33)

Fig. 3-10. Ocean facing side of Tower with sitting, reading room protruding.

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Fig. 3-11. Approaching the last set of steps to reach top of Hawk Tower. Note the keystone with hawk image and the chain for ascending the steps. Stones in the sky.

Fig. 3-12. Living room in Tor House. Window looks out to the ocean. Jeffers would read the classics here at night to Donnan, Garth, and Una.

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The granite stones were pulled up from the beach with ropes and horses, “some weighing nearly 400 pounds” (Karman CL I, 32). The house was modeled after “a Tudor barn that Una had seen in Surrey, England. Tor House had a living room with windows facing south and west, a guest bedroom, a kitchen, and a bath. Above the living room, accessible by a short stairway, there was a loft where Robinson, Una, and the children slept. It was a small sturdy structure (some of the walls were four feet thick) with running water, but no gas, electricity, or telephone” (Karman RJ 4950). As Donnan Jeffers reports, zoning didn’t hamper the house design; there wasn’t any zoning. In addition, all of the “horrid sounds” that come with modern building were absent. I was thinking of this passage when I was at Tor House in July, 2011. Just down the street, near Teddie Kuster’s place, there were awful construction sounds (screaming saws and the omnipresent safety alert of beep, beep, beep from the truck that seems to back up forever) as a house was having major construction done. This wasn’t the case during the building of Tor House: The building of a house in the present day is accompanied by all kinds of horrid sounds. First, frequently, is the nasty noise produced by a chainsaw as trees and brush are removed. This is followed by the growl of a bulldozer and, if the site is filled with rocks, the insufferable rat-tat-tat of a jackhammer. Following comes the high pitched whine of electric saws and other equipment and the ever present roar of gasoline engines as huge trucks and cement mixers bring material to the site. All of these were absent in the building of Tor House; what was not done by men and hand tools was accomplished by horses, and cement, sand, lumber, and hardware were all brought in a horse drawn wagon. In a more hectic age, it is pleasant to think back upon those quiet days, and a reminder of them is provided every spring when, on the rough land before the house, a patch of domestic oats appears, descendants, after many generations, of those spilled from the horses’ nosebags as they, along with the men, had their lunch. (10)

I particularly like that last touch: a patch of oats has survived as a reminder of feeding the horses and the building of the house. After the initial part of the main house was finished with the guidance of M.J. Murphy, Jeffers went on by himself to add other structures over the years including the planting of nearly two thousand trees. The most well-known and impressive addition, however, was Hawk Tower. During the 5 years Jeffers spent building the tower, Una states in a letter that “so often the hawks flying above came to rest on the great granite boulders that at last we called it

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Hawk Tower, and had hawks cut with the unicorns in the keystones over the doors” (Karman CL 2: 323).

Fig. 3-13. Hawk Tower.

Hawk Tower is a truly magnificent structure, “inspired by the ancient towers of Ireland but designed according to the dictates of Jeffers’s own imagination” (Karman CL 32). Karman sketches the process: It took five years to build, occupying Jeffers from 1920 to 1925. When finished, it included a sunken dungeon, a ground floor room, a second floor room paneled in mahogany and containing an oriel window, a secret staircase enclosed within the walls, an exterior staircase that led to a covered turret (from which one could look out to sea through a porthole from the ship in which Napoleon fled Elba), a third floor open platform paved in marble and surrounded by a battlement, and a fourth-floor open turret. (RJ: Poet of California 50)

“And so it went,” reports Karman, “day after day, with writing and stonemasonry bound together in a mutually stimulating round” (CL 1: 33). One can see in Fig. 3-14 the ramp and the block and tackle mechanism. When he could no longer roll rocks up the ramp, he engaged the use of the block and tackle.

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Fig. 3-14. Here one sees the Tower more than half done. The twins are pulling a rope that hoists the rock up aided by a pulley at the top of the scaffolding. The Tower windows are facing the ocean, and the twins are on the south side.

In the first chapter, I quoted Bachelard on the importance of the house; he warned in those pages against becoming “`beings whose towers have been destroyed’” (xxxvii). In this spirit, Jeffers had the following Latin quote engraved above the fireplace in Hawk Tower: “We fashion dreams for ourselves” (Karman CL 477n.1). Jeffers’s tower is the culmination of the bold move to establish an alternative approach to living and writing (his writing during the tower building period was significant). As a result, Jeffers explored and discovered an approach towards literature that is only now being understood by professionals in the literary field. In the 30s, Jeffers announces his new poetic mission and focus: …my love, my loved subject: Mountain and ocean, rock, water and beasts and trees Are the protagonists; the human people are only symbolic interpreters…(CP 3: 484)

In 1996, Cheryl Glotfelty, a professor of literature, announces the academy’s recognition of this insight, without any attribution to Jeffers of course. Glotfelty, in the seminal Ecocritism Reader, celebrated the new sun that had risen in the literary mind: “we are now considering nature not just as a

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stage upon which the human story is acted out but as an actor in the drama” (xxi). In an article called “Carrying the Weight,” I explored Jeffers’s role in the emergence of ecocriticism. Jeffers brought a unique view of the relation between humans and nature into stark relief. He called this view Inhumanism. In “Carmel Point,” he felt that We must uncenter our minds from ourselves We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from. (CP 3: 399)

He inherited his poetic and aesthetic program as a result of his relation with nature. His aesthetic program emerges from the disinterested but powerful beauty of nature. The hawk becomes one of the most frequent and strongest embodiments of this sense of power, endurance, and beauty: I think, here is your emblem To hang in the future sky; Not the cross, not the hive, But this; bright power, dark peace; Fierce consciousness joined with final Disinterestedness; Life with calm death; the falcon's Realist eyes and act Married to the massive Mysticism of stone, Which failure cannot cast down Nor success make proud. (CP 2: 416)

This sense of disinterested beauty and power was, for Jeffers, not only the basis for his poetics, but also the way in which he tried to discipline his mind as an individual: he wanted to uncenter his mind from himself; he wanted his country to be neutral and calm; he wanted his house to reflect these granite qualities of nature and politics. He wanted to become like neutral nature (“As the rock and ocean that we were made from”) and honor the insights he had gained into the world of the granite, the ocean, the hawk.

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Fig. 3-15. Hawk figure high on the wall of Hawk Tower. There are two and both extend where there are platforms on the tower. My recollection is that these are raptor-shaped water drains.

I have held that this gesture of house building possesses political import as well. As with Thoreau, Jeffers’s gesture has obvious and immediate political translation. Like Thoreau, Jeffers’s move away from the city or town to the coast suggests a rejection of current trends and values in modernist and industrial America. Both writers adopt an inseparable connection between their writing, the land, and their houses. As a result, they forged their homes and patterns for living accordingly. Their projects come out of the land and are not forced upon it. However, as Thoreau was responding to some specific personal, historical and personal figures (how to shape his life, marketplace dynamics, Downing, etc.), Jeffers’s house and lifestyle are the result of some largely forgotten historical forces which I will discuss shortly. The easiest assumption to be made is that the tower and house were a kind of melodramatic rejection of modern life. Such an assumption has brought with it accusations of misanthropy and Jeffers has been accused of a cynical delight in contemplating apocalypse and disaster. And William Cronon, of course, labeled such gestures of escaping to nature as “expressing a peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism” (78). It is true

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that part of what Jeffers does is all about refuge and retreat. Taking to towers has a very special kind of history and meaning in the first half of the 20th century. Theodore Ziolkowski, in The View from the Tower, has recently pointed out that The vogue of tower habitation in the years immediately following WWI constitutes one of the more remarkable phenomena in the history of poetic ecology….modern “turrites” took to their towers as strongholds of security in what they regarded as the wasteland of Western civilization. (5)

In Shelter, the section on towers features Jung’s comments about reasons for building his tower: “I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired” (96). A while later in this section, Jung goes on to say, “The feeling of repose and renewal I had in this tower was intense from the start” (97). Theodore Ziolkowski, in The View from the Tower, states that, “like Jeffers,” Jung learned from two masons “how to split stones and soon became skillful in the art of stone masonry” (139-40). As Ziolkowski reports, Jung’s need to build the tower was connected with childhood affiliations with stone as well as connections with his dreams on the subject. It had positive effects for him: “`I just spent about 3 weeks in the tower, where I finished the 3rd edition of a little book of mine, much inspired by the peculiar atmosphere of the place’” (Ziolkowski 140). Although it is true that part of what Jeffers was up to involved rejection and escape, there was a larger part of this gesture that has not been understood. Critics have had a hard time deciding exactly why Jeffers fell on such ill favor in the 40s and 50s, and to some extent thereafter, since he was so popular in the 30s. It wasn’t so much that he was gradually forgotten; it was more like a drumbeat ritual ushered him to the margins. As Jim Karman states, “For Rexroth, the decline of Jeffers’ reputation began in 1932 when Yvor Winters wrote the review that appeared in Hound and Horn, the review that contained, he believed, `one of the most devastating attacks’ against a poet in modern criticism’” (RJ: Poet of California 143). This event is part of the story, but the rejection of Jeffers was due to larger, political reasons.

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Fig. 3-16. Stones hung in the sky.

Jeffers does create many difficulties, even for admirers. What should we think of a poet who says he’d rather be a “worm in a wild apple than a son of man” (CP 3: 204)? And how is it possible for Jeffers to be opposed to WWII? How could Jeffers really mean that he’d rather kill a man rather than a hawk (CP I: 377)? And how could he dwarf us in an unimaginable, limitless, spatial void surrounded by beautiful but meaningless spiral galaxies drifting, drifting further and further out into blackness?: “The flaming and whirling universe like a handful of gems falling down a dark well” (CP 3: 274). Of course, most who enjoy Jeffers relish his ability to foreground nature over humanity and see this as a much needed and refreshing corrective. Humans tend to subscribe to delusional and selfcentered perspectives, and these readers feel that Jeffers’s cosmic context puts things back in perspective. I believe I have found a way to understand this issue of the fall in his reputation in a new way, and see it as part and parcel with his focus on house, forest, ocean, stars, and nature. Jeffers felt that humans were too afraid on the one hand and egotistical on the other, so they tended to indulge in all sorts of fanciful thoughts and destructive actions. To offset this, Jeffers explains that he intended

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to present a certain philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty. (CP 4: 428)

Cultivating a quietude that neutralizes fanaticism is a theme in Snyder's work as well, as we shall see, and is associated with his practice of Buddhism. But Jeffers was also schooled in this tradition and Una refers to this quality in Jeffers in a letter to George Sterling: Come and read…in my tower room—it’s the most enchanting place to read verse in—and to talk about verse. It’s even perfect for silence—that’s Robin’s great idea of Happiness. (Karman CL I 478)

Jeffers wanted humans to look out and around to absorb the size and beauty of things; he felt this could settle the restless human heart, neutralize desire and fear, and keep humans from messing with each other: …we have all this excess energy; what should we do with it? We could take a walk, for instance, and admire the landscape: that is better than killing one’s brother in war or trying to be superior to one’s neighbor in time of peace. We could dig our gardens…We could, according to our abilities, give ourselves to science or art; not to impress somebody, but for love of the beauty each discloses. We could even be quiet occasionally… (CP 4: 419)

This was Jeffers’s explanation for a poetry that attempted to cool the passions of an individual by foregrounding and coming to terms with the large, indifferent but gloriously beautiful universe. There are larger political contexts and issues at stake, however. Jeffers was writing at a time when the mood of the nation was largely in favor of a neutral position (be quiet occasionally) on the stage of world politics. It is my contention that Jeffers lived as an individual the way he hoped his nation would behave in world affairs. Jeffers’s dedication to his spot on the coast and his focus on the building of his house were direct indices to how he felt his country should behave: he wanted his country to mind its own business.

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There is a long running debate in the country over the difference between an irresponsible isolationism (actually this is happening now in the US Senate and in the Presidential debates leading up to the 2012 election) and an informed position of neutrality; Jeffers was certainly informed. Complicating our understanding of Jeffers and his views on war is the fact that he “wanted to enlist” (Karman RJ 39) in WWI but his young wife wouldn’t have it. Her resistance to his wishes to join up caused quite a rift in their relationship (RJ Karman 40). In addition, although too old to serve in uniform during WWII, he served as a “volunteer aircraft spotter, while Una did Red Cross work; Garth [one of the twins] joined the Marines” (Ridgeway 258).

Fig. 3-17. This movement attracted, like today, those on the left who oppose intervention in the name of political and economic justice as well as those on the right who oppose intervention due to an isolationist or neutrality stance.

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Fig. 3-18. Tower almost finished, 1923. Tor House and garage complete.

It is important to remember the political realities of the times Jeffers wrote in. At first, it is easy to believe the misanthropic labels that Jeffers has been saddled with over the years. As stated previously, his opposition to WWII seems odd to 21st century readers. Even sometimes sympathetic and supportive critics like Buell have labeled Jeffers as ahistorical and unconcerned with humans and human history. Buell exaggerates one strain of Jeffers into an overarching defining feature. According to Buell, Jeffers assessment of World War II was equal to “a dot on the disk of history” (WWE 155). Indeed, there were moments when Jeffers wanted to emphasize the power and beauty of the Earth and the universe by diminishing the deluding importance humans sometimes give to world events and their own lives. But there is so much other evidence to suggest how involved Jeffers was in world events and history. Jeffers’s house was literally made out of history. Jeffers placed pieces of rock in the walls of his house from around the world. Embedded in the house are fragments from Irish round towers, Roman history, a tile from the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, other historically relevant pieces from Cambodia and China, along with other parts of the world and its history: “Jeffers cemented stones from around the world into both structures” (Karman CL 1: 33). And even a casual look at the titles of Jeffers’s poems easily documents that there has probably not been a more politically and historically focused poet. And with a more careful look, one finds Jeffers

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squarely planted within a vigorous public debate that was taking place in the street as well as the legislative houses of the United States. For instance, Jeffers belonged to the largest anti-war movement in US history. “The America First Committee boasted 800,000 members. Its members ranged from patricians to populists, from Main Street Republicans to prairie socialists. John F. Kennedy was a donor; his future brother-in-law Sargent Shriver was a founder, as were Gerald Ford, Potter Stewart, and Kingman Brewster. Many of the finest writers in America sympathized with (or joined) “America First”—Sinclair Lewis, Edmund Wilson, Robinson Jeffers, e.e. cummings… The antiwar movement of 1940-41 was essentially libertarian: in favor of peace and civil liberties, opposed to conscription” (Kauffman “Heil”). Bill Kaufman, in America First, outlines the extent of this movement and especially the involvement of writers like Jeffers. Kauffman is amazed that the anti-war movements of “1960s and 1990s pay no homage to America First, which was broader, more inclusive, and far more populist than the admirable but often one-note opposition to Vietnam, Central American, and Gulf wars” (Kauffman America First 21). In retrospect, this movement has been accused of being associated with German sympathies, but the fact is that the same strain of Midwestern isolationists that were opposing war then are the same that oppose foreign interventions today (such as Sen. Byron Dorgen or Kent Conrad from N.D. or a Tom Daschle from S.D.). In addition, isolationists on the conservative side, like today’s Pat Buchanan, were also merged in this movement.

Fig. 3-19. Spiral stairs on Hawk Tower.

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In a 1938 pamphlet entitled, Writers Take Sides, put out by the American Writers League, the question asked of writers of the day was: "Are you for or are you against Franco and fascism?" Jeffers responded, "You ask what I am for and what I am against in Spain.” Part of his response was as follows: “I would not give a flick of my little finger to help either side win” (Ridgeway 266). This is the Jeffers some critics think they know; there is a side of Jeffers that acknowledges the size, indifference, and terrible beauty of the universe and of living and dying in this universe. But this is not all and certainly not in context. This is the Jeffers that those who have not carefully read or studied Jeffers assume to be the essence of his vision. His ability to love the sea, the cliffs of Big Sur, his family, along with his protestations for peace and against violence, notwithstanding, Jeffers, it is assumed, built a tower, turned his back on humanity, and waited for the end of times. However, it’s not the case that Jeffers was unconcerned or removed or unsympathetic. The sentence prior to the one quoted above illustrates this point: “I would give my right hand of course to prevent the agony” (Ridgeway 266). Such a position is echoed in many places in Jeffers’s work. This is the language of a particular kind of political engagement that was strong in American culture but has been lost. Jeffers embraced the language of the day in that sentence: the language of neutrality.

Fig. 3-20. Morning summer light in the entrance to Tor House.

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Jeffers was opposed to war in general, but he had specific arguments against WWI as well as the Spanish Civil War as noted above. The country, too, had decided that no involvement in foreign disputes and intrigue was the best policy. As usual (and as Jeffers puts forth in “Let Them Play”), this realization came at the end of a brutal war: WWI. “Polls taken in the late fall of 1941 found the vast majority of Americans—as much as 80 percent—were against our entering the European war as combatants, even though there was substantial support for…`aid short of war’” (Kauffman AF 21-22). The demand for an official legislative position came from the fact that many Americans still believed that entry into WWI was a mistake and that the level of corruption relative to the war was intolerable. The Neutrality Act of 1935 (altogether there were four neutrality acts in the late 30s) responded specifically to these issues. After the legislation passed, additional legislation was passed forbidding loans and other activity that would give anyone an incentive to profit from war.5 All of this was passed in retrospect, assuming, as it did, that WWI involvement was a mistake, that the countries who defaulted on war loans first time around were at it again, and that by “helping” we ended up joining. Cash and carry policies (an add-on to the 1939 Neutrality Act) were implemented insisting that war armaments be paid for in cash (avoiding loans) and that the purchaser picks up the shipment (avoiding Uboat targeting of our merchant marine fleet). As it turned out, these policies favored the western democracies over the dictatorships since France and Britain controlled the seas and could successfully pick up armaments as well as stop the other countries from doing the same. Additional amendments were made to keep the U.S. out of civil wars, specifically such as the one in Spain. Echoing Jeffers’s sentiment regarding taking sides, these Neutrality Acts considered both sides of any conflict “belligerents.” One recalls that Jeffers stated, “I would not give a flick of my little finger to help either side win.” In the larger political context of the times, his comments seem mainstream, sensible (in the sense of being popular), and pacifist, not uncaring. More partisan and aggressive legislation, such as various Alien and Sedition acts and the more recent Patriot Act, underline an “us and them” dialectic. And in these post 911 days, frankly, it’s hard to resist a “them and us” framework given world events. Today, the attack on the U.S. seems more direct, more personal. Neutrality seems more difficult to embrace. Taking sides, according to Jeffers, solves nothing, creates unimaginable suffering, enriches the few, and causes more wars in the future. None of these views was out of step with his times. Jeffers even imagines a kind of

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metaphysical protest in The Double Axe as the dead, young soldiers march on Washington: Think of the Stinking armies of semi-skeletons marching on Washington. (CP 3: 217)

In another poem in The Double Axe collection (1941), Jeffers uses this same theme: The old gentlemen shout for war, while youth, Amazed, unwilling, submissive, watches them… for a coming time it means mischief. The boys have memories. (CP 3: 108)

The suggestion here is that imperialism, war, and murderous hatred, all foster future acts in kind. Entrance into such wars sows the seeds of empire, a push back reaction from thoughtful citizens, and memories in those who lose loved ones and in those who are defeated. Jeffers’s poetry exhibits strong support for the popular and widely held position of neutrality. As shown already in his letter about the Spanish Civil War, Jeffers displays a hatred and contempt for divisive speaking and thinking. He was convinced that taking sides was more emotional, self-serving, and primitive than it was a solution of any kind. In “Fantasy,” Jeffers imagines dialectical forces of us and them being dissolved: On that great day the boys will hang Hitler and Roosevelt in one tree, Painlessly in effigy… While the happy children cheer (CP 3: 109)

Understanding that Jeffers was attempting to critique the use of dialectical thinking (us vs. them) allows one to see this poem (censored by Random House) in a less scandalous light than one might be tempted to do. War, violence, and murderous ruination of cities are all unfortunate, and he rails against these. He is conscious of doing so. He says he will have to “pile on the horrors” in his poetry but he also assumes, given the power of ideological seduction, he “will not convince you” (CP 3: 114). In “Pearl Harbor,” Jeffers objected to WWII suggesting that, as opposed to the popular spirit of neutrality that had gained wide favor in previous decades, this war is one that a few connivers “have carefully for years provoked” (CP 3: 115). In “Shine, Empire,” Jeffers saw the U.S. as “Powerful and armed, neutral in the midst of madness” and he believes

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…we might have held the whole world’s balance and stood Like a mountain in the winds. We were misled and took sides. (CP 3: 16)

In “Historical Choice,” he laments that we were “Strong enough to be neutral” (CP 3: 122) but insisted on involvement and engagement: “…we chose/To make alliance and feed war” (CP 3: 122). Choice might be too strong a word since it was a choice that obscured because “we were misguided/By fraud and fear, by our public fools and a loved leader’s ambition” (CP 3: 122). Towards the end of the war, Jeffers writes in “The Neutrals” that it is time to “commend the neutrals” (CP 3: 136). He admires the neutral countries for being “honest enough/Not to be scared or bought” (CP 3: 136). Jeffers was very focused on the war and its developments and partisan appeals. In “The Day is a Poem (September 19, 1939),” he wrote a particularly unnerving poem that reflects how Hitler sounded to an American, in a stone house, on a remote part of the northern coast of California, at an undecided and jittery moment of history. He reads the events of the day and notes the beauty of nature in his typical clear and moving fashion. He uses the inhuman cry of the hawk to represent the power, beauty, and indifference of nature and to compare this with some human events that seem equally unbelievable and uncontrollable: This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we heard his voice. A man of genius: that is, of amazing Ability, courage, devotion, cored on a sick child’s soul, Heard clearly through the dog-wrath, a sick child Wailing in Danzig; invoking destruction and wailing at it. Here, the day was extremely hot; about noon A south wind like a blast from hell’s mouth spilled a slight rain On the parched land, and at five a light earthquake Danced the house, no harm done. To-night I have been amusing myself Watching the blood-red moon droop slowly Into black sea through bursts of dry lightning and distant thunder. Well: the day is a poem: but too much Like one of Jeffers’s, crusted with blood and barbaric omens, Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk’s cry. (CP 3: 16)

How similar all of this is to events leading up to our first invasion of Iraq and our subsequent interventions in other countries in the region. Regarding Iraq, half of America wanted to remain calm and neutral as disarmament inspections were pursued. The public was reluctant, and our European allies even more reluctant. There was not an interest in war. There were, however, those who felt differently. The point is that, as

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Jeffers’s situation illustrates, each period has its claims to urgency which can’t be confirmed or seen clearly until it’s too late; each period of crisis also has its apparent provocateurs as well as accusations of corruption. Looking back now, few believe that Hitler was a menace that could be dodged, managed, or avoided, and similarly, some now increasingly think that the radical forces in the Middle East make confrontation, not reconciliation, inevitable. In the early days of Hitler’s expansion as in the Iraq disarmament efforts of Hans Blix, the U.S. and much of Europe were all looking for the easy way out. Some still are. Jeffers wanted isolation, but he also knew confrontation was usually unavoidable. His analysis was not just political but biological, psychological, and informed by evolution and even the behavior of stars, matter, and waves battering coastlines. Justin Raimondo, in “Robinson Jeffers: Peace Poet,” summarized Jeffers’s assessment of the times and the treatment he received: [H]e was far from shy in speaking out on the issue of the day. This hardly endeared him to the Marxist critics or the Roosevelt administration, and the cries of horror went up and out. Jeffers was even accused of having fascist sympathies, but his stern voice was neither deterred nor silenced. Against the "emerging Caesarism that binds republics with brittle iron," his was a lonely voice crying out against "the age of decline and abnormal violence," when men are "frightened and herded increasingly into lumps and masses." The fear that was spreading like an evil mist was paralyzing our ability to reason, because "a frightened man cannot think and the mass mind does not want truth, only democratic or Aryan or Marxian or other colored truth." However, "the truth will not die," and mankind may even find it again. Conflict was inherent in the nature of man, "much more than baboon or wolf," and yet "a clear shift of meaning and emphasis from man to not-man can make him whole." (Raimondo)

Jeffers’s rejection of ideology and other lenses for looking at the world is reminiscent of the problem many feel we have today as we try to wander through the ideological and political fog. Jeffers tried desperately to redirect humans away from their selfserving obsessions. Therefore, in “Sign Post,” he tells us to “Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity” (CP 2: 418). In “Carmel Point,” Jeffers says “We must uncenter our minds from ourselves” (CP 3: 399). This is his advice for general humanity, but also Jeffers is giving counsel to himself. He is attempting to find a way to deal with the suffering, the cruelty, the warfare and the stupidity of it all. For the rest of us, he hopes that his view of Inhumanism will help us live differently and create a different world. Inhumanism is based on the recognition of

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the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact the mankind is neither central nor important in the universe. (CP 4: 418)

In the published version of the “Preface” to The Double Axe, it is important for this discussion that he describes the benefit of Inhumanism as providing a “reasonable detachment” and it also “neutralizes fanaticism” (CP 4: 428).

Fig. 3-21. Entrance to Hawk Tower. The massive mysticism of stone.

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Jeffers tried to calm his and humanity’s passions. He was insulted by humanity’s “stupid dreams and red-rooster importance” (CP 3: 476). Jeffers wanted his nation to be calm and neutral. The strategy in this case was to confront the nation with “star swirl” images as well as images of disaster (“so many blood lakes and we always fall in”). What is new in my proposal is the notion that Jeffers produced imagery that seemed to naturalize violence in concert with an attempt to remain neutral. Naturalizing violence can be amoral and indifferent, truly inhumane. But when done as a means to cool the love and the hate, the reckless human passions, it must be seen as having a different motivation and quality. This is the same approach as a zen calming of passion. Jeffers makes his point about sides and dialectics: To sum up the matter: “Love one another” is a high commandment, but it polarizes the mind; love on the surface implies hate in the depth…as the history of Christendom bitterly proves… (CP 4: 420)

Note that Jeffers is not promoting the rejection of fellow feeling. He is pointing at a habit of thought that divides thinking and, therefore, people. The original version of the “Preface” is much harder hitting and clearer about the issue of choosing sides: “we must always be prepared to resist intrusion” (CP 4: 419). He also suggests ways of living and alternative activities that reflect unpolarized thinking. He is not overly optimistic about our abilities to take him up on his viewpoint, but here we see how all this culminates into shaping a lifestyle: Well: do I really think that people will be content to take a walk and admire the beauty of things? Certainly not. But whoever “can minimize” these pressures in their own life should do so. Thoreau’s life was not a bad one; nor Lao-tsze’s. (CP 4: 419 my emphasis)

It is important to emphasize that although he suggests that we “turn outward” as an antidote to discharging energy on each other, this position is qualified. In the original version of the “Preface” he says “Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit” (CP 4: 420 my emphasis)! This statement suggests something far short of a severed, reclusive profile. Calm down, he seems to say. As an individual with needs, as a member of a nation with a flag, an anthem, and patriot laws, and as a member of a greedy species, don’t take yourself so seriously. However, don’t isolate yourself to the point where you lose community.

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Beyond human passion and self-preserving delusional obsession, there lies a world of (neutralizing) beauty: And this is bitter counsel, but required and convenient; for, beyond the horror, When the imbecility, betrayal and disappointments become apparent,-what will you have, but to have Admired the beauty? (CP 3: 132 “Invasion” my emphasis)

Here he clearly seems to equating nature with neutrality. Don’t get involved in the binary games of human intrigue and one-upmanship, he warns. To survive, and to see the best in the world, Jeffers expands his vision beyond human definitions, calendared concerns, and conventional understanding. Opening one’s eyes to the size and beauty of the universe has a calming and perspective-changing impact. To remain neutral and balanced in the face of the tribal brutality of humans, Jeffers even sometimes sees the disturbing event itself as beautiful. In “Battle,” Jeffers proposes that …we shall have to perceive that these insanities are normal; We shall have to perceive that battle is a burning flower or like a huge music… (CP 3: “Battle” 21).

In order to see both opposing forces as belligerents and to avoid taking sides, he must transform the event into a non-dualistic phenomenon. In another poem meant to calm his frustrations, he chides himself: “Be angry at the sun for setting/If these things anger you” (CP 3: 24). Jeffers purposely wrapped himself in timeless granite, gazed at the magnificent beauty and power of ocean, stars, and mountains, to keep him always in touch with the neutralizing forces of nature. Jeffers managed many beautiful versions of this sentiment. In “Natural Music,” for example, Jeffers attempts to view the human storm of emotional rage through the beauty and distance of the non-human. In this case, the nonhuman is figured as a girl, dancing alone on the shore. In a cinematographic manner, Jeffers gives the reader an image of a girl spinning and twirling alone on the shore; he slows the film, gradually zooming the visual and audio in towards her face, so, as she dances in slow motion, one hears her breathing only and sees, gradually, only her lips, covered by strands of hair, mouthing unknown words, in a grainy, slowly moving, image:

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So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without Divisions of desire and terror To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities, Those voices also would be found Clean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances alone By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers. (CP I: 6)

Fig. 3-22. Angles of Hawk Tower and the gate to the ocean.

The fact that she is dreaming of lovers suggests the energy and passions of the nonhuman world, the lack of concern that the large, nonhuman reality around us has about our individual, social, political and temporal travail.6 Jeffers approaches this same issue in a different manner in “Apology for Bad Dreams.” In this poem, he uses distance and perspective to approach what he accomplished with a girl’s breathing in “Natural Music.” Jeffers sets the scene and paints the beautiful scene along the Big Sur coast: In the purple light, heavy with redwood, the slopes drop seaward, Headlong convexities of forest, drawn in together to the steep ravine. (CP I: 208)

Within this large expanse of natural formations and forces, Jeffers zooms in on “a lonely clearing” somewhere down the cliff as the landforms

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plunge towards the sea. He can make out a “little field of corn by the streamside” and a small roof through the trees. But Jeffers quickly reminds us of the super-natural context. He pulls his poetic camera back sharply: …Then the ocean Like a great stone someone has cut to a sharp edge and polished to shining. Beyond it, the fountain And furnace of incredible light flowing up from the sunk sun. (CP I: 208)

It is in a minute clearing, barely scraped out by human endeavor, that Jeffers draws our attention: …In the little clearing a woman Is punishing a horse; she had tied the halter to a sapling at the edge of the wood, but when the great whip Clung to the flanks the creature kicked so hard she feared he would snap…(CP I: 208)

As a result of this, she “Noosed the small rusty links round the horse’s tongue.” And this brutality continues. Luckily for Jeffers, Seen from this height they are shrunk to insect size, Out of all human relation. You cannot distinguish The blood dripping from where the chain is fastened, The beast shuddering…You can see the whip fall on the flanks… The gesture of the arm. (CP I: 208)

Jeffers quickly returns the camera view to the large nonhuman world: The enormous light beats up out of the west across the cloud-bars of the trade-wind. The ocean Darkens, the high clouds brighten, the hills darken together. Unbridled and unbelievable beauty Covers the evening world… (CP I: 208)

This is not to be confused with indifference however, and this is the important distinction between compassionate, involved neutrality and a removed, indifferent, isolationism. Jeffers was trying to fashion a lifestyle and a writing project that moved between the forces of large, unending beauty and what were the clear limits of human behavior. Sometimes the balance was difficult, either because he can’t sustain it or because he looks

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too removed. As we discussed in the Thoreau chapter, Jeffers, too, sees a reason to draw on Asian aesthetics in this issue surrounding perspective. In “On an Anthology of Chinese Poems,” Jeffers once again sketches the panoramic scene of the Big Sur coastline. But this time, he is describing nature as imaged in the Chinese imagination: “Beautiful the hanging cliff and the wind-thrown cedars.” If one has seen the large murals of Eyvind Earle, one knows how easily the Asian theme—juniper branch hanging from the top left of the canvas in the foreground; steep coastal cliffs in the background shrouded in mist—comes to mind in the Big Sur environment. And, of course, in Jeffers reading the image of the recluse’s hut catches his eye: Beautiful the fantastically Small farmhouse and ribbon of rice fields a mile below; and billows of mist Blow through the gorge. These men were better Artists than ours, and far better observers. They loved landscape And put man in his place… (CP 3: 449)

Jeffers, then, built a house and a lifestyle that were totally integrated with and a reflection of the issues we have been discussing. He built a house, as Glaser suggested, that both focused intimately inward and opened outward. A stone house to protect and wall out the world, and a tower to look up and out at beauty and to see beyond the painful limits of the times. Jeffers’s house was designed as a means to get closer to the earth and its energies, to commit to a place, to a vision, to a discipline; it provided him with a place to think and focus, to achieve a “reasonable detachment” and a place to quell and “neutralize” the fanaticism in himself that he felt was largely running rampant on the world stage and in U.S. cities. The very material of the house, the “bones of the mother” as he called the granite rock, was designed to remind him of the neutralizing forces of nature. In addition, the science of astronomy and evolution were important features of this neutralizing mind set for Jeffers. One recalls in The Double Axe that the Inhumanist begins to stack stones as a marker. A not too thinly veiled reference to Tor House and Hawk Tower, the Inhumanist takes “an artist’s pleasure in his little pyramid” and asks, “To Whom this monument: Jesus or Caesar or Mother Eve? No,” he said, “to Copernicus: Nicky Kupernick: who first pushed man Out of his insane self-importance and the world’s navel, and taught him his place. “And the next one to Darwin.” (CP 3: 274 my emphasis)

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Fig. 3-23. “And the next one to Darwin.” Looking past Hawk Tower out to the Pacific.

In this way, Jeffers saw what he was doing as something enlarging and encompassing, not a narrow retreat. In word and deed, Jeffers showed himself a very connected and aware individual regarding world events. And as remote and isolated as his life appeared, Tor House was frequently a place where a large number of interesting folks crossed paths. David Rothman puts an interesting list of these folks together in his article “Shine, Perishing Republic of Letters.” The letters, Rothman states, from both Robin and Una show that their lives were not only full of love for each other and their twin boys (Garth and Donnan, born in November 1916), but also that they were close with friends and cordial to admirers from around the country and the world, many of whom visited Carmel to meet Jeffers and even became close as a result. A short list of some of the better known among these correspondents and visitors would include Ansel Adams, Mary Austin, Witter Bynner, Bennet Cerf, Clarence Darrow, Babette Deutsch, Max Eastman, Lincoln Kirstein (who contacted Jeffers about staging The Tower Beyond Tragedy in 1926, when he was an undergraduate at Harvard), Sinclair Lewis, Mabel Dodge Luhan (with whom the Jefferses had a long and tortured relationship), Edgar Lee Masters, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Harriet Monroe, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Genevieve Taggard, Louis Untermeyer, Mark Van Doren, Leonard and Virginia

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Woolf (the Hogarth Press published several books by Jeffers), and many others well known in their day if not in ours, in addition to scores of friends who had no major literary or professional ambitions. The Jefferses liked their privacy, but they were not recluses; and his poems are a highly selfconscious and artful project of modernized pastoral lyrics and Aristotelian tragedy, not an advice column. (167)

Other names that Rothman doesn’t mention are Georgia O’Keefe, Langston Hughes, Charles Lindbergh, George Gershwin, D.H. Lawrence, Jack London, and Charlie Chaplin. Jeffers’s house was part of a cultural network of people searching, writing, exploring, and wandering. In this way, however, one meets and deals with people of one’s own selection, more or less, as opposed to the cities which were filled with millions of people who encounter each other in a most random, unfiltered, and unlinked fashion. As one can see, Jeffers touched and engaged with many of the bright stars of his time and connected with the local folks in the region. According to Shillinglaw, in 1928 The New York Herald Tribune claimed that Jeffers “wrote the most powerful, the most challenging poetry of his generation.” Four years later, he was on the cover of Time Magazine. That same year,…John and Carol Steinbeck, and Joseph Campbell pored over Jeffers’s poetry….Campbell reported that he read and reread lines from “The Roan Stallion.” (Shillinglaw 136)

Fig, 3-24. Jeffers with Edna St. Vincent Millay at the base of Tower, c. 1930s.

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His impact was truly large in scale. Therefore, it is with particular interest that many Jeffers scholars (Robert Brophy, Tim Hunt, David Rothman, Robert Zaller, David Morris, James Karman, Rob Kafka, ShaunAnne Tangney, et. al.)7 have consistently wondered and speculated about the reasons for his decline in popularity, at least in official academic circles. In a recent article, I put it this way: However, when Edward Abbey, an ardent admirer of Jeffers, recorded the pilgrimage he made to the master’s house, even Abbey put his visit in these illuminating terms: a “literary pilgrimage to the shrine of one of America’s best, most reclusive, least known, most unpopular poets” (“A San Francisco Journal” 71). Abbey records what, for many decades following the 30s, became a standard reaction to Jeffers: ambiguous, hesitant, admiring, and, for many, dismissive. In attempting to account for this reaction, one certainly must cite the well-documented reaction to the publication of The Double Axe in 1948. The press savaged this antiwar poem, published at the climax of victory in WWII. In addition, those who work in Jeffers studies have made much of the effect New Criticism had on excluding Jeffers. The combination of these exclusionary elements led an uncharitable reviewer, in 1962, to say, “it took his death to remind us that he had in fact been alive” (in Karman 1–2). (“Carrying the Weight” 2)

Of course, in addition to these forces, there has been the added bias against reading a certain kind of writer, which I outlined in Chapter One. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “What Killed American Lit,” Joseph Epstein put the case in blunt terms: The Cambridge History of the American Novel is perhaps best read as a sign of what has happened to English studies in recent decades. Along with American Studies programs, which are often their subsidiaries, English departments have tended to become intellectual nursing homes where old ideas go to die. If one is still looking for that living relic, the fully subscribed Marxist, one is today less likely to find him in an Economics or History Department than in an English Department, where he will still be taken seriously. He finds a home there because English departments are less concerned with the consideration of literature per se than with what novels, poems, plays and essays—after being properly X-rayed, frisked, padded down, like so many suspicious-looking air travelers—might yield on the subjects of race, class and gender. (Epstein)

Benjamin Reiss rightly defends his editing of the anthology critiqued by Epstein by saying that one cannot deny the civil rights movement, slavery, wars, capitalism, and other items that serve as defining context for Reiss

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(Reiss). I agree with Reiss that the re-establishment of high modernism is an unlikely and dubious goal, but, nevertheless, we need to get much better about balancing what and how we read and teach, staying wary about our agendas. And I don’t recall Epstein denying these issues of history and social movements. Epstein simply pointed to his concern regarding Reiss’s definition of appropriate context. As I mentioned in the opening pages of Chapter One: “a wide-open agenda considers all these things including individual uniqueness. One does not edit history nor pre-shape context and still claim to be exploring critical thinking.” Even Reiss admits that it has become too “easy to slip so far into analysis that we lose sight of what brought us into this business in the first place: our love of great writing” (Reiss). Reiss gives this point, but is “good writing” a universal that has been abandoned (a la Andrew Ross) to the sociopolitical categories? So although literary studies is bogged down with machinations that have made a focus on Jeffers less likely, my article, “Carrying the Weight,” documents how many folks— not in the literary profession but in the sciences— have been reading Jeffers continuously over the decades. Why? Jeffers maintained a determination of focus on themes that transcend the fads, twists, and turns of literary critics and the political flavor of the moment. Jeffers dug in deep, breathed deep, scanned the Santa Lucia hills, and looked long and hard out to sea and down the coast. In sum, Jeffers’s experiment in grounded and committed living in place with an inextricably connected writing project amplifies the dynamic relations between writing and living. Lawrence Buell states that “Environmental texts…practice restorationism by calling places into being…not just by naming objects but by dramatizing in the process how they matter” (EI 267 my emphasis). Jeffers brought so much to light through the building and the contemplation of his house, the coast, and the star swirls. By such practice, he hoped individuals could calm their fearful and hysterical need for war, answers, attention, salvation, and inclusion. He also hoped nations could suspend the same forces that sought security by defeating every foe in the field. His house was a practice, a retreat, a refuge. It was a symbol of strength, of emplacement, independence, unimpeachable neutrality yet with unflagging commitment to a set of values.

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Fig. 3-25. Through the back gate of Tor House/Hawk Tower out to the Pacific Ocean.

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Notes 1

See Robinson Jeffers Newsletter, No. 100, Fall 1996. . 2 See James Karman’s biography for a discussion of the discovery of this place (22-25) as well as Karman’s discussion in the introduction to the Collected Letters (31-39). 3 David Rothman rehearses these events in his comments on the newly published Collected Letters edited by James Karman. “Good examples would be the long fierce letters of July 9 and 11, 1912, that Una Call Kuster, later Una Jeffers, penned to her husband at the time, the wealthy and successful Los Angeles attorney Edward (Teddie) Kuster, whom she had married in 1902, when she was seventeen and he was twenty-four. In those letters, written when she was traveling in the British Isles, she finally tells Kuster exactly how she feels about their troubled marriage and how those problems led to her affair with the young poet and sometime wastrel Robinson Jeffers, whom she married on august 2, 1913, the day after her divorce from Kuster was finalized (and the same day that Kuster married his second wife, Edith)” (“Shine, Perishing Republic of Letters”). 4 This phrase also appeared on the jacket of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems: “it was evident that we had come without knowing it to our inevitable place.” See Karman in Collected Letters p. 16. 5 See http://www.answers.com/topic/neutrality-act 6 The passage reminds one of Snyder’s “The world does what it pleases” (TI 44), Darwin’s “blind” evolution, and Whitman’s “Urge and urge and urge,/Always the procreant urge of the world” in Leaves of Grass. 7 David Morris, in particular, has done interesting research on past and recent anthologies tracing Jeffers exclusion and inclusion.

CHAPTER FOUR VARIATIONS ON THE THEME: “EVERY MAN, EVERY WOMAN, CARRIES IN HEART AND MIND THE IDEAL PLACE”

Fig. 4-1. Keys on the inside of the Tor House front door.

This chapter explores a few more writers who are worth mentioning given the theme of this book. Some of the following writers could have commanded their own chapters here while others are more of a footnote, at least within the main interest areas of this book.

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In the 1930s, Henry Beston, writing and living at his “Outermost House” at Cape Cod, had the opportunity to call that seashore into being. He thought broadly in geological time about Cape Cod. He conceives his place in a large spatial context: The east and west arm of the peninsula is a buried area of ancient plain, the forearm, the glaciated fragment of a coast. The peninsula stands farther out to sea than any other portion of the Atlantic coast of the United States; it is the outermost of outer shores. (3)

Thinking he might build a small summer house away from it all, Beston …wanted a place to come to in the summer, one cozy enough to be visited in winter could I manage to get down. I called it the Fo’castle. It consisted of two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen-living room, and its dimensions over all were but twenty by sixteen. (6)

Moving into his house for a short stay in September, he found that “I could not go.” The health and energy he felt there made him realize that “The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things.” Beston revels in this world of sea, sun, weather, and dune. And he found he must stay on through the seasons to “know this coast and to share its mysterious and elemental life” (10).

Fig. 4-2. Henry Beston's Outermost House, a.k.a. "The Fo'castle," as it appeared on Eastham's Coast Guard Beach, probably sometime between 1965-75.

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Although Beston had a neighbor build the house, he designed it himself with “perhaps, a somewhat amateur enthusiasm for windows. I had ten” (7). He enjoyed the light from the sea cascading into his rooms. Beston placed himself in the nexus of elemental forces so he would witness power and beauty everyday. Wondering what was disturbing the gulls, for instance, he walks out on the dune: …staring at the vanishing gulls and questioning the sky, I saw far above the birds, and well behind them, an eagle advancing through the heavens. He had just emerged from a plume of hovering cloud into the open blue. (26)

The powerful bird emerges with surprise and power and then quietly and gracefully power glides overhead and down the coast. Decades before I ever came to Beston’s book, I had an inspiring quote of his hanging from my wall that I copied from some early magazine on environmental thinking. It is the kind of wisdom that puts humans into perspective. It is the kind of perspective Jeffers thought would help humans neutralize their destructive egos and, as Jeffers put it, learn “to love outward” (CP 2: 418). It was the kind of wisdom I needed at that point in my life when young egos are so fluid and one needs a higher calling, a larger perspective, a more soothing picture of the big picture. His humbling and enriching encounter with nature makes Beston think that We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err and greatly err. For the animal will not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. (25)

Beston was a clear offshoot of Thoreau. He knew Thoreau’s work and even visited Walden Pond. His experiment with the “Outermost House” is simply another example of how Thoreau struck a chord in so many. American’s love the idea, if not the actual experience, of a life of simplicity, solitude and thoughtfulness surrounded by large forces of nature. Beston left his house for the last time in 1964 and he passed away

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in 1968. The house washed away in a blizzard in 1978. There is, now, a newly upgraded website and organization dedicated to Beston on Facebook and on a separate organizational web page. There were several other important writers making their mark at this moment. I must not fail to mention the work of Mary Austin and her house in Owens Valley. She also had a house in Carmel which one can still walk by. Linda Paul’s Cottages by the Sea has a nice set of photos of Austin’s house (36-45). Austin also had a tree house built by the same builder who did Jeffers’s Tor House, M.J. Murphy. Austin referred to her tree house as “Wick-I-Up,” and she used the little private space to do a considerable amount of her writing during her time in Carmel.

Fig. 4-3. Mary Austin’s tree house “study” in Carmel. She called it her “Wick-I-Up." April 16, 1908.

Interestingly enough, in a 1915 American literature anthology, American Literature edited by Roy Pace, Hawthorne’s tree house is pictured and captioned but not discussed in the text. Further research shows that a postcard was issued with a painting of the tree house. My search hasn’t been exhaustive, but after several days and many hours, I could not find any other references to Hawthorne’s tree house. It seems Mary Austin had been there and gone by the time Jeffers arrived in Carmel. In a 1929 letter from Jeffers to Austin, Jeffers states “I have never met you.” He does suggest though that he has “Long admired

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your works…and your presence is still a vivid memory among a few of our first-met friends on this bit of coast” (CL I: 781). Mary Austin and Jeffers finally did meet, although it seems this was in New Mexico after Mary had moved from Carmel. In a 1930 exchange, Jeffers mentions to her that “We are so happy to have seen you” (CL I: 937) while he was in New Mexico. Although her work is crucially important for the ecoliterature field, it doesn’t have the intimate relation with a house that is pertinent for this study.

Fig. 4-4. Hawthorne’s Study in the Grounds at Concord.

Lack of fit is not something that can be said about leaving Aldo Leopold out of a detailed discussion in these pages. In the early part of the century, Aldo Leopold was writing and living in Wisconsin. His “land ethic” work has been crucial for the environmental movement. Leopold

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accomplished something similar to Gary Snyder in that he “re-inhabited” damaged farmland, rebuilt a dilapidated chicken shack into a home, and began a relationship with the land that was captured in A Sand County Almanac. Omitting Leopold is simply an issue of choice involving time and space on my part. This same unfortunate issue of expediency must be applied to John Haines. I reserve a deep sense of regret for omitting Haines. Haines committed himself to the striking, inspiring Alaskan wilderness and wrote powerful poetry as a result of his contact with this region. Dana Gioia summarizes the connection between the wilderness, poetry, and similarities with Jeffers: Haines also used the solitary years to master another primitive craft— making poems. Like Jeffers he came late to artistic maturity, and his development as a writer was inseparable from his creation of a life independent of the social and economic distractions of the modern city. Both men discovered their poetic identities in solitude, meditation, and hard physical labor. Haines' isolation, however, gave him personal authenticity only at the investment of many years. He was forty-two when his first book of poems, Winter News, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1966. (His prose appeared even later; Haines was fiftyseven when his first book of essays, Living Off the Country, came out from University of Michigan Press in 1981.) Many young men, hoping to become writers, embark on romantic lives in the wilderness. But exhausted by responsibilities, unsupported by colleagues, and hungry for human society, few have the discipline to achieve their literary ambitions. Through patience, strength, and uncommon intelligence, Haines did. He is virtually unique among the significant poets of his generation in having emerges outside of either the university or an urban bohemia. (Gioia)

W.S. Merwin must also be mentioned as someone who could have had significant focus in this study. He has been living on Maui in the mountains for a number of years and has built a house and written beautiful poetry about the land, as well as Native Hawaiians. John Muir comes to mind as someone who might have been discussed at length. His pure and unyielding commitment to Yosemite is one of the most powerful stories of early place-based living in the annals of ecoliterature. Muir didn’t commit and center his imagination in and around a house, so he wasn’t discussed here either. Other great writers with admirable and notable commitment to a place or region might have found more attention in these pages if there had been a focus on a house in addition to a region. Terry Tempest Williams’s compelling book, Refuge, is a tempting potential target for larger study,

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but, again, the focus in this book is more than the significance of place for an individual. For inclusion here, there needed to be a significant value placed on the house as a basis and focus for much of the writing and living project. This is unfortunate in the case of Williams since her book has had such impact, and deservingly so. There are other women writers who have focused on houses in their work, but the quality of the writing didn’t rise to level of a Terry Tempest Williams, or of a Jeffers, Sanders, Snyder, or Thoreau. In this category, I place writers such as Ann LaBastille and her Woodswoman: Living Alone in the Adirondack Wilderness. Ms. LaBastille has had a bold and interesting life and documents the process of going it alone. But the book raises no environmental, social, and political issues of significance and therefore was left out. Helen Hoover’s A Place in the Woods is more interesting but raises a similar set of concerns regarding my interest in her writing. Zane Grey, a writer of westerns, had a log cabin on the Rogue River, and he built a large house at the turn of the century on Catalina Island overlooking the small harbor at Avalon. An interesting career for sure, but there is not the environmental or social interests that this present study needs for a focus.

Fig. 4-5. Zane Grey’s place on Catalina Island, built in 1926.

Similarly, Jack London built a colossal house away from it all in the hills in Sonoma. As Jeffers’s and Snyder’s were, London’s place was named; the ranch at large was “Beauty Ranch” and the house itself was referred to as “Wolf House.” London wanted to settle down (something that didn’t come naturally to him) and build a huge, agricultural utopia with fruit trees and livestock. After becoming increasingly disappointed with the prospects for a socialist utopia associated with the labor movement, London began thinking about a rural refuge. I think many who entertained ideas of changing the world decided to focus on changing their own, individual world. And indeed, London purchased a ranch in the Sonoma

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area to explore and deploy innovative and sustainable agricultural techniques. This period in London’s life was depicted in the novel Valley of the Moon. In this novel the main characters, Billy and Saxon, find their way out of the urban tensions surrounding the labor movement and discover the peace and possibilities of northern California rural life. London’s house burned down days after the building was completed in 1913, just a few weeks before he was to move in. However, parts of the foundation and chimney structures still survive and can be toured in Sonoma. London’s place was an architectural index to his rather large and insatiable appetites in general. It was a colossal affair, certainly compared to the more humble dwellings of Thoreau and even Jeffers. Zen aesthetics don’t come to mind here, but the house partakes of the materials and size of the California topography: granite, volcanic rock, redwood, tile. The web site dedicated to this location, Jack London State Historic Park, describes the materials and the size: The design of the Wolf House called for 15,000 square feet of living space, it was to be a 4-story building constructed of volcanic rock, which came from a quarry in the Valley of the Moon; the roof was constructed of Mexican-style tile, which came from Oakland; the wooden beams on the outside and the trim on the inside came from Redwood trees which were cut and seasoned on Jack London's property. The house had 26 rooms and 9 fire places. The final cost was an estimated $75,000 in 1913 Dollars. Jack London purchased an insurance policy several weeks before the fire and collected an estimated $10,000. He vowed to rebuild the Wolf House, but had no financial means to do so. Instead, he built an annex to the cottage, where he worked for the next three years and where he died in 1916. (JLSHP)

For writers like London, Hemingway, and Grey, nature was more typically conceived as part of a manly adventure rather than a spiritual journey of humility, aesthetics, growth, reappraisal, and insight. As opposed to the grace and subtlety that come from a Thoreau, Jeffers, Snyder, Sanders or Berry, other writers who have placed themselves in nature come from a different tradition. Writers like Grey, London, and Hemingway come from the tradition that tends to pit “man against nature” or what might be called the “big-game hunter” tradition. Even Wallace Stegner seems to divide folks up along these lines, between the contemplative inward types who dig in and stay put and those of another breed: But if every American is several people, and one of them is or would like to be a placed person, another is the opposite, the displaced person, cousin not to Thoreau but to Daniel Boone, dreamer not of Walden Ponds but of

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far horizons, traveler not in Concord but in wild unsettled places, explorer not inward but outward. Adventurous, restless, seeking, asocial or antisocial, the displaced American persists by the million long after the frontier has vanished. He exists to some extent in all of us, the inevitable by-product of our history: the New World transient. He is commoner in the newer parts of America – the West, Alaska – than in the older parts, but he occurs everywhere, always in motion. To the placed person he seems hasty, shallow, and restless. He has a current like the Platte, a mile wide and inch deep. As a species, he is nonterritorial, he lacks a stomping ground. Acquainted with many places, he is rooted in none. Culturally he is a discarder or transplanter, not a builder or conserver. He even seems to like and value his rootlessness, though to the placed person he shows the symptoms of nutritional deficiency, as if he suffered from some obscure scurvy or pellagra of the soul. (Sense of Place 1)

Fig. 4-6. Model of Jack London’s Wolf House.

Stegner is right, I think, that every American is several people, and if we allow the pure dichotomy to stand, then the accusation of masculine nature narrative advanced by Armbruster, Lynch, and others might make a bit more sense. But even so, I would maintain that these writers had a more nuanced and varied treatment of nature that transcends the reductionistic agenda of current critical tendencies, Stegner’s categories, and my own comments here. All movement isn’t the same, for example. Snyder even advanced a more migratory vision at one time. He imagined shacks and hermitages all over the country, every one being a “`day’s hitchhike (about 500 miles) apart all over the land’” (Suiter 186). However, it’s true that some tendencies and styles can be discerned from the evidence at hand. There’s no doubt that London’s intention at

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“Beauty Ranch” had environmental focuses. However, although his house was constructed of selected native materials, carefully chosen rocks and redwood, there is a theme park feel to the enormity and over zealousness of the project. The Jack London State Historic Park web site describes the house as follows: The long outdoor pool was to be stocked with mountain bass. Inside, there was a library and above that, isolated from the rest of the house, a large workroom for Jack. A fireproof vault in the basement was designed to house his collection of manuscripts and other valuables. The two-story living room featured a massive fireplace and an alcove for Charmian's grand piano. The dining room could seat as many as fifty people, and there were numerous guest rooms. Downstairs there was a big game room for men only. (JLSHP)

Another web site dedicated to London’s house gives even more details regarding its design and purpose. A comment on the Jack London’s Ranch Album site reveals a less intimate relation between the writing project and the life-lived than we have been describing with other authors: "I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate” (JLRA).

Fig. 4-7. Ruins of Wolf House.

Helen and Scott Nearing should also receive mention here. In the early days of the 20th century, Scott Nearing found that being a radical pacifist, vegetarian, and socialist was not a welcome combination that put one on

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the invitee list for much. In an interview with Mother Earth News, we can see he shared some familiar patterns with other writers in this book: A pacifist, Scott was tried for sedition by the Government for opposing U.S. entry into WWI. Acquitted by a jury, he was then blacklisted by the academic world for—among other things—his stand against child labor. His textbooks were even taken from the schools and he became a prophet without honor in his own country. (Mother Earth News)

In addition to seeing the need to carve out a life of independence, most writers here opposed war and other mass actions of modern, mechanized living. And, like many writers examined in this book, the Nearings were ahead of their times, on the sustainability front for sure, exploring issues in simplicity, sustainability, independence, and other eco-related lifestyle issues. But as happens, the Nearings’ political profile diffused the foregrounding of these other lifestyle issues. Nearing was eventually blacklisted from teaching and, therefore, his career as a professor of economics was finished. He couldn’t find a publisher for his writings in this political environment either.1 Nevertheless, the result for Nearing was such that he and his companion, Helen Knothe, bought an old farm in Vermont and began a life of simplicity and courage. Years later, Scott and Helen moved their project to Maine where, during the 60s and 70s, they became a site of pilgrimage for many counter cultural youth. As David Shi recounts it, Nearing inspired “many young middle-class seekers in the 1960s and 1970s” (257). The Nearings were strict adherents to the dictates of simplicity since “they built their stone houses, cultivated their gardens, and cut their firewood all by hand” (Shi 255 my emphasis). In the opening lines of The Good Life, Nearing laid out the problem and the goal: Many a modern worker, dependent on wage or salary, lodged in city flat or closely built-up suburb and held to the daily grind by family demands or other complicating circumstances, has watched for a chance to escape the cramping limitations of his surroundings, to take his life into his own hands and live it in the country, in a decent, simple, kindly way. (11)

The Nearings’ values are, in the main, in line with the values of Thoreau, Jeffers, Abbey, and Snyder, since they all question some fundamental assumptions of current cultural trends and directions. However, the genre of creative nonfiction has certain qualities that must be present for it to be the kind of deep felt exploration tied to the everyday which I am concerned with in this present work.

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The Nearings were clearly a part of a movement that bridged several decades in the 20th Century. Stuart Ewen talked about the power and persistence of “style” as it is connected to social, economic, and political movements, and as I look at the clothing and hairstyles of people in line at Starbucks in Kailua, Hawaii (bandanas, nose piercings, long, flowing, paisley skirts, long hair on women, dangling earrings, beards on men; all the trappings and ambience of Crosby Stills and Nash culture or of Joni Mitchell’s “Ladies of the Canyon”), I see the attempt to refer to and recapture this style, associated as it is with casual ease, voluntary simplicity, and alternative knowledge of medicines, food, work, community, and mindset. This style is even more pronounced in pockets on the Big Island (folks living “off the land” there) and Maui (folks living on trust funds there) and in places on the mainland such as Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, northern California, parts of the upper Midwest, and New England. Sometimes it all seems hopelessly stylized and empty now. As Thoreau warned, it is not just a matter of fashioning the external layer; there must be substance, something inside, something else at work that brings power to the surface image. We have lost that moment it seems, when denim jeans and a rucksack were vigorous representations of a movement and a time of intellectual freshness, sincerity, earnestness, spontaneity, independence, and curiosity. Is this sense of loss just the jaded and cynical perspective of an aging boomer (definitely possible), or are the still visible remnants and signals of the simplicity culture echoing forward into an unknown future looking for a place to regroup? In The Dharma Bums, Japhy Ryder (patterned after Gary Snyder) was heralding a a great rucksack revolution. Thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and all living creatures. (97-98)

There was a moment when this spirit was fresh and palpable. The historical moment has passed, but the phenomenological residue of possibility has settled, partly in the grace of the wood, stone, and glass of today‘s alternative houses.

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Fig. 4-8. Arne Naess, father of deep ecology.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, Arne Naess’s name carried an air of clever simplicity, philosophical freshness, and a straightforward approach to living and thinking. In environmental circles in the U.S., Naess was known as “The Father of Deep Ecology,” and the book, Deep Ecology, was dedicated to Naess and Snyder. Snyder and Naess were both accomplished and advanced mountaineers, but they had more in common as well: deep ecological philosophies. Things Scandinavian came into American culture with an air of moral freshness, openness, simplicity, a notable touch of Buddhism, and a humble grounding in nature. A marvelous book was circulating at the time, Wisdom in the Open Air: The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology. Many of my current colleagues in the U.S. became acquainted because we were connected by this book and this Nordic movement (e.g., David Rothenberg, Doug Hulmes). It had the brisk, clean, feel of a breeze coming in from the North Sea blowing over and freshened by fields of brilliant snow. Not everyone was so impressed. The leftist-anarchist-Marxists associated with Murray Bookchin had plenty of complaints. These groups were still holding on to the economic base as a point of departure. They were slinging accusations such as “fascists,” “sexists,” “racists,” “misanthropes,” and more.2 Again, the objection from the left is that if one is not plugged into the progressive, collectivist agenda, one is an agent of the imperialist, individualist, capitalist system. Naess’s responses were many to these accusations. Regarding the complaints of dualism (this is the same complaint Armbruster leveled, discussed in the first chapter) Naess said the following: “Deep ecology is not the search for the pure, empty wildness far from your home. It's knowing how to tend the grounds of your home place, to trust the land that holds you up, to learn all the beings that share your place, and honestly find the right way to live” (Rothenberg “Alpine Garden”).

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Having lived in Norway for a number of years, I was able to match the rhetorical excitement in the U.S. regarding Norwegian philosophy with the place: compare the map with the territory. Much of what I had gathered as impressions about Norwegian lifestyle, values, and culture was validated on the ground there. People are less egotistical and noisy than Americans. There is an emphasis on the health and the well being of women, children (all families with children get “barnetrygd,” child care payments because, well, children need things), the environment, and a smart simplicity (hence Scandinavian “design”). There is a love of ideas, of art, and of nature. Education, health care, and the environment are removed from market forces for the most part. Once, when a doctor was leaving my house after a house call (yes, a house call), I attempted to pay him. “This was for the children,” he said, startled by my gesture. In Norway, the idea of paying to have health care delivered to children is particularly perverse. There is, nevertheless, a vital marketplace, but it stays in the marketplace and doesn’t invade other areas of social and psychological space. One never gets that sense recorded by Emerson and other American critics that all outdoors is a marketplace. As a Norwegian taxi cab driver said to me once: “You Americans live to work; we work to live.” The social contract tilted to the left in Norway and seemed to work nicely. Norway was able to fund its idealism, however, given that the North Sea is full of oil and given that there are only approximately 4+ million folks in country. I have the sense, however, that in the many years that have passed since living there, things have changed considerably. I understand that at the University where I taught, the budget of the English Department is largely determined by the “productivity” of the faculty. That certainly is new for Norway, and it is moving forward in the U.S. as well. When my wife, my two sons, and I lived in Norway there was still some of the freshness, calm, lightness, intelligence, innocence and community that the U.S. had in the 60s and 70s. Such social markers as trust and creativity were still afoot. One night my family and I traveled from Bergen to Oslo on the electric train in preparation for taking a plane to the U.S. the next morning. As it turned out, our hotel reservations were no longer available. There were many conferences in Oslo at this time of year, and we could not find one room. We decided to wait it out in the train station and take a taxi to the airport in the morning. However, the train station closed at 2:00 a.m. As we were moving our luggage out to the curb-- to do we knew not what--, a taxi pulled up as the snow lightly fell. A woman in her early 30s asked if we needed a ride, and we explained our predicament. She said no woman and child could be out at night in the snow (I was not a focus of her concern, alas.). She then proceeded to take

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us around to a few hotels where she had connections: nothing was available, not even in the lobby. So, she took us to her home! She showed us the refrigerator, made the beds, soothed my crying child, and she went back to work. In a few hours she came back to get us and took us to the airport, refusing all attempts to pay her. It was in this social and political atmosphere that I met and interviewed Arne Naess, philosopher, professor, writer. Frequently referred to as the father of Deep Ecology, Naess agreed to meet me for an interview. I traveled from Bergen to Oslo and met Naess at his office at the University. “Du er en fin ryggsekket,” he said, admiring my backpack. Naess came from a generation where the backpack was a sign of independence, of simplicity, self-reliance, and of hope for a different way of life. Out of the backpack, however, I pulled a video camera and taped a lengthy and engaging interview with him. He was friendly, generous with his time and with his thinking.

Fig. 4-9. Tvergastein. High up in the mountains Naess built a special place.

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Fig. 4-10. Naess’s place at Hallingskarvet. Note the absence of even patches of snow. This is the high point of summer. Note the stone wall on right side to protect against drifts and wind.

At that time, I was more interested in discussing environmental politics and philosophy with Naess and, therefore, it wasn’t until later that I took a closer look at an unpublished essay he gave me during our meeting: “Tvergastein: An Example of Place.” I then began to research Naess’s own special place. In an email, a few years after our meeting, Naess stated that he had written far too little about his own living situation and had concentrated too long on abstract philosophy. Shortly after this admission, he came out with Det Gode Lange Livs Far (the father of a good, long life). This book is a tribute to his wonderful place in the mountains above Ustaoset in south central Norway: This is Tvergastein. As a young man, Naess was transformed by the natural world of the mountain range above the little village of Ustaoset: The stupendous, majestic Hallingskarvet captured my imagination from the time I was 5 years old, staying Easter and summers in a cottage at Ustaoset, about 8km distance from the mythogenic mountain where I developed my place. (2)

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Fig. 4-11. Tvergastein the way it looks most of the year: with snow.

This notion of “developing” a place doesn’t refer to development in the more modern sense of a housing development. It speaks more to the act of thinking one’s way into an environment. As Naess says, “the development of a place for a person to feel at home, and to belong, shows exceptionally clearly some of the forces at work in the establishment of a place (or perhaps I should say, ‘establishment of a place as a Place’)” (8). Therefore, “developing a place” in these terms means forming a relationship, investing meaning, thinking about context, understanding the ins and outs. As a result, Naess built a place of refuge and retreat in the wild mountains. Getting there is a rough hike and then a rough climb, and, Tvergastein means, appropriately, “crossing the stones.” The little town of Ustaoset, where the train passes, presents one with a 3-hour hike uphill (Rothenberg “Alpine”). It was a project long in the making since, like Snyder, the dream and call of the mountain began early in Naess’s childhood. Early on, the mountain established itself in his mind: This far-away, supreme, powerful, serene, distant, beautiful mountain gradually gained in status, revealing itself to me as the benevolent, protecting father or even divine being. I made Hallingskarvet into the symbol of everything good which was lacking in the world and in myself. When still as a boy, I was able to reach its knees, later I roamed around on its shoulders and on the vast summit plateau with its surface of big greenish rocks, rounded through erosion.

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Fig. 4-12. Hallingskarvet, Naess’s inspirational mountain range, with no snow. The cabin is barely discernible in the middle.

As the idea of the mountain and a life on the mountain gained strength in Naess’s mind he made the first move to establish himself there: It got to be a great dream to be able to stay on the mountain—not compelled to get down before darkness or because of rain and thunderstorms. And in 1937, when I was 25 years old, I chose the best possible place to build a cottage; not too high and difficult to reach for transporting materials over snow, but high enough on the flank of Hallingskarvet to feel that I was living on the mountain, and to have a superb view of a large part of Norway through the window. A friend at Ustaoset who had a horse promised to transport enough materials for a very sturdy wooden cottage 8 x 5 meters in size. He indicated that he needed 15 trips to get it up to the site of the cottage. It actually took 62 trips because of the difficult terrain and the uneven snow. "Madness!" was the judgment of people at Ustaoset: the highest private cottage in Northern Europe and in a climate unsuitable for "normal" cottage life. (8)

I have stayed in the small village of Ustaoset, and “normal” there is quite something. In this part of Norway, sometimes the snow is so deep it is level with the roofline in deep winter. This is why some Norwegians build trap doors in the roof to enter from above. The snow piles deep and high and the wind can howl. Then, the sun comes up and all is still, white, light, and serenely surreal.

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Fig. 4-13 Inside Tvergastein. Books, skiis, natural studies collection.

David Rothenberg describes the inside of Naess’s cabin: Inside the cabin is an intellectual world brightened by humor and curiosity. The library, inside a room the size of a large closet, is impressive. The complete works of Aristotle and Plato, handbooks of chemistry and physics, novels of Dostoyevsky. Teach-yourself manuals for Rumanian, Icelandic, and Chinese. The most extensive Sanskrit-English dictionaries available. Buddhist logic, Marxist rhetoric, formerly the complete edition of Auguste Comte in French, until it was burned for fuel on a particularly cold winter night. Generations of rock climbing equipment, from heavy leather boots and steel pitons to light carabiners and high-tech nylon shoes. There are personal contraptions only the master understands: kerosene lamps that heat tea and soup at the same time, solar-powered reading lights that work even if the sun doesn't shine for weeks. (Rothenberg “Alpine Garden”)

Fig. 4-14. Inside Tvergastein there were books, kitchen, tea: all that was needed.

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The vision one is presented with here is someone deeply involved with the conversations in his country and in the world, as well as someone deeply committed to balancing this with a focus on his own continuing personal development and peace. A countryman of Naess’s must get a mention in this discussion. I met Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng in 1999 at a conference on “Nature and Culture” in Estonia. We shared the role of keynote speakers at the conference. He has white hair, a quick smile, sparkling eyes, and a bit of a paunch. Yes, he is a bit reminiscent of Santa Claus. But make no mistake: he is a tenacious environmentalist (and he can stay up most of the night with the younger scholars). During the conference, he told me about his movement away from academic life and his commitment to his family farm and to the rivers of Norway and other environmental issues facing Norway. Kvaløy, like many Norwegians, has a deep commitment and abiding connection to the natural world. And like Snyder, Kvaløy combines a strong interest in Buddhism along with a history of interest in progressive socialism. Following Naess’s lead, Kvaløy and others in the 1950s in Norway read Gandhi and involved themselves in many nonviolent actions to protect the rivers and environment. Although he has focused much on action, policy, and changing the way Norwegians think about nature, he really lights up when he talks about his farm, Brusetgrenda. Like Naess, who sees placecorrosive forces afoot, Kvaløy focuses on his farm as a counter measure. He discusses this focus in Buddhist and existentialist terms. Focusing on his farm means “going inside”: …my house speaks to us of being inside Nature, which is where we are now forced to return because of the global eco-social crisis. (30)

In “Inside Nature,” Kvaløy lays out the cultural conflict as he sees it: the challenge is “what I call the Advanced Competitive Industrial Dominion or ACID” (30). In addition, he discusses the importance his farm has for him and the world it is nestled in. His farmhouse is 270 years old and the grain house next to it is 400 years old. While having his house repaired, since the “northwestern part…has spent the last two hundred years sinking slowly into the ground” (30), he finds he has trouble instructing the carpenters. He wants the repairmen to honor the gracefulness with which nature and house have been coming together. Kvaløy knows the carpenters want to straighten the house up “jack it up…and stop time” (30). Kvaløy, however, is successful at appealing to his carpenters’ more Norwegian nature. They understand him, “since they are not completely caught in the European-Cartesian world” (30), when he says that “a house should wither like everything else in Nature” (30).

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Kvaløy has traits typical of so many Norwegians I came to know in my years there: a stubborn commitment to nature, strong personal independence, a generous sense of community, a love for children, a love of books and reading, a good sense of humor. I feel honored to have met him and Arne. Arne Naess passed away in 2009. I had hoped to have this book to him while there was still time. For Sigmund, I wish him continued good living “inside” the Setreng Farm. Ha det bra Sigmund!

Notes 1

Today I read a story where the mayor of Eugene, Oregon is supporting the notion expressed at the city council that asserts that the Pledge of Allegiance has no business being recited in City Hall, that it does not unite people, and that it is divisive. I recall a time not too long ago when I would have “gotten behind” such “daring” opposition. At this point in my life, however, it strikes me as a silly kind of acting out. There are so many other pressing and scary issues. I no longer feel threatened, absorbed or co-opted by such gestures. The ego must become content enough that it can join hands and look for common connections as opposed to sifting for troubling, oppositional points, just to be different, just to stand out, to resist without end. I spend no small amount of time these days reassessing the political dynamics that particularly caught Scott Nearing and others in a web of confrontation with the government. Those on the left bestow, immediately, a badge of courage for anyone who gets into these scrapes. As I discussed in the first chapter, however, the knee-jerk assumption that the government, those in business, those in the military, those with ambition are, by definition, corrupt and usurping figures to be opposed is a troubling assumption. Such positioning can be a form of juvenile insecurity and rebellion, which one never grows out of. Intimidated by any sign of confidence, accomplishment, or success in the world, one sometimes resorts to a scripted, inconsolable, sulking, oppositional positioning: whatever you have, we are against it, above it, better than it. This isn’t to say that governments, institutions, and cultures don’t present, at times, untenable conditions for personal growth, justice, freedom and spiritual exploration all of which cry out for and necessitate resistance. There is a time when push back is inevitable; but when it becomes a uniform and assumed positioning to forge an identity, or gain acceptance in, say, an academic field or a social group, well, then this is problematic and disingenuous. One benefit from the past few decades of poststructural and postmodern thinking is that one issue became clear: the left was just as interested in power and control as anyone else; in many cases it was clear that the existence of power wasn’t the issue (although some in the academic left try to frame the issue this way), but who had the power was indeed the issue. As Scholes put it nicely in The Rise and Fall of English, moving forward “means giving up any claim to be revolutionary opponents of `the system.’ We are in it and of it, and we had better admit this to ourselves and others, just to clear the air” (85).

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For a quick online tour of this debate see “Deep Ecology and Its Critics,” by Bill Devall and then go to “Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Defending the Earth: A Debate,” at The Anarchist Library online at http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Murray_Bookchin.

Color Plate 1. “Waiting.” Edwards Air Force Base. © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

Color Plate 2. Hawk Tower and Tor House.

Color Plate 3. Snyder was at Sourdough; Kerouac stayed at Desolation Lookout where this was taken. Courtesy of Todd Burley, photographer. 2002.

Color Plate 4. Snyder’s Kitkitdizze. Permission granted from Ed Kashi/VII.

Color Plate 5. Snyder’s writing cabin at Kitkitdizze. Courtesy of Terry Husebye, photographer.

CHAPTER FIVE GARY SNYDER: “I SEE MY ROLE AS TRYING TO PRESENT SOME ALTERNATIVE”

In 1969, American Machinery and Foundry (AMF) bought the Harley Davidson company, streamlined production, and slashed the workforce. This tactic resulted in a labor strike and an even lower quality of bikes. The company also ceased to be an innovator in the motorcycle industry, with a design that remained basically unchanged for many years. The bikes were expensive and far inferior in performance, handling, and quality to Japanese motorcycles. Sales declined, quality plummeted, and the company almost went bankrupt. The venerable name of "Harley-Davidson" was mocked as "Hardly Ableson," and the nickname "Hog" became pejorative. (“Harley” Wikipedia)

Harley Davidson’s decline was an index of a larger engine of turmoil brewing within American culture. As of the late 1960s, many aspects of American culture had been receiving withering scrutiny. John Wayne, once an American icon symbolizing patriotism and the manly ideal, had become the butt of jokes. His name even became a much-used, idiomatic expression used for criticizing someone for bullish, thick headed, arrogant behavior: “What are you, some kind of John Wayne character or something?” The American “muscle car” began to experience what would become, decades of declining sales at the hands of the quieter, smoother, longer lasting Asian products. The success of the movie Easy Rider, with the featured Harleys, notwithstanding, it was the Japanese bike (along with hitchhiking, and the German VW beetle and bus) that gave freedom and independence to many young people in the 1960s. Therefore, this reconsideration of American culture included Japanese motorcycles and cars (which were superior in their more finely nuanced engineering, and cheaper), sympathy with Asian culture in Vietnam and other places of perceived American imposition and insertion, and interest in Asian philosophy and art as well. To this day, we are enchanted with the mystery

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of Asian calligraphy, Zen gardens, and the understated and muted nuances of Asian art and life. This was a time period when American masculinity, as manifested in the home, in the culture, and in foreign policy, was being questioned and caricatured. And the forms of American masculinity under scrutiny were things such as its foreign policy in Vietnam, its defense industry, the military industrial complex, its treatment of women, its environmental policies, fat-cat, backroom, cigar-smoking, deal makers, and other aspects of what had previously constituted American “strength.” David Carradine starred in a TV series, Kung Fu, that put a marvelous reversal on all that had been central to American values. Instead of a rough and ready, gun-toting cowboy as hero, David Carradine, starring as Kwai Chang Caine, was a half-Chinese, half-white American Shaolin priest. He carried no gun; he was a sexually nonaggressive, impossibly humble, barefoot spiritual being with a special connection to nature. He practiced an ancient and “foreign” religion dedicated, not to god, or a good vs. evil, us vs. them binary, but to Zen harmony and unity: it’s all one. He found the fighting and the gunplay of the American west silly, depressing, and juvenile. In short, this series embodied the countercultural critique of the 60s, and it embodied the vision of a dreamy, disconnected, noncompetitive, passive, peace seeking, wandering lifestyle sought after (in concept) by many a bourgeois middle and upper class “revolutionary” lad. What would later become institutionalized political correctness had a popular hero, and the aesthetics of the counter culture had one of its most popularizing proponents. The Protestant work ethic was in the trash as food, housing, and the essentials seemed easily and “naturally” negotiated by Kwai Chang. Added to this was the fact that the hero was an Asian, an image of the “enemy” in Vietnam. Furthering this transgression was the fact that he was a person of “mixed race,” a relatively ignored demographic at the time. Kwai Chang Caine was close to nature and to a spiritual dimension far removed from the hardened, crude, greedy, judgmental, rigid citizens of American towns depicted as being the norm in the 1870s. Kwai Chang wandered through the countryside practicing a form of kindness and peaceful living that Christians knew only how to talk about; or so the narrative implied. In fact, the series was a hard-hitting expose’ focused on revealing what it perceived as the contradictions about how Americans view nature, money, native peoples, and other cultural hot points. Watching Caine receive his early lessons from his Chinese Master Po and subsequently watching him move through the western landscape with humility and grace, one came away with the feeling that American culture was a pretty barbarous and shallow enterprise. One also was tempted to

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think that there were some fairly complete and attractive solutions in the form of some “other” culture.

Fig. 5-1. The act of identifying with the “other” is not new. Here we see the U.S. in the guise of a young, female Native American standing her ground with an ornate, aristocratic Mother England. “I’ll force you to Obedience you Rebellious Slut.” “Liberty Liberty for ever Mother while I exist.” As opposed to current versions of this tableau, self-loathing was not part of the identification with the other.

Today, we continue in this vein with movies such as The Last Samurai, Dances with Wolves, and Avatar. In each, the hero disparages of modern European and western progress, is absorbed with self-loathing, and has complete contempt for his American culture while finding impossibly beautiful refuge in another culture. The grace, beauty, and dignity of the “other” are held out as refuge from the barbarousness of one’s own culture. All of this reminds one of Eagleton’s critique of capitalism in Chapter One: we create beauty and the other, according to Eagleton, because we have made life so utterly intolerable via capitalism. Or we create the allure of a gauzy alternative because we disagree with the

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current culture. Don’t get me wrong; I love these movies. However, the narrative thread is wearisome and is the repeated echo of something that was fresh in the 60s but has grown stale and scripted. As Fig. 5-1 points out, the identification with the exotic other as a pivot point of oppositional thinking has been around for a while. It’s at once instructive and ironic to see a young America identifying itself with the “natural” and indigenous against the ornate and aristocratic. The 60s amplified and re-engaged these interests in alternative, nature-grounded cultures and exotic thought systems in order to marshal attacks against “the system,” the machine, the demands of a modern lifestyle, and more. However, the unrelenting indictment and demonization of “power”—as discussed in the first chapter—becomes a corrosive obsession, and it has no exit strategy; it is a totalizing way of thinking and living. Nevertheless, as recent demonstrations suggest, there may be new life for these old ideas. Gary Snyder touches on all of these issues in his essays and poems and other activities. In recent years, for instance, he has had some very critical comments on postmodern (today’s new, new left) theories of cultural interpretation. And it is in the midst of all these cultural battles and tensions that he emerges as a force in American political and literary culture. The Pulitzer Prize came to Snyder in 1972 for Turtle Island. In this work, his poetry was exceedingly readable (as opposed to Myths and Texts and other poetry where he indulges the fragmentary line), and he included in this volume a prose section that outlined what was needed in American culture. “Four Changes” discussed the environment, living patterns, consciousness, modern industry, and consumption culture. “Four Changes” was anthologized (and many times since then in other collections) in Theodore Roszak’s, influential 1972 book, Sources: Tools for Preserving Personal Sanity While Braving the Great Technological Wilderness, and it became a kind of easy to read manifesto for what many in the 60s generation thought needed to happen. As with Thoreau and Jeffers, Snyder’s critique of culture took a recognizable form: rejection of modern trajectories, retreat to nature, and commitment to a place. Snyder went deep with his assessment and appreciation of Native American and Japanese culture. He wasn’t using these cultures as a dreamy, gauzy escape mechanism. He saw these cultures as providing crucial lessons regarding commitment to land and in maintaining healthy communal ties. Snyder’s anthropological training allowed him to see the value of making the connection between our current culture and the host or indigenous culture that’s been here for 40,000 years. Snyder is concerned that although we live here “we haven’t

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discovered North America yet” (Real Work 69). In 1976, in an interview, he says that “You know whether or not a person knows where he is by whether or not he knows the plants” (Real Work 69). Snyder knows he isn’t Japanese or an “Indian,” but he considers himself Native American and, therefore, he considers himself as part of the “tribe” that has been living here for thousands of years. In other words, instead of merely complaining about modernist trends, he found a way forward to recreate his lifestyle apart from dominate trends. At this time as well, he was spending quality time with the Governor of California (who again has emerged as Governor), as poems such as “Talking Late with Governor” and articles document. Even in 1996, Jerry Brown, as Mayor of Oakland, outlined his philosophy, which includes a reference to Gary Snyder, to local food production, community, etc.: My philosophy was one of greater self reliance, a philosophy of decentralization, of more person-to-person contact. That's what I was espousing. That's what I still espouse. That's the whole point of the We the People program here in Oakland. The farmers markets were another step to giving people an opportunity to take more power over their own lives-and also to provide another outlet for organic produce. That is important because the production and distribution of food is increasingly being monopolized and controlled by large corporate structures, large financial structures. So this was an effort to get back to the basics. There's a whole philosophy here: E.F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder. These were the people who were thinking about it, talking about it, who we were meeting with. It was a movement that was against the drift toward more anonymity, more distant markets, more passivity on the part of the citizen and the consumer. When the farmer can sell directly to the consumer, it is a more active process. There's more contact. The consumer can know, who am I buying this from? What's their name? Do they have a face? Is the food they are selling coming out of Mexico with pesticides? (Brown in Seasonal Chef)

Snyder, of course, is indebted to both Thoreau and Jeffers. Snyder finally got to Thoreau in 1953 while on fire lookout duty at Sourdough Mountain. As Suiter suggests, “…surely Sourdough Lookout was the place for Henry David Thoreau. Few backdrops could be more fitting…” (71).1

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Fig. 5-2. Sourdough Mountain Lookout before being rebuilt and before Snyder got there. A future journalist, Will Jenkins, is standing in front of the lookout where he worked in 1917.

The experience as a lookout is a special experience of place and of dwelling in place. Kerouac, Philip Whalen, Ginsberg, Ed Abbey were all lookouts. Kerouac, Snyder, and Whalen all spent time in LOs in the early 50s and discussed the experience many times with one another. This experience gave Snyder practice in the discipline of zazen and of being alone. For some, the solitude is a challenge; for Snyder “such complete and lengthy solitude was exactly what he had come to the mountains hoping to find” (Suiter 43). Suiter sees that this time period that combined Asian studies, Thoreau, and the lookout experience was a crucial moment: “It was all fitting together: the Zen, the Blake and Thoreau, lookouting, poetry” (Suiter 72). In this environment, Snyder paid attention to the “change of mood over vast landscapes” (Suiter 57), and by doing so sharpened and disciplined his perceptual powers. He saw a “vast sea of mountains flowing to the far horizon—`Blue heaped upon blue,’ in the old Zen phrase” (Suiter 31). Also, he studied calligraphy and Asian languages, wrote poetry, drank tea, read Zen texts, and meditated. Suiter observes that this “made for a perfect Zen hermitage, and Snyder had come loaded for Zen” (Suiter 29). Suiter sees the connection immediately between the hermitage lookout and Thoreau’s assertion that “The most interesting dwellings in this country are the most unpretending.” And indeed the Sourdough lookout sits atop a rocky outcropping, and the world falls away from it in all directions. Suiter

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Fig. 5-3. This is the much-celebrated cabin that Snyder spent a productive summer in. The picture was appropriately taken in August on Sourdough Mountain. Burley, the photographer, was up on Sourdough for two weeks in 2003 getting the cabin ready for the 50-year anniversary of Snyder’s lookout stay.

goes on to ask, “What could be more unpretentious than an L-4 fire cabin?” (Suiter 72). In this section, Suiter spends considerable time documenting Snyder’s close reading of Thoreau’s commitment to simplicity and his focus on wakefulness (Suiter 72). And in an effort to reinforce the theme of this book—the connection between houses and poetry—I should note that in Left Out in the Rain, Snyder has a poem from this experience: “Poem Left in Sourdough Mountain Lookout”: I the poet Gary Snyder Stayed six weeks in fifty-three On this ridge and on this rock & saw what every lookout sees, Saw these mountains shift about & end up on the ocean floor Saw the wind and waters break The branched deer, the Eagle’s eye, & when pray tell, shall lookouts die? (42)

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An early poem to be sure, and a little awkward, but his focus on huge, timeless, natural process that takes place outside limited, human experiences of time and space is clearly there. At the end of the poem, Snyder has a note: “A later lookout told me this poem was still pinned up in the cabin in 1968” (42).

Fig. 5-4. This is just another example of the humble structure and remote and majestic location of these lookouts. Indian Rock Lookout in Oregon.

By retreating, studying, and communing, poets like Snyder used experiences in the lookouts to practice alternative ways of living with less while surrounded by grandeur. Hermitages and Thoreauvian cabins may seem romantic and quaint to some readers today and ultimately not practical. However, a quick search of the web demonstrates that “small houses and “tiny houses” are gaining enormous popularity. In addition, there are institutes such as Cal-Earth dedicated to building with earth. On the CalEarth website the BBC is quoted as saying these homes are “cool in the summer and warm in winter, probably the most environmentally friendly homes you’ll ever come across.” There are books, design companies, and builders moving into this field. The popular and interesting book, Homework: Handbuilt Shelter, has a section on “Tiny Houses” (70-71). A quick “small houses” search on “Amazon.com” yields a long list of newly published books such as Great Spaces Small Houses, More Small Houses,

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The Big Book of Small House Design, Big Ideas for Small Spaces, and Living Small. But in addition to dealing with issues of constricted space and sprawl, many proponents of small houses are attracted to the aesthetic aspects, as well as the political and economic dimensions. The owner of “Tumbleweed Tiny House Company,” Jay Shafer, says his interest in small houses is because of his concern “about the impact a larger house would have on the environment, and because I just do not want to maintain a lot of unused or unusable space” (Shafer). He goes on to say on his web site that his “dwellings have met all of my domestic needs without demanding much in return. The simple, slower lifestyle my homes have afforded is a luxury for which I am supremely grateful” (Shafer). Clearly, the simple life, as lived by Thoreau and recently chronicled by David Shi (in The Simple Life), and the “smaller” life, as laid out by EF Schumacher in Small is Beautiful, is alive and well in American culture and trotting alongside its corpulent, sloppier twin: the fat, silly life suggested by Donald Trump and others. Tea House culture and wabi sabi aesthetics alone may never drive a mainstream movement in the US; but environmental and cost pressures may shape our lives in the near future. If so, we luckily have some cultural and aesthetic trends to inform that moment when it arises. Jeffers had never been a lookout, but he, of course, built his own lookout on the shores of the Pacific and practiced his own meditation on nature, gazing out and beyond the Pacific Ocean and up and down the coast. And, as Suiter states, it was during this period of lookout sitting that Snyder “had lately been thinking of the poet Robinson Jeffers and Jeffers’s Inhumanism…Crater Lookout was a fitting place to consider the necessary questions of poetry, nature, and humankind raised by Jeffers’s work” (38, 40). “Snyder was a great admirer of Jeffers’s work,” Suiter points out, “which he discovered in high school and read with great excitement” (40). Although Snyder is not quick to admit to the influence of Jeffers these days, the record testifies differently. John Suiter (author of Poets on the Peaks) expressed his view in an email recently: “I am constantly reminded in my research of what a large influence he was on Snyder—more than Williams, if you ask me, as much as Rexroth, sometimes rivaling Pound” (Suiter, personal communication, 8/2006). One is tempted to see a connection between Jeffers’s rhythmic habit of stacking stones and Snyder’s early poem “Riprap” from the collection of that same title: Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set…(Riprap 32)

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The purpose of this collection, Snyder says, is to “celebrate the work of hands, the placing of rock, and my first glimpse of the whole universe as interconnected, interpenetrating, mutually reflecting, mutually embracing” (Riprap 65). The parallels with Jeffers are strong regarding what Jeffers “felt” in the rock and the fitting of rocks together. Jeffers saw the cosmic interconnection as well, as was discussed at length in Chapter Three. As I discussed in a recent article, “Carrying the Weight: Jeffers’s Role in Preparing the Way for Ecocriticism,” Snyder was thinking very early on about how Jeffers approached the project of nature writing. In a very early journal entry (early 50s), Snyder was clearly thinking about and positioning himself in reference to Jeffers. In “Lookout’s Journal,” Snyder wondered how to proceed towards a vision if “one wished to write poetry of nature”: (reject the human; but the tension of human events, brutal and tragic, against a nonhuman background? Like Jeffers?). (Earth House Hold 4)

Further evidence of Snyder’s debt to Jeffers is revealed in a newspaper article in the L.A.Times, dated Jan. 14, 1987. Robert Brophy organized a seminar to celebrate the 100th birthday of Jeffers. Snyder, Everson, and Milosz were participants. While Milosz registered a typically ambiguous response regarding Jeffers (“Jeffers is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century... but at the same time my basic reservation [about him] is of a theological nature” (qtd. in Moffet 1)), Snyder put forth a hearty defense. Snyder documents that he started reading Jeffers in 1949. He then goes on in this news article to discuss what he took from Jeffers. In Jeffers’s verse, he found “insights into why science acted with such hubris and destructively” in the August 1945, atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Snyder also felt that Jeffers’s poetry spoke to such issues as the ongoing destruction of the Pacific Northwest forests and waters. Jeffers’s poetry expresses “a profound respect for the non-human” rather than contempt for humanity, Snyder said. His philosophy was that of “posthumanism, or trans-humanism, a humanism that goes beyond the human” to embrace the rest of the natural world (qtd. in Moffet 1, 5–6). Snyder, expressing his admiration for Rexroth, tells Whalen in 1954, that Rexroth “`has Jeffers…in his blood’” (Suiter 80). In a 1954 letter, sent to Rexroth after their first meeting, Snyder lays out the direction for American poetry that is so clearly the approach Jeffers was taking. “`My own generation is completely cowardly’” Snyder writes to Rexroth. He goes on to claim that

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there is need for poetry that cuts and slashes, that points to the existence of a non human Nature in this world, that can talk about contemplation without falling into rose-water and incense burners. (qtd. in Suiter 81)

This determined approach to a philosophically-driven life that insists putting ideas to the test should remind us of Thoreau’s desire to live “deliberately” (W 60). Thoreau wanted to “live deep and suck out all the marrow in life…to put to route all that was not life…to drive life into a corner” (W 60). Recall also that, like Snyder, Jeffers wanted a poetry that intensely embraced the power of nature, a poetry, therefore, that was newly born and a departure from the conventional. Jeffers wanted to …feed my eyes With Santa Lucian sea-beauty, and moreover To shear the rhyme-tassels from verse. (CP 4: 253)

The challenge, therefore, is to capture an engagement with beauty and frame it in a new poetic vehicle: These are clearly themes staked out by Jeffers and well known by Snyder as being such. Most importantly, however, Snyder certainly took from Jeffers a commitment to be grounded in place. As with each of the writers examined in this study, Snyder had a large dose of politics in his poetry and in his life. Suiter notes that the years Snyder, Whalen, and Kerouac worked in the Skagit were the heyday of the lookout era. In 1953, when Snyder was sitting Sourdough and Whalen was on Sauk, there were 5,000 fire watch cabins on public lands across the United States. Most of these were in the Northwest. As useful and productive as these lookout retreats had become for Snyder, his anticipation for a third summer of solitude and learning was dashed: Gary Snyder was blacklisted from government employment. Suiter asks the obvious question: “On what grounds would an unknown and unpublished twenty-four-year-old poet applying for a summer fire-watching post have been considered a threat to national security” (Suiter 86). Like Jeffers, Snyder saw no value, gain, or good in war. He was a pacifist, “even during the Second World War, when he made the highly unpopular move of declaring himself a conscientious objector” (81). But it is important to note that, like Jeffers, Snyder wasn’t for or against any “side” although the left offered pivot points of resistance that were usable and convenient for him. Suiter explains:

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Chapter Five Gary had never made any secret of his radical political opinions, which were vocally anti-Stalinist and critical of the Communist Party, despite his many Marxist friends. He considered himself a pacifist and anarchist in the mold of Thoreau… “I’m disloyal, & they figgered it out…So what,” wrote Snyder to his friend Dell Hymes. “Of course they will never take into account the fact that I feel nastily disloyal to ALL governments, that Russian dungheap or the foul British stew…I am coming more and more strongly to an anarchist position, seriously, & with full cognizance of its philosophical silliness & general impracticality.” (Suiter 86)

As I have said throughout these pages, I see more independence in the political stance of these writers than any firm, ideological affiliation on the political spectrum. These writers are not joiners or ideologues. They think and reposition for freedom, openness, beauty, and energy. As it turns out, a classmate from Reed College (nicknamed Red College at the time for the subversive culture that prevailed) helped Snyder get his maritime union papers so he could ship as a merchant marine worker. The union he belonged to, Marine Cooks and Stewards, was avowedly progressive and left wing. This union was racially integrated and also accepted gays. As Suiter reports, most unions of the time refused workers of color. Nevertheless, the union President was a communist and with the advent of Taft-Hartley, this union came under special scrutiny. Snyder was a victim of the Cold War cleansing of the civil service and because he was “associated” with known communists, he was deemed a “poor security risk” (see Suiter 86-91). It is important to note that as with Jeffers, it is a mistake to assume that Snyder’s retreat was a head-in-the-sand maneuver. Like Jeffers, he was most clearly a thoroughly engaged poet, although their politics were not identical to be sure. As Suiter put it in the Big Bridge interview with Michael Rothenberg, while Americans were being trained to duck-and-cover, and to build bomb shelters in their basements and cower for Civil Defense drills,… these guys went instead to the open mountaintops and sat zazen. I love them for that: they were fearless in a time of great fear. We can still learn something from that… When Snyder, Whalen and Kerouac went on lookout in the 1950s, it was against a certain political backdrop that couldn’t be gotten away from—the Korean War, the Cold War, the McCarthy inquisition, H-bomb fears. Snyder, don’t forget, was on the blacklists of the Coast Guard, the Forest Service, and the State Department, as I bring out in my book. He didn’t just go off to the mountains, he went toe-to-toe with the powers that were, and won. (Suiter Big Bridge)

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Despite the pressure and stresses during this period, all in all it was a fruitful period of growth for Snyder. Reading, writing, hiking, working, hitchhiking, meditating, all came together with the political tensions of the period in a productive way for Snyder. Hitchhiking and seeking hermitages were two features that dominated the period for Snyder and friends. While the interstate highway system began to be implemented and telephone lines were going in across America, another network of community and communication was emerging. Hitchhiking was a mode of transportation available to anyone with a backpack, a sense of adventure, and a need for discovery and independence. “The road” was a portal for experiencing what life could bring for Snyder and thousands of other young people in the disaffected years between the 50s and 70s. The cover of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, for instance, had the road running right through her, defining the shape and feel of her life at that time. Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan, Jackson Browne, and Joni Mitchell all made “the road” the focus of many songs. Here is Simon and Garfunkel with “America”: "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together I've got some real estate here in my bag" So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies And walked off to look for America "Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh "Michigan seems like a dream to me now" It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw I've come to look for America …(Simon and Garfunkle 1968)

Snyder documents his own version of this on-the-road genre in “I went into the Maverick Bar.” While hitchhiking, Snyder stops at what would easily be called a “redneck bar.” The purpose of the journey was personal and cultural discovery and to “look for America.” Snyder, after tucking his long hair under his hat, enters the bar and witnesses America‘s values and cultural constructs in motion. As Kwai Chang Caine would in the popular TV show, I picture Snyder finding a corner somewhere on the margin and observing while a country couple clumsily dances: They held each other like in High School dances in the fifties I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Orgeon. That short-haried joy and roughness -America -- your stupidity.

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Chapter Five I could almost love you again… under the tough old stars -In the shadow of the bluffs I came back to myself To the real work, to "What is to be done." (Turtle Island 9)

His reaction to provincial, uncultured, regional culture is still familiar and palpable today. These days, it may be wiser not to judge our fellow citizens so quickly in such a divisive, partisan manner. Those on the left need to recover and guard against sweeping sets of assumptions and harsh judgments about those not in the cool and hip “tribe.” The counter-culture movement of the 60s and 70s, while breaking away from conformity towards horizons of new freedom, tended to develop codes, restrictions, language, dress, and ideologies that had to be adhered to as passport for inclusion. This is essentially the subject of my 1998 article “Rethinking Resistance.” In this article, I assert that resistance movements frequently and fatally exhibit the same interests in power and dominion as the structures they are resisting. Snyder’s poem serves as testimony to a moment when young people were trying to find their way in and around a culture they were struggling with. However, as I mentioned, gestures towards freedom too quickly get codified into new systems of conformity. Emerson, in essays like “Circles” and “Self reliance,” argued that power lies in the moment of transition from one state to the next, not the settling into an ideology. He knew that fluid moments quickly congeal into routine and order. Notable in Snyder’s poem is the Marxist reference that caught much of the youth moment during the 60s. Note the nod to Lenin’s 1901 article of that title in the last line: “What is to be done?” This treatise suggested that bourgeois intellectuals have a duty to bring ideas to the working class to propel the workers’ society. Ideas, in this context, are not allowed to be guilty of what Murphy accused liberal humanism of in Chapter One: undecidability! As with contemporary neo-Marxists, Lenin insisted that ideas serve the cause.2 In Formalism and Marxism, Tony Bennett sketches out a similar theory of engaged art by distinguishing between aesthetic disorientation, i.e. defamiliarization (making things strange), and sociopolitical anchored understandings of language that question the norm. An idea either supports the march towards the revolutionary horizon (i.e., the idea is “with” history), or it is revealed for its hesitation or reactionary stance. Many intellectuals found life difficult as the Soviet Union came into being. Lenin and then certainly Stalin fairly quickly codified the moment of revolutionary exhilaration into dogma and program. Snyder

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showed awareness of these traps by eventually rejecting both Marxism and what he considered the excesses of capitalism. I made the argument in the Jeffers chapter that Jeffers was a trailblazer in many respects. Snyder has been as well. He was on to the issues of watershed commitment and bioregionalism at its inception; he had solar at his house before the early adopter stage; he had an earring before earrings were popular; he was hitchhiking, mountain climbing, exploring cultures and languages, as well as new poetics, and setting up a home in the wild before and as this was becoming popular. One of the great avenues of freedom offered in the 50s and 60s and pursued by Snyder was hitchhiking. Many articles have been written examining the demise of hitchhiking as a form of travel and community networking. Hitchhiking was a low cost mode of travel and a way to meet people outside your community of familiarity. I remember being proud of having met people from backgrounds I was unfamiliar with and finding common ground as the miles went by. Now, we are more likely to sit silently next to each other in airplanes, with nothing to look at and nothing to say, fiddling with our iPads and other electronic distractions. And, of course, hitchhiking became increasingly dangerous, as the amount of violence in the U.S. seemed to jump dramatically year after year in the 70s. Early participants in what would become a rite of passage for many coming of age in the 60s and 70s, Snyder, Kerouac, and others used hitching as an escape, a refuge, a way to focus on self-discovery, a way to feel time and journey: a vision quest for sure. Kerouac expressed some of the desperation felt by this generation when he asked “`Where shall I go to escape this civilization which at any moment may thrust me in jail or war, or madhouse’” (qtd. in Suiter 171). There were 3 main ways (beyond indulgence in drugs and alcohol of course) to handle such social, political and psychological pressures: the road, art, and a “hermitage.” As Suiter documents regarding Kerouac, by the end of 1954 “the hermitage concept had taken on the force of an imaginative imperative for Jack” (171). As one will recall, I have documented that this notion of hermitages is alive and well on web sites such as Hermitary.3

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Fig. 5-5. Gary Snyder at Kitkitdizze. This photo appeared in Outside Magazine, Nov. 1993.

Snyder took this thinking about hermitages a stage further and began to frame his evolving social vision around it. Snyder developed the notion early on of a social movement that pulled all of this together by imagining a network of connected hermitages. He imagined shacks and hermitages all over the country, every one being a “`day’s hitchhike (about 500 miles) apart all over the land’” (Suiter 186). Years later, in “The Rediscovery of Turtle Island,” he describes this in less socioreligious terms using more ecological concepts: “Bioregionalism calls for commitment to this continent place by place, in terms of biogeographical regions and watersheds. It calls for us to see our country in terms of its landforms…” (A Place in Space 246). What Snyder envisioned in the 50s has actually come about in some respects. Defined by watersheds more than hitchhiking distance, Toby Thompson suggests that “the idea seems to have taken root; following Yuba’s lead, other watershed councils have sprung up across California, including Friends of the River, the Putah Creek Council, the Greenwood Watershed Association, the Redwood Coast Watershed Alliance, and the

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Mattole Restoration Council. They are, in a sense, Snyder’s stepchildren” (63). And one sees similar concepts everywhere in Snyder’s writing. In an Audubon article, he describes the area where he has lived in the Sierras. He states that many other settlers found their place in California back in the early 70s, so eventually there was a whole reinhabitory culture living this way in what we like to call Shasta Nation. (66)

From the early years, Snyder was concerned with the increasingly frenetic mobility in American culture and the lack of attention and fidelity to a place. In an online interview with Juliet Harding, Snyder sketches the issue: “This is a society where many people never think about a place to settle down. Lots of people don’t even know how to tell you where they’re from. If you ask, they say, ‘Do you mean where I was born, or where I went to college, or where my parents live now?’ There is a lot of vagueness about where we are from” (Snyder, Modern American Poerty Online Interview). What Snyder says is true in the main, but choices of settling might be more available to some poets and others not hooked so thoroughly into the economy and conventional family-raising activities. I would push back on his comment here a bit and suggest that a lot of people think about learning the flowers and birds, settling down and settling in, all the time. Therefore, like Jeffers, Snyder suggests one must move into an area gracefully; it is not a matter of clearing the ground and deploying the geometry (ala Piñon Oaks discussed in Chapter One). One must learn how to re-inhabit the land. The phrase at once refers to learning to respect the land as well as learning to live with the land in a way that may involve healing past damage to the land. Snyder oversees and becomes steward to this watershed; Jeffers, of course, planted hundreds of trees in a similar spirit. Gary Snyder, like Jeffers, combines writing and living in nature as a totally conceived project. As Snyder has said, “I haven’t been just writing poems. I have been creating a much larger picture in my work. I look at it as one large project in which all of these things are part of the picture.” (qtd. in Murphy, Wayfaring 13)

Writing is just part of the project according to Snyder: “I see my role as trying to present some alternative” (qtd. in Murphy, Wayfaring 12). Thoreau expresses something akin to this thought when he states that “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts…but so to love

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wisdom as to live according to its dictates” (W 16). In essence, he wants to do something. And Jeffers wanted to touch the earth, stack stones, tell the truth, and be more than a poet because “`The poets lie too much’” (CP 4: 391). This is an area of cultural intrigue that has been with many of us our entire political lives. Like other generations, many baby boomers have been moved by the vision of the simpler life, a life where a concern about beauty, about nature, about ideals come together with a daily way of life. Writers like Snyder and Jeffers bring this ideal to its ultimate realization by conceptualizing and envisioning their values in writing and living these values daily. To borrow from Thoreau, they are living the life they have imagined. Like Jeffers, Snyder has an originary moment of discovery of place. In the turmoil of the 60s and in between trips to Japan to study Buddhism, Snyder focuses on place: In 1969, back for good in California, we drove out to the land and made a family decision to put our life there. At that time there were virtually no neighbors, and the roads were even worse than they are now. No power lines, no phones, and twenty five miles –across a canyon—to town….We had our hands full the first ten years just getting up walls and roofs, bathhouse, small barn, woodshed. A lot of it was done the old way: we dropped the trees to be used with a two-man falling saw…Young women and men with long hair joined the work camp for comradeship, food and spending money. Light was from kerosene lamps; we heated with wood and cooked with wood and propane. (A Place in Space “Kitkitdizze: Node in the Net” 253, 255)

And like Jeffers and Berry, Snyder has dedicated essays and poems to the building and meaning of his house. In the poem, “Building,” Snyder sketches out the scene in 1970: We started our house midway through the Cultural Revolution, The Vietnam war, Cambodia, in our ears, tear gas in Berkeley Boys on overalls with frightened eyes, long matted hair, ran from the police, We peeled trees, drilled boulders, dug sumps, took sweat baths together” (No Nature 366).

Snyder purchased the property in the 60s “with Allen Ginsberg and Richard Baker, then president of the San Francisco Zen Center” (Goodyear 70). The house was built with friends, a community of loosely knit folks that came and went. Some folks who were part of the original design and

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building project still live in the area and have been a part of Snyder’s longstanding community of friends and supporters. In 1969, Snyder sought 10 volunteers to help him build a home that was to be part Japanese Farmhouse, part Indian lodge. They came—some from Berkeley, some from Antioch College—in the summer of 1970, and, with Snyder and Uehara, built the house in a few months, using ponderosa pines from within three hundred feet of the site to frame, and local incense cedar for siding. The foundation stones came from the middle fork of the Yuba River. There was no electricity (Kitkitdizze is still off the grid, and nowadays runs on solar and generators) so they felled trees with a two-man handsaw. Days were hot and nakedness prevailed. (Goodyear 70)

Snyder put solar power into Kitkitdizze in the late 70s, and as usual he was early on all of these issues regarding place and knowledge of region and rhythms. From the earliest days of building at Kitkitdizze, Snyder’s poetry is peppered throughout with the saws, the smells, the axe handles, the community, and, yes, the nudity from this process and project. As Goodyear states, “The topless women carpenters inspired `Alabaster,’ published in a mid-eighties collection, Left Out in the Rain” (71). In this poem, Snyder notes that it is “so hot/only beads to wear are cool.”4 He goes on to note that “The girls chests like the mens/are bare” (Left 116). Snyder goes on in some detail about events of the building, and Goodyear reports that “Many of the volunteers—Holly and Tanya among them— decided to stay on San Juan Ridge. Some pooled their resources and bought the adjacent property, and this community became Snyder’s testing ground for the ideas he was beginning to explore in print” (71). Most notably along these lines is the prose section in the Pulitzer Prize winning Turtle Island called “Four Changes.” In this section, Snyder lays out the problems with modernist consumption and waste, and he discusses directions that the future should take instead. Like Jeffers’s Tor House, Kitkitdizze was, in addition to a place-bound effort, informed by ritual and social practice. In “Kitkitdizze, Zendo, and Place: Gary Snyder as a Reinhabitory Poet,” Katsunori Yamazato underlines the importance of Snyder’s house in shaping lives and values: “The…house…played an important role in forming a communal attitude toward the place” (56 my emphasis). As Goodyear discusses this aspect of the house with Masa Uehara (Snyder’s 3rd wife), she suggests the communal energy could be a bit much at times: Uehara and Snyder divorced in 1990; she is remarried, and lives on a piece of land next door. “Gary was so social—still is,” she told me. “Out of seven days, maybe five of them we had someone for dinner. A natural,

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Chapter Five organic poetry salon was constantly happening in our living room. Ferlinghetti came, Ginsberg came, McClure, Lew Welch”—a poet Snyder had known since Reed. “They [Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, et. al.] were in and out all the time. Gary would invite the neighbors who were interested in their ideas. I was doing all the cooking, with two little kids in diapers.” Snyder, she said, did the dishes. In addition to the welcome guest, there was a stream of uninvited and, according to Uehara, ill-mannered hippies, who would arrive expecting to be edified and fed…His style of writing was very appealing in the seventies to young men looking for a poetic identity. He was a good example of a greened-out, dropout way to live.” The world of Kitkitdizze also attracted a more sophisticated type of seeker and scenester. (Goodyear 72)

Fig. 5-6. The house serves in many ways to support the values and activities of the writer. Gary sits zazen with his wife Carole Koda. Note the sliding doors as in Japanese architecture. Sadly, Carole Koda passed in 2006.

The house provides for family ritual as well. In “The Bath,” Snyder bathes with his wife and two boys, surrounded by “black night & all the stars” and a “cloud across the sky. The windy pines.” By repeating, “this is our body” between stanzas, Snyder associates the bodies of his family with the body of the Earth, so the mere function of bathing is a bonding moment with the family and all of nature: As Kai laughs at his mother’s breast he now is weaned from, we

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wash each other, this our body … Clean and rinsed, and sweating more, we stretch out on the redwood benches hearts all beating Quiet to the simmer of the stove, the scent of cedar… The cloud across the sky. The windy pines. the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow this is our body. (“The Bath” Turtle Island 12-14)

After several stanzas where the refrain, “this is our body,” is repeated, he makes the clear association between their bodies and the earth. It’s amusing to note that when Snyder’s two boys were old enough to read this poem and care that it was published worldwide, “They banned him from reading it on the West Coast” (Goodyear 72) where they had their friends. Ritual and tradition are strong elements in reinhabitory culture. One sees the admiration Snyder has for cultures which are close knit and integrated into the forces of nature. In “Anasazi,” Snyder sketches native people who built their adobe huts in the sides of tall cliffs: “Tucked up in clefts in cliffs” (3). In addition to their natural building strategies, he admires their ritual and mythic beliefs: “up to your hips in Gods” (3). Women give birth “at the foot of ladders in the dark” while “trickling streams in hidden canyons” carry on “under the cold rolling desert’ (3). Note the juxtaposition of the human event of child birthing and the natural context of a stream in an adjacent canyon. How similar this is to the image of bathing with his family while The cloud across the sky. The windy pines. the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow this is our body.

In a like manner of combining ritual, nature, and the everyday, Snyder, friends and helpers “gathered at the edge of a meadow” to begin work on the zendo in 1980: Blowing conch, shaking staff rings we opened work on the Hall. Forty people, women carpenters, child labor, pounding nails, Screw down the corten roofing and shape the beams

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Chapter Five With a planer, The building is done in three weeks. We fill it with flowers and friends and open it up. (No Nature 366)

In the first few lines of the first chapter in this book, I established the question, “And how shall we live?” as the essential question nature literature asks. Gary Snyder, in his various “reinhabitation” essays and poems, has made the question, “And how shall we live?” his most central theme. In “Kitkitdizze: A Node in the Net,” Snyder speaks about his home directly. Snyder, like Jeffers and others, named his house. In Snyder’s case, the house’s name refers to a Native Indian word for a ground cover or shrub. Naming of places is not a new phenomenon, but it is revealing. Aristocrats have always named their manors. We have already discussed the hallucinogenic and fantasia-like “Piñon Oaks” and the ads for subdivisions such as “Grayhawk,” that represent the naming devices of contractors and real estate marketers. Vacation homes advertise their casual and recreational purposes with names such as the “The Mountain Top,” or “Lazy Pines.” These house names take on a recreational air. Ranch names tend to reflect the cattle business with names such as the “Cross V Ranch.” All of these lack the kind of committed, earnest, placebound spirit and practice based on reinhabitation and long term alternative lifestyle crafting. Like Jeffers, Snyder places a large emphasis on seeing his house in geographical and temporal contexts. In No Nature, Snyder has a poem, “Word Basket Woman,” where he discusses Jeffers (“his tall cold view/ quite true in a way”) but also his place in the Sierras: I dwell in a house on the long west slope of Sierra Nevada, two hundred mile swell of granite, bones of Ancient Buddha, miles back from the seacoast on a line of fiery chakras in the deep nerve web of the land… (371)

Snyder places his house in bioregional perspective, and the context goes out to the coast and deep beneath to the fault lines. In “What Happened Here Before,” Snyder imagines his place as it was 300,000,000 years ago. Snyder places himself in an ecocontext within a huge sense of geologic time. He sees this as a crucial exercise to achieve identity and purpose:

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“First a sea: soft sands, muds, and marls—loading.” Then after a millennia or two, he gets to where he and his family are with the land: now, we sit here near the diggings in the forest, by our fire, and watch the moon and planets and the shooting stars— my sons ask, who are we? (Turtle Island 81)

Thinking in geologic time as well as within bioregional relations allows Snyder to properly position himself in this place for ritual, identity formation, right action, and a lasting interwoven connection with culture and nature; all of this radiates from and is embodied in the house. Clearly, Snyder imagines his house as part of the watershed, just as Jeffers’s name for his house connected his structure with the ecocontext. Snyder feels integral with the interests of the life forms around him. When first considering the land he was about to buy, he realized that he recognized the “inhabitants” and liked living where these “folks” lived: “I knew the assembly of plants—ponderosa pine, black oak, and associates— well enough to know what the rainfall and climate would be, and I knew I liked their company” (Place 253). In this way, he portrays the standing of living things as having equal value to his humanness in a horizontal value line, not a vertical hierarchical one. In addition, by naming his house after a local ground cover, he demonstrates his desire to fit in, to blend with the natural forces. He also draws on his much-used nature imagery of webs, nodes, and cells to describe his home as part of a dynamic set of integrated energies. Snyder doesn’t see place, in the end, as defined because of a deed, a mortgage, or an address. In a 1995 Audobon article called “Cultivating Wildness,” he says that in 1969 “we drove out to the land and made a family decision to put our life there” (Snyder 64). Putting one’s life into an area implies an earnest biological and spiritual enterprise, not an investment or economic activity. A more typical expression in this case would be for one to say “we bought there,” or “we invested there.” Snyder’s home has appeared in photos in magazines such as Audobon, Outside, and Shambhala Sun. One of the most revealing photos is to be found in a Japanese publication called Great Earth Sangha (35). The picture of the inside of the house reveals smooth, long-plank flooring, high ceilings, a skylight, un-milled, heavy pole beams, cascading light, a shimmering, simple elegance. The house is described in the Outside

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magazine article as a “Japanese—and Native American—style farmhouse, with its tile roof, pine-log posts, and cedar-board siding” that “was built by Snyder and a dozen friends in the summer of 1970, part of the back to Mother-Earth movement that was inspired in part by Snyder’s writings” (Thompson 63). The structure is, according to my exchange with Snyder, patterned after Japanese farmhouses. But also, like his poetry, Snyder’s home exhibits a purposeful mixture of western rusticity and eastern elegance. But the overwhelming design lines are Japanese. From the pictures, one can see the activities that the design supports: study, meditation, community. Katsunori Yamazato documents the similarities with the traditional Japanese farmhouse: “According to Hirotaro Ota, the typical Japanese farmhouse” is “divided into three sections: a dirt floor, the living room where the hearth is placed, and the bedroom….The floor plan of the Kitkitdizze house shows that it too is divided basically into three sections” (52).

Fig. 5-7. Japanese farmhouse. Note similar roofline as Snyder’s place.

In his home, as in his poetry, Snyder pays tribute to the aesthetics and the ideas of his three most cherished value systems: 1) the beauty and the power of the northern California bioregion; 2) native Indian myth and culture; 3) Asian and Japanese culture and particularly the wabi-sabi aesthetics and crucial insights of Zen. Check the color plates in the middle section of this book to see Snyder’s place and these architectural elements. Snyder himself admits to these multiple strains of culture interweaving in his poetry. For instance, speaking of some lines in Myths and Texts, he says he combined the “cosmic unitary vision of the Oglala Sioux with the shamanistic voice of Haida spokesmen, the Ch’an poetry of Han-shan, and the pragmatic advice of the logger” (qtd in Murphy, Wayfaring 27-28). Asian and indigenous cultures are typical inspirations for many who leave the mainstream and seek a life of peace outside the grid. Jeffers, too, felt a sense of connection with native Indians who lived at the same spot where he built his home (CP: I “Apology” 210). And as I mentioned in the Thoreau chapter, Henry was influenced by Asian and Native cultures and

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ideas as well. And, it must be noted that these writers were also significantly influenced by western lifestyle traditions of independence and literary influences, especially the classics.

Fig. 5-8. Inside a refurbished and modernized Japanese farmhouse. Snyder used a similar post and beam style with skylight.

Snyder’s project involves a commitment to place and a larger vision of community: “My home base, Kitkitdizze, is but one tiny node in an evolving net of bioregional homesteads and camps” (Place in Space 262). Yamazato summarizes the ideas associated with the house: “it reflects Snyder’s decision to be regional, to lead a life committed to a place and the community of all beings” (55). In fact, as Yamazato goes on to say, “Building a house is fundamental for the creation of a culture of place” (59). In a recent email, Snyder quibbled a bit with this statement from Yamazato defending the patterns and lives of nomads: “But `nomads’ are as place-based as anybody, its [sic] only that they have a larger territory and move (usually in an annual pattern) from place to place. Then various ingenious portable dwellings come into existence, like the tipi” (personal communication 9/7/2011). The home is a centerpiece involving a writing project, dedication to a place, a family nest, and a thread in a larger community of fellow members of the tribe. In this notion of a community

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of interacted folks, Snyder offers a new concept to think about this lifestyle. As I mentioned earlier, Snyder is concerned that “Our current system punishes those who stay in one place; and rewards those who jump system to system” (A Place in Space, “Reinhabitation 189). Instead, he wants people to rededicate themselves to the land; to once again understand its rhythms, smells, cycles, and wisdom. “Reinhabitory refers to the tiny number of persons who…turn back to the land, back to place…to become people who are learning to live and think as if they were totally engaged with their place for the long future” (A Place in Space, “Reinhabitation,” 190). It also refers to taking possession of damaged land so there is a moral piece to this gesture as well. When he began inhabiting and living on the land, he noted, “We weren’t `in the wilderness’ but rather in a zone of ecological recovery” (Audubon 65). Snyder suggests we need to reinvent the current, dominant pattern of anxious mobility with the countermovement of “reinhabitation.” It is interesting though that the issue of re-inhabitation is raised in this context. It is raised mostly from the point of view of stewardship, as a responsibility to restore damaged land and to heal bad, past practices. But perhaps it also speaks to what we may have to do to find a place to heal ourselves. So, yes, as Buell stated above, “Environmental texts…practice restorationism by calling places into being…not just by naming objects but by dramatizing in the process how they matter” (EI 267). Also requiring restoration is he or she who inhabits the land. In a recent email message to me, Snyder associated “long-term mental health and creativity” (Snyder, personal communication, 6/2011) with finding the right place and staying put. Staying put will have other benefits as well, making the case for local life: I’ll tell you one simple case where it would make a big difference: If fewer people were mobile and more people were settled in the United States, you would have much much more voter participation. People are interested in voting on local issues. Even if they think that the national election is hopelessly rigged, they’ll still go to the polls because they care about local issues, about who gets elected county supervisor. While they’re there, they’ll also vote for their choice of president. (Modern American Poetry Online Interview)

But the term not only refers to those who are making their way back to a lost way of life. “Inhabitory” is a term used by Snyder to describe folks who never left this path: “Actual inhabitants—peasants, paisonos, paysan, peoples of the land, have been dismissed, laughed at, and overtaxed for

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centuries by the urban-based ruling elites” (A Place in Space “Reinhabitation” 184). Snyder regrets that his region, “Nevada County west slope of the Sierra” has had its cultural meaning determined “almost entirely by the Gold Rush.” And now because of that haphazard, transient, and mercenary moment of definition, the naming traditions have “no value now in making any sense” (Real Work 25). Sometimes it seems Snyder may be asking for too much regularity and place bound living where naming isn’t disrupted by historical events and other unavoidable calamities perpetrated by humans. There is no doubt that having naming references makes history more interesting and can suggest, among other things, a stable, earthcentered inhabitation. Snyder also uses the term bioregionalism to try and achieve this rethinking of what it means to be in a place: Bioregionalism calls for commitment to this continent place by place…It calls us to see our country in terms of landforms, plant life, weather patterns, seasonal changes…This doesn't mean some return to a primitive lifestyle or utopian provincialism…(A Place in Space, “Rediscovery of Turtle Island” 246-47)

And, therefore, as Jeffers, Snyder thinks of his life and his house in context. And like Jeffers, Snyder participated in the building. Snyder invested much thought and effort into the details of his house. I asked Snyder how he saw his house in reference to the watershed. His answer was detailed and shows how integrated the materials are with the region: Local stone, all the log framing members from within a few hundred yards, and boards cut by a local shade-tree mill at which the sawyer could tell us who had fell what log and from what ridge. Hand built by a crew that camped out for almost 3 months, myself a lead carpenter. No power tools. It's oriented true north. Hip roof with a perched gable. Low plate all around. Original doors and windows scrounged from a wrecking yard (some of those replaced now.) Stone floor in the kitchen, campito sandstone from the White-Inyo mountains trucked here by us. (Snyder, personal communication, 7/2004)

Interestingly enough, a lot of Snyder’s serious writing has occurred in another structure on the property. In the Outside article, Toby Thompson recounts that while walking a considerable distance from the main house a small cabin appeared “with a tile roof, gray-green walls, and a porch facing a gorge. `This is my study,’ he says, `the Ditch Hut.’ It looks like a doll’s house—or like a child’s secret camp. `This is where I work when I really want to work,’ he murmurs as we enter” (162). Snyder reports in an email that the hut got its name for a “local” reason. It’s right “by a very old

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hand dug mining ditch to lead water somewhere for a hydraulic operation” (Snyder, personal communication, 9/7/2011). Thompson makes a connection between the cedar cabin and a childhood “friend” Snyder sought out when troubled. This “friend” was an old cedar tree (he called it his “advisor”) Snyder would seek out when things were difficult in his troubled childhood home. “`I would climb the tree and sit in it until I got the answer’” (Thompson 64). In this tableau, it all comes together: Snyder seeks refuge in nature where he meditates and works it out (later this will be writing). The childhood tree is now a writing cabin! I should note in email conversations, Snyder states that he doesn’t use the cabin as much now. Carole Koda passed in June, 2006 and Snyder lives alone. “Since I now live alone, there is less need for me to get out of the way of the daily life of others. I don't get to Ditch Hut as often as I used to, but it is still very valuable” (Snyder, personal communication 9/7/2011). In email exchanges, I also asked Snyder if commitment to a place had punished him in any way: I probably could have a more visible and remunerative public career if I had lived and socialized in a major city or academic setting.

“But,” he added quickly, “My life itself is my reward” (Snyder, personal email 7/2004).

Notes 1

Just a quick note on the photo of the lookout at Sourdough. Scott Morris from the Darrington Historical Society added the following note to this photo. “The caption info shown in The Herald is correct. Will Jenkins and his dog, Tony, are standing at the Sourdough Lookout. I can't remember the exact year, but if the caption has it, that's the correct year. It would be something like 1917 or 1920, somewhere around there. Will was not a beat poet, obviously, but he later became a journalist, writing for newspapers in the Bellingham and Vancouver area. He wrote "Last Frontier of the North Cascades," which is a collection of his stories of exploring the wild backcountry of the Upper Skagit River in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, mostly. Will ended up living almost to 100 years old (97 or so), and his son, Chuck, is still alive, almost 80 now. 2 I too recall feeling the impatience with an overly apolitical study of literature. But subordinating all discussions to the interests and categories of power agendas has been overdone. As Epstein says in the Wall Street Journal article discussed in these pages, English Departments have a particular interest in posturing as radical agents. In a book I largely admire for its scholarship, Russell Reising’s The Unusable Past: Theory and Study of American Literature, puts forward the title of

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the last chapter “What is to be Done?” documenting the large influence of Marxist thinking on literary scholars. 3 It should be noted that there is a lengthy discussion of Jeffers on this website. See http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/jeffers.html 4 It’s curious that Abbey has always been singled out for having multiple marriages, using gendered language, and exhibiting other behavior relative to women deemed, by some PC types, inappropriate, when Snyder, who clearly is vulnerable to similar “complaints,” has largely gone unscathed in this regard.

CHAPTER SIX WENDELL BERRY: “THE HOUSE SET SNUG/ AS A STONE IN THE HILL’S FLANK”

Wendell Berry has been working the ground on his Kentucky farm and writing beautiful and powerful poetry for decades. He grew up in Henry County, Kentucky where his family had been farming for several generations. After finishing an M.A. in 1957 and marrying his wife Tanya in the same year, Berry taught for a number of years, with his longest stretch being at the University of Kentucky from 1964-77. It’s worth noting that after finishing his M.A., he studied under Wallace Stegner in a creative writing seminar; other members included Ed Abbey, Larry McMurty, Ken Kesey, Tillie Olson, and others (Angyal 139). What a class! Leaving the University in 1977, he focuses on writing and farming on his 125-acre farm. As with our other writers in this study, Berry also has an originary story for the living project, which embraces a life with nature, the family, and his writing. Berry, his wife, and two children return to Kentucky in 1964 and buy the “property known as Lanes Landing, on the Kentucky River” (Imagination in Place 2), very close to where his parents grew up: Before we moved here, I had known this place for thirty-one years, and we have now lived here thirty-nine. We raised our children here. We have taken from this place most of our food, much of our fuel, and always, despite the difficulties and frustrations of a farming life, a sustaining pleasure. Also, nearly everything I have written has been written here. When I am asked how all this fits together, I have to say, “Awkwardly.” Even so, this has been the place of my work and my life. (IP 2)

All through this book, I have made the claim that the interesting part of the work of these writers is that the living project is inseparable from the writing project. Berry makes this point clearly for me. Berry confesses to the “difficulty of separating my work from my life, and the place from

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either. The place included in some of my work is also the place that has included me as a farmer and a writer” (IP 2). Berry documents the first time poetry started to make sense to him, and this moment is totally intertwined with placeness. He recalls “one afternoon when I tied my boat to a snag in the middle of the river” (LongLegged House 122). As he relaxed there fishing, he has a remarkable feeling of satisfaction, tranquility, and ease: I became conscious of what a fine thing I was doing. It came to me that this was one of the grand possibilities of my life. (LLH 123)

But he soon became upset and distressed since he hadn’t the background, or the thoughts, or the “cultural inheritance” to put his feelings into perspective. If one returns to the Thoreau chapter where I discuss idleness and deliberateness,1 one cannot mistake the Thoreauvian language Berry uses to characterize the event. In fact, a few lines after this description, he mentions that he ended up reading Walden at that spot on the river: To be idle, simply to live there in the sunlight in the middle of the river, was something I was not prepared to do deliberately. I tried to stay on…but the spell was broken. That I had nothing to do but what I wanted to do, and what I was in fact doing, had become utterly impotent as an idea. I had to leave. I would have to live to twice that age before I could do consciously what I wanted so much then to do. And even now I can do it only occasionally. (LLH 123 my emphasis)

Berry documents that it was around the time of these stays at the river that “I was beginning to read poetry with some awareness that it interested me” (LLH 123). Wendell Berry has focused on farming, his family, marriage, his community, politics, and living and writing a life of simplicity and principle. In addition to these values, his importance for this study is the essential and necessary interrelation between the life of soil, commitment to the preservation and quality of local life, the life of the house, and the writing. Lawrence Buell reports that Berry stated, “he would not be a writer if not for his home base on an Appalachian Kentucky farm” (EI 255). Berry wants to lay particular emphasis on the quality and style of living, his wife and family, and the farm as the primary elements in his work and in his life, especially as this relates to the writing project: “The place is precedent to my work” (IP 1) as a writer. And as with all writers here, it is the ability to combine the imagination, a commitment to the land, with fixing the door, planting the food, staring out the window, honoring friends and community, listening to the wren, being alert to the

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beauty and wonder that marks my interest with these writers. No one says it as clearly as Berry in his 2004 essay “Imagination in Place”: If imagination is to have a real worth to us, it needs to have a practical, an economic, effect. It needs to establish us in our places with a practical respect for what is there besides ourselves. I think the highest earthly result of imagination is probably local adaptation. (IP 33-4)

Imagination is too often associated with flights of fancy, imaginary worlds, and the deliriums and daydreaming of children, poets, and impractical folks. Imagination for Berry and others in this book is the energy needed to shape a life, to elevate life, to see layers and depth, to feel integral and connected. Berry intertwines his house, his love of soil, his labor, his love of natural beauty and power, his marriage, and his poetry into one act, and he commits to a place with abandon. His locale and his life there contain all the world he needs. Berry explores the gift of this unconflicted path in his poem about natural processes: Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need is here…to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here. (Selected Poems 90)

“What we need is here” (Berry). “Here is all that you love” (Thoreau). “The heart of a place is the home, and the heart of the home is the firepit” (Snyder). So, like Thoreau, Jeffers, and Snyder the project is immediate, in focus, and whole in concept; it’s about place, politics, family, house, writing, and nature. The hope is for the kind of abandon the geese seem to demonstrate or the kind Thoreau discussed above: “it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished” (W 72). This abandon comes with a settling in, a knowledge of place, a belief in the patterns and rhythms and sounds of a place. One recalls the quote from the Thoreau chapter where Henry made his statement about the fullness of a sense of place: Take the shortest way round and stay at home…Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are. Here is your bride elect, as close to you as she can be got. Here is all the best and all the worst you can imagine. What more do you want?...Foolish people imagine that what they

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Indeed. What we need is here. And digging in deep locally has the ability to connect one beyond the local. One recalls the power granite had for Jeffers. Touching, stacking, and living amidst the stones, all of these acted as a sacrament for Jeffers, connecting him with the creative forces of the universe. For Berry, farming is clearly tied to a relation with cosmic forces, tied to hope and death, and, like Jeffers and Snyder, it is this contact with nature that puts him in touch with the essential elements that sustain our being: …the man born to farming… to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap and rise again in the corn…(Selected Poems 67)

Berry made his name early on with his defense of local agricultural practice and his criticism of industrial agriculture in essay collections such as The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. And like Jeffers and Snyder, it is easy to see that Berry combines his focused lifestyle with political positioning. Reminiscent of Jeffers, Berry seeks refuge and health from his place as he encounters events in the world that are overwhelming. In the following, we see that Berry uses the ritual of hope (planting) in a desperate act to keep his spirits alive in the dark times of the Vietnam War: February 2, 1968 In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover…(Selected Poems 67)

When I read a Wendell Berry poem in the early 1970s—“To a Siberian Woodsman”—, I was immediately drawn to a strong, elegant, defiant voice. I had found a voice that reflected admirable values such as integrity, simplicity, and compassion. Further, the message was refreshingly radical (for the time) in its opposition to the government, its opposition to sanctioned organized industrial warfare, and its opposition to cultivated hatred for other cultures. I loved this poem for its commitment to the land and to home. I was a young man looking for ideas, elegantly and passionately stated ideas; Berry was my first find. Oddly enough, Berry made “home” sound attractive even while a generational mass exodus

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from and rejection of “home” was occurring. From his grounded position at home, Berry questions the hatred he is officially being told to have for a Russian farmer whose life looks like his own. Poetry like this from Berry, Jeffers, and Snyder puts to shame the claim of current critics that we need theory (need critical theorists) to unveil and reveal the pitfalls of language, power structures, and social forces: 4. Who has invented our enmity? Who has prescribed us hatred of each other? Who has armed us against each other with the death of the world? Who has appointed me such anger that I should desire the burning of your house or the destruction of your children? Who has appointed such anger to you? Who has set loose the thought that we should oppose each other with the ruin of forests and rivers, and the silence of the birds? Who has said to us that the voices of my land shall be strange to you, and the voices of your land strange to me? Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to destroy you, or that I could improve myself by destroying you? Who has imagined that your death could be negligible to me now that I have seen these pictures of your face? Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you, or laugh with you, or visit in your house and go to work with you in the forest? And now one of the ideas of my place will be that you would gladly talk and visit and work with me. 5. I sit in the shade of the trees of the land I was born in. As they are native I am native, and I hold to this place as carefully as they hold to it. I do not see the national flag flying from the staff of the sycamore, or any decree of the government written on the leaves of the walnut, nor has the elm bowed before any monuments or sworn the oath of allegiance. They have not declared to whom they stand in welcome.

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Every time I read this poem aloud in class, I, much to my continued amazement, fight back tears. Few poems have stood the endurance of 35 years of reading poetry. This one has for it reminds me of my first ethical and aesthetic moments coming to poetry. In the opening of the Jeffers chapter, I talked about how difficult it is to craft and build a life. This struggle is born by each one of us and by coming to poets like Berry we are able to wake ourselves and then renew our commitment to make our life add up to something substantial, something beautiful. The fight for an authentic life is so notable here, the fight for sincerity and earnestness, for beauty, for humble work, for the life one can imagine. Note in this poem that Berry is equally critical of Russian propaganda as he is of the U.S. Like Snyder, he saw the problems in the excesses of both of these political machines. In addition, this poem makes the case for the relation between ideas and place: “And now one of the ideas of my place will be.” Like Thoreau, Jeffers, and Snyder, Berry marks a distinction between manufactured reality for the expediency of the times and the masses as opposed to his need to create and nurture his own sense of need, beauty, wonder, place, and self. One recalls the discussion in the Jeffers section examining the photo of Jeffers, Dali, and Rogers! Far from idiosyncratic selfish indulgence in solipsism and narcissism, a strong and noble ethical principle emerges from a focus on a life of substance and on the home as a foundation and refuge for this alternative life. It sets the stage, as Arne

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Naess said, to live out our priorities. The home becomes central for getting to all of these issues. Like Thoreau, Jeffers and Snyder, Berry focuses on his house in a number of ways. First he sees it as a living thing, as representative of his own world, as something that moves and changes with the energies of those inhabiting it. In “The Design of a House,” he defines it, and he is defined by it: …the house is a shambles unless the vision of its perfection upholds it like a stone… Love has conceived a house, and out of its labor brought forth its likeness --the emblem of desire, continuing though the flesh falls away… like a god, the house elects its own omens; because it is I desire it should be… Cities we have gone to and come back Are the prospect of its doorways… (Selected Poems 11)

Love has conceived a house, and out of its labor brought forth its likeness. The house is an idea in Berry’s mind and heart and in the mind and heart of his family. It wouldn’t exist without the love that brought it forth and holds it together. This sentiment reminds one of Thoreau’s claims that the beauty of a house comes about as a result of the life of those who live there. For Berry, love created the house one is looking at, and one can recognize the quality of Wendell and Tanya’s life in the way the place looks. The house allows one to establish priorities, reflect those priorities, and move through its doors out into the “prospect” of the world. Berry also points to the power and life that the house seems to possess. It is an “emblem of desire”; it is “like a god” and it continues, “though the flesh falls away.” This last sentiment strikes a Jeffersian note in that Berry is able to acknowledge the nonhuman world in a forceful and frank manner. Living in place brings on this experience for all of the writers looked at in these pages. Recent social justice eco critics have played down the value of this experience, but this is a crucial moment of insight to properly contextualize human action and value systems. In the extraordinary poem “To What Listens,” the house becomes a part of the world of mute and mysterious nature. But while acknowledging the inhuman context, one sees that Berry’s poetry is inextricably tied to a balance between the human desires of the moment and the day within the context of the

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nonhuman. The house works as a foundation for Berry in this poem allowing him to “journey” beyond human concerns to the world around and beyond him; the house is a like a stone and it, too, has its process of returning to the earth: I come to it again and again, the thought of the wren opening his song here to no human ear no woman to look up no man to turn his head. The farm will sink then from all we have done and said… the house [is now] set snug As a stone in the hill’s flank.. Its songs and loves throb In my head til like the wren I sing—to what listens—again. (Selected Poems 108)

Jeffers would have recognized the nonhuman voice of the wren as an example of “Inhumanism”; Snyder thought of it as the hum of the void. This is a lovely poem that maps out and weaves together a complex and interwoven theory of poetry, the home, and the wild. In the first part of the poem, there is a brave, if not somewhat disturbing, image of the wren. The wren represents the world of nature that always exists apart from humans and their interests. Berry too is a singer in this poem and he sings the love that happens inside the house. In this way, he identifies himself with the mysterious wren and its exotic song. The song of the wren is the sound of a world pursuing its own interests, following its own pathways and energies, all of which emits to us a strange and marvelous beauty. Snyder, in his usual succinct fashion, put it this way: “The world does what it pleases” (TI 44). This world is whole and full and will persist beyond our time. This is classic Jeffers Inhumanism. In “Their Beauty Has More Meaning,” Jeffers makes this position clear: I know that tomorrow or next year or in twenty years I shall not see these things—and it does not matter, it does not hurt; They will be here. And when the whole human race Has been like me rubbed out, they will still be here: storms, moon and ocean, Dawn and the birds. And I say this: their beauty has more meaning Than the whole human race… (CP 3: 119)

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Jeffers and Berry sacrifice the human in order to bring on the humbling and ennobling attributes of the mysteriously, transhuman divine and sublime. Humanity has tended to respond to the realization of this stunning and indifferent reality in a variety of unfortunate ways. Most religions have at their root and very essence a denial and rejection of the proposition that humankind is simply one part of the scene, one part of a process that privileges no life form above another. Denial and rejection may be too harsh. Christianity and other religions, as I have continued to think and puzzle over them through these several decades, now strike me, if I am going to put the best face on it, as trying to acknowledge the void and the inhuman with some grace and dignity. But much of the religious impulse does involve some unfortunate reactionary thinking and some outright denial. Why else the continuing response of outrage to Darwinian thinking, stem cell research, the possibility of cloning? On the whole, religion has erected a human centered edifice of belief, mythology, ontology, an incredible story that removes us from the unknown, the discarded, the accidental and puts us, like Ptolmey’s Earth, in the center of all things. But it’s not just the religious zealot that struggles with the Inhumanism of Jeffers, the void of Snyder, or the wren of Berry. Robert Zaller provides a fine examination of how Czeslaw Milosz, a European intellectual, struggled with Jeffers’s vision and found “the well springs of Jeffers’s attitude suspect” (45). These responses, I think, say more about some readers, however, than they do about Jeffers, or Snyder, or Berry. The writers examined here are not mesmerized into despondency upon the discovery of the Jeffers’s “transhuman magnificence,” or the hum of the void as in Snyder, or the song of the wren as in Berry. These writers, as Thoreau, get deliberate about fashioning a life, a house, a value system, a writing project. A critic writing about Snyder put the relation between the poet and these energies in this way: Ekbert Faas states that Snyder practices a “love-making hovering between the void and the immense worlds of creation” (Faas 101). This relation between the day to day and the immensities of reality is captured in Snyder’s phrase that sees the immediate juxtaposed against the infinite as a …plank shutter set Half-open on eternity…” (Regarding Wave 28)

Instead of seeing our situation as unfair, depressing, or something to escape, instead of formulating a human-biased religious response that transcends and negotiates away all threat to the individual, Berry (as

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Jeffers and Snyder) elevates the nonhuman world and shapes a life, a house, and a poetry that acknowledges and responds to this sensibility. By singing his own world of insecurity, singing about the life and the noises of the temporal human life in the house—all wrapped in the world of the nonhuman wren—Berry becomes, like the wren, a natural singer. His poetry is a blend of the beauty of the human finite existence within the context of the grand, nonhuman world all around it. This combination, this juxtaposition, brings on and emits a special kind of beauty. It’s the kind of beauty Jeffers couldn’t tire of dramatizing: large nature, small human all captured in the melancholy golden light cascading through the pines onto the white, fine sand of Carmel Bay. Jeffers loved the huge drama of the surging, ocean waves crashing against the pitching cliffs in Big Sur, or spiral galaxies blowing themselves further into space (“The flaming and whirling universe like a handful of gems falling down a dark well” (CP 3: 274)), or the rainbow colors inside a domed seashell at the bottom of the ocean.2 Contemplation of this vastness calms him and reconciles him to the humble simplicity associated with “what we need is here.” Berry makes sounds (sings poetry) that speak to the nonhuman sense around him and that celebrate the human intimacies of house and the family. Berry, like Jeffers and Snyder, gives the reader a release from ego and personal struggle in these poems. The house is placed between the “songs and loves” of the house and these radical forces of nonhuman energy. The house stands as the exchange and a nexus bringing the human and the nonhuman together in the writing of the poet. The house of the poet exhibits and embodies the beauty that comes from the meeting and merging of these two worlds. Thoreau hoped his own life would be tinged by brushing the human up against towering nature: “`The birds…seem serene and in their places—I wonder if my life looks as serene to them too’” (qtd. In Maynard 50). In addition, one recalls Jeffers hoping that the powerful natural forces would change him and his sons. Another way that Berry explains and unveils his poetic process is by using his house as the frame for his poetry. In a series of poems called “Window Poems,” the house becomes the literal and figurative framework for his poetry. In addition to an interesting figurative devise, Berry gets at the existential urgency we experience in our homes. Windows fill our world with light, hope, and expectation. We contemplate the beam of sunlight cascading across the bedroom floor, highlighting the grain in the oak floor. We glance out windows looking for a fleeting image of beauty and fineness. (The window always poised the biggest threat to elementary school teachers it seemed). I find myself looking out the window as a gauge, as a way to re-center, to reorient, a break in the stream of human

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demands; I also always seem to be expecting something wild or fine or compelling “out there.” Windows mimic the distance between our inner world and the outer world of nature and wonder. We see beauty and want to be closer; we stretch and strain our eyes and push on our imaginations, trying to make something come into being. In our houses looking out our windows, we can choose to get up and walk right outside and be a part of what we’ve been gazing at from the inside. In Berry’s poetry, “Wendell” looks out of the window: The frame is a black grid beyond which the world flings up the wild…. The window is a form of consciousness, pattern of formed sense through which to look into the wild that is pattern too but dark and flowing… Wendell’s window…a seeing into days to come, the winds of the days as they approach and go by. He has come mornings...to be thoughtful here…(Selected 35-36)

The house is part of the aesthetic experience as much as it is part of a daily set of routines. It is, therefore, a kind of lens to help us think through things as we look out of its windows. In “For the Rebuilding of a House,” Berry connects his house to his sense of place but also his sense of preparing a way out of place. Considering his house, he suggests it is the house that captures the days of his life as The days arc into vision like fish leaping, their shining caught in the stream I watch them go in homage and in sorrow. I build the place of my dream. (Collected Poems 105-06)

The house is the place for his dream of days, of all the days that have come and gone. But it is also a place that signals his leaving:

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Therefore, as we have we seen with Jeffers, Snyder, and others, the house serves many functions for the life and mind of the nature writer.

Notes 1

“I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands.” 2 It’s the kind of beauty Shakespeare was working with in “That Time of Year”: “This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong/To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

CHAPTER SEVEN SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS: “THE HOUSE DWELLS IN US AS SURELY AS WE DWELL IN THE HOUSE”

Scott Russell Sanders writes fiction and essays that focus on the wonders of nature and living within nature. Many of the possibilities for alternative living with an eco-focus are fashioned and explored within the genre of creative nonfiction. This makes sense because this genre is best suited to capture the life the author is leading. The prototype is, of course, Thoreau’s journals and the classic Walden. Nevertheless, as Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry demonstrate, other literary forms can lend themselves to the meditative process of capturing the alternative vision in language. Sanders, like Ed Abbey, uses fiction as well as nonfiction as a means to advance his position. In addition, as we shall see, Sanders’ lifestyle poses quite an exception to the previous models. All other writers here placed their project of intimate and meaningful space in the wild. This has been one of the repeated elements of the profile of the writers being examined in these pages. However, Sanders stands out as an example of living a thoughtful existence, connected to community, within intimate space, sustaining a close relation to nature, all the while being located in a somewhat conventional neighborhood. Sanders’ place is on a suburban street in Bloomington, Indiana. Sanders has written compellingly about staying put, and it seemed important to examine his work and to consider that the lifestyle and value system under examination in this book might have a chance of success in a suburban environment as well. Let me establish at the outset of this discussion the degree to which Sanders qualifies to be included in this examination of the relation between houses, writing, values, and nature. In an online interview, I asked him a lengthy question about the meaning of his house. His answer is a combination of Berry and Bachelard; it will also connect to the uses Jeffers, Snyder, and Thoreau made of their houses. The last line is the one you need to wait for and enjoy:

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Chapter Seven I distinguish between a house, which is a physical structure, and a home, which is a space saturated with stories, meanings, histories, and relationships. For me, the emotional and cultural space of home is centered in the house that my wife and I bought and began fixing up thirty-eight years ago. Since all structures break down over time, we’re still fixing it up—my list right now, for instance, includes repairing a ceiling damaged by a leak from the upstairs bath; putting fresh stain on the porch railing; replacing the roof; and installing an on-demand hot water heater, among other items. In Staying Put and A Conservationist Manifesto, I’ve written about the house and our way of inhabiting it; so in that sense the house has inspired my work. More generally, the house has provided a haven for my thinking, imagining, and composing over four decades. The place provides the climate within which words arise. (Sanders, personal communication, 6/2/2011)

Fig. 6-1. Scott’s workplace where words arise. Lots of Wendell Berry on the bookshelves.

As Bachelard said, the house protects the dreamer. Sanders also had an inspiring response to my question regarding the aesthetic dimensions and pleasures his house offers. I share his love of wood, which is observable in the following passage. Wood is a living material, and I think has a feel that speaks to our vision and touch: For ecological as well as aesthetic reasons, I rejoice that our house is small—two stories, each one 25’ x 25’ square. From every room you can see outside through windows in at least two directions, and in several spots you can see outside in all four directions. I love the exposed wood—red

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oak flooring and stairs; poplar trim; yellow pine car siding on several walls and wainscoting in the dining room; rocking chairs of maple and oak; stacks of turned maple bowls; sculptures carved from wild cherry and black walnut—all of it unpainted, revealing its grain. Along with the limestone and the clay bricks, this wood reminds me that our house is a gift from the Earth. (Sanders, personal communication. (6/2/2011)

He goes on to say that in addition to a pleasant aesthetic dimension, the house also embodies his values surrounding a practiced simplicity: My own taste, like Thoreau’s, runs toward simplicity: fewer things, each one deliberately chosen and cared for, infused with meaning. (Sanders, personal communication, 6/2/2011)

Although Sanders lives out his priorities in a town setting, he is very much aware of and focused on the value of the wild. A well-known nature writer and a frequent speaker at ASLE and other related venues, Sanders has spoken widely and written about the house-in-nature model explored in this book. In Terrarium, for example, Sanders places his novel in a future that has experienced environmental devastation and meltdown. Having totally devastated the ecosystem by 2026, humans found themselves inside the Enclosure. Having polluted the land and oceans, the humans retreated “inside” to an artificially maintained and enclosed environment. There have been many science fiction plots based on this narrative structure with The Matrix being the most recent. As a way to accommodate and adapt to their situation, the popular assumption was that living inside was a positive development. Many in the Enclosure adopted a philosophy that saw the “outside” world as chaotic, diseased, and messy. The Enclosure, therefore, is seen by many as humanity’s natural evolutionary journey away from the physical. Others in the political and cultural spectrum see a return to the wild as inevitable and necessary. As opposed to the modernist and technological defenses the Enclosure has erected against the forces of change and nature, the hippy-like subculture in the Enclosure plans to re-introduce themselves to nature and accept natural processes. In language that resembles the Heraclitean sentiment of many writers in this study, one of the main characters in Terrarium states that: All life was a burning, Zuni thought, a fire in the cells defying for an instant the ultimate cold of the universe. In the Enclosure, he would have been frozen after death, against the hope of some future cure. But out here there were no resurrection vaults, and death, when it came, might as well be celebrated with a final fire. (205)

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Thoreau, Jeffers, Abbey, Snyder, Berry, and others make tribute to and honor change as a defining principle that reappraises humanity’s definition and importance in the scheme of things. Thoreau’s self-exile, Jeffers’s Inhumanism, Snyder’s Buddhism, Berry’s wren, and Ed Abbey’s appreciation for the desert and his interest in anarchy were all different forms of the same recognition of humanity’s place IN not ON nature. In Terrarium, the mother of one of the main characters was a dismantler of the old, ruined cities; she is called an Anarchitect, once again underlining the appreciation for the kind of change to be found in nature as well as in politics. In an opposite direction, dominant political factions in Terrarium see the Enclosure as a saving grace attempting to “build an incorruptible world. Build utopia…heaven” (215). The rest of the novel explores this gradual out-migration back to the land and a rediscovery of community and “the mother.” Buddhism, environmentalism, yoga, community, simplicity, and harmony are easily recognizable in Sanders’ novel, as they are in many other such Gaiafocused novels in the late 70s and 80s. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia is another similar novel that characterized this genre. The Gaia Hypothesis circulating at the time inspired and infused these novels. This theory suggests that some humans, who are properly plugged in, actually act in service to the mother, as part of her defense mechanism. When several main characters find their way back to nature, they encounter folks who had escaped back to nature before them. The tension for the main characters resides in finding a way back to nature, a way that plots a course between the radical, technically defined Enclosure and the militant back-to-nature culture. In this way, the novel resembles the same dynamic found in Ursula Le Guin’s powerful novel, The Dispossessed. Similar to the elements in LeGuin’s novel, one finds Terraium driven by a communal vision of cultural closeness, the pursuit of a life based on nature’s terms, Buddhism and meditation, and some healthy sexual appetites, freely pursued. One of the high points towards the end of the novel sees the group of nature sojourner’s witnessing a whale migration from a cliff: “See the flukes! And there’s one breaching…look!...And the calves…are with them! See…the little ones…are with them!” (195)

Here was a sign that humanity had not permanently disrupted the health and pattern of nature. Written in the mid 80s, this novel in many ways represents the culminating and evolved value system and vision of the counter culture that had grown and transpired over the previous several

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decades. One recalls that Graham Nash and David Crosby recorded a popular song at the time called, “To the Last Whale.” Greenpeace was in its heyday at this moment as well. The novel documents considerable anxiety over issues such as cutting the last of old growth forests, destroying the last of the whales, and basically the total disregard of preservation and conservation many folks felt that modernism represented in the 60s-80s. At one point a character suggests that nature—i.e. Gaia— was acting through them to preserve herself: “Has it ever occurred to you that Terra used…all…of us to preserve herself?” “Used us…What are you saying?” “I’m saying what you know intuitively. Terra is an organism, and like any organism it has evolved methods of protecting itself.” (212)

Therefore, in many ways this novel is a creature of its times and is instructive as a result. It should be noted that even these characters, trapped in a post-apocalyptic future, draw on Thoreau for inspiration: “Remember what Thoreau said: `A person is rich in proportion to the number of things she can live without.’” (111)

Sanders, as with many environmental writers, is perhaps better known for his nonfiction. He devoted one whole collection of essays to Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. In this book, Sanders shows us that not all living experiments need to beat a complete retreat from neighborhoods and towns. Sanders wonders in this book “How has this box, this frame of possibilities, come to fit me so exactly?” (23). Sounding very much like Berry, Sanders explains that “After nearly two decades of intimacy, the house dwells in us as surely as we dwell in the house” (23). Like Berry, who sees his house as an “emblem of desire,” Sanders wants to honor the house as something that has an interactive relation with its inhabitants: “After two decades of intimacy, the house has worked on me as steadily as I have worked on the house” (Staying 33). Sanders reinforces the connection between the house and the inhabitants by seeing that “It has…needed the work of many hands, the wishes of many hearts, vision upon vision, through a succession of families” (Staying 35). It is a refuge but “Not a perfect refuge, for there is no such thing” (Staying 29).

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Fig. 6-2. Scott Russell Sanders, summer 2011, staying put at 1113.

Fig. 6-3. Sanders’ house from the front.

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Sanders has no illusions about the apparent protection or permanence the house appears to give. Jeffers as well sought refuge, a sense of strength and permanence by stacking granite boulders, but as was discussed in that chapter, he knew, of course, that he was surrounded by powerful natural forces and that his house would live beyond him and then the house would also disintegrate. Sanders remarks that his house is physically and metaphysically getting roughed up all the time: “A house is a shell caught in a surf that never stops grinding” (Staying 23). Life is fluid, and the house gives us temporary refuge: “The river that carries us along is wild, and we must caulk our boats to keep afloat” (26). The house is invaded by all manner of insect: “we play host to crickets, grasshoppers, moths, flies, mosquitoes, and frogs” (Staying 28). Sounding like Sigmund Kvaløy discussing his disintegrating porch, Sanders says the house “Like anything born” finally “is mortal” (Staying 29) as are we. So the house delivers lessons about mortality and the fleeting nature of things just as it makes it clear that “Our shelter is on loan” (Staying 29). There are lessons about nature as well. The house is “entirely derived from the land” (Staying 26). The house is made from natural materials and this reminds us that, “like our bodies,” our houses are “made from the earth” (Staying 27). If more people built their own houses, Sanders states, then people would see that we are “wrapped…in the land” (Staying 27). Sanders feels the natural forces that the house is made from: “When I walk up the [oak] stairs, I feel their grain curving through me” (Staying 27). The house is “composed from the land” and it “is itself a part of the landscape” (Staying 29). Sanders’ point is that there is no inside and outside. In my interview with him, he had quite a thorough and striking response that touched on all the main themes in this book. Even though living in suburbia, the house provides a connection to the wild, a connection to geologic time, to community and more: Our house is the center from which all my journeys begin, imagined as well as literal ones, and it is the destination to which I return. It’s my anchor hold in community, linking me to neighbors and neighborhood. Our small yard is dense with vegetation—wildflowers, domestic flowers, ferns, vegetables, berry bushes, a dozen kinds of native trees and shrubs. Those plants link us to our bioregion, to birds and butterflies, to bees, worms, chipmunks, and browsing deer, and to the many passersby who walk, jog, bicycle, or drive along our street. The limestone in the walls around our yard and in the foundations of the house was quarried from local bedrock, which is the floor of an ancient sea; so the stone reminds me of the land and its deep past. (Sanders, personal communication, 6/2/2011)

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Reminding me of the discussion in the Jeffers chapter, Sanders finishes his thought on this issue by providing the description of the house that provides intimacy but also opens one up to the world: “While the house provides shelter, it also connects me to place.” Echoing the value Snyder places on stewardship and transmission of well cared for structures, tools, and watersheds, Sanders thinks in these terms as he cares for his home: As we make changes—putting on a new roof, for example, or replacing the old windows—we are conscious of making decisions aimed at benefitting the families that will live in this house long after we are gone. I feel less like a homeowner and more like a steward, responsible for seeing that the house is passed on in even better condition than it was when we found it. We should aspire to care for the Earth in the same spirit. (Sanders, personal communication, 6/2/2011)

As Jeffers and Snyder located their homes in an ecocontext, Sanders also sees his home in an enlarged, interconnected context. When traveling, he finds that he misses the “house, which is planted in the yard, which is embraced by a city, which is cradled in familiar woods and fields, which gather snow and rain for the Ohio River” (33). His description is not unlike the way Thoreau, Jeffers, and Snyder sketch their houses in ecocontext. In addition, even though living in suburbia, Sanders appreciates that his house is built from local materials and that it is connected to natural forces all around him. In a more recent essay, Sanders focuses specifically on the question of what makes a “real” place. Interestingly enough, as I have done in this book, Sanders refers to James Howard Kunstler’s work, and his essay title reflects this influence: “The Geography of Somewhere.” Sanders, like Kunstler, is concerned with the “homogenizing of America” (Conservationist Manifesto 94). “We have allowed our home places to become the colonies of global corporations” and we have “surrendered to the tyranny of automobiles” (CM 94). Instead of a head long, orgiastic treatment of the problems with our urban and city centers, Sanders, refreshingly, goes on to focus on the qualities of “real” places. He asks: What are the qualities of a real place, a distinctive place, a place with its own history, culture, and texture? What qualities give certain places a feeling of character and charisma? What distinguishes the geography of somewhere, makes it worthy of a visitor’s deep engagement and a citizen’s love? (CM 96)

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A real place, Sanders states, “feels as though it belongs where it is” (96). It is made from the local materials, constructed to meet local culture, and it, therefore, reflects the geography and weather patterns in its foundational elements. Sanders gives compelling examples of places in Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and New England that embody these qualities. A real place has a vigorous local economy and as much as possible supplies its own food from local agriculture. This agricultural behavior also creates farmers’ markets where the townspeople from every walk of life mingle and talk.1 Also, as Snyder in particular reminds us, Sanders as well states that a real place keeps a sense of what happened there before, keeps its history. In many ways, Sanders suggests that these qualities exist in his hometown, Bloomington, Indiana: [D]epending on the season, you could walk with me among market stalls heaped with corn, fragrant cantaloupes, gourds the size of basketballs, eggplants like giant purple tears, and beeswax candles smelling of meadows. …You could listen to musicians playing…sign petitions, register to vote, question political candidates, or volunteer to work for a worthy cause. And you could watch all manner of people, from grizzled quarriers in bib overalls to executives in suits to college students in cut-off jeans to Tibetan Buddhist monks in burgundy robes…They talk, touch, greet friends, dandle babies, exchange notes and promises…In those faces you can read the pleasure that draws humans together…(CM 101)

Of course, one of the more important features of a real place, according to Sanders, is that it keeps us “mindful of nature” (CM 99). Places need to acknowledge (with care, policy, poetry, architecture), and protect the natural features around them. In some remarkable cases, Sanders describes towns that are rediscovering the natural elements around them. “Providence, Rhode Island, has uncovered the rivers that flow through downtown” (CM 100). Therefore, even in a more populace setting, nature need not be an afterthought on the margin of our minds and experiences. As noted above in my interview with Sanders, he is very aware of the nature in and around his house, and he is mindful how those elements are interconnected to a vast set of relations extending miles beyond his house. One essay in Staying Put makes this point regarding the connection to nature rather dramatically. While having an early evening meal on his porch with friends, a change in weather caught the group’s attention. “We were lifting the first spoonfuls to our mouths when a stroke of lightening burst so nearby that it seemed to suck away the air, and the lights flickered out, plunging the whole street into darkness” (98). Sanders describes a sense of respectful excitement that governed his dinner guests, Sanders,

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and his wife after the explosion. Sanders manages to find candles, as the dinner party wanted to continue with the meal. However, a “sudden stillness” was upon them and a “smoldering yellow light came into the sky” (98). These Midwestern dinner party members knew how to read these signs. Even knowing the signs, however, they debate whether a retreat to the basement is in order. After considering the pros and cons, the guests put it to Sanders to decide: “`I’d like to stay here and see what comes,’ I told them” (99). Riding out the storm in the candlelight, Sanders finds that he is transported by the rush and energy of the wind: “for a spell I rode the wind, dissolved into it, and there was only the great wind, rushing” (99). The tornado missed the house by a half a mile, killed no one, but tore through some structures. Sanders summarizes the experiences with a mixture of regret, reverence, and gratefulness: Prudent folks would have gone to the basement. I do not recommend our decision; I merely report it. Why the others tarried on the porch I cannot say, but what kept me there was a mixture of curiosity and awe. (99)

In considering the choice to remain on the porch, Sanders reconnects with the theme of his book: the virtues of staying put. Sanders lays out the usual way to understand responses to situations such as the appearance of the tornado: fight or flight. Instead he suggests “there may be salvation in sitting still” (101). He furthers this thought by adding, “And if salvation is impossible, then at least before perishing we may gain a clearer vision of where we are” (101). In very Thoreauvian terms, Sanders expands on his thinking here by suggesting that the choice to stay put relative to the tornado needs to be extended to our life in general over the months and years in order to yield the insights and benefits that are available by staying in place: The tornado memories dramatize a choice we are faced with constantly: whether to go or stay, whether to move to a situation that is safer, richer, easier, more attractive, or to stick where we are and make what we can of it. If the shine goes off our marriage, our house, our car, do we trade it for a new one? If the fertility leeches out of our soil, the creativity out of our job, the money out of our pocket, do we start over somewhere else? There are voices enough, both inner and outer, urging us to deal with difficulties by pulling up stakes and heading for new territory. …I wish to raise a contrary voice, to say a few words about standing your ground, confronting the power, and going deeper. (102)

Snyder said “learn the flowers; go light” (TI 86); Sanders says stand your ground; go deep. Differently expressed equations with the same answer.

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All the writers here commit to place, create the rituals, embrace the quiet, deploy the discipline, find the language, generate the focus, dedicate fidelity to the house, to a marriage, to children, to the writing, to a community, to embracing forest, tree, light, and put it all together. Emerson summarized this act of putting it all altogether by associating the house, as does the title of this book, with the imagination. Adam Sweeting made that connection between houses and Emerson in Reading Houses and Building Books, and he offered this from Emerson: “Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven.” (124)

Notes 1

I recall one of the nice things about Norway was the public outdoor fish and vegetable market. In addition, cars in Norway were used sparingly in favor of public transport, and ferries were used to get from the many islands to the mainland. All of these actions slow things down and put people together. Of course, the car was pushing much of this aside. Bridges, for instance, were connecting the islands to the mainland.

CHAPTER EIGHT CONCLUSION: ALTERNATIVE FUTURES

Sitting in my local coffee shop writing this page, I note a tastefully understated t-shirt worn by a woman waiting to get coffee. It’s the kind of shirt I’d wear as well, I guess. A small, sketched beach chair or wooden deck chair on the front with the imperative underneath: “simplify.” We all want it, think about it, politic about it, talk about it. We just don’t do it. We have popular magazines available in the supermarket checkout stand dedicated to it: Real Simple. For many, this amounts to escapism, fantasy, daydreaming. As Bachelard suggested about daydreaming and as Yi Fu Tuan suggested about escapism, these activities are not necessarily associated with an unproductive substitute for the “real thing.” But sometimes, too often, they are simply the equivalent of our tropical screensaver at the office or the bumper sticker that petulantly whines, “I’d rather be…” As discussed in the Wendell Berry chapter above, Berry provides a painful tableau of this condition. In “The Thought of Something Else,” Berry presents a character stuck in traffic and in a life dominated by routine, a life that can’t measure up to what he imagines should be his lifestyle. As a result, the voice in Berry’s poem thinks of “something else.” He thinks about “another place” (55) while braving the “intersections of traffic” (55). In this poem, Berry celebrates “the old dream of going” to “another place, simpler, less weighted” (55). He seeks “a simple wakefulness filling/perfectly/the spaces among the leaves” (56). One reason I wrote this book was to explore the notion of, the authentic possibilities of, a life “elsewhere,” a life that had the content, not just the form, of simplicity, grace, sanity, health, fullness. I wanted to document traditions, trends, and new directions that all were searching for a “psychically self-sufficient moment of…isolation from an insane world…overdetermined by…the rote groupthinks which are bred from an endless and irresolvable contest of cultural politics” (Van Proyen). It seemed like the houses of environmental writers might be a good place to anchor such a discussion. In a world that’s fleeting, frenetically paced,

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sold and bought by the second, exploding, shifting and changing, I liked the idea of exploring foundations in the face of current trends in nonfoundational theories in literary studies. The possibilities of (nondelusional) peace and contentment have also been a career-long focus of mine. The poems and essays I have read through the years have finally brought me back to their origins, to the homes, farms, watersheds, coastlines, where they were born. “Stones have stood a thousand years,” Jeffers stated, and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems. (CP 1: 5)

In the process of assessing the possibility of alternative pathways, I found that the path has to be looked at carefully. As Adam Sweeting pointed out regarding the “Genteel Romantics,” Pretending to be free from the workings of the market, genteel authors and readers reacted with an ideological counterthrust aimed in the direction of commerce itself. Symbolic retreat from the marketplace into homes evoking refinement and gentility allowed Irving and others to pretend that their hands remained unsullied by economic competition. (127)

This is the nonsense in some alternative lifestyles that really needs to be clarified and avoided. Thoreau, I believe, specifically took this on. Snyder and others have made a point to talk about the details of living alternatively and its complications. If we aren’t careful, we end up with a codified cool and hip that is an edgy and self-delusional escape from the realities of living day to day, and, as a result, we get a cagey and intolerant form of the oppression we supposedly were in rebellion from. In addition to lifestyle possibilities, I wanted to explore the connection all of this had with writing. Lawrence Buell has defined the poems and essays that emerge from these places in a way that could easily be understood as a central goal of this book. I have wanted to show that environmental writing practices “restorationism by calling places into being…not just by naming objects but by dramatizing in the process how they matter” (EI 267 my emphasis). How better to show the way places come to matter than by examining people living and writing in them. I have tried to show that this happens not just in word, but also in word and deed combined. The dramatic process I have sought to outline and describe, in writer after writer, is characterized by: a) the search for and discovery of beauty and power; b) and then an attempt to merge into and commit to place; c) and then the ongoing tribute to this beauty in the

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building of a house and in the writing project; d) and a life of pattern and ritual associated with all of the above. In this book, I submit that the house stands in a fruitful position within these forces of language, work, immediate materiality, felt experience, culture, politics, self-discovery, and nature. The house as a focal point balances and arbitrates between these forces, and each writer calibrates these elements a bit differently. Within powerful forces of nature and culture, the house establishes a foundation (while admittedly being tossed about), and it is firmly settled and is uniquely nestled in a place. It comes with a complicated origination story. It provides writers the refuge they seek and the stage to engage with nature as well as culture. The beauty of these houses and the beauty of the writing that results are the productive outcomes of the house being the nexus point between nature and culture. I have tried to present writers whose writing project was indistinguishable from their living project. No Walden without the cabin; no timeless tributes to the beauty of the northern California coast without Tor House; no myths or texts or bioregion poetry without Kitkitdizze. No “Mad Farmer’s Manifesto” or thoughts about a Siberian woodsman without the Kentucky farm in Port Royal. And no Staying Put or Terrarium without the house in Bloomington. These places are important for much more than keeping wind and rain off the head of the writer and the family. As I have tried to suggest, these houses partake of and are imbued with the vision of the writer and the writer’s words as well as the place they are nestled in and made from. Home is a place to build strength and vision and then to walk out to meet the world: “Our house is the center from which all my journeys begin, imagined as well as literal ones, and it is the destination to which I return,” Sanders said. I started the first chapter quoting Bachelard in The Poetics of Space and it seems appropriate and apt to begin this closing with him as well. Houses, Bachelard stated, “are in us as much as we are in them” (xxxvii). In many ways, he continued, these houses reveal the “topography of our intimate being” (xxxvi). And he also argued against becoming “`beings whose towers have been destroyed’” (xxxvii). I have tried to show that the houses of poets, and our own houses, current or imagined, are present in us; that they form a shell we are aware of and are influenced by; that they provide surfaces of wood and stone that please, calm, and strengthen us; that they provide windows on the world that become lenses for contemplation, meditation, daydreaming, looking out and beyond, within and without; that they immerse us in the worlds of ocean, light, birds, soil, seasons, storms, sounds, moons, animals, fog, trees, histories, and community.

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Kunstler suggested that only “a few lonely figures” (249) have been able to pull away from the larger trajectories of modernism. However, it is clear that the ideas and cultural forces that make the lives of people like Snyder and Jeffers interesting have deep roots in our being and our culture, and these energies refuse to disappear. In addition, this study has examined how far and wide variations—e.g., the tiny house movement—of this movement have circulated. This study has also tried to raise questions about the power of modernist forces and ask questions such as: “How did these modernist forces that shape our lives so often get so strong and what can we do about it?” “What can we learn from the alternative lifestyle experiments such as the ones catalogued here?” Stuart Ewen, in All Consuming Images, provides a masterful example of the way advertising documented these changes in perspective and value. In a Vitalis hair product advertisement, there is a depiction of three decades of hairstyle: 1) the 60s had “the wild look”; 2) the 70s had “the let it be look”; and 3) the 80s had “the neat look.” Ewen worries about the triumph of style over substance in our culture, and certainly this is a theme easily identified in all the writers examined in these pages. Many on the left at the time were worried about the dominance of “the politics of neat” of the 80s. Ewen ends his discussion on this issue by pleading for a “reconciliation of image and meaning, a reinvigoration of a politics of substance” (271). Fig. 2-2 above, also from Ewen, reinforces his concerns in this area. Scott Russell Sanders exposes more on this fault line. He considers the fact that a quaint and “real” place can be “in danger of being smothered by the effects of its own charm” (98). In sum, oppositional energies can become as standardized, intolerant, and regimented as the structure they are supposedly moving away from. In this study, I have tried to address notions of beauty and aesthetic integrity that fight off not only modernist forces but also the charm and trendiness of a scripted cool and smooth look that itself becomes authoritative and restrictive. This is when form and function get separated, and artifice rules the day, broadcasting its presence. Thoreau was on to this with his concern over the pattern houses of Downing, and this is why he thought the most beautiful places were also unintended and unpretentious. One wonders, therefore, whether it is wise for us to settle into a perceptual habit that wants every town to display, as Sanders describes his town, these features of farmers’ markets, local economies, and Buddhists and professorial types afoot and to eschew the box stores and the auto? Is this simply another kind of tyranny, or are these place-qualities essential to humans in general? Currently in Kailua, Hawaii, where I live, there is a

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tension in town over the building of a Target in our little, upscale, lowkey, beach town. I, frankly, worry that the resistance is snobby and elitist. It does make me ask how much of these “modern” energies can be indulged before a feeling of authenticity is ruined (there’s already a MacDonald’s, a small Macy’s, a Long’s), and, the residual pomo in me must ask, who decides? The shops in the center where Target will be built have been cleared; they were “local,” but I never used them. They were an odd array and collection of key shops, shoe repair, a chain store with Asian dry goods and knick-knacks, and the like. These stores were local but random and unconnected to the feel of this bioregion. A Target is equally un-organic but will add jobs to the area and, as these stores go, it is clean and offers higher quality goods than say a Wal-Mart. The Target store will also keep people from driving (and using gas) to Honolulu so often to buy things. In sum, I am hesitant to become rigidly militant about the evil of “chain” stores. One further wonders to what degree we need some towns that are governed by cars, business, and box stores to support the possibility of, if not give comparative energy to, the little quaint placebased town? Although having experienced Ft. Lauderdale recently with its tall skyscraping hotels lining the beaches, its concerted and accomplished creation of No Place, I am tempted to claim universal value associated with Sanders’ arguments and descriptions supporting the “real,” small town places. But even Abbey, that old contrarian and singer of open and free space, said, “We must save the city. It is essence and substance of us all—we cannot lose it without diminishing our stature as a nation, without a fatal wound” (The Journey Home 101). I can hear Snyder, Berry, and Sanders arguing with me here. If we dig deep into a place and commit ourselves to a place over time, we will embrace the funky little shops and insist on the local nature of business, materials, and community. The argument would go on to include a vision of the U.S. without the megalopolis and business urban centers bent on high consumption and waste. Abbey, I am reminded, sitting in a Hoboken bar, might disagree, just for the hell of it. That’s the person I’m trying not to forget as we get lost down some pastoral trail. Abbey reminds me that if every license plate holder in town has a “Lifetime Member of NPR” message on it, he won’t want to belong. In a related manner, I wondered about larger versions of this question when I lived in Europe. I was and remain an admirer of Norway for its community, connections to nature, and social values. However, I recall wondering if the social services, as well as the charm of Europe, might be connected to the fact that, in the main, the U.S. had/s been shouldering military costs for Europe as well as fostering a riskier more aggressive

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form of capitalism at home to keep the forces in the East from having their way with Western Europe. I worried that Europe was the American business world’s preserved museum and a place that has been saved from the tougher requirements of capitalism and defense budgets. In sum, I think it is always important to keep in mind the contexts—whether these be climbing vines, the historical context, or political moment—for beauty, quaintness, and apparent authenticity. Sometimes, as Sanders warns above and Thoreau made clear, the charm of a place can conspire against a liberating and fresh beauty and authenticity by becoming self-conscious, codified, smug, and rigid. Carmel, for instance, came about organically but soon developed marketing, zoning, regulations, and other protections and engines of promotion that make it a very different place than the one Jeffers lived in during the 20s, 30s, and 40s. Nevertheless, the place still has a feel of authentic removal, distance, difference, and charm despite the hovering and coveting of planners and marketers. The days of bohemian, spartan reclusiveness are long gone, however. The writers looked at in this study vary in how much and in what way they engage with the “larger picture.” Thoreau was critical and concerned about expansionist wars and the ensuing marketplace energies. But on the economy, he was also ambivalent. Jeffers was pretty clear about his distaste for and his sense that modernist cities were monsters and harbingers of the beginning of the end. Snyder as well condemned these large modernist forces and imagined a new world of networked communities evolving out of the failure of the modernist colossus. Arne Naess and others were also categorical in their condemnation of current trends, as is Scott Russell Sanders. In the main, however, the featured focus and goal of the writers discussed in these pages has been to balance a life involving the wild, involving writing, thinking, working, and living within a context of some relative sanity and peace, despite and in spite of “the times.” Snyder, in “Buildings,” after mentioning recent historical events, refers to these larger historical moments and politics as “this dance with matter…This is history.” He is not unaware or unconcerned, but the poem focuses on the fact that “our buildings are solid” (“Buildings,” No Nature 366). In the end, we don’t see these writers casting large political programs or ambitions for exporting the goals dominating their work; they do wish to manage it for themselves and their families and friends. As a result, both Jeffers and Snyder have sections in their work labeled “For the Children.” Perhaps Sanders suggests a view of these projects that captures the essence of my thinking here. These gestures “tend to be small-scale, and…too humble to attract the spotlight. They are responsive to the needs and conditions of particular places” (CM 19). That being said, it’s not hard

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to find large-scale analyses of modern life in Jeffers, Snyder, and particularly Berry, with his well-known critique of agri-business farming. We have awakened to a world that has changed, and we have acknowledged our complicity in the excesses (and successes) of modernism. And although it is becoming harder and harder to retrace our steps back to a time when, as Jerry Brown says, “something was happening,” my assumption in this book has been that there is a set of worthy sensibilities surrounding place, nature, peace, and beauty that were present in the 1960s, but also in the 1850s, and in many centuries before. These sentiments and pathways are still alive and well, being practiced, and within our reach. As mentioned in Chapter One, Ann Cline documents, in A Hut of One’s Own, that the first recorded recluses were Po-i and Shu-chi from China (1000 BCE). It seems their main motivation was political. Retreating from the reign of Emperor Wu Wang, the recluses noted, “He [Wu Wang] does not know he is substituting tyranny for tyranny.” Since the “times are hopelessly decadent,” the recluses ascended “West Mountain” where “we pick its wild ferns” (Cline 3). Political context is a classic motivation for an act of rejection. In the case of Chinese recluses, they were done with that context altogether: out of here. This act is frequently more than rejection; it is also an attempt to preserve and rejuvenate values lost, embattled, or in need of invention. And, as discussed above, this move to creative space must be relearned for our educational mental spaces as well. We must stop freezing and editing context for students and for our scholarship. Context is infinite in its variety, and we owe it to everyone to keep that door open so we don’t become disingenuous and try to settle things for others. The writing and living projects discussed in these pages document a number of urgent and compelling parallels that are shared: strong and important connections to the earth, a pull towards Asian aesthetics (a humble, “found,” and impermanent beauty), a refusal to be seduced by modern mass hysteria or the political urgencies of the moment, a focus on making the best of the counted number of pulses left to us. In an interview with Salon, Jerry Brown recounts the moments from the 60s that exhibit these features: There were certain recurring themes (in my administration): "protect the earth,” "explore the universe," "serve the people," "Spaceship Earth." This was the mid-1970s. It was the time of the Whole Earth Catalogue. I was dealing with people like Stewart Brand, Wendell Berry, Amory Lovins, Herman Kahn and Dick Baker from the Zen Center. I mean, it was a hotbed of ideas. And there was a sense that we were on the threshold of a

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By the 70s, many thought certain issues were settled: poverty is unacceptable; government has a positive role to play in solving problems; war solves nothing; gun ownership is a social ill; big industry and profit need vigorous regulation if not total redesign; mass concentration of humans in population centers is madness; assertiveness and brazen masculinity need to be redirected; public transportation will bring us closer together; natural foods are better for us; there are no limits to imagination and human potential; the world can be redesigned in an innovative, personal, creative way. All good ideas. But the left was so consumed with its own vision of a better world that it lost its sense of humor, its ability to make light of itself, to stay creative and responsive in changing times, to adjust its appeal to a broad audience. The times were changing, are changing, and the left missed it. Reagan and Thatcher took on the USSR and won, ending the long, cold war. As a result, the left was driven back into a petulant and sullen retreat. The right wing brought new energy back. It suggested that the day to day is ok, hard work matters, that business could be creative and fun, that America was a great concept to celebrate, that the “normal” was OK, that main street was better than slick urban centers, that personal responsibility matters. They even have engaged in some “dangerous thinking” (e.g. privatize social security, eliminate some federal depts. and other agencies) scandalizing the left. They said all these things before, but they have gained traction this time, which in time they will lose, of course. In addition, Apple and the larger communications technology revolution blurred the lines between modernist energies, work, and the creative and personal world. This further opened up new opportunities for the business class to re-advance the world of business and corporate values in a way that is less noxious, conformist, and regulated, as was previously the case. The left missed this restructuring of the work world. In the same way that Jeffers persisted with his neutrality position long after the public abandoned that position, the post-60s left stayed with its anti-system, antiprofit, and anti-tech positionings as the mainstream drifted away. The left has recently responded with another attempt to unify the “agendas of opposition” to reclaim a centrist position. The OWS crowd is peopled with anarchists, socialists, environmentalists, unemployed, labor organizations, some who have really been victims of the latest economic downturn, and a variety of others. But this political oscillation seems endless and it’s the kind of thing that makes Van Proyen seek “self-sufficiency” and isolation from the “endless and irresolvable contest of cultural politics”; it is this that made Jeffers seek the “neutrality” of nature; it drove Po-i and Shu-chi

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to ascend “West Mountain” where “we pick its wild ferns.” In all cases, however, this doesn’t mean one is intellectually or politically disconnected. The chapter on Jeffers made this a central point of analysis. Other cultural shifting changed the context that would allow folks to orient themselves in a stable direction during the counter culture period. The Rolling Stones concert at Altamont was a moment that seemed to signal a turn from the bright (albeit dreamy) utopianism of the 1960s to the crude chaos of Charles Manson, and then everything gave way to the silly carnival called Disco. A short four months after Woodstock, the Stones and Angels joined forces (both involved with Satanism at the time) to bring on Altamont. The event seemed to be a marketing ploy pitting the Beatles against the Stones and the east coast against west. A young black man close to the stage, brandishing a pistol after being harassed by Angels, was beaten to death. The body was then dragged on stage by the Hell’s Angels during the concert. For many of us, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young emerged as a sane kind of middle ground to float us all up and away from the crash of these forces. At the same time, the world of recluses and alternative house dwellers took a dark turn here as well. Along with a general decline of the high point of the period came Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski, of course, became known as the Unabomber because of the bombs he sent to universities and institutions where professionals in the science and technical fields worked. He was a Harvard grad, held a math position at UC Berkley, and had published in a difficult area of geometry: One of his professors at Michigan, George Piranian, said: "It is not enough to say he was smart." He earned his PhD by solving, in less than a year, a math problem that Piranian had been unable to solve. Kaczynski's specialty was a branch of complex analysis known as geometric function theory. "I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 people in the country understood or appreciated it," said Maxwell O. Reade, a retired math professor who served on Kaczynski's dissertation committee. (“Kaczynski” Wikipedia)

The parallels between Ted Kaczynski and the writers celebrated in this book are, well, a little uncomfortable. Kaczynski had an odd following— misguided as they were— that saw him as breaking with the “dominant paradigm” and taking on the “system.”1 Like Ed Abbey and other writers in this book, Kaczynski linked the machine and technological advances with a more oppressive society. This was his main argument in Industrial Society and Its Future. In addition, he wrote a journal and lived “simply” in his Montana residence. Nowhere, however, do we see a concern about beauty, architecture, and the things that Thoreau discussed, relating them

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as he did to social ills. Kaczynski sounds like a Marxist social engineer, however, when he discusses social change strategy: I think what has to be done is not to try and convince or persuade the majority of people that we are right, as much as try to increase tensions in society to the point where things start to break down. To create a situation where people get uncomfortable enough that they’re going to rebel. So the question is how do you increase those tensions? I don't know. (Kaczynski)

Of course, what this general outline so far fails to mention is that Kaczynski also killed several people, a notable deviance from the other supposed parallels. Thoreau, of course, did not have bomb-making equipment or binders full of information on the topic! Kaczynski’s interview with Earth First! after his capture also revealed his desire for violence to break out in a way that generally would aid the breakdown of modern culture. Oddly enough, Kaczynski’s house, a very close copy of Thoreau’s cabin, became a piece of evidence in the trial against him. I still have a picture where the house is being trailered away by the FBI. The connection between Kaczynski and Thoreau has been noted frequently over the years. Recently, aware of the disturbing similarities, James Benning, a professor at CalArts has built replicas of both cabins as part of an art project.2 In recent years, however, new interest in alternative living, alternative energy, local food production, and simplified lifestyles has re-emerged as environmental concerns have become urgent, and as baby boomers and others have recommitted to the idea of meaningful place and sane living. In the case of boomers, they are growing into late life, and there seems to be a desperate need to return once again—or more likely, for the first time—to a house and a simple life characterized by rustic beauty. As I suggested in the first chapter, there is also a renewed interest in the “simple life” in magazines, books, and housing design. Interesting pieces are published in Utne Reader, for instance, about the ability of bamboo to be a major source of building supply. There is clearly an emphasis on crafting a life, and even writing about it is an attempt to give these houses heft by framing them with the language of being. The goal is certainly beauty and style, as well as survival. I have stacks of books at home that are exploring these avenues and writing about it (The Practice of Home by Charles Goodrich, for example). The idea is alive and will no doubt take new shape around a new set of cultural notions. So the discussion waxes and wanes, ebbs and slows, but it is far from over or marginalized. This book is a tribute to those who have carved out lives of grace, humility, intelligence, exploration, relative calm, and elegant

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simplicity in a tough, weird world. In the first chapter, I quoted Kunstler saying that we have “created a landscape of scary places and become a nation of scary people” (G 273). This is true. However, there is a strong yearning in American culture, Norwegian culture, and many places beyond for something saner. In addition to yearning, there is a long history of practice. The space for exploring these pathways has always been open to us. We are still free to follow any one of the paths that have gone before, or the ones that are ongoing now, adding our own “brand of magic” (Updike 231). Jeffers’s offer, for instance, still stands. After a day of stacking stones just right, take a walk, for instance, and admire the landscape: that is better than killing one’s brother in war or trying to be superior to one’s neighbor in time of peace. We could dig our gardens…We could according to our abilities, give ourselves to science or art; not to impress somebody, but for love of the beauty each discloses. We could even be quiet occasionally… (CP 4: 419)

And suddenly I’m reminded of Thoreau’s refreshing quote repeated throughout this study: It is “vain,” he said, “to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live” (qtd. in Stewart 4). I’m reminded of this because while we are talking and writing in academia, the world is moving. On the island of Oahu, for instance, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands has built a subdivision of affordable homes for Hawaiians, called Kaupuni. These homes (19 in total) come equipped with alternative energy systems (6.2 kWhs each.) that insure they are net zero users. In addition, there is community gardening and hydroponics in the subdivision and more activities that promote sustainable lifestyles and community connection. Snyder said, “The world does what it pleases” (TI 44). This doesn’t have to mean in a negative direction. The world is moving, and I believe there is much to suggest it is going in a good direction. We don’t have to be consumed and carry on a self-righteous war with imagined demons of power and authority. Snyder was on to this destructive dialectic early on: “The release of Demonic Energies in the name of the People must cease…Down with demonic killers who mouth revolutionary slogans and muddy the flow of change” (TI 15-16). As Scholes points out, and as I have argued throughout in these pages, the time for accusations, pompous crusades to unendingly unveil the sinister forces behind every business, every energetic (fiscally successful) person will not help; it’s bad energy. We do have to get busy about our own business though. We are free to find a piece of land, stack stones, cut and sand wood, enjoy the feel and the relation between wood, stone, and glass,

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stare out the window, note the light spilling generously over the oak floor, write about and contemplate a wondrous, unfolding world. “We could even be quiet occasionally.” Or we are free to at least honor those who have done so by reading with them, and not, following the dictates of current theory, against them. With the looming population, energy, resources, economic, water, and climate crises, both gestures—innovating, experimenting and honoring, reading—will be necessary options to embrace. By doing so we may realize and gain a bit more time, a few more moments of beauty and quiet, a few more of Pater’s “counted number of pulses,” because, as Jeffers pointed out: When the imbecility, betrayal and disappointments become apparent, — what will you have, but to have Admired the beauty? (CP 3: 132)

Fig. 8-1. The back yard gate from Tor House to the transhuman magnificence. Plank shutter opening on to eternity.

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When I taught at a conservative engineering college, I found myself urging students to be more involved in questioning and activism; I even involved them in Greenpeace activities. When I taught, at the same time, at a very liberal environmental college, I found myself advising them not to be canon fodder for ideologically frenzied activists. I think there is a discernible and defendable pattern there. As Jeffers had it: “Finally I say let demagogues and worldredeemers babble their emptiness/To empty ears” (CP 3: 118). 2 See http://cabinproject.tumblr.com/

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INDEX

A Abbey, Ed · 7, 10, 13, 22, 23, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 44, 45, 66, 76, 77, 78, 81, 89, 92, 107, 112, 133, 166, 181, 198, 221, 223, 235, 238, 251, 255, 262, 265, 267 agenda of opposition · 12, 15, 25, 28, 37, 56, 82, 83, 84, 89 al-Qaida · 86 alternative energy · 41, 42, 256, 257 Angyal, Andrew · 223 Architecture or Revolution · 46 Armbruster, Karla · 7, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 106, 113, 179, 183, 261 arts and crafts movement · 86 ASLE · 237, 263 Austin, Mary · 34, 164, 174, 175 Wick-I-Up tree house study in Carmel · 174 B baby-boomers · 2, 210, 256 Bachelard, Gaston · 9, 57, 72, 73, 80, 103, 138, 144, 235, 236, 247, 249 The Poetics of Space · 9, 113, 249 ballon framing · 120 Bass, Rick · 35 Baudrillard, Jean · 60, 80, 85 Bauhaus · 46, 48 Beatles · 255 Benning, James · 256 Berkeley Tribe, The · 40, 41, 42

Berry, Wendell · 23, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 45, 65, 66, 70, 76, 78, 97, 103, 110, 112, 178, 197, 210, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238, 239, 247, 253, 261 "February 2, 1968" · 226 "For the Rebuilding of a House" · 233 "Notes to a Siberian Woodsman" · 226 "The Design of a House" · 229 "The Man Born to Farming" · 226 "To What Listens" · 229 "Window Poems" · 232 Imagination in Place · 223, 225 Selected Poems · 45, 225, 226 The Long-Legged House · 103, 224 Berryman, John · 60, 61 Beston, Henry · 109, 172, 173 influenced by Thoreau · 173 Outermost House · 173 Big Sur · 8, 36, 38, 39, 127, 153, 161, 163, 232 bioregion · 26, 36, 216, 241, 249, 251 bioregionalism · 31, 208, 219 Bookchin, Murray · 183, 192 boomer · See baby-boomers brick and stone houses · 120 Brophy, Robert · 166, 202 Brown, Jerry · 197, 253 Browne, Jackson · 93, 205 Buddhism · 52, 149, 183, 190, 210, 238

272 Buell, Lawrence · 7, 26, 28, 32, 33, 75, 76, 108, 109, 124, 137, 151, 167, 218, 224, 248, 261 The Environmental Imagination · 7 The Future of Environmental Criticism · 26 Writing for an Endangered World · 137 Build, therefore, your own world · 123 butterfly houses · 55 C Calthorpe, Peter · 59 capitalism · 3, 6, 14, 15, 19, 28, 29, 82, 86, 103, 166, 195, 207, 252 Carlin, George · 23 Carmel Bay · 37, 128, 129, 134, 232 Carmel Development Company · 37 Caughey, John and La Ree California Heritage · 34 Champeon, Kenneth · 99 Chaplin, Charlie · 34, 165 China · 67, 86, 151, 253 Cline, Ann · 67, 68, 253 A Hut of One's Own · 67, 253 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor · 22 communal · 12, 24, 26, 29, 32, 41, 65, 105, 106, 109, 196, 211, 238 conservative · 54, 63, 83, 152, 259 constructivists · 14, 20, 127 context · 5, 9, 10, 12, 14, 30, 36, 38, 50, 56, 59, 67, 81, 88, 90, 104, 112, 127, 139, 148, 153, 154, 162, 166, 172, 187, 206, 213, 214, 218, 219, 229, 232, 242, 252, 253, 255 counter culture · 41, 42, 95, 194, 238, 255 Crockett, Davy · 68 Cronon, William · 5, 6, 7, 92, 127, 264 Uncommon Ground · 5, 146

Index Crosby, David · 65, 66, 182, 239 Crosby, Stills, Nash · 255 cultural studies · 20, 21, 82 D Dali, Salvador · 228 Davis, Erik · 69 de Angulo, Jaime · 34 deconstruction · 25, 30 Deep Ecology · 183, 185, 192 defamiliarization · 16, 17, 206 Derrida, Jacques · 50, 54 Devall, Bill · 192 Ditch Hut · 219 dominant paradigm · 52, 255 Do-Nothing-Huts · 67 Downing, Andrew Jackson · 10, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 146 The Architecture of Country Houses · 10, 119, 123, 146, 250 Druid Heights · 69, See Davis, Erik E Eagleton, Terry · 3, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 28, 38, 51, 56, 65, 83, 84, 91, 195, 256, 262 Elder, John · 1, 12, 262, 263 Ellis, John · 53 Ellison, Ralph · 24 Emerson, Ralph · 29, 41, 53, 57, 58, 98, 101, 105, 106, 110, 111, 114, 115, 123, 184, 206, 245 Epstein, Joseph · 166, 167 Estok, Simon · 7 Evenson, Norma · 46 Evernden, Neal · 54 everyday, the · 14, 25, 42, 50, 97, 101, 173, 181, 213 Ewen, Stuart · 62, 182, 250

Housing the Environmental Imagination F Faas, Ekbert · 231 Felsenstein, Les · 42 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence · 8, 123 formalism · 16 formalist · 23 Foucault, Henri · 73, 74, 97 French Revolution · 53 Fuller, Margaret · 105, 114 G Gaia · 113, 134, 238, 239 geodesic dome · 54 Ginsberg, Allen · 198, 210, 212 Gioia, Dana · 176 Glaser, Kirk · 138, 163 Glotfelty, Cheryl · 144 Golf Ball House · 55 Goodyear, Dana · 210, 211 Google Earth · 61 Great Earth Sangha · 215 Greek Revival · 46 Grey, Zane · 177, 178 Grow your own house · 123 H Hallingskarvet · 186, 187, 188 Handbuilt · 44, 200, 264 Hawk Tower · 125, 130, 131, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 152, 158, 161, 163, 164, 168 Hayles, Katherine · 20, 21 Hemingway, Ernest · 178 Hermitary · 2, 67, 207, 265 heterotopia · 73 hitchhiking · 8, 193, 205, 207, 208 Hitler, Adolph · 49, 52, 155, 156, 157 Hogan, Linda · 10 Hoover, Helen A Place in the Woods · 177

273

how shall we live? · 1, 12, 214 Hunt, Tim · 131, 166 hut · 34, 72, 73, 93, 107, 112, 114, 163, 219 I immediacy · 24, 35, 44, 45, 77, 86, 98, 112, 124, 127 individual, the · 3, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 18, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 60, 63, 70, 85, 90, 92, 108, 109, 113, 116, 118, 123, 134, 145, 149, 159, 161, 164, 167, 177, 231 inevitable place · 37, 128, 130, 169 ISLE · 7, 88 J James, Henry · 17, 18, 43, 63, 69, 131, 139, 169, 242, 256, 264 Jeffers, Donnan · 130, 141, 164 The Building of Tor House · 130, 142, 264 Jeffers, Robinson · 2, 24, 27, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 44, 45, 57, 66, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 86, 98, 102, 110, 111, 114, 117, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 181, 196, 197, 201, 202, 203, 204, 209, 210, 211, 214, 215, 216, 219, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 235, 238, 241, 242, 250, 252, 257, 258 "Advice to Pilgrims" · 44, 54 "Apology for Bad Dreams" · 132, 161, 162, 216

274 "Battle" · 160 "Fantasy" · 155 "Historical Choice" · 156 "Invasion" · 160 "Mal Paso Bridge" · 138 "Miching Mallecho" · 155 "Natural Music" · 160 "On an Anthology of Chinese Poems" · 163 "Pearl Harbor" · 155 "Rock and Hawk" · 145 "Shine, Empire" · 155 "Sign Post" · 157 "The Day is a Poem" · 156 "The Neutrals" · 156 "Their Beauty Has More Meaning" · 230 "Tor House" · 139, 140 “Carmel Point” · 145, 157 Original version of The Double Axe Preface · 159 Preface to The Double Axe · 149, 158, 159 The Double Axe · 155, 163 Jeffers, Una · 37, 125, 128, 129, 130, 134, 140, 141, 142, 149, 150, 164, 169 K Kaczynski, Ted · 255, 256 Kahn, Lloyd · 40, 44, 124, 253 Karman, James · 128, 131, 134, 139, 142, 143, 147, 150, 151, 166, 169, 264 Kauffman, Bill · 152, 154 Kerouac, Jack · 67, 98, 198, 203, 204, 207, 264, 269 The Dharma Bums · 182 Kitkitdizze · 208, 210, 211, 212, 214, 216, 217, 249, 269 Knowles, Joseph · 68 Koren, Loren · 67, 98, 99 Koyaanisqatsi · 47

Index Kunstler, James · 43, 48, 49, 52, 55, 56, 59, 61, 63, 70, 71, 242, 250, 257 Geography of Nowhere · 43, 48, 52, 55, 56, 70 Home from Nowhere · 59, 61, 71 Kuster, Teddie · 129, 130, 142, 169 Kvaløy, Sigmund · 190, 191, 241 L LaBastille, Anne · 177 Lao Tzu · 67, 68 Lao-tsze · 159 Larkin, Jack · 119, 120, 121 Larkin, Philip · 64, 65 "Poetry of Departures" · 64 Lawrence, D.H. · 34, 108, 165 Le Cabanon · 49 Le Corbusier · 46, 48, 49, 71 Le Guin, Ursula · 80, 137 Lefebvre, Henri · 25 left wing · 54, 105, 204 Lenin · 206 Leopold, Aldo · 109, 175 Levertov, Denise "The Secret" · 81 Live the Life You Have Imagined · 53, 77, 96 log construction · 120 London, Jack · 34, 78, 128, 165, 177, 178, 179, 180, 265 Beauty Ranch · 78, 177, 180 The Iron Heel · 78 The Valley of the Moon · 78, 178 Wolf House · 177 Lynch, Tom · 31, 32, 33, 179, 265 M MacLeisch, Archibald · 23 Marxism · 14, 15, 20, 26, 28, 29, 84, 85, 207 masculine wilderness romance · 25

Housing the Environmental Imagination Masteller, Richard and Jean "Rural Architecture in Andrew Jackson Downing and Henry David Thoreau" · 123 Matrix · 48, 50, 52, 60, 85, 93, 237 Maynard, W. Barksdale · 98, 114, 232 Melville, Herman · 7, 69, 70, 108, 110, 124, 135 Midwestern isolationists · 152 Miller, Angela · 104, 115 Milosz, Czeslaw · 231 Mirandola, Pico Della · 54, 266 Mitchell, Joni · 65 Mitchell, W.J.T. · 19, 28, 75, 108, 205 modernism · 7, 51, 56, 60, 61, 63, 75, 85, 96, 97, 100, 109, 112, 167, 239, 250, 253 modernity · 45, 74, 87, 119 Modernity · 60, 267 Moffet, Penelope · 202 Morris, David · 166 Morris, William · 86 Mother Earth News · 181 Murphy, M.J. · 139, 142, 174 Murphy, Patrick · 27, 28, 29, 33, 38, 88, 106, 109, 113, 209, 216 "Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics" · 27 Ecocritical Explorations · 27 N Naess, Arne · 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 229, 252 Tvergastein · 80 Nash, Roderick · 68, 107 Nearing, Scott · 180, 181, 191 neutral · 145, 149, 155, 156, 159, 160 Neutrality Act · 154

275

O O’Keefe, Georgia · 34, 165 Obama, Barack · 86 Olowin, Ron · 111 P pagan · 36, 135 Pater, Walter · 17, 99, 258 patriarchy · 28 Pearson, David · 136 Phillips, Dana · 1, 3 Piñon Oaks · 58, 59, 209, 214 postmodern · 4, 11, 20, 25, 50, 81, 191, 196 Poststructuralism · 4 Price, D. · 72, 73 Q quiet · 36, 37, 45, 86, 106, 129, 142, 149, 225, 245, 257, 258 Quigley, Dylan · 47, 48 Quigley, Peter · 7 "Carrying the Weight Jeffers' Role in Preparing the Way for Ecocriticism" · 86 "Nature as Dangerous Space" · 7 "Rethinking Resistance" · 206 R radical · 10, 14, 16, 18, 23, 30, 42, 57, 81, 83, 86, 97, 118, 120, 157, 180, 204, 220, 226, 232, 238 Raimondo, Justin · 157 rainbow rush · 79, 110 reading against the text · 37 Reading Houses and Building Books · 245, 269 Reagan, Ronald · 86, 254

276 Real Simple · 247 recluse · 33, 68, 73, 112, 163 reclusion · 67 reductionist · 67 reductionistic · 7, 19, 81, 179 refuge · 2, 7, 18, 19, 25, 32, 35, 36, 57, 65, 67, 68, 72, 78, 93, 96, 97, 132, 138, 147, 167, 177, 187, 195, 207, 220, 226, 228, 239, 241, 249 reinhabitation · 73, 214, 218 restorationism · 167, 218, 248 Rexroth, Kenneth · 147 Reynolds, Susan Salter · 109 Rogers, Ginger · 228 Rolling Stones · 255 Romantic · 9, 73, 123, 262, 269 Ross, Andrew · 14, 15, 21, 56, 82, 83, 84, 85, 89, 267 Roszak, Theodore · 41, 42, 196 Rothenberg, David · 66, 183, 189, 204 Rothman, David · 164, 165, 166, 169, 267 Rowe, John Carlos · 50 Rowe, Peter Modernity and Housing · 45 Ruskin, John · 86 S Sanders, Scott Russell · 61, 78, 112, 177, 235, 236, 237, 239, 241, 242, 243, 244, 250, 252 A Conservationist Manifesto · 236, 242 first read Walden · 224 Staying Put · 60, 236, 239, 241, 243 Sattelmeyer, Robert · 113 Schumacher, E.F. · 197, 201 Shafer, Jay · 201 tiny houses · 201 Shi, David · 38, 69, 181

Index The Simple Life · 38, 69, 181, 201 Simon and Garfunkle · 205 simplicity · 37, 42, 67, 74, 77, 96, 98, 103, 104, 115, 116, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 199, 224, 226, 232, 237, 238, 257 skyscraper · 79 Snyder, Gary · 22, 23, 29, 35, 42, 57, 69, 70, 73, 76, 77, 80, 100, 110, 111, 117, 124, 138, 139, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 183, 187, 193, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 235, 238, 242, 243, 244, 250, 252 "Anasazi" · 213 "Building" · 210 "The Bath" · 212 "Word Basket Woman" · 214 A Place in Space · 23, 208, 210, 216, 218 Left Out in the Rain · 199, 211 Myths and Texts · 216 No Nature · 210, 214 reads Thoreau in 1953 while on fire lookout · 197 Regarding Wave · 54, 231 Riprap · 202 The Practice of the Wild · 80 The Real Work · 196 Turtle Island · 196, 208, 212, 213, 215 social construction · 13, 21, 50 Sokal, Alan · 21 solitude · 2, 7, 24, 29, 31, 77, 99, 100, 114, 116, 132, 173, 176, 198, 203, 221 Solnit, Rebecca · 33, 34, 107 Sourdough Lookout · 197, 198, 220 Stalin · 49 staying put · 112, 218, 235, 240, 244 Stegner, Wallace · 70, 178, 223

Housing the Environmental Imagination Sterling, George · 34 Stewart, Frank · 24, 66, 77, 105, 106, 110, 111, 152, 253, 257 Suburban Nation · 59 Suiter, John · 67, 98, 179, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 207, 208 Poets on the Peaks · 201 Sweeting, Adam · 57, 118, 119, 122

277

Tuan, Yi Fu · 66, 75, 97 Escapism · 66, 97 Tvergastein · 80, 185, 186, 187, 189, 266 U undecidability · 27, 38, 206 Updike, John · 79, 126

T V Tangney, ShaunAnne · 166 The America First Committee membership · 152 the poets lie too much · 210 the simple life · 29, 38, 201 Thoreau, Henry David · 5, 24, 25, 27, 29, 33, 34, 53, 56, 59, 61, 66, 68, 70, 73, 76, 77, 79, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 138, 139, 146, 159, 163, 173, 177, 178, 181, 182, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 203, 204, 209, 210, 216, 224, 225, 228, 229, 231, 232, 235, 237, 238, 239, 242, 250, 252, 256 Walden · 29, 33, 53, 98, 106, 107, 109, 112, 113, 224, 235 Walking · 105 timber-framed houses · 120 tiny house movement · 200 Tor House · 34, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 151, 153, 163, 164, 168, 171, 174, 211, 249, 258, 264 tower · 127, 133, 134, 142, 144, 146, 147, 149, 153, 163

Van Proyen, Mark · 6, 19, 45, 77, 247, 254, 269 VW camper · 38 W wabi sabi · 67, 201 Wal-Mart · 63, 251 Ward Ritchie · 34 Watts, Alan · 69 what we need is here · 45, 232 Whitman, Walt · 66 Williams, Terry Tempest Refuge · 176 Wilson, E.O. · 75 Winters, Yvor · 147 Wordsworth, William · 9, 22 Writers Take Sides · 153 Y Yaak Valley · 35 Yamazato, Katsunori · 216, 217 “Kitkitdizze, Zendo, and Place Gary Snyder as a Reinhabitory Poet” · 211 Yeats, William Butler · 66 Young, Neil · 69, 210

278 Z Zaller, Robert · 166, 231 Zen · 96, 178, 182, 194, 198, 210, 216, 253, 262, 263

Index Ziolkowski, Theodore The View from the Tower · 133, 147, 270 zoning · 56, 59, 142, 252