On wild-ness

When I was a cultural studies undergraduate, I became fascinated with the American concept of wilderness. I wrote an extended essay about the art of Albert Bierstadt and how it related to the writing of Henry David Thoreau. I'm slightly disappointed now that I didn't keep it, in either paper or electronic form, since it was probably one of the only A's I got in my whole academic career -- but also because I want to refer back to it now to see if it made any reference to the philosopher Spinoza. I read about Spinoza recently in a book called "What's It All About?" which tries to address questions on the meaning of life, and I feel fairly sure that he must have been mentioned in my clases on the wilderness -- although it's difficult to say now how much attention I paid at the time.

What linked Spinoza to Thoreau and Bierstadt was the concept that God didn't just "create" nature, but that God "is" nature. It's very difficult to try and explain in words, directly -- it's a feeling more than anything. For example, Thoreau was all very comfortable (one might say almost smug) about the wilderness when he wrote Walden, but the fact is that he was never really all that far from 'civilisation' -- he didn't really push much outside of his comfort zone.

Albert Bierstadt's paintings can be looked at and appreciated on a very shallow level -- and without having compared them to literature and thought about them I would dismiss them entirely. They're nice and all, but they're just the typical romanticised nature painting -- mountains, rivers, sunsets, all that sort of thing. But if you look at them with the philosophy of Spinoza in mind, you can read the painting on a slightly deeper level. It might not be news-worthy or altogether remarkable, but Bierstadt's use of light -- particular in pictures like Among the Sierra and Yosemite -- and likewise his use of darkness can be interpreted as being symbolic of God's existence not only in the wilderness but as the wilderness.

The rock formations are like the vaulted ceilings of cathedrals, they are designed to draw your eyes upwards and inspire thoughts of heaven -- and in a way the mountains of the west were Bierstadt's cathedrals. I don't know much at all about Bierstadt's beliefs, maybe he was a devout Christian -- one could argue he might have had some quite puritanical ideas, since it would seem that he considered God to be threatening as well as loving. I personally like to consider God in this context in a Spinozan sense, God is the light, and the absolute darkness, and the water, and the mountains, and the elk.

I am agnostic, and as such don't deny the existence of God, just as I don't recognise it either. I am not undecided, I just don't believe it is possible to ever really know -- and perhaps like many things with me, where I sit on the matter can vary. However, when I do consider God, it is in these terms that I consider it -- not as a sentient being, but almost as the sum of all consciousness and existence.

I mentioned Thoreau and Walden at the start -- but where I feel Thoreau really met with the Wilderness in the Bierstadt sense was when he climbed Mount Ktaadn. Here it is both terrifying and overwhelming.

I ended up writing my final year dissertation on the wilderness, but didn't really feature Bierstadt -- instead choosing to focus on Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, Aldo Leopold and Henry David Thoreau. It frustrates me sometimes thinking back that I didn't do a better job of it, and I also wish that I had the book I have started reading now -- Into the Wild.

In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey abandons his trailer to sleep in the open air of Arches National Park -- and he would write at great length about rivers and canyons and all the rest. But what I feel was missing from his work now was a sense of terror, a sense of being overwhelmed by nature -- what Thoreau feels on Mt. Ktaadn, and what Chris McCandless must have felt when he went into the wilds of the Alaskan landscape. While it could be said that McCandless was a bit of an idiot who didn't really grasp the full gravity of what he was doing or how likely he was to die -- he was also part of something much larger.

In some ways, he was trying to work out for himself what it is all about -- like the philosophers and thinkers before him. To my knowledge, at least Kerouac and Snyder out of the Beats both spent time living an almost entirely solitary existence in the wilderness at one time or another -- and like Abbey, skirted on the edges of madness. And in many ways I respect someone who is willing to take the risk and go out into the wild -- even if like Chris McCandless they don't make it back again.