Notes from the Mountain, July, 2016, Woodstock, New York, Byrdcliffe Art Colony...
1. The month of July, on a global level, was shockingly violent and unhinged, as my new friend T. mentioned to me while we walked one night to town from our forest-enclosed 100+ year old inn on Mount Guardian. We agreed that our political and cultural worlds, if only as they come to us filtered through anxiety-accelerating, technological devices, are in near-cataclysmic conditions. Or are they are in complete cataclysmic conditions? And what actions and thoughts should this knowledge of cataclysm, however partial or total, compel?
2. Later, after a few beers in a converted freight train station, we were greeted on our steep, dark way back by spastic fireflies in lieu of still streetlights, as well as a scattering of pulsing stars (some bluer, others redder and some, perhaps, planets) through the skeletal tree canopy, and chortling frogs lost in the grasses between the narrow, ghostly birches on the side of the road. Rarely have I ever walked through such total, dizzying darkness. On other nights we had the advantage of an unpolluted moon spilling its light on trees and grasses, turning them that unfamiliar, almost negative color of smoked, grayish opal.
3. We are staying and working for most of July at the Byrdcliffe Colony: 1500 acres of cabins, inns, woods and studios on the south-facing side of Mount Guardian (in the Catskills) a couple miles from the town of Woodstock. Byrdcliffe began in 1902 as a “Utopian experiment” inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement and the philosophy of John Ruskin and is the oldest operating arts colony in the United States. Historically, most colonies, colleges or communal experiments based on artistic principles eventually fail (I’m thinking particularly of Black Mountain College), so it’s humbling and energizing to be welcomed into such a rugged, earthy, persevering place, not to mention in a landscape so beautiful and remote.
4. “Utopia” is a troubling and problematic concept, of course, and yet one that I’ve explored, in various ways, in my last two years of teaching English Composition to college freshmen. The problems of theorizing “Utopia” are manifold but one obvious one is that in Thomas More’s version of “a perfect place” slavery is legal. Thus, one person’s Utopia is another person’s Gulag, as also exemplified by the current election season. Relatedly, another problem, testified by various “utopian” experiments through the ages, is that “Utopian” ideology can be a virulent cause of homogenization and fascistic tendencies; under the always-false rallying cry of perfection and idealization the wild pluralism of the human condition is forsaken. Even the very abstract word “society” presupposes an Utopian ideology in which our actual pluralistic complexities are obscured.
5. Taking a cue from “critical thinking” I decided to theorize to my students an idea called “Utopian thinking”: instead of some ideal, global place to design and implement, or some impossible perfection to collectively aspire to, what can each of us, as autonomous, imperfect individuals do to enrich, empower and edify every context and situation of our lives, as well as the various others we encounter and engage with in those contexts? Such thinking can only be “local” and always process-based and, usually, small-scale; one’s ethical range begins with your closest neighbor, in the town that you live in; such thinking, too, has everything to do with the shifting of rhetorics and discourses and the new thoughts and actions these changes can bring about; as well, it depends on the exercising of the critical imagination. It occurs to me, now, that perhaps at some radical points in history this kind of thinking was at the heart of what we mean when we say “politics.”
6. Politics now, at least on the national level seems to be more concerned with the rhetorical destruction of other people’s experiences. I imagine for politics to become, in some way, legitimately political again it must engage actual, material conditions and daily, local complexities, and it must insist on patient, disquieting conversations across jarring differences rather than insisting on rigid offensive positions between ideological adversaries. It must also emphasize the accumulation of short-term, small-scale actions of reform and renovation in tandem with long-term, big-picture enrichments. Politics, like education, also needs to ruthlessly interrogate the many toxic assumptions of “progress” and to take into ethical account the imperatives and needs of the non-human.
7. Based on my limited experiences as a teacher and a citizen, I realized recently that an ideal political arena (and maybe only for me) might be the English classroom, or at least the classrooms I’ve taught in for the last few years. In such small places, very different citizens gather, physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally to tease out possible solutions, raise and follow questions and collectively explore the labyrinthine natures of their shared and conflicting contexts and stories. Theoretically, at least, this is what should begin to happen in such a space. And as slow as such beginnings can be they are always exhilarating when they do happen.
8. The classroom, (in this case, the English class), like older models of the salon or the coffeehouse or the town hall even, can become a common gathering place where ideologies and institutions, presuppositions and prejudices can be put into question in the hopes that such questions, while not necessarily leading to succinct or convenient answers, can compel rhetorical, ethical and aesthetic energies that might increase our individual and collective autonomy. Instead of the instrumental view of education -- in which education’s purpose is to make people more employable -- there remains the possibility of reinventing and radicalizing what the Greeks called “paidea”: a complete education of the citizen, assuming, indeed that to be a citizen today is to acknowledge a deep responsibility to a complex world larger than one’s self. The citizen as an ecological agent and ecology as the necessary political philosophy of the present and the future. A lot of this thinking, as well, especially about autonomy I gleaned from my readings of the polymath thinker of the 1960′s Cornelius Castoriadis.
9. But at Byrdcliffe, I’m not really thinking about the actual daily realities of teaching but these pleasant, inspiring theories behind teaching: the writing behind the actions, the abstracted harmonies behind the concrete muddle. The “reality” of teaching -- especially in a place like Las Vegas -- can feel sometimes much more dire and frustrating, so right now I won’t think about that. It disheartens me, for example, that some addictive smartphone video game will deter most of my students from appreciating any passage at all from MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But no-- soon enough, come late August, I will have to think about these matters more practically. Instead, for now I’m writing as much as I can because the activity stirs, centers, expands and delights me. A part of me even thinks that my writing might, conceivably at some point give some delight or reassurance to others.
10. When I’m not writing or researching in my studio cabin, I’m off into the woods, running and hiking, stopping to photograph moss, boulders or mushrooms, hoping to find a cardinal feather (and failing) after seeing rare, flying dashes of red through the trees, dipping my feet and face into cold creeks and streams, arranging stones on the ground into beguiling faces or simply sitting on a boulder in a glen allowing the vibrating leaf-light to wash over me. When it’s time to eat, I’m learning to enjoy this shared 15 person kitchen, and simple, cheap, fortifying meals shared among a diverse group of fellow artists and writers. I’m lucky to count among these people new friends and allies. And I’m becoming very comfortable with spiders, those otherworldly sentinels: on my desk, in my bed and on the walls.
11. Any “Utopian” thinking worth its salt requires an appreciation and cultivation of two forms of Otherness: Friendships/Alliances & The Wild/Wilderness. Both kinds of Otherness are embraced through creative risk and ethical courage. And any political or educational vision of any real value requires the same double awareness: the healing need to courageously expose one’s self to human difference, to the surprise of others, to unforeseen assistance, difficult mentorship, baffling apprenticeships, and ennobling interpersonal conflicts. Unlike the static word “society’ hanging limply in the air, real friendships and real alliances need to be re-forged, re-imagined, and re-won on a daily basis. And, as well,we must learn to occasionally breach our own physical and spatial comfort zones and violate our own habitual, overly-domesticated territories in favor of more primal, less-civilized, non-human places and zones. Like the cultivation of inspiring and catalyzing social relations, the Wild needs to be entered into and explored on a daily basis, lest one’s vitality goes stagnant and one’s imagination becomes too docile and tame.
12. Much of the writing I’m working on at Byrdcliffe is about my month-long pilgrimage walks last summer in England. As I write about those journeys, as well as about the tragic death of an ex-girlfriend that happened to frame some of my travels, I realize the story I am trying to weave is largely about strangers, companions, allies, mentors, spirits and friends who crossed my path and temporarily imbued my life with wisdom or strangeness or assistance or pleasantness as I made my way across those ancient trackways of England. I consider how the spiritual thinker Gurdjieff titled his most autobiographical book, Meetings With Remarkable Men, a book in which his encounters with various teachers and masters (both men and women) in his journeys becomes the story of the person and thinker he ultimately becomes; likewise how Dante, lost and frightened in a dark wood, is relieved of his panic and disorientation by a mentor, Virgil.
13. Nights of heavy rain and thunder on the mountain as I lie in my small, second story loft room watching giant bugs flap against the screen. The next day, in the swampy woods, the greenness is profound, shining and heavy, as new moss and lichen crawl up the wet wood and newts scamper over the rocks. The jarring arrival of orange, via newt, via lichen, in these otherwise green and silver and brown woods is cause for wonder! New growths have arisen on the ground: crimson, bronze, auburn and white fungi and parasites and mushrooms. Old, soaked birch limbs turn copper blue with rot, while the drier ones are starkly white against the brown and green ground. The air is redolent of fertility while the rock slabs I keep encountering, often driven against the bases of trees, suggest ritual and sacrifice -- or else old human territorial markings now given over to the devouring woods.
14. I’ve been writing for hours in the morning, and then going out into the woods in the afternoons to sweat out my analytical mind. As habitual thinking leaves my pores, newer and sometimes quite alien thoughts might enter from the breathing earth around me. Or instead of thoughts, sensations. Instead of reason, intuition. Once, I tripped on a log and nearly hurt myself quite badly, which reminded me to splash cold creek water on my face. Give attention! I said. And not just attention to the usual mind muddle. Another time, I saw a ghastly face in the hollow of a tree that pinned me to the spot. The longer I looked the more ancestral the face became.
15. And yet another time, I had that uncanny experience of the Scottish “grue” -- as poet Helen Adam calls it -- when, for longer than I thought necessary, I inspected, without understanding or identifying it, a methodical, twitching movement on the ground only to discover its source under rotting bark and crushed leaves: a black, bulbous horned and pincer-prodding beetle-type-thing the size of a baby bird. It seemed, too, that it was vibrating and/or expanding its body towards some glutinous ends...Shivering, I ran off with a new eeriness puckering my limbs. These woods are secreting and writhing and on the days after the storm they testify to their forces of replenishment and renewal in spite of the ever-encroaching human predator and our ever-sensitive views of “nature.”
16. When I’m finished being enraptured and unsettled by the woods, I come back to friendly people talking on the porch. In a word, I am welcomed back into a provisional community. I come back sweaty to a rickety, human-tended hearth, and there is relief mixed with admiration, hunger mixed with curiosity, humor mixed with awe. We don’t often acknowledge, I think, how our emotions and sensations are so strangely blended. And so we sit there as the thickening night sits, and we talk about sexuality, art, pain, loneliness, mean people and good people: and it’s a wonderful, grounding way to end a largely solitary day. Then the fireflies come out, or the moon does too, and, if I walk down the road a bit, covered again in near-total darkness, bats begin to zigzag above me, bespeaking chthonic hungers.
17. It occurs to me that the immense privilege of being here for a month, immersed in my work, in the woods, in walking and running, in the collective, historical-based experiment of mingling and eating and creating together is a living diagram for something indeed utopian or political: each of our solitudes and our imaginations (and we can’t be real without cultivating both of these) must be refined in the fires of human and non-human others. And as with most days, there is a delicate, often precarious balancing to this refinement process, an alchemical artistry to being wildly alone and also being wildly with others. The fact that these interactions are Wild, and should remain Wild is what we must keep acknowledging and preserving. For in forgetting or forsaking our innate wildness, we are doomed to become more and more servile to the purely automated, profit-driven, homogenizing, hyper-mechanized worlds that beget ecological catastrophe and paralyzing soul sickness.
18. Moreover, I think of how Allegory works in the service of Wildness, especially through poetry and myth and ritual: there are Dark Woods, there is a Cryptic Stranger, there is a Enigmatic Guide, and there are Ominous Creatures and Uncrossable Chasms and Ravishing Gardens and Mysterious Temples. Generally, we work with the Images that our Star-canopied Earth induces and inspires throughout the ages. These general images recur with different allegorical intentions and meanings through time; and yet they also refer to very specific, truly singular entities and occasions that happen in moment-by-moment actual life: THIS temple, THESE woods, THIS stranger, THIS mentor, THESE crossroads, etc. The ever-renewing Primordial becomes grasped in a present, fleeting singularity and so what is new and novel comes to be seen, beautifully, as something or someone quite ancient and imperishable.
19. And indeed, Allegories can help us or, at least, they should help us if we allow them to: For our individual and collective betterment, we have to believe that the Wild Woods beyond our electric fences and gated communities harbors healing insights and beneficial visions, and that it is not naive or fruitless to embark on a devoted Quest or Pilgrimage that is not inspired solely by financial or career gains. And that certain Strangers, should we have the intuition and courage to engage them wisely, can give assistance or inspiration, and that certain Exiles we undergo, whether chosen or not, from the violent yet normalized marketplaces of status and exploitation, or away from the familiar citadels of family, career, security and polis can, perhaps, lead to rarer and more rugged jewels of wisdom. And that, despite the seemingly endless and ever-renewable Darkness engulfing us there must arise, at some points, a Hearth or a Refuge, a place of Fire and Sustenance, however temporary or ramshackle or out-of-the-way.
20. Likewise, if we keep our faith in Fairy Tales and Allegories alive -- which is to say, if we still adamantly believe in the Universe -- each of us can become at some point a Wise Guide or an Insightful Stranger for another. Each of us can be in the lucky position to provide respite for the Pilgrim, sanctuary for the Exile and nourishment for the Mendicant. When encountering a befuddled Wanderer we might, miraculously provide the very coordinates she is seeking. Our own navigational maps, often taken for granted, might be received as miracles by some unknown Other. The look of pleasant Surprise on another’s face is alone worth the risk of poetic encounter. And for those brutalized souls who most desperately need healing proof that such fires can still exist, we can provide a Hearth Fire (a real fire, and not a computerized one!), around which more catalyzing and medicinal stories will gladly be told. So then stories and fairy tales, poems and allegories are no longer the stuff only of imagination and escapism, entertainment and academia, but become conduits of real energy that we give back to the world to enrich its transformational possibilities.
21. Thus, Allegory can throw us into the Outside, into Otherness, into Companionship with the Strange and the Archaic. Allegory invites us to set out and to venture forth and it is by doing so that meaning emerges, along with, eventually, some kind of wisdom if we’re attentive.
22. An unsettling event happened the other day on the mountain. Actually it was the same day I tripped in the woods while running. Somebody else that day slipped in a creek and hurt her head. Something strange in the air, we later reported to each other. We must give extra attention to the elements, I told myself. But it’s so easy not to.
23. That afternoon, I decided to ascend the very steep road towards the summit of the mountain upon which sits a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. The monastery, itself, is directly right next door to a Christian Orthodox Church. It seems that there was a conscious recognition that this mountain, like so many others, is sacred terrain, and conducive to sacred rites. On the way up the mountain I saw a “Fire Investigation” truck driving fast towards the summit, and, maybe before or a little after, I smelled something burning in the air. When I got in sight of the trailhead parking lot on top, right next to the Monastery, I saw a police car and a Fire Investigation car parked in front of some other cars. As I got closer I realized something strange had happened: there were four cars parked close together by the Monastery sign, and they were all in varied stages of demolition.
24. The one car, a VW sedan, parked closest to the monastery sign was a completely incinerated husk of a car, blackened, melted, stripped by flames and reduced to a charred skeleton. Where the engine once was, the Fire Investigation man quietly and carefully investigated, trying, I assumed to deduce some kind of reasons for whatever had happened. The other three cars around the exploded car appeared as if parts of their fronts and sides had been semi-totaled and all their windows were shattered, too. An orange-robed, friendly-looking monk from the monastery calmly watched the investigator, as did a very befuddled police man.
25. The whole atmosphere had a somber silence to it which was even more unsettling. I couldn’t begin to fathom what had happened but a pedestrian nearby explained that somehow, after the family had parked their VW and gone hiking towards the look-out area several miles away, their car had exploded. But there were no fatalities? I asked, uncertainly. None, she said. How did it happen you think? I asked. Well it’s possible it could have over-heated, someone said. But does an overheated car simply detonate like a bomb? It didn’t seem likely. So, I asked, the family is out hiking and doesn’t know yet that their car has exploded and that’s it also wrecked the three pretty nice cars around it?
26. No, she said, they have no idea. And I can’t even imagine how they will react when they get back.
