Mind-map of my notes for discussion on Wild Nature

The students have been reading Wilderness and the American Mind (R Nash).  The mind map allows us to hike through big terrain. (Click on map for larger view)

And Jack Came Tumbling After – Han Shan, Jack Kerouac and Desolation Peak

Part I of a couple of posts (who knows, maybe 3) on Kerouac in the Wilderness.

In Dharma Bums, Kerouac describes visiting Japhy Ryder (i.e. Gary Snyder) in his shack near Berkeley and Japhy talks to him about the difficulty of translating Han Shan’s poem Cold Mountain from the original Chinese.  Jack is impressed with the similarities between Han Shan and Ryder.  “That’s like you too, Japhy, studying with eyes full of tears.”  Han Shan, Ryder said, was “a mountain man, a Buddhist dedicated to the principle of meditation on the essence of all things… he was a man of solitude who could take off by himself and live purely and true to himself.”   Ray Smith (i.e. Kerouac) responded, “That sounds like you too.”  “And like you too, Ray”, Ryder generously replied. 

Thinking that it would be a good thing for Kerouac to have some solitary time in the mountains, Snyder encouraged Kerouac to apply to work a summer as a fire lookout in the Northern Cascades in Washington.  The first part of Kerouac’s novel Desolation Angels, based upon his notebooks from the summer of 1956, recorded Jack’s summer of anguish and paranoia in his mountain retreat.  Though Kerouac may not be everyman – at times he’s jubilant, at times morose, verbose, braggardly, brilliant, invariably drunk, incessantly dissecting, sullen, always writing, experimenting, vagabonding, observing minutely, oedipally strange, holy, obnoxious – nonetheless Jack’s ordinary failure in the wilderness is perhaps a more successful account of the meaning of wilderness for us everyfolk than all the successful accounts written by the hard men of the great American Wilderness tradition. 

A Note on Nietzsche as a Wilderness Thinker

Nietzsche, retreated from the city (Basel) in 1879, retired from the habitual, and nurses upon wild things.  In this leave-taking and this suckling on the wild, Nietzsche can be identified as a writer of a particular tradition.   Alongside Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey (a truncated roster of influential writers on wilderness (and in some cases the Wild)), Nietzsche is an environmental writer in general, and a wilderness writer in particular. 

The tradition has some recognizable characteristics: a celebration of nature as special place and governed by special processes, a suspicion that these places and these processes intensively prevail elsewhere, a usefulness to seeking these out, a normative role for these places and processes.  The city is held in contempt. The wilderness writer needs solitude.  A deeper excavation reveals that this thinking as part of a declensionist tradition (things are NOT better now!).  This leads, not inevitably but invariably to negative suspicions about the human animal.  If remedies exist they exist in a return to a prior place, a prior time.  The wilderness writer can lead the way – the environmental writer has a priestly vocation; he (typically, he) can initiate us into natures’ secrets, and can (if we act right now) lead us to the altar to confess, (re)consecrate and (re)commune.