Via Negativa

Last night as I was making supper, I heard a story on NPR about Steve Fossett’s successful completion of the first, solo, round-the-world jet flight without refueling.

He guided his single-engine jet to a flawless landing in Salina [Kansas] on Thursday and triumphantly disembarked on a brilliantly sunny day as thousands cheered. Elated but a bit wobbly, he hugged his wife, Peggy, and Richard Branson, the flamboyant chairman of Virgin Atlantic, the airline that financed the trip.

Branson promptly hosed Fossett down with champagne before the pilot swigged from the bottle. He looked perky for someone who had flown 37,000 kilometres crammed into a two-metre cockpit for 67 hours with only fortified milkshakes for sustenance.

“Well, that was something I wanted to do for a long time,” Fossett, 60, told spectators and reporters. “It was a major ambition. I’m a really lucky guy.”

Asked if he wanted to take a shower, he replied: “I wouldn’t mind finding a toilet.”

That’s from the Sydney Morning Herald (reporter Matthew Wald), which I chose just now from the Google News page because of its headline, “High drama, but a landing that went to script.” I wonder if it would occur to any newspaper editor in the United States to allow a critical note to sour a headline about such a self-evidently great achievement?

But my own reaction, upon hearing Fossett’s words on NPR, was even grumpier. The guy just completed a solo, round-the world flight, and the first words out of his mouth are about how happy he is to have achieved his fucking goal?! What about about the flight? Might it have been just a wee bit amazing, incredible, beautiful, perhaps even awe-inspiring? Who the hell knows! In fairness to Fossett, perhaps he had these feelings and simply chose not to express them – or perhaps he did express them, and the reporters simply didn’t deem them newsworthy. But I was struck by the reaction of the crowd: they cheered ecstatically at the banal words of this adventurer, as the media calls him. They actually cared that he had accomplished “a major ambition”!

Except when they behave badly or fail spectacularly, heroes and athletes are boring. Michael Jordan was boring until he decided to play baseball in the minor leagues. Tiger Woods was ungodly boring until he fell in love and his game started to slip. Dennis Rodman was never boring. The all-American success story of triumph over adversity is slightly interesting the first time you hear a version of it – for example, in Pilgrim’s Progress – but thereafter quickly becomes not merely boring but alienating, even offensive. Most of us don’t live lives of such easily scripted linearity, and many don’t even aspire to it. There’s a hell of a lot more to life than self-actualization, the pinnacle – as I understand it – of Maslow’s vacuous and morally bankrupt hierarchy of human needs.

Sometimes I think I would be better off returning to my English or Dutch roots, moving back to Old Europe where so many people seem to have learned the lessons of over-weening ambition and would-be heroism on the battlefield. I long for the fellowship of folks who (forgive the stereotype) understand nuance and satire, like to putter about in gardens, hang in out in neighborhood pubs and who are, above all else, easily amused. I was confirmed in this stereotype of the British recently when I read Bill Bryson’s charming travelogue, Notes From a Small Island (Avon Books, 1995). Bryson was from Iowa originally, but married an Englishwoman and made Great Britain his home for many years.

I used to be puzzled by the curious attitude of the British to pleasure, and that tireless, dogged optimism of theirs that allowed them to attach an upbeat turn of phrase to the direst inadequacies – “Mustn’t grumble,” “It makes a change,” “You could do worse,” “It’s not much, but it’s cheap and cheerful,” “Well, it was quite nice” – but gradually I came around to their way of thinking and my life has never been happier. I remember finding myself sitting in damp clothes in a cold café on a dreary seaside promenade and being presented with a cup of tea and tea cake and going, “Ooh, lovely!” and I knew then that the process had started. Before long I came to regard all kinds of activities – asking for more toast in a hotel, buying wool-rich socks at Marks & Spencer, getting two pairs of pants when I really needed only one – as something daring, very nearly illicit. My life became immensely richer.

High adventure for me yesterday was an hour’s snowshoe around the trails, right before I started supper. Perhaps that’s partly where my strong reaction to Fosset’s victory speech came from. It was nice and cold, the snow was firm from two days of drifting, and the low sun kept winking in and out behind fast-moving cumulous clouds in an otherwise deep blue sky. Most tracks had been erased by drifting snow, but I noticed strange, shallow markings all across the trail in front of me, too precise and not quite random enough to have come from stuff falling off of trees. In one spot there’d be a series of parallel hash marks like the graffiti of some lonely, ethereal prisoner keeping track of the days. Somewhere else, a strange, skipping, meandering line maybe six feet long, as if a bird drunk on fermented berries had tried briefly to land, and then thought better of it.

The author, I finally realized, was the wind, writing its name with whatever instruments came to hand. I found a couple of its styluses, dead oak leaves curled up like fawns in shallow depressions that once had been bootprints, before the wind went to work.

Why Salina, Kansas? Because, they said, it has an unusually long runway at its airstrip, originally built for bomber pilots in WWII. I take Fossett at his word when he says he isn’t in it for the publicity – it’s not like he needs the money – but from a p.r. standpoint, he couldn’t have picked a more perfect place to take off from and return to than the state of Kansas. I mean the Kansas that we’re not in anymore, Toto, but eventually come to wish that we were, because when you get right down to it, “there’s no place like home.” The hero, hag-ridden by ambition, must always long for his dull-but-happy former life in Ithaka.

But for me, Salina, Kansas has other associations: it’s the home of the Land Institute, where botanists, agronomists and others have been working for a couple decades to breed perennial grains, develop more accurate systems of ecological accounting, and in general to pioneer new ways of inhabiting the once-mighty tallgrass prairie of the American middle west. As it says on their website,

Because this work deals with basic biological questions and principles, the implications are applicable worldwide. If Natural Systems Agriculture were fully adopted, we could one day see the end of agricultural scientists from industrialized societies delivering agronomic methods and technologies from their fossil fuel-intensive infrastructures into developing countries and thereby saddling them with brittle economies….

The Land Institute seeks to develop an agriculture that will save soil from being lost or poisoned while promoting a community life at once prosperous and enduring.

If they succeed, I doubt that they will be mobbed by cheering fans or filmed for the six o’clock news. Not too many folks think of Land Institute co-founder Wes Jackson as a hero, though perhaps they should. News reporters tend to refer to guys like Jackson as a visionary, which is on a level with adventurer, but is nowhere near as prestigious as expert with the XYZ think-tank – let alone anonymous source. Visionary has a whiff of unreliability about it, like activist, Palestinian spokesperson, drifter, or even – god forbid! – poet.

UPDATE: The online environmental magazine Grist just published a great little overview of Bill Bryson’s writing, A Short Review of Nearly Everything: Bill Bryson’s books offer environmental ethics with a light touch, by Sarah van Schagen.

When I took art history in college, I was struck by the notion that there could be such a thing as laws of perspective. It seemed bogus to me, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. The rather sudden dominance of the perspective of a single viewer is one of those things historians use to divide Medieval from Renaissance – a rather bogus exercise in itself, shaped as it is by our desire to see history from the perspective of progress, all lines converging on some indefinable point in the near future. These days, the ideology of progress involves a constant invoking of the vague term development, which etymologically implies a stripping down, a reduction. History follows two tracks: one for us, the developed nations, and another for those slow pokes who need to be more like us – the developing world. In a feat of intellectual prestidigitation we have substituted ourselves for the vanishing point. Poof!

But what I was going to say before I got sidetracked is that the “discovery” of the Laws of Perspective is like the “discovery” of the wheel. Each unique application represents not a context-free achievement of some unitary position in time and space, but simply an invention. Have we yet come anywhere near exhausting the uses for wheels? What sorts of wheels might remain to be discovered, obscured by our blind arrogance as “discoverers”? We Westerners are given to marvel that the civilizations of the New World, so otherwise “advanced” – i.e. like us – were without the wheel. But that’s absurd. Wheels are everywhere! It would be more accurate to say that the profound reverence of New World civilizations for cyclic patterns in time and nature made the exploitation of wheels for quotidian purposes virtually unthinkable.

In a similar manner, East Asian cultures have always evinced a deep sensitivity to the problems and rewards of perspective – far deeper than in the West, where the truth was almost always sought through a metaphysics of oneness: a first principle, an efficient cause, a logos. For Chinese thinkers, whether of a Daoist, Confucian or Buddhist bent, truth was highly contingent and relational, and the sage was someone who mastered the art of shifting perspectives. A strong distinction between subject and object never emerged. As Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall put it in the introduction to their philosophical translation of the Daodejing,

The field of experience is always construed from one perspective or another. There is no view from nowhere, no external perspective, no decontextualized vantage point. We are all in the soup. The intrinsic, constitutive relations that obtain among all things make them reflexive and mutually implicating, residing together within the flux and the flow.

This description of the metaphysics of philosophical Daoism also captures quite accurately the Daoist-influenced mindset of the traditional East Asian landscape painter. The artist’s goal was not so much to develop an individual creative vision as to merge with, or become enveloped by, the larger creative flow. Thus the (to us) strange perspectives in a traditional Chinese landscape painting: the buildings that get larger as they get farther way from the viewer, a horizon that curves up rather than down. Often, the near distance is obscured by mist or clouds, as if to emphasize the challenge that heaven-and-earth everywhere present to the self-centered, discriminating vision. A landscape is something the viewer must walk into to fully appreciate. Therefore, there must be multiple vanishing points as one’s perspective continually changes position.

But in modern times we have, in theory, this thing called a vanishing point. Does it exist in fact? Who knows! Given the limits of ordinary vision and atmospheric haze, one reaches the point of diminishing returns much sooner. What really interests me, though, is how different kinds of seeing can shape what we see. For example, I wear the same boots, the same jeans, the same quilted shirt day after day without paying much heed to the need for maintenance, much less variety. Each year I think, “This pair of boots” – or whatever – “will last forever!” But of course a year later I’m saying the same thing about a new pair. I could definitely benefit from more regularly taking the long view about such things, instead of living always day to day. It’s almost paradoxical, isn’t it? By ignoring vanishing points, I may actually hasten the inevitable disintegration of things within my sphere of experience.

Once I met an ex-Marine Special Forces guy on Greyhound who told me that he wore the same pair of boots for twelve years, through mountains and jungles and several changes of the soles. His secret was simple: he oiled them down every night before going to sleep, he said. But over the course of a year, wouldn’t one spend enough on leather treatment products to buy a new pair of boots? To say nothing of the labor. But that wasn’t the point, I gathered. He disassembled and oiled his gun every night, too: an unchanging verity in an otherwise chaotic world. “I have seen things you wouldn’t believe. Nobody does. It doesn’t fit with what people think they know about this country,” he said when the discussion moved to U.S. policies in Columbia.

And speaking of vanishing points, I’ve looked through telescopic sights and pulled the trigger myself on occasion. It’s always such a surprise when one makes a clean miss and the animal doesn’t even react to the sound. Your ears are ringing, your arms are shaking with adrenaline and the damn thing is still feeding placidly a hundred feet away. It’s more fun to shoot beer cans – after first emptying them, of course. They lie where they fall – no unsightly flailing about – and the holes are nice and clean. You think you’ll feel this good forever. I mean, at some level you realize it’s only a temporary high, but it seems as if it ought to be possible to prolong it almost indefinitely, given the right drug or yoga-induced trigger. You strenuously ignore the sad and simple fact that heights and depths are solely a matter of perspective.

What I’m saying here, in a nutshell, is that there are two ways of looking at things: one that makes them appear smaller than oneself, and another that makes them appear larger and richer. One reduces, the other builds up or makes whole. Why should we have to see things as larger than they perhaps really are in order to see them accurately? Simply to correct for the limitations of our own points-of-view. As my father explained once, meeting someone half-way to resolve some difference tends to fail, because there’s almost inevitably some gap between what you and the other person each perceive as being half-way. For a true meeting in the middle, each party must be a little generous in their estimate. The heart needs to practice hospitality, to open up to multiple perspectives and possibilities.

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Fairly superfluous afterthought. I don’t stand with those who want to see all beings merge into some kind of amorphous whole or godhead, and thus to arrive at some very limited idea of peace. To me, that’s another form of reductionism, as violent in its violation of the integrity of individual beings as any other. Just as without gravity a bullet could not reach its target, without vanishing points, without some inclination – however gradual – toward nullity, there could be no space for anything. If the analogy between seeing and shooting seems overly concrete, perhaps that’s because shooting has its origin in a very literalized form of seeing. (Remembering what the Bible says about the dangers of being overly literal: “The letter killeth, the spirit giveth life.”) Violence and sorcery err in their attempt to foreshorten distances, to claim universal applicability for one vision, to foreclose on what must appear to the eye of an artist or a lover as the most radical Opening.

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For those who haven’t noticed, my dad has been updating his Peaceful Societies website with two new articles or reviews every Thursday morning. Recent additions include Piaroa Homegardens Provide Focus for Socializing; Batek Persuaded to Abandon Nomadic Lifestyle; Inuit Hunters Share Meat, But Not as Exchanges; and Reformers Win Tahitian Elections But Deadlock Remains. Today began Part I of a new series of articles, Violence Threatens the Peaceful Societies of North India, focusing on the armed Naxalite revolt of rural India, which has been virtually unreported in the West.

From Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (University of Chicago Press, 1992):

“Her name in Greek is Artemis. She is one of the oldest, most enigmatic of Greek deities. Her worship goes back to the Pre-Hellenic period, but even in historical times she was widely worshipped as a fertility goddess in Asia Minor, her cult being based at Ephesus. From that city has come down to us the famous marble statue that depicts her standing upright with arms extending outward from the elbows. A congeries of wild animals stare out from her gown and headdress, while her front side is weighed down by multiple bulbs that suggest a proliferation of female breasts.

“For a long time no one thought to doubt that these bulbs were breasts symbolizing the goddess’s superabundant fertility, but then someone looked closer and remarked on their strange lack of plastic realism. In short, a group of Austrian archaeologists recently confirmed that these protrusions do not represent breasts after all but rather the testicles of bulls. The fact is corroborated by evidence uncovered at Ephesus which indicates that on her festival days Artemis’s priests would castrate several bulls, string the scrotums together, and then place the gruesome garlands around a wooden image of the goddess, which her votives would then follow in an ecstatic procession from her sacred altar to the center of the city….

“Her virginal aspect deserves greater emphasis, for in ancient times forests were by no means always virgin or beyond the bounds of human domestication….Silviculture is an ancient practice, but our goddess had nothing to do with it. She belonged to those dark and inaccessible regions where wild animals enjoyed sanctuary from all human disturbance except that of the most intrepid hunters.

“Like her domain, the goddess too was remote and inaccessible. She refused to be seen by man or woman. Even her most ardent priestesses and votives did not set eyes on her. The story of Hippolytus, son of Theseus, confirms this. So total was the youth’s devotion to Artemis that he went so far as to spurn the power of Aphrodite, who in revenge devised a cruel fate for him at the hands of his stepmother Phaedra. In Euripedes’ Hippolytus the young hunter brings Artemis flowers from a wild meadow where no human except himself could enter, and where he was granted the extraordinary privilege of hearing the goddess’s voice. But even he could not set eyes on her. ‘True I may only hear,’ says Hippolytus, ‘I may not see God face to face.'”