Working on the last post took me back to the time of my divorce. Crossing the threshold from married to single was instantaneous only in a literal sense. It was not even brief. I learned that translating a life from one mode to a very different mode requires passing through wilderness.
At the time, I described it as finding my land legs: strengthening muscles needed to balance on new terrain, which moved so differently under me than the previous land had.
A judge’s password opened the gate, yes, but the threshold expanded with every step, like a doorway in the House of Leaves. (When I read that book just few years later, it felt crazily familiar.)
The process is not unlike translating poetry (which I was doing a lot of at that time): You take the language-house that the poem lives in and pull apart all the bits (siding, lines, metaphor, paint, shingles, sound), launch the naked poem into the air and build a new house—out of words in a new language—for that poem to dwell in.
You see, the poem itself lives beyond the words you read, or hear. Translators talk about the original poem actually being the first translation.
“The poem as it is presented is a manifestation of another, invisible poem, written in a language behind the common languages. Thus, even the original version is a translation.”
—Thomas Tranströmer (1931–2015), who won the Nobel Prize in 2011, accepting the Neustadt International Prize for Literature at the University of Oklahoma, June 12, 1990. (From World Literature Today.)
In the process of translation, a poem returns to a pre-linguistic wilderness on the way to finding its new language-home.
Wilderness and wild things have an irresistible pull on me. Gary Snyder pointed out that “wild is largely defined in our dictionaries by what—from a human standpoint—it is not.” He gives examples like: land (uninhabited); food (not cultivated); animals (undomesticated); person (uncivilized).
Of wilderness, he writes that it “has implied chaos, eros, the unknown realms of taboo, the habitat of both the ecstatic and the demonic. In both cases, it is a place of archetypal power, teaching, and challenge.”[i]
In nature—wild nature—subject to weather, season, mineral, hoof, and mandible—ecologists describe successional and climax ecosystems. After disruption, for example, when a cyclone-induced landslide in a climax forest leaves muddy, gaping banks and ridges of debris, the land goes through a kind of chaos before journeying again through the stages of succession toward another version of climax. If allowed to get that far.
Think of Mt. St. Helens, which erupted 43 years ago this May. Imagine my surprise when, in the midst of working on this essay, I went down to my local library branch (shoutout to Oak Lodge Library!) to pick up a book on hold and (choose your own adverb) conveniently/coincidentally/providentially spied on the “New Books” shelf After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens, by Eric Wagner.
Obviously, I’m going to have to get a copy of my own to read, re-read, mark up and marvel at. Meanwhile, I get to journey along with the scientists who studied the mountain as its ecosystem got back down to business.
When that volcano erupted, I was an undergraduate studying environmental science. The ecologists in the department were beside themselves with excitement at the “natural experiment” that would take place in the seasons and decades to come.
Wagner describes a group of scientists who travelled by helicopter to the mountain a mere month after its eruption, certain nothing had survived. “They were flying toward something for which they did not yet have the language,” he writes, explaining the natural experiment this crew was “perversely” excited to witness.
“What happens when every single living thing for hundreds of square miles, big and small, plant and animal, is burned away or buried, and nothing is left but rock and ash?... Their working hypothesis was that although it might take decades or even centuries, plants and animals were sure to return at some point.”
Exiting the copter 12 miles away from the crater, after the puff of ash raised by his feet settles back down, Jerry Franklin, a U.S. Forest Service ecologist, glances around and sees (wait for it…) something green! “It was a plant shoot, maybe two or three inches tall.”[ii]
It was fireweed—so named because it’s among the first new growth to appear after a fire or other destruction. This one must have sprouted from roots that survived the blast and the mud and the debris flows.
“Franklin stood and took in the landscape again. He realized that this fireweed was one of tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of little green shoots emerging from the ash.” Unbelievable, just a month after the apocalypse. He sees other shoots. Then beetles, ants, signs of a gopher.
“The fireweed that Franklin saw not only changed the ways that he and other ecologists approached the eruption and the landscape it created, but also led to new ways of thinking about how life responds to seeming total devastation.”
That last line is worth repeating. “…how life responds to seeming total devastation.” Maybe life is precisely that which responds when the devastation seems total.
I cannot say how happy this makes me.
[i] Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild: 30th Anniversary Edition, Intro: Robert Hass. Counterpoint: Berkeley, 2020.
[ii] Eric Wagner, After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens. University of Washington Press: Seattle, 2020.
The Earth is so full of metaphors about life--and wisdom for living. Being its student is my happy place! Even more when it’s meaningful to you! Thank you. <3
This is great! You integrate personal experience with scientific/environmental observation so movingly! Love it.