Pulse Impulse

We ate dahl last night with our thali. This morning I read that India produces and imports more pulses than any other country in the world. But Leguminosae, the second largest family of plants, is not what I am writing about. I’m also not thinking, in the technical sense, of impulse as physical quantity. Rather I am thinking metaphorically, from those excitable cells transmitting electrical nerve impulses to that weird human feeling, or impulse, to write. I found out yesterday that the impulse to write, however, can be incited by external stimulus-a pulse. In this case, I’m talking about a short burst of energy transferred into words and posted to a WordPress blog that then led to an impulse (or impulses) to write. One post leading to another post leading to another post. As Murray Kreiger once put it, words about words about words.

The world is places. Though “place blog” may be an awkward phrase, I do think it was L’s usage of this phrase that made it possible for me to understand (and appreciate) what she was up to–a playful and perfectly promiscuous kind of concentration. Others claim that blogging is some kind of postindustrial or subversive use of language. Though I’m less interested in all of that. More simply, sporadic engagement with L’s posts over these past few years has been part of my preoccupation with the poetics of place-how we build, construct or make a sense of place; how in reading and writing we give meaning and value to places; how words and images combine to organize perception and feeling and thought into what we then call an experience of a place;. and how we learn, and what it actually means, to live in a place or call a place home.

I would use words and photographs, then, to enact the lived experience of a place. For as L says, I am here and she is there; and she is there and I am here. We both seem to find pleasures and rewards in the meditative practices of walking and writing, of being in the world and knowing it. “The world is places” comes from the writing of Gary Snyder. It is his way of reminding us that we experience the world as places-whether sweating on the hot summer streets of an Indian city or sinking into the muddy brown leaves of a New England Forest.

Perhaps the impulse to keep a place blog is, after all, an impossible attempt, happily unfinished, to capture the natural and cultural history of the present.  And maybe this act of forever finding out where you are is what the founder of the Soto school of Zen in Japan, Dōgen, meant when he said, “When you find your place where you are, practice occurs.”

 

Impulses

As a teacher of writing I’ve read far too many sensible articles and books about the life-giving virtues of writing. There is free writing, for example, that authentic activity that makes one feel as if authenticity is something one finds by practicing it, as Peter Elbow and Natalie Goldberg and many others have persuasively argued. There is writing about one’s intellectual preoccupations, something I am doing a lot of during my sabbatical—that purposeful mode of writing for an audience of people who share a passion for thought and inquiry. And then there is what I’m doing right now. Blogging.

On the days when I do sit down at the little desk here in this hot apartment in India to write a blog entry—in the interval between a morning of sabbatical work and a late afternoon swim with the kids—I spend about thirty minutes to an hour allowing my mind to wander over the subject I’ve chosen to take up. Usually, I’ve given the subject some thought; and often in the writing I find the post heading off somewhere else, as this post might in fact be doing. So as the theorists and pedagogues will say, I’m writing my way to understanding. Though in most cases I’m simply following sight or insight—elaborating on something seen or partially considered.

In the 10 December issue of the New Yorker, Louis Menand published an essay that considers why people write and read diaries, “Woke Up this Morning.” He observes that “The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness. Most of us do wish that we were slim diarists. It’s not that we imagine that we would be happier if we kept a diary; we imagine that we would be better—that diarizing is a natural, healthy thing, a sign of vigor and purpose, a statement, about life, that we care, and that non-diarizing or, worse, failed diarizing is a confession of moral inertia, an acknowledgment, even, of the ultimate pointlessness of one’s being in the world.” Menand then goes on to explain three theories for why people might keep diaries, an explanation as irreverent as it is insightful:

“They are theories of the ego, the id, and the superego (and what is left, really?). The ego theory holds that maintaining a diary demands a level of vanity and self-importance that is simply too great for most people to sustain for long periods of time. It obliges you to believe that the stuff that happened to you is worth writing down because it happened to you. This is why so many diaries are abandoned by circa January 10th: keeping this up, you quickly realize, means something worse than being insufferable to others; it means being insufferable to yourself. People find that they just can’t take themselves seriously enough to continue. They may regret this—people capable of taking themselves seriously tend to go farther in life—but they accept it and move on to other things, such as collecting stamps. The id theory, on the other hand, states that people use diaries to record wishes and desires that they need to keep secret, and to list failures and disappointments that they cannot admit publicly have given them pain. Diary-keeping, on this account, is just neurotic, since the last thing most people want to do with their unconsummated longings and petty humiliations is to inscribe them permanently in a book. They want to forget them, and so they soon quit writing them down. Most people don’t confess; they repress. And the superego theory, of course, is the theory that diaries are really written for the eyes of others. They are exercises in self-justification. When we describe the day’s events and our management of them, we have in mind a wise and benevolent reader who will someday see that we played, on the whole, and despite the best efforts of selfish and unworthy colleagues and relations, a creditable game with the hand we were dealt. If we speak frankly about our own missteps and shortcomings, it is only to gain this reader’s trust. We write to appease the father. People abandon their diaries when they realize that the task is hopeless. These are powerful, possibly brilliant theories, and they account for much. But, though they help explain why people generally don’t like to write diaries, they do not explain why people generally do like to read them.”

To be quite honest, I have never been able to sustain an interest in a diary. My ego has never fully convinced me that my experience is worth recording in detail. My secrets, for what they are worth, are my own, and my mind seems to be a perfectly suitable repository for such things. And self-justification never seemed to be worth the time when god promised another day outside in the mountain air, a new book to read, or some real work that needed to be done in a life full of complications and contingencies.

Sure, when I was younger, I kept climbing notes in a journal whenever I headed out into the mountains for more than a week. My notes were never written down every day, though. Nor did I feel that there was anything especially significant finding its way onto the page. Did it really matter that we spent the day on the north ridge, and that the rope got caught when I was leading the most difficult pitch and I had to climb down to untangle it? That the smell of sky pilot on a granite ledge at 11,000 feet was simply indescribable? That the late night walk out of a valley by night after a sun-filled day on glacier and rock should be recorded on the page with a date and year? Or that the snow was softer and deeper the farther we plunged down the thousand foot gulley? I have experienced interest rereading those pages of notes written on a granite ledge or in a tent under the light of headlamp with wind and snow raging outside. But who was this person? I find myself asking as I am cleaning out the attic of the carriage barn and reading a few pages from the assorted journals among the yellowing papers and notebooks.

But what about blogs? What does one do with page after page of electronically stored characters on just about anything? Why do people keep blogs? Why do people read them? I did something new this morning to begin answering these questions: I “surfed the net.” As someone who spent most of his youth on a surfboard I still struggle with this metaphor, and yet I did find all kinds of ephemera (like what I am writing here) that has some degree of passing interest. There are people blogging about blogging, too. There are lists of dos and do nots for aspiring bloggers. And there are blogs about anything you can imagine. From what I can tell, people blog for many reasons—self-expression, advocacy, boredom, self-justification, compulsion, passion, trying to be funny or serious, and so on.

In fact, a few of the people blogging do seem as if they are enjoying themselves. Perhaps the impulse to blog is like the impulse to run: it feels good to exercise–pleasure–and it is good for the organism–health. Still, the real difference between a journal and blog is that other people are free to read what you write. So the ego and superego may be at work here as well. But the other question, why people read blogs, interests me. I discovered the other day, much to my surprise actually, that people read my blog. What happens, as far as I can tell, is people are looking for something and they end up at my blog. So, for example, one person typed in “Living in Pune” and she ended up at my blog. Reading blogs, to be honest, holds little interest for me. Though my friend Lorianne has convinced me, through her blogging,  that words and images define or capture something about a place, and the experience in that place, well worth saying. I have a growing sense, too, that blogs on particular subjects can be very useful for people with common interests and concerns to share information or thoughts.

I’ve been writing on this blog for a couple of months now. The idea was to share my experiences in India with family and friends. So I asked for advice from my friend Lorianne, a person with a gift for combining words and images and a remarkable tolerance for the joys and hardships of writing. I had just taught a course on the science and literature of plants, too. I was reading Darwin and Thoreau’s journals, refamiliarizing myself with Leslie Claire Walker’s nature journaling ideas as I began keeping a field journal, and surely feeling some nostalgia for my own attempts to catalogue wildflowers long ago in the Sierra. Once I began writing blog entries, I realized that sharing my experiences in India with family and friends was leading somewhere else. I was more engaged with India and, in the process of writing, was coming to discover more about where I was. Through writing I am finding out all sorts of things about what is around me. I am thinking about what I was noticing. And I am considering how I might understand, and share, my impressions.

Some day I hope Menand, or a cultural critic with his gift for analysis, will linger over the new phenomenon of the blog as well as the increasingly common practice of blogging.

 

Reading India

Whether I spend my mornings at work on my sabbatical project, or editorial work, afternoons have been consumed with reading about India. This week I’m completing what I began on our trip north: my colleague Brinda Charry’s most recent novel, Naked in the Wind, Rustom Bharucha’s Rajasthan, An Oral History: Conversations with Komal Kothari, and Ramachandra Guha’s How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in India and the United States.

Years ago, in graduate school, I read Guha’s “Radical Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation; A Third World Critique.” First published in the journal Environmental Ethics, Guha’s argument emerged from his experiences in the US with the deep ecology movement. As Guha tells it, during the 1970s he heard in the rhetoric of his students at Yale the same kind of oppositional (and reductive) thinking of the leftists he had left behind in Calcutta. His polemic, that the deep ecology movement was an elaboration of the American wilderness movement and, more controversially, that other cultures expressed environmentalism differently, offers much for anyone interested in the ideology of American environmentalism.

I was reminded of Guha’s essay this week as I read his reflections on his 1989 essay in his most recent book, How Much Should a Person Consume? In the introductory chapter, “History sans Chauvinism,” Guha rehearses the various disciplinary and cultural chauvinisms (humanistic, ecological, economic) that claim, essentially, that environmentalism only emerges once a society becomes fully industrialized. His perspective highlights the parochial nationalism that underlies the environmental historian Roderick Nash’s landmark book Wilderness and the American Mind, as well as historical assumptions attributed to the thesis of Lynn White, Jr., in his 1967 “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.”

My initial response to Guha in the early 1990s was surely sympathetic, as I too become impatient with the oppositional dogma of environmentalism. Today, as I work through Gadgil and Guha’s This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India (1992), Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India (1995), and How Much Should a Person Consume? (2006) I am coming to realize how my time in India will make a difference in my thinking about environmental literature and history. My presentations here on John Muir had focused on not only on how his preservationist ideals had made possible something significant in the US, but also on how difficult it is to escape the shortcomings of his arguments about the preservation of land. These shortcomings were delightful to explore with an audience of intellectuals doing work that involves the long and complicated ecological history in India chronicled by Gadril and Guha.

All of this, I am seeing, is a part of coming to know a place, as well as preparing to return to New England, the place I call home.