The Apocrypha of the Wild
Exploring the Sublime in Lake Clark National Park
Image Gallery • Lake Clark National Park
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•The Apocrypha of the Wild
Last light on Lower Twin Lake • Lake Clark National Park
Part Three: The Apocrypha of the Wild
I am tempted to think that every place has once been under water. Visit the Grand Canyon and interpretive signs will explain how, as difficult as it is to believe, the land on which you are standing was once at the bottom of the ocean. Signs on some of the highest mountain passes in Wyoming attest to their previously inundated state. Yosemite, Nevada's desert plateau, the Badlands, even the Sahara desert—the driest of the dry—have spent significant portions of their histories as home to the fishes. On reflection you begin to wonder why the park service hasn't spent a little more time searching for a spot to erect a sign indicating a region that has never once been the floor of some ancient sea; it would seem a singular distinction. Although it is quite certain that the land over which I am hiking between Turquoise and Lower Twin Lakes was once under ice, I can't say if it was ever an ocean floor. There are no signs. In the entire four million acres that make up Lake Clark National Park I doubt there are any interpretive signs once you leave the little visitor center in Port Alsworth.
Throughout the national park system, most of the signs you see will fall into the Visitor Information System (VIS) category. This is part of the Park Service's goal to present our public lands in a unified, easily understood way that is immediately identifiable as belonging to a larger framework—and "experience a National Park without confusion and conflict." According to the NPS sign standards manual they allow "content to be presented in discrete, easily comprehended 'eyefuls' consistent with how park visitors are most willing to receive information." The design standards essentially take an enormous and diverse collection of land and fit it into a brand. I don't want to be too critical of the interpretive efforts made by the National Park Service, they are fascinating and useful, but they also leave the impression that the path toward appreciating the land begins and ends with natural history and science. This should come as no surprise since the park service's mission is based on preservation and resource management and the parks hire managers with backgrounds in various scientific disciplines. For the artist, however, science is often less than fruitful ground and to spend a few days walking through an uninterpreted wilderness, to escape the positivistic framework that dominates not only the Park Service but also our entire culture is a gift to one's imagination. So much of our daily lives is dominated by mediated experience—newspapers, television, maps, traffic signals, interpretive signs—that we rarely confront anything without either implicitly or explicitly receiving a framework through which to interpret it. In a capitalist society most of our actions fit into an economic structure which manipulates our fears and desires. We go on vacation to escape and enter another mediated environment. Even when we escape to nature we often find ourselves in a mediated experience presented to us in terms of humanity's struggle to control and overcome nature—idyllic farmed land, adventure escapes where we climb mountains and race down rivers, or places presented as rational conservation efforts (such as our parks) where science gives us the resources to administer nature. The true wilderness experience, where the landscape is left unmediated and you are alone with your own thoughts to reflect from neutral ground, is rare and becoming more rare every day.
To say this is truly an unmediated experience is not quite accurate. Although there are no signs or trails I have brought most of my cultural baggage with me and I am interpreting this wilderness through bits of history, science, and art I have picked up over the years. Maybe self-mediated is a better term to describe the experience of being here alone. After a few days of travel, letting my mind wander over the mountains, streams, and glaciers, looking at the huge and the small, the interplay between rock, water, and biology my imagination begins to fill the gaps in my understanding of this land. One unexpected result is that I begin to understand animism as a natural reaction to being alone in the wilderness. If the modern media has improved any one of our mental skills it has been our ability to block things out. We are constantly bombarded with stimuli competing for our attention and we react not by paying attention to everything, but by filtering out as much as we can. It is no surprise then that you don't notice that objects can enliven a part of your consciousness—you drop by Starbucks and simply eat a madeleine, you don't wait Proust-like for it to awaken something in you. Take all these images away and replace them with a few quiet, natural objects, add a little fear to sharpen your observation and suddenly everything seems to vibrate with life. The inanimate takes on a meaning beyond its mineral composition, the birds become individuals observing you rather than two-dimensional representatives from a field guide fitting perfectly into a Linnaean taxonomy. This is the source of myth and, I believe, art and it makes me crave a glimpse of this place through fresh eyes without the cultural symbolism I brought with me. If we follow Kant, this sounds a little like seeing the world in its uninterpreted state—the noumenal world, the thing-in-itself—which he says is not only impossible, but makes no sense. We can't experience the world without experiencing it through conceptual structures. We can, however, imagine an entity who does and we can measure ourselves against its image. For this we turn away from Kant's world of transcendental deduction to consider the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the angels who inhabit his Duino Elegies.
This landscape is nothing like the Adriatic, although the bora sweeping down the coastal plains of Italy must have felt the same on Rilke's face as the cold gusts coming off the nearby glaciers. As I look out over the tundra I can't help thinking of Rilke standing on the steep cliffs outside the deserted Duino castle overlooking the Gulf of Treiste, feeling the profound isolation, when the question that opens the Elegies entered his mind: who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders? I could ask the same question here and would receive the same answer Rilke eventually arrives at: nobody. Rilke's angels bear little resemblance to the traditional image; they are neither cherubs from a Raphael painting nor mighty heroes like Milton's archangels. According to the poet, "The angel of the Elegies is that Being who stands for the recognition in the Invisible of a higher degree of reality" and "is the creature in whom that transformation of the visible into the invisible we are performing already appears complete." The "transformation of the visible into the invisible," taking the everyday world and breathing new meaning into it is the poet's work and Rilke expresses a deep envy for the angel's viewpoint. The angel experiences the world directly, has an immediate connection, has what the poet always strives for and can never attain because humans are trapped with their reason and concepts in the interpreted world [gedeuteten Welt]—a world in which Rilke feels we are never really comfortable. Throughout the elegies Rilke asks what our reaction to his angel would be, what would we feel and think standing face to face with this being that experiences the disassociated world? Rilke uses the German schrecklich; a word that is often translated as awesome or terrifying, but could as easily be translated as sublime in the Kantian sense. The Angels have many elements of the sublime: the crushing smallness and brevity we feel in their presence (And even if one of them should suddenly press me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence), the affinity between the beautiful and the sublime, (Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror we are still just able to bear) and a sense of indifferent power (We adore it so because it serenely disdains to destroy us). At the same time they offer a model for our aspirations in both art and life. If we could experience the ordinary in the way we experience the beautiful and the sublime, we might approach the viewpoint of the angels. This is an attractive idea for a poet or artist intent on seeing with his own eyes and suggests that what Rilke's angels could teach us we might also learn from the sublime in nature.
The example of Rilke's epiphany at Duino illustrates an alternative reaction to the landscape. It does not meet the National Park Service's ideal "without confusion and conflict." Nor is it based on science or logic, nor the mastery or shepherding nature, nor even understanding nature in any rational way. It is a poet allowing the land to infect his imagination and interact with his cultural framework and his personal symbolism yielding a very rich interpretation. Most importantly, the interpretation is not a received one, it escapes mediated experience. Rilke addresses the landscape as directly as he can, or more correctly he images a being who experiences the world directly and then explores the possibilities of approaching this state. Instead of projecting inner conceptual structures on the world, he turns the process inside out and appropriates the external world into his conceptual structure. Rilke's says it well in his notebooks, "This world, regarded no longer from the human point of view, but as it within the angel, is perhaps my real task, one, at any rate, in which all my previous attempts would converge."
Next: The Diaspora of the Flesh
©2005 Mark Meyer