Wild within

Today is my late brother Scot’s birthday, and as I usually do on this day I went for a long walk.

In past years I’ve taken these walks in remote wilderness areas. But unavoidable commitments made that impossible this year, so I went instead to the Biltmore Estate, which is closer and has several long trails that, if not through wild places, at least give the illusion.

As I drove onto the estate, I thought Scot would have rolled his eyes. He’d have thought a walk there overly tame. Scot sought out wild places in life, which is the reason I usually do for walks in his honor.

The schism between where I walked today and where I think Scot would have liked me to walk got me thinking about the divide, imaginary or otherwise, between wild and tame, outside and inside, natural and domestic.

It is more difficult to define these differences than I thought.

The Biltmore Estate was landscaped by Frederick Law Olmstead, who laid out Central Park in New York City and other famous and highly cultivated places. He had a knack for making a managed parkland seem like a wilderness, at least after a hundred years of growth and grooming.

The long approach road made me feel like I was driving through a wilderness: huge trees, streams, waterfalls, stone outcroppings, ferns, bracken. The road twisted back and forth like a mountain trail.

I noticed however that the forest beside the road displayed not just itself, for I could see and enjoy it plainly, but was also trimmed and tended so that it revealed the forest twenty and more yards beyond.

The near forest was in fact a parkland, there not just for itself but also to suggest the forest beyond. It was open, cleared of understory. Beautiful itself, it nevertheless revealed the darker more natural forest beyond.

In this way the Olmstead forest was both itself and something else, a park and a forest, a collection of carefully placed trees and shrubs designed to suggest a virgin wildnerness, but also a window, a shaded framework there to show off the darker, gloomier, seemingly more dangerous and distant landscape.

Thus, at once, these woods revealed but also distanced.

I suppose the Olmstead forest is a buffer, a sort of liminal space, neither entirely domestic, for the trees and ferns do suggest wild nature, nor entirely wild, for they are so obviously cleared and managed.

The staged forest reminds me of a museum diorama, the elements of which are carefully positioned to suggest natural profusion without hiding anything.

In some ways, the juxtaposition between park and forest at the Biltmore replicates within the estate the relation between the estate - an elaborate artifice made to seem like nature - and the great Pisgah National Forest just beyond the estate’s boundaries.

Indeed, it is in Middle Prong and Shining Rock Wilderness areas within the Pisgah Forest where I have usually gone to walk on Scot’s birthday.

The relation between park and forest at Biltmore got me thinking on my walk about our family’s interest in wilderness in the first place. It began for us children on walks led by our parents through farm forests and meadows. These were Sunday afternoon affairs along dirt roads and well-beaten paths, across dairy fences and pasture brooks.

Thinking back, those walks were through an agrarian nature, hardly wild. And yet to us kids, they were wildness itself. I remember imagining us as Indians and Explorers trekking through remote territories, hunting bison and white-tailed deer, wary of ambush at every step.

So the farm fields of youth, like the manicured forests beside the Biltmore approach road, opened us up to wild places, planted an interest in remote nature even as it was more a wood lot beside the pasture the other side of a hill from the barn.

The farm forest was wilderness to two young boys, and wilderness itself became an idyll for the grown boys. And now that wilderness, for me, was replaced for a day by the Biltmore woods, for they reminded me of remoter places, at least for the little while as I walked and remembered my brother.

The domestic forest was transposed into the wild forest, then transposed today into a domestic forest. Today’s walk wasn’t so wild. Parts of it were within ear shot of the interstate. Parts were within sight of the Biltmore mansion, a castle of grace and overindulgence. Other parts, however, took me past trees three- and four-feet in diameter, tall and dark and carpeted below with thick moss and lush bracken.

Here and there I emerged into a meadow buzzing with the playing-card-in-the-spokes sound of grasshoppers and dragon flies.

The estate evoked the wild, at least for a couple of hours, much the way the farms of my youth evoked the American frontier. I thought at several moments along the way that they were not so neatly divided from one another: each participates in the other. Even Middle Prong Wilderness is a wilderness by definition, by some national decree, and in that way it too is domesticated.

Folklorist: Space Not Place

On some mornings, the dog and I walk to feel ourselves move.

Well, I don’t know about the dog. I suspect it’s true for her. Sometimes she just walks. Doesn’t bother to sniff.

When I walk to walk, as I did this morning, I allow myself to enroll in the pace of the march, to go forward, and in that way to become entranced by the rhythm of walking, like one of those dancers on the desert. He sang until he lost his mind, or found it.

I suppose sometimes I walk to lose my mind. Or find it.

That’s crazy talk, I know. But walking through space, along streets and lanes, country paths, without aim or destination, is a way of relating to place by annihilating place.

It’s Zen. The place of no-place. Walking for movement, for being.

Movement in space without sense of place. Presumably I’m passing through places. But places themselves require attention, demarcation, here not there. Movement without this sort of attention is different.

A teacher once told me that “awareness” was not the same as “perception.”

That lesson confused me. I’d thought the two words synonyms. I thought that I was cultivating awareness, awakeness, by paying attention to my perceptions: what the eyes saw, the ears heard, the nose detected, the soles of my feet felt.

I thought that these perceptions pulled me into the present. But they also managed to draw me into place and away from space.

I’ve pondered what the teacher said for years. I’m still unsure. But I’ve come to think awareness when sitting is analogous to the trance "awareness" I experience during certain forms of walking.

Space itself becomes the focus rather than the places along the way.

“Place,” like “perception,” involves separation, a pulling something apart from the whole, distinguishing this from that.

Zen on the other hand seems to invite simple awareness of undivided being.

Every perception, every place, involves foregrounding and thus backgrounding. These are conceptual activities, a sort of analysis, requiring cognitive steps, priorities, temporal desires, laser focus.

Sitting, or walking oneself into a trance, involves something more global, awareness of all these things at once without preference, without picking and choosing.

These anyway were the musings of an old man on his return with the dog to the coffee pot this morning.

Kenneth Neal Wood 1933 - 2013

A person is a sort of place. In fact, a person may be a truer, more abiding place than any geographic location.

I have not relied on my father and mother for shelter in nearly forty years. But they have been that deep safe harbor. Even when I was far away, I knew that if I had to I could set a course and find shelter, strength, love.

That harbor lost its tall lighthouse last Saturday. We are all now at sea.

From his obituary: 

Kenneth Neal Wood spent his life teaching himself and others to seek out and pay attention to experience. He was a farm boy who grew up to be a minister, then turned to education before becoming director of experiential learning at Davidson College. In his last years he was a gardener and abiding friend of nature. He died Saturday. He was eighty years old.

The cause of death was amyloidosis, a rare disease involving the buildup of amyloid proteins in organ tissues, particularly the heart and digestive system, eventually causing their failure. He had been an exceptionally healthy and robust man. But for the disease, his family and friends had expected him to live another decade or more.

He was a quiet giant. He stood six feet four inches tall, all of it broad and muscled. He grew up milking cows and baling hay, hunting and fishing on days off. Once, hunting for meat on a distant relative’s ranch in Wyoming, he shot and killed a bull elk with a royal rack two inches off the Boone & Crockett record. Yet he gave up hunting altogether when his young children could not bear the carnage of the rabbits and pheasants he brought home for dinner.

He was a minister who eventually left the church because he felt it had failed to be the liberating institution it promised to be. As a minister he worked in the trenches of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements of the 1960s. He spent much of his professional life with young people encouraging forms of education that freed them to think for themselves.

After high school and before college, he and a friend spent a year driving around the American West in a Model A Ford, working on ranches and farms. For the rest of his life he would urge others to pursue their own adventures and learn firsthand from them.

In one of his early sermons as a Presbyterian minister, he celebrated the value of adventure.

“Late Wednesday afternoon,” he wrote in 1963, “I parked the car in front of the manse, stepped out, and was greeted by the excited little voice of my two-and-a-half year old daughter: ‘Hi Daddy, look where I am!’

“The voice was coming from an unfamiliar location, high up somewhere. I looked in all the upstairs windows, and then at the same instant the panic button was pressed. I spotted her fully twenty feet up a tree in the front of our house. A young eaglet on its first flight out of the nest couldn’t have been more proud and thrilled and excited than my little daughter beaming down at me from her perch....

“Pity the adult that cannot look upon a child straining to reach a perch far above what the adult world considers safe and not envy the reckless courage and the sense of victory that belongs to the young climber.... Pity the adult without an inner tree to climb.”

Ken Wood participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and two years later was arrested with others, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, on the Selma-to-Montgomery March. He organized his church in Orchard Park, New York, to work against inequality. He and other community leaders convinced Saul Alinsky to bring his Industrial Areas Foundation to organize Buffalo’s impoverished eastside.

Once one of his sons was told by a stranger in a pickup to go get his father and tell him there was a man outside who was going to “kick his ass.” When the son reported this news, his father assumed it was someone upset with his Christian politics.

Turned out it was a long-absent favorite cousin pulling everyone’s leg.

Ken Wood was born in 1933 in Buffalo, N.Y., and grew up on farms at Evans Center and Sturgeon Point, on or near the shores of Lake Erie. After the year traveling out West, he studied history and psychology at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa. He spent summers earning money for college at farm and construction jobs, even stints on freight boats on the Great Lakes.

At Westminster he met Sandra Jean Colman, who became his wife, love, and life-long companion.

He studied theology and counseling at Princeton Theological Seminary and was ordained in the Presbyterian Church. In 1959 he became founding pastor of Northway United Presbyterian Church in Williamsport, Pa., and then in 1964 an associate pastor at United Presbyterian Church in Orchard Park, N.Y. There he developed PACT, or Park Action, a citizen’s organization for racial justice.

In 1968 he became director of the Lansing Area United Ministries, where he continued work on race and justice issues. These led him from church to school interventions. Throughout this period he worked with school dropouts and alienated teens. He helped create the People’s Learning Center. In 1971 he joined the Youth Development Corporation in Lansing. The following year he became a fellow with the National Program for Educational Leadership at Ohio State University.

Much of his professional life had been focused on youth, cultivating in them capacities for freedom, critical thinking, and learning from experience. In 1974 he became director of experiential learning at Davidson College, where he counseled students about lives and work they envisioned for themselves and helped them gain real-world experiences to explore their dreams and build competencies.

During his time at Davidson he volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. In part because of that work he won the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award at Davidson College. He and Sauni gutted and renovated the family’s old house on Main Street, where they continued to live.

Wood retired from Davidson in 1995, and spent his remaining years tending bees in his backyard, negotiating garden rights with woodchucks and deer, tramping Western North Carolina mountains in search of old-growth forests, reading, listening to music, attending to birds, visiting with family. He could watch a spider build its web for an entire morning and consider it time well spent.

Asked about high points of his life, he remembered volunteering with Sauni at state and national parks, climbing snowy mountains, hitchhiking in Newfoundland and going out to sea with its fishermen. He remembered adventures, abroad and at home.

He was preceded in death by parents, Christian Witmer Wood and Bessie Emily Wertman Wood; sister Janice Wood Tonder; and son Scot Kenneth Wood.

He is survived by his wife of fifty-eight years, Sandra; children, John Colman Wood and wife, Carol Young Wood, of Asheville, N.C.; Melinda Wood and husband, Irvin Wardlow, and daughter, Rosa, of Decatur, Ga.; Peter Neal Wood and wife, Patricia Sierra, and sons, Scot Salomon and Esteban Nathaniel, of Coral Gables, Fla. He is also survived by sister, Nancy Wood Mackenburg and partner Ron Smalt of Orchard Park, N.Y.; brother-in-law, sister Jan’s husband, Robert Tonder of McCaysville, Ga.; brothers-in-law, wife Sauni’s brothers, George Colman of Oaxaca, Mexico; Samuel Colman of Binghamton, N.Y.; Robert Colman of Montpelier, Vt.; and David Colman of Middlebury, Vt.; along with many loving nieces and nephews.

“Education,” he once wrote, “...should function to free people and thus enable us to act toward the solution of our personal and corporate problems. At times I am discouraged by the complexity and intractability of the problems. But I find within myself, my family, and in youth, abundant cause to hope and to work for both a better present and a better future.”

Ken Wood spent his life climbing such trees.

A celebration of Ken Wood’s life will be 2 p.m. Saturday, January 11, at the Davidson, N.C., Friends Meetinghouse on South Street.

Zen Anthropology

I teach a class called “Zen Anthropology.” It’s a methods class. Zen methods? Meta-methods, actually.

The class is about attitudes more than techniques. In it we ponder how to learn deeply from experience.

What cultural anthropologists do is ethnography. What ethnographers do, at least at the start, is fieldwork. Ethnographers carry out fieldwork among communities of people and then write up what we’ve learned.

The problem is that when we teach methods, we emphasize techniques – participant observation, interviewing, systematic observation, discourse analysis. But we seldom teach students about cultivating proper field attitudes, frames of mind, points of view.

Ethnographic knowledge is channeled through an ethnographer’s mind. So why don’t we talk about mind in our classes? How does one become open to others? How do we cultivate the capacity to notice what others are doing? How do we become mindful of ways our minds (and cultural sensitivities) color understandings of others?

These are matters of subjectivity that, as a discipline, we tend to leave up to the field worker or pretend will be eliminated by proper methods, or techniques.

I teach Zen anthropology because Zen has been around a long time and has over millennia developed texts, practices, teachings to help students become aware of their own minds and the minds of others.

Zen sometimes strikes my students as negative, nihilistic: Zen talk is full of expressions like “no self” or “no mind.” It is a Zen way of talking that Americans struggle with. But it is not so negative as people imagine.

I recently re-read Donald Barthelme’s essay “Not-Knowing,” in which he writes positively about the need in any art not to know, at least at the outset, where the work is going.

“The not-knowing,” he wrote, “is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.”

The ethnographer is not, at least at first blush, an artist. The ethnographer does not, should not, make things up in the way a fiction writer, such as Barthelme, makes things up.

On the other hand, the ethnographer must set aside some of her or his own cultural dispositions if she or he is to make sense of the cultural dispositions of others. In that sense, the ethnographer too must “not know.”

This is where Barthelme’s attitude of not-knowing would come in handy for an ethnographer doing field work, and where Zen has an entire canon to help students cultivate the capacity.

Hence, Zen anthropology.

This morning I was thinking about how to talk to students about “no-self” in a way that helped them understand the notion without simply dismissing it as crazy or nihilistic. The self is one of the great western certainties. How can these Zen masters talk about no-self?

It occurred to me that “not-knowing,” at least at the start of a project, may be intuitively comprehensible to my students in ways that “no-self” is not.

They know what it means not to know. They can imagine the value of suspending judgment. Perhaps this was a way to get at the meaning of no-mind, and thus, no-self.

Hence a formula: No-self : Self :: Not-knowing : Knowing, or put another way: no-self is to self as not-knowing is to knowing.

The attitude of “not-knowing” might really be a matter of openness, or receptivity. It doesn’t mean idiocy. It doesn’t mean a person must be a vacuum. Rather it means that for a time a person suspends a knowing attitude in favor of a not-knowing one, in which the person might discover something she didn’t already know.

Not-knowing may in fact be necessary if one is ever to learn something outside one’s own world view.

Barthelme’s “not-knowing” does not mean the writer gives up knowing altogether, just that for the project at hand one becomes open to other possibilities. One may know and not-know at once. We can imagine that. We can see how a painter or short story writer could set out on a project not knowing where it will end up, all the while knowing who she is, where she comes from, and where she’s got to be tomorrow.

Similarly, a person could adopt an attitude of no-self. It may in fact be the same sort of thing as not-knowing.

No-self does not have to mean no self. One can be self and no-self at the same time. It is not negative or positive. It simply is the case that all of us are just that, whether we think it or not: self and no-self.

We each have a body, a name, an identity, a set of memories, desires, hopes, frustrations, and so on. Yet each of us is related to everything else, dependent on an environment, a set of social relations, infinite interactions with others. The idea of a separate self is, in the final analysis, a fiction.

Like not-knowing, no-self is a platform from which we may realize our connection to others, cultivate our openness to others, discover our empathy for others.

They are really the same: mind and body and other. That is what interactionist theory teaches us in anthropology and what Buddhist teachings point toward in Zen. The aim, whether we are anthropologists or Zenists, is to be open to and learn about the reality of ourselves and others through personal experience.

That is why I teach Zen anthropology.

This, of course, is only speculation.

A matter of interpretation

The poststructural stereotype of structuralism, or modernism, was that the latter presumed certainty and correctness, that it was the right way to know and interpret the world.

The reciprocal stereotype of postmodernism is any view is as good as another.

These are extremes, of course. Neither structuralism nor poststructuralism is or ever was monolithic. Both are more complex than their critics like to admit. Still, stereotypes linger and inform arguments.

William H. Gass, in a review of essays by the noted literary scholar M.H. Abrams (and Gass’s former professor), characterizes the poststructural critique of literary theory in just this way: anything goes.

“But suppose,” Gass writes, “as has been proposed by followers of Jacques Derrida, there is no right reading of the work, no correct sense for it. Out of a cage of calculations, suppose we are free to choose the pigeon we like best.”

Perhaps that is the way it goes in the literary world (though I doubt even there you get to pick your pigeons). But these arguments needn’t always retreat to the corners.

The poststructural turn grew out of (or was at least cognate with) anthropology’s idea of cultural relativity. This assertion is a matter of interpretation. But it makes sense historically.

Contact with other societies over the 19^th and 20^th centuries (coupled with misgivings about slavery and colonialism) eroded the West’s confidence that it had things right, had a privileged view of others, let alone humanity.

A gross extension of this uncertainty is there is no better view: one pigeon is as good as another.

But that’s a leap: it’s one thing to say the culture of my family has nothing privileged to say about your family, quite another to say that the culture of your family has no privileged platform from which to think about itself.

One family may eat food with silverware; another with hands. The fact that these practices are relative to respective families does not mean there is no right way to eat, just that their views about each other must be taken with a grain of salt.

This might smell like I’m saying that a culture critique may only be mounted from within. That may be so. But I’m not making that argument.

I’m suggesting that the challenge to modernism of cultural relativity was more specific than general: a European could not hope to understand an African from a European perspective alone.

That doesn’t mean any view goes, or that there is no basis from which to interpret and evaluate cultural forms (such as literary texts). It’s only to say that a person from one culture is likely to get another culture wrong if she relies on her own cultural resources alone. It does not deny the possibility that there are better and worse interpretations.

There is, in other words, a middle view between a) modern certainty and b) postmodern uncertainty.

One can make better or worse interpretations from premises, and perhaps complex and nuanced variations with other premises, and that a critical “post” modern perspective is not "anything goes" but that "it depends" on the premises, it depends on perspective. Each interpretation is a function of its location relative to what is being interpreted.

Derrida’s project was not to say anything goes. If that was all, why would he have bothered to say anything? His aim as I see it was to expose the reality of multiple possible interpretations, to open up the possibility of richer, more nuanced readings. This is something I think Gass would applaud.

Indeed, Gass once did in a great essay called “In terms of the toenail: fiction and the figures of life.” Here he spoke of the power of metaphor to model (and interpret) the world. Metaphors matter. Perspectives matter. Some metaphors work better than others. We make choices; our choices matter.

In the Jones family they eat with their hands, in the Smith family, with a fork. It’s not “anything goes.” It's a matter of tradition, presumption, culture, point of view. Pluralistic rather than relativistic.

The texture of things

As I get older

It is the texture

Of things that matters

The rub of wind

On my cheeks

The feel of a pencil

Between fingers

The tongue of bitter coffee

These once trivial

Facts I comprehend

While the politics

Of idealism

Theories of aspiration

Are inconsequential

As a recipe.

A matter of orientation

This morning, while I was sitting against the wall, a mosquito began to buzz my ears. I let it be, and it went away.

Then I heard it buzzing my coffee cup which rested on the desk nearby. The cup was warm from the coffee I’d just finished before starting my meditation. I suspect it was warmer than I, for I think it was the cup’s warmth that drew the mosquito away from my ears. I made this hypothesis quickly and returned my attention to the wall.

Then I corrected myself, for to ignore the mosquito and face the wall then was, in a sense, a failure to be present. The mosquito was here, resting on my cup, and I had not really observed it.

So I quietly lifted my reading glasses from beside the cup on the desk, put them on, and watched the mosquito. The mosquito landed on the outer wall of the cup, its front legs splayed out before it like the curved runnels of an old sleigh. Finding nothing to bite it hovered and landed again. For a few moments it probed the porcelain surface of the cup with its stiletto proboscis, and eventually finding no pore, lifted off. In a moment it was buzzing again around my ear.

The experience got me thinking afterwards about my habit of making quick assessments and moving on – I rarely really observe anything but glance, quickly “figure out” what is there, what is going on, and then turn my glance upon the next thing.

Of course, I prefer close observation, to stop myself and see – study  – what is there rather than to see briefly, noticing only what I expect.

Not that I observed the mosquito all that well. The room was dimly lit in the morning dark by a single bulb the other side of the desk. But I’m glad to have looked again at the mosquito, for I did notice that it wasn’t simply a little slit of gray wings resting on the side of the cup, but that it had the hunched head and shoulders of a microscopic stork and the front legs of a winter sleigh, and I wouldn't have noticed those features if I’d relied simply on memory, the prototype of a mosquito I had carried around in my head.

I read the following passage from Shunryu Suzuki. He was quoting the Zen master Tozan: “The blue mountain is the father of the white cloud. The white cloud is the son of the blue mountain. All day long they depend on each other without being dependent on each other. The white cloud is always the white cloud. The blue mountain is always the blue mountain.”

This passage reminded me of a poem by Dogen:

All my life false and real, right and wrong tangled.

Playing with the moon, ridiculing wind, listening to birds…

Many years wasted seeing the mountain covered with snow.

This winter I suddenly realize snow makes a mountain.

The Tozan quote helped me make new sense of the Dogen poem, the idea of both independence and dependence, that the mountain depends on the snow, just as the snow depends on the mountain, and that a snowy mountain is made by snow just as much as it is made by mountain.

I suppose the self is a parallel case – being utterly dependent on everything in its sphere (and all spheres beyond), and yet distinct, itself. The self is and is not. It is independent and dependent. It is distinct as a wave in water: we can point at a wave and understand its being in a sense separate from the water generally and yet also know that it is not separate from the water at all but part of it. Likewise, we can speak meaningfully of a self, and act accordingly. We do it all the time. We must do it or perish. Even so we are simply separate waves emerging for a time upon an ocean of water only to slip back into it eventually.

The contrasts between dependence and independence, mountain and cloud, snow and mountain, self and not-self serve to orient us. They are, like many of the oppositions we decorate our lives with, useful distinctions, good (albeit distracting) to think.

They are like the contrasting white and black keys on a piano. There is nothing in the color of the keys that is essential to the sounds they make. There is nothing about the contrast that is essential.

Except for one thing: the contrast, the difference – or rather the différance of Jacque Derrida – the contrast orients the player’s hands to the keyboard.

This matter of orientation is the key thing, and returning to the idea of the self, is the deciding difference: the idea of a separate self orients us vis-à-vis the rest, the not-self, but does not exist in itself any more than the contrasting keys of a keyboard exist in the sounds that they make. The idea of the self (as the “idea,” the contrast, the différance between the keys) is orientational, helps us make the next move.