Following on from Dougald’s last post, and the very useful additions of others beneath it, I’m going to add my own two penn’orth to our ongoing effort to create the beginnings of a Dark Mountain syllabus. We plan to get a list up on the site at some time in the next few months, and to keep adding to it as time goes on. Don’t worry, there are no exams. But there are a lot of cold, fresh streams of beauty and wisdom and cleverness and humour flowing down the side of the mountain. As we come across them we can decide whether to drink from them or dip our toes in or just keep on climbing.
Firstly, some poets. I’ve said enough about Robinson Jeffers here and elsewhere, so suffice it to say that his verse come close to being required reading. W S Merwin is another poet who I’ve spoken of here, whose work is warmer than Jeffers and perhaps more beautiful, if less uncompromising. These are two American poets approaching the same themes – our place in the world, the complexities of being human, the horrors we are capable of – from different directions. To complete an American poetic trilogy I would add the name of Mary Oliver, whose engagement with the world is as total as either of the two men. Oliver’s poems have very few humans in them, yet they reflect the best of what being human means.
I don’t know why American poets – like American environmentalists – have a larger vision and a deeper immersion in wildness than British ones. Perhaps the size and age of the country. Over here, Ted Hughes and R S Thomas come close to being Uncivilised at times, but there’s not a lot else to match them.
From poetry to novels, and another trilogy, this time of post-civilisational fiction. The post-apocalyptic novel is an old genre, which can be traced back at least as far as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, which was published in the 1820s. Much has been added to it since, and the most recent addition, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, is notable for the sparseness both of its writing and its landscape. McCarthy has always been a writer of empty landscapes and bleak visions and compromised, unhappy people doing the best they can. In The Road this vision is transposed into a future landscape where everything is dead but people. We never find out why (we have argued on this site about whether this is a vision of a climatically changed world) but it doesn’t matter. The why is almost irrelevant: its the consequences that matter.
The same is true of Russell Hoban’s classic Riddley Walker, which has been mentioned here by Gregory Norminton, whose post under Dougald’s last entry sums the book up brilliantly. I’m halfway through it at the moment; because it’s written in its own dialect, it’s not easy going, but for the same reason it sucks you in utterly.
As a wildcard, to make the numbers up to three, I would add in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. This is not an example of Uncivilised writing – almost the opposite. It is a well worked-through vision of what an over-civilised world, dedicated to pleasure, consumption and life in the bubble, could look like.
There is other fiction worth considering too. I would put The Plumed Serpent by D H Lawrence on any Uncivilised reading list: like much of Lawrence’s work it’s an attempt to see beyond, or perhaps beneath, the veneer of civilisation to the elemental forces beneath. A good few of Lawrence’s poems (’Snake’ is one of my faves) do the same. There are also short stories which take up our theme – E M Forster’s The Machine Stops is a brilliant allegory. The Machine is civilisation itself and when, one day, it suddenly stops, chaos reigns.
Speaking of chaos, anyone who has not read the weird, otherworldly short stories of H P Lovecraft is in for a treat. Horror, sci-fi … Lovecraft is hard to pin down in terms of genre, but his vision is deeply unsettling. The same themes occur again and again in his stories – the ancient terrors of the non-human world, and the Great Old Ones, pre-human beings who still slumber beneath the waves and will wake one day to consume us. The depths of Lovecraft’s work touch on dark things which the author himself probably only half-understood. Read them at night, by the sea.
Finally, some non-fiction. Thoreau’s Walden would be the obvious example of a book by a civilised man trying to get back in touch with the wilderness within and without, and reporting on what he finds. A similar theme is taken up by Jay Griffiths’ new book Wild, in which the author spends seven years exploring wilderness, both literal and figurative, all over the world, and recounts her finding in the kind of fizzing, barnstorming language she is known for. The list of great environmentalist non-fiction is long and growing, and we could talk about it all day (Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, for example, is another classic, and Barry Lopez is always worth reading). But this will do for now. As ever, please keep your suggestions coming.
I recently read any very much enjoyed Starhawk’s first novel The Fifth Sacred Thing.
My favourite recommendation would probably be Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men.
It was reading some of his short pieces, notably On Cultural Diversity, The Core, and Old Man in a New World that lead to me coming up with the name “United Diversity”
Dark Mountain: what a fascinating and worthy project!
You’ve mentioned Ted Hughes and RS Thomas, but one of the great English nature poets that you haven’t mentioned is Grayson Ellis. I run his official website, and as I have posted here, some of Grayson’s very early work has striking resonances with your myth-creation project. It’s wonderful how these themes and ideas echo down the generations. Keep up the good work!
Warmest regards
Janice Moor
The first section – 30 pages or so – of ‘After London – Or Wild England’ by Richard Jefferies deserves a place in the Uncivilised Library. Find it at http://www.amazon.co.uk/After-London-England-Worlds-Classics/dp/0192812661 or you can get it through Abe I believe.
A 19th century novel, it describes in painstaking (but compelling) detail how post-civilisation England is reclaimed by nature over a number of decades following an unspecified catastrophe in which much of the human population is wiped out. There are premonitions of climate change too, with the sea level rising in some places and falling in others, while flooding has created a giant lake in the south-centre of the country. Domesticated animals roam the country, feudal and nomadic systems return and the ancient urban centres are shunned for the toxic fumes that rise from the marshes they have become. It’s brilliantly imagined and quite convincing. The second section is a novel set in this world and pretty mediocre, but section 1 is really startling, thought-provoking and evocative and should join the syllabus.
Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings
by John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming.
http://tinyurl.com/lba9au
An article about John Seed
http://tinyurl.com/no3pwg
ATTITUDES FOR SURVIVAL: Can Doom Prophesy Inhibit Change? http://psyberspace.com.au/articles/attitudes.htm
This is an article I wrote in 1977 about fear and attitude change. It has some relevance to the ‘rabbit-in-the-headlights’ position occupied by masses of people in response to climate change and similar issues.
Dave Straton
I agree about Riddley Walker: it’s first book I thought of when I came to this site. Because it’s set out of our time and in a different dialect, somehow it seems to make you see more clearly what we actually are. It’s a masterpiece. I think about it often.
The other novel that springs to mind is William Golding’s The Inheritors, which comes to the human story from the other end, as it were. It follows one of the last tribes of neanderthals before they are wiped out by the ‘progress’ of the time. What makes it special for me is the imagination with which it is told. Like Hoban, Golding gets the language just right.
I hadn’t thought before how similar those two books are.
There seems to be a nervousness in our world about the idea of taking a step backwards… ‘backwards’ is always wrong… but this word needs to be reconsidered and re-understood.
I’m glad that Gavin has mentioned Richard Jefferies: he’s largely forgotten nowadays (so far as I can tell) but AFTER LONDON is certainly worth including on any Dark Mountain reading list. Jefferies himself was an interesting figure, in revolt against the grimy certainties of C19th industrialism. I’ve only browsed in libraries through some of his books and I don’t think he was much of a novelist; but he certainly belongs to a dissenting tradition against the dark satanic mills, and some of our current ‘nature writers’ (horrible term) acknowledge a debt to his close observations of the natural world.
Another book worth considering is ‘The Peregrine’ by J.A. Baker: a sustained work of extra-human empathy – if you see what I mean – in which the author obsessively tracks a peregrine and attempts to see the world as the bird might. This a poor description of a book which is packed with some of the most textured and nuanced descriptive writing I’ve ever encountered. It is a strange work, in some ways quite alienating (Baker, as he identifies with an inherently ‘monomaniacal’ predator, seems increasingly disgusted by his own humanity), and I can’t improve on Robert Macfarlane’s description of it here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/may/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview35
Kenneth White (a Scottish-born poet living and working in France)has a lot to say about moving beyond ‘civilisation’ and founded the Institute of Geo-poetics in which to say it. Worth checking out what you can find in English.
Gary Snyder, American poet and anthropologist, is a must.
Annie Dillard, ‘Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek’ is a classic, though perhaps dated now. Good writing, though.
Jamie Whittle’s White River is very poorly written, but brings together an enormous range of experience and thinking.
I was going to put in a word for After London; and I see two folks have already beaten me to it. I enjoyed the longer second part; but the much better first part was quite haunting.
I’m just reading Aldous Huxley’s “Ape and Essence” a screenplay written in a novel, it is THE blueprint to a Dark Mountain film.
In fact most of Huxley’s novels have uncivilised rants in them, no doubt down to the influence DH Lawrence had on him, though not to underestimate his own intelligence. Quite a natural conclusion when one thinks about it.
Great website. I highly recommend “The Road Washes Out in Spring”, a memoir by the poet Baron Wormser. Wormser and his life raised two children in the Maine woods without electricity or indoor plumbing. He describes a life filled with meaning, grace, and an awareness of place, not one cramped by a minimalist lifestyle. A beautifully written account showing that a much simpler lifestyle might not be as constrained as some might imagine it to be. Thoreau would have like this book.
John Gray has written a review of ‘Uncivilisation: the Dark Mountain Manifesto’ in the New Statesman, 10th Sept 2009.
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/09/civilisation-planet-authors
I am reading Thoreau’s Walden at the moment but I am afraid I find it vastly overworked with tedious discussions about civilisation. The freshness of his life in nature rarely shines through on the pages.
I would recommend Olga Kharitidi’s Entering the Circle and The Master of Lucid Dreams. Her books are not about civilisation and uncivilisation but about trauma, but the two are intertwined and parts of a whole. She also keeps a very interesting log on http://www.cliffhousepublications.com .
Very much agree with comments about DH Lawrence and EM Forster.
Then there is LP Hartley, writing around the same time, whose ‘The Go Between’ paints the evocative suffocation of inbred aristocratic families living a life of sactuary amongst their grand estates. And this is how it still is today, generally speaking – which raises a significant point: with something like fifty percent of private land in their hands .. what might it take to shift this closseted perspective and for them to start opening up their fields for prospective agrarians?
W.S. Merwin less uncompromising than Jeffers? How about his poem”One of the Laws” which begins “So it cannot be done to live/without being the cause of death?”
Bukowski anyone? He had a lot to say about the nonsense of civilisation. To deal with it he had to go to the pub all the time. When he couldn’t afford that, he’d lie on his bed for days and do nothing. Sounds like a damned fine prescription to me x
The Machine Stops was read for ‘O’ level back in ‘74 and it made a big impact on me then and I’ve never forgotten it. Amazingly I’ve spoken to other people who’ve read quite a bit of Forster and never heard of it so really good to see it recognised here.