The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  How tenacious.

  Some may have already spread via Inuit tribes who share a cultural history with tribes of Eurasia, over in Siberia.

  Oh.

  But does all that make them any less potent?

  I guess we all came from somewhere.

  I felt the pulse of the whole great herd of caribou, calf mothers and babies and, yes, some males as well, stood out on the tundra making Dali-shadows in the molten bask of the sun. And I knew that it did not have to be a particular reindeer guarding me like an angel and it did not have to talk to me and tell me my future because there is enough magic in seeing a whole herd of anything just being, just being apart and for themselves.

  This is it, the point of complexity and otherness and the thing that I needed to take away and the thing worth saving and the reason to not bugger off to Mars and the reason Damon should have stayed alive. I think I am ready to talk to Damon now. I think I have decided what I need to say.

  Damon, I have been unravelling, unravelling, to try to get to where you were at, and I came undone, I was scared I might go all the way too and end as a tangled mess of unravelling. I followed your philosophy all the way to its genesis, like the deduction that led to the atom bomb. Of this unravelling and of the atom bomb you would say let it happen, let it all unravel and go up in nuclear flames, it’s sad but it’s for the best, the world is better off without us. But I have come so far. I thought there must be a reason to save something of it if I can. To let it all go is to lose too much. And I found a reason. Because it can all be written differently, we can change the direction of the story.

  Nothing is lost with no one there to miss it, you said that.

  Stay with me. The complexity of our symbols distinguishes us from all the other creatures (as it stands right now) and you think that from the symbols emanates the bad thing, the thing that propels us towards catastrophe. And perhaps it does right now, but I do not think it is inherent in the symbols. Yes, our language is dichotomising, but for now it is the only one we have to work with. The Enlightenment taxonomers wanted to posses and to control the natural world and they sewed their signatures into the names. Yes, as with the Earthrise photo we can lose the directness of the thing to symbolism, but shared meaning is potent too. We need our symbols so that we can feel the love of sad beauty. If the mountain had no symbolic meaning it would just be a chunk of rock. If I did not know the difference between a kestrel and a buzzard it would be easier to forget them both. Naming can be reverence and not possession.

  Narratives are important. Narratives can be dangerous. The trick is to be critical, to always be trying to choose the right and good one. To be critical of your view from what body, to what limit. There would be no love of sad beauty without us. There would not be anything worth dying for without beauty.

  Well, there might be some love of sad beauty without us but not felt by anything potent and influential enough to do anything about it apart from feel sad and in love. For example, the pack rat collects objects that interest it and it stores them all in its midden. Middens are considered by palaeo-ecologists to be reliable time capsules of natural life of millennia ago. And the bowerbird, when it builds a nest, gives its nest a garden and garden ornaments made from beetles’ wings and orchids and things. It might be to attract a mate but the bowerbird’s beautiful objects have to exist otherwise the world would be too easy to let go of. What do bowerbirds and pack rats mean by their collecting? Are these creatures saying ‘I too am in the appreciation of beauty club’ and at the base of it they are just as scared of being alone as the rest of us?

  We need to realise that our categories are illusions, but we also need to be able to name the tiny things, the microscopic creatures that live inside us, we have to name them because how could we know them if we did not name them and how could we love them if we did not know them? We need to be able to find a place in the continuum to point at and say ‘me’.

  Wilderness as a static boundary keeps humans out of nature, as though we are still two sides of a dichotomy when we are not. But it is also useful to stop from saturation, the unbalance of the system from too many Mountain Men. Thoreau wanted full libertarian ‘freedom’, like Buck the dog, but men are more destructive than dogs, which would leave wildness to fend for itself against many Mountain Men with guns and pickaxes, which it can’t. The ‘self-willed man’ stakes his claim to freedom while taking no care over anybody else’s.

  This regulation does not take away the wildness. The plants and animals do not even think of it. You can call the mountain Mount McKinley but the Athabaskans will still call it Deenaalee. And wildness allows for renewal. Like the flux of Inuit identity, the wild is not static. The tamed can be feral can be wild again.

  The categorisation of indigenous peoples was a colonial endeavour in the first place, an awarding of status and non-status. They mostly had no written language before white people arrived. But there is empowerment where communities can self-identify. Eskimo language is being written down, in order to preserve it, in order that young Eskimos can relearn the language that underpins their culture. They need a taxonomy of self to know themselves. The plaque in the visitors’ centre has a hopeful message of regeneration. It says that modern ethnically Eskimo and Athabaskan people are reclaiming and reviving their languages and cultures.

  Once you realise the thing that would be missing when all is lost, you have a responsibility to it, to the future. Because trans-migration is a really beautiful concept and if you understand how potent it is you have a responsibility to help it carry on. Like the difference between a dead Damon and a Damon never born. You feel it too. You must have left your diary somewhere your mother could find it.

  The yearning of lack and the panic of saturation are part of what sent me, but to try to shrug them off is to shake off the shackles of responsibility that are at the same time ribbons of meaning. It is important to have a story for yourself, in order to be in love with the world. And it is the love we feel when we look at the mountain which could save it. Maybe women are made more prone to loneliness, but is this a bad thing? We will be lonely without the plants and the animals and we feel their loss more acutely. There is no purity so there is always the possibility for renewal. Like mother goddess renewal, not like a male god of beginnings and ends.

  Stop being so New Agey.

  Why don’t you try not being so literal?

  A LETTER FOR THE UNABOMBER

  Ms Erin Miller

  Cabin in the Wilderness

  Denali Wilderness

  Alaska

  Ted Kaczynski 04475–046

  USP FLORENCE ADMAX

  U.S. PENITENTIARY

  PO BOX 8500

  FLORENCE, CO 81226

  Dear Mr Kaczynski,

  I am a girl writing to you from a cabin in the wilderness. I have read your manifesto while here from beginning to end because instead of taking for granted that everybody who said you were just a crazy person was right, I wanted to understand why you set off the bombs for myself. I am a big fan of your work; your understanding of the technological system and your predictions for the future of humanity echo worries that I have myself. You are right that this reckless and unsustainable system is causing climate change. But I have come to the conclusion that you take these things so far as to void them, and have actually given more ammunition to the system you despise. I think you need to know this because yours is a dangerous logic and while you spout it others are living and dying by it.

  I know what happened to you at Berkeley and I am sorry that you can’t help that it made you the way you are. You are not wholly to blame for your legacy but I can’t resurrect Thoreau to chide him, or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, and evidently each has an influence on and on in infinite regress. But you are alive and with living disciples and you have a responsibility for your words while they are still mutable. You could be the last link in a chain that unravels from itself.

  I am sure you get lots of letters, both fan mail and
hate mail alike, but I wanted to ensure that you received the thoughtful perspective of a woman because I feel your philosophy would benefit from this greatly. I know you do not like girls and especially not feminists, or the English, so I am addressing you as a fellow member of the human race, specifically one who is uneasy about the future of humanity under the current technological regime. It worries me also to think that the time may come where there is complete discord between humans and nature. It terrifies me that our civilisation seems to think that we could exist happily as the sole inhabitants of a barren planet. This is not the way I want things to go either. However, I do not think that this outcome is an inevitable progression from where we are now, only a possible one. And I do not think your revolution of individualists who will destroy the system then return to life in the wilderness as loners or in small clans is a fair or just or helpful cause.

  I did some maths. I am not very good at maths like you are but roughly I think I worked something out. So Earth has about 57,500,000 square miles of dry land and not all of it is habitable, but if you take away the 23 per cent of mountains and 33 per cent of desert which totals 32,200,000 square miles you are left with 25,300,000 square miles. Now divide this between the 7,107,663,700 (give or take a few) people on Earth circa 2013, and remember this is also rough, but just for the sake of argument then 25,300,000 ÷ 7,107,663,700 = 0.00355953813 square miles, or 9,219.2 square metres. 9,219.2 square metres per person, which is just a little larger than a football pitch. Enough room for your cabin but not for the woods or much land to grow things and generally be self-sufficient, even with each individual farming their own plot and trading with neighbours, even with some grouping together in order to farm animals. There is still not enough room to avoid the rest of humanity or to be immersed in nature because all the cabins would disrupt the grazing and migration land of animals and also many trees would have to be cut down for all the logs. Also by estimates, the amount of land that would be needed to support a hunter-gatherer lifestyle far outweighs the amount of land available per head currently (only enough land to support around 100 million hunter-gatherers).

  I am sure you would argue that population would not be an issue because after the revolution and subsequent fall of technology many drones would starve to death without the system to feed or medicate them. But here I think you underestimate people’s resourcefulness. Surely those with sense would not just curl up and die but loot the cities of their resources, and when these are spent they will drive their SUVs into your wilderness and shoot your wildlife with their machine-made rifles to feed their children, who cannot be fed by the system because of the revolution. Another danger is that the elite would monopolise the remaining resources due to their power and the availability they already have the upper hand on, and would therefore be the ones not to perish, leaving them with a foundation from which to build back up and become monolithic (they already have exclusive billionaire underground bunkers set up for the apocalypse in Germany somewhere). This for me is immoral, and very easy for you to say from your privileged position. Not everyone can have access to the freedom you condemn them for snubbing.

  Maybe I am biased because my tiny female brain is 40 per cent social, but the way I see it, the biggest threat to the freedom of each individual is the patriarchal hierarchical structure of society and the waning of its resources, which puts strain on those at the bottom and is mostly caused by those at the top. I weigh this threat as the one which affects the most people, rather than that which weighs most heavily on certain individuals (i.e. you). A predominant concern for us both is population density, because the denser it gets, the more restricted becomes the individual’s freedom. Therefore your dismissal of the feminist and gay movements is a fatal flaw as their success is key to a social reform that could curb or decrease indiscriminate population growth.

  Generally liberating poor people, liberating women, getting oppressed women into the workplace, or educating them on the options available to them and providing them with the means, could reduce reproduction. Around the world nearly 40 per cent of pregnancies are unintended. Around 350 million women in developing countries did not want their last child or do not want another, but they do not have access to information or services to help them. This means deconstructing patriarchy so that women can take control of their bodies. The deconstruction would also mean that the sole pressure is not on the woman when it comes to child-rearing. Equally shared roles between parents and even communal care would relieve this. The current paradigm does not want communal care because it means the child is not moulded in the image of its parents and is therefore not time-capsulised.

  I think one of the sentiments that underpins this problem, perhaps the most significant sentiment, is actually the individualism that you advocate. A more collectivist sentiment would encourage alternative ways of fulfilling the desire to nurture, without feeling the need to immortalise the self in genes, and lead to an increase in adoption of children.

  The concept of metempsychosis is a beautiful thing, and I think that once it is embraced the need for biological children will seem outmoded, we will think like the Inuits and name our children in plural. Every person around you gives and takes from the fabric of you. This is spiritual and intellectual more than it is biological. It is how men have been doing it throughout time. You can’t just spay people; you have to remind them that our shards don’t migrate with specificity of genes in mind.

  But anyway, population is not everything; it is the individualist consumer mentality of the developed world that causes more emissions than the ‘overpopulated’ developing world. This can be reformed into a free and equal society based on cooperation and voluntary contribution from all for the good of everyone, which is the fairest way to liberate, spreading freedom as opposed to consolidating it. The technological system can be used to help reform, spreading the message and reminding the people that we are WORLD CITIZENS. Our skill for invention is not the issue, but the way that we are directing our skills. Scientific research and technology are vital in bringing basic rights and freedoms to such a large population. It is scientific research and technology that have given us an understanding of deep time and therefore of our future generations ahead. It is scientific invention that got us far enough to stop and consider ourselves.

  This individualism is tied up in your invocation of FREEDOM. Your kind of freedom still requires a dualistic philosophy for it to be maintained. Searching for absolutes in nature builds just another dualistic metanarrative, one of good vs. evil and pure vs. impure. This kind of freedom is the philosophical driving force behind the Machine. You are worried about the subjugation of human nature, but see, essential human nature does not exist.

  The thing that has been bugging me all this time is the influence of the idea of natural law in the arguments of the Mountain Men. Although I could just argue now that science or natural law is just a bunch of stories, I wanted to meet you on your own territory, so I have come up with some scientific proofs against the argument of the Mountain Men that civilisation is unnatural and women just biologically suck:

  There is the evolutionary case of sexual dimorphism. Although I could just invoke Lynn Margulis and her whole argument for origins and cooperation over competition, I want to be specific. In our close relatives of the ape family, males have much more pronounced canines than do females (apart from bonobos, a matriarchal species). In the bones of our long-dead predecessors it has been noted that males had much more pronounced canines, which shrank and shrank until they are as they are now, in no way divergent between the sexes.

  One theory is that this is because females, when selecting a mate, selected social and sharing males, reducing the evolutionary need for big old canines. The theory is that this is because there was not much or maybe any division of labour between the sexes, we all hunt-gathered, and likely took our meat from scavenging. Sexual specialisation probably came very late in human evolution, as late as the dawn of agriculture, the so-called Neolithic
Revolution 12,500 years ago.

  The Palaeolithic came before the Neolithic and had a very vast time span of around 2.5 million years. It has only been 12,500 years since the dawn of agriculture, and the birth of the ‘modern human’. The Palaeolithic world and way of being stayed static for all that time. They obviously had the formula for being human just right then, before things started to change.

  The birdman with the boner painting in the caves at Lascaux is dated to the Upper Palaeolithic, the last division before the Neolithic and the birthing of behavioural modernity. Behavioural modernity is characterised by abstract thinking, planning depth and symbolic behaviour like art and ornamentation. So the birdman was painted at a time of upheaval and the caves are a time capsule of this period.

  The message fails time, no one can agree on what the birdman means, but that does not matter. We are allowed to interpret it for our purpose like the palaeo-ecologist interprets the pack rat’s midden (narrative licence). So here goes:

  I could, for example, say that the birdman is aroused by the dominance that at this point in history he had begun to exert on the natural world. The yak thing represents the natural world. Perhaps that is an enlarged vulva hanging below her abdomen, representing femininity. Lots of art from this time features the female body, so called Venus figures. As though at the time the people revered the female body as a life-giving deity. Perhaps what the painting represents is the rise of patriarchy, at the cusp of two opposing paradigms. But the bull is knocking the birdman down. Perhaps what it says is matriarchy WILL PERSEVERE!!!

  My point is that I believe there is no proof that competition and dominance are essential and innate features of the human being. The subjugation of women is not necessarily an essential fact of life.