A Book of Migrations

by Rebecca Solnit

  The expanse of countryside around Killarney has been considered, for two centuries, to be the most wild, the most romantic, and the most beautiful in Ireland. Some of this status is due to the place’s inherent wonders, some of it to the fact that much of the rest of the island was deforested and domesticated long ago. What survived as forested parklands if not as wildernesses were gentlemen’s estates. Much of the region—91,000 acres—around Killarney had been granted to Sir Valentine Brown in 1620, said a plaque in the park; when Arthur Young came through a century and a half later, Lord Kenmare owned much of it, and a Mr. Herbert seemed to hold the rest. All the elements of romantic landscape are here: steep slopes, long views, narrow passes, rough rocks, water as both placid lakes and turbulent falls, magnificent trees and groves, and the crowning romantic element, gothic ruins—all compressed into the intimate scale of Ireland. Young, well educated in the protoromanticism of his time, was distracted from his agricultural interests long enough to rhapsodize for many pages: “There is something magnificently wild in this stupendous scenery, formed to impress the mind with a certain species of terror . . . From one of these heights, I looked forward to the lake of Killarney at a considerable distance, and backward to the river Kenmare; came in view of a small part of the upper lake, spotted with several islands, and surrounded by the most tremendous mountains that can be imagined, of an aspect savage and dreadful.” Muckross Abbey, in Young’s time, had already fallen into the kind of ruin so beloved of the eighteenth century, and the bones of monks were still scattered among the rocks. Kenmare and Herbert devoted themselves, in the fashion of the time, to improving the landscape with bridges and paths, making it more of a garden but not much less of a wilderness—by European standards, anyway.

  The poet Shelley came to admire the scenery a few decades later, by which time the place had already become an established beauty spot, like the Lake District in England and the Swiss lakes. Tourism as we know it was an outgrowth of the eighteenth-century English enthusiasm for scenery, a taste that now seems wholly natural but was in fact a creation of the connoisseurs of paintings and gardens of that time. Their taste in gardens became more and more naturalistic, until, as Horace Walpole remarked of the first great landscape garden designer, William Kent, “he leapt the wall and saw all nature was a garden.” The making and owning of vast gardens was an aristocratic privilege, but the admiration of existing landscapes could be a far more general pleasure, and as it became one, scenic tourism came into being. Scenic tourism—traveling for the eye—which is now such a vast industry and popular activity, and which was for all intents and purposes the foundation of the environmental movement’s first stirrings in the nineteenth century, is often imagined by its participants as an innate desire as well as a universal hallmark of civilization. But it had its birth among such heights and views as Killarney as a very specific, cultivated, and class-based taste—an English, and to a lesser extent continental, import.

  So it was perhaps peculiar that Killarney, when I arrived, was full of a more medieval kind of traveler: pilgrims seeking wisdom rather than scenery, or pilgrims of a sort. The International Transpersonal Psychology Association was holding its annual conference in Killarney, this one titled “Toward Earth Community,” with, among all the presentations on psychology and spirituality, some environmental, Native American, and Irish speakers. The California-based ITA is an interdisciplinary organization with a fickle enthusiasm for “new paradigms” and sweeping ideas. Its members were mostly well-off white Americans who were entering their own middle ages, the men’s hair thinning and the women’s bodies thickening, clad in the purples and talismanic jewelry of New Age subculture. A scattering of European and Irish people were there too, along with a few young people I knew as friends of friends, and the Native American speakers. I hung out for three days while my nether limbs recovered and got caught up in the usual spirit of conferences—a gluttonous delusion that all the answers are being offered, if only one can sit and eat up enough information from morning till night.

  I skipped out periodically, but came by often enough to hear some interesting things. There was a native Hawaiian woman, Mililani Trask, who spoke of how tourism was destroying her island’s ecology, and a Hopi woman, Marilyn Harris, who showed slides of her part of the world until I felt so at home, or back at home, among the red rock and blazing skies of the southwest that Killarney’s green and gray came as a shock to me when it was over. Two women, Winona LaDuke and Helena Norberg Hodge, spoke brilliantly of the effects of capitalism and globalization on traditional cultures. The speakers often represented third- and fourth-world cultures whose spiritual traditions are still intact and whose political situations are dire. They spoke of the need for activism and pragmatic change. The audience seemed drawn from almost the opposite situation, one of great material privilege and a sense of spiritual poverty, and they wanted to hear about spirituality and tradition as solutions, rather than the political forces that threaten them and the activism that might protect them.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t say too much about the conference or its audience. It may be that the flocks of New Age followers annoy me because in some ways I resemble them. They are most often responding to the same ambiguous situation of coming from an amnesiac, hybridized, commercialized, and confused culture. The diagnosis is often not bad at all. But the solutions are where they lose me: they become spiritual tourists, and I mean tourist in its pejorative sense here. They often want to pop into another culture or era and pick up meanings and identities like snapshots and souvenirs. The very way they look for alternatives embodies some of the most pernicious aspects of the culture they come from: the desire for quick gratification, a kind of globalizing control over other cultures, the segregation of politics from spirituality. Their pursuit of awareness often incorporates considerable obliviousness.

  Part of it is a pervasive insouciance about the concrete politics going on around them and about the politics of their own conduct. Spirituality as a depoliticizing worldview seems to isolate those who see it that way, and I often wonder if some of what they’re looking for in spirituality might be found in the communities and purposefulness of political engagement. Too, much of the spirituality they pursue and practice isn’t theirs: “Spiritual traditions cannot be mixed and matched in ritual potluck,” said one speaker, a university professor named Bron Taylor, “without degrading all of them.” This appropriation has put the New Age movement at odds with some of the cultures they claim to admire. A year before this conference, the Lakota Nations of the northern plains had issued a formal declaration of war on the New Age movement and anyone else expropriating, hybridizing, and abusing their spiritual traditions.

  I remember one talk in Killarney in which a man who was supposed to be addressing forest politics told us all to close our eyes as he led us through a visualization of a forest, and I wondered why we were all sitting there with drawn curtains when one of the last great forests of Ireland beckoned outside. While I was supposed to be envisioning a forest, I scribbled notes about how somewhere in the last few decades the mainstream of philosophical inquiry had been split into two incomplete and unsatisfactory channels best described as the New Age and the academic. The New Age movement tries to find meaning and belonging by blurring distinctions and differences, but to say, for example, that Hopi culture is just like Tibetan Buddhist culture renders both meaningless. It seeks some common ground that will reconcile all differences and establish a single absolute truth, and toward this end it constantly asserts the interconnection and affinity of various cultures at the expense of significant differences. It may be, among other things, a strategy that allows them to insert themselves in the picture: if Hopis and Tibetans are really so alike, then the ground is common enough to admit a few hybridized Euro-Americans too. The absolute unity of all things, which has meaning as a mystical vision arrived at after long travel, doesn’t make much of a starting point, and proposing it seems to be a way of taking a short cut.

 
Meanwhile many of the modes of thought pursued in recent academic practice seem most often to triumph in making absolute distinctions. Their worldview is razor-sharp, but so are all the objects in it, too sharp to touch. The only pleasure remaining in such systems is that of yet more rigorously defining or dissecting an object and thereby demonstrating one’s mastery over it, a mastery that depends on one’s distinctness from it. The conversation about ethnicity has veered between these two poles: a sort of postmodern multiculturalism has pointed out that the universal brotherhood of man has too often been used to suggest that the rest of the peoples of the world should or do resemble modern European man. An alternate model of radical difference has emerged, along with the idea that one should not speak for the “other,” for those culturally dissimilar from oneself (which in its ultimate form means one can talk about nothing but oneself), or appropriate from other cultures. Such a model is far from the New Age ideas that ancient secrets link so many cultures and they are all available for the spiritual pilgrim; in some ways the New Age isn’t new at all, but a strange, half-humbled, hungry vestige of the old universal brotherhood business of a dominant culture. Somewhere in between these schismatic traditions it seems that it should be possible to think with feeling, to feel thoughtfully, to find a middle ground between the fuzzy and the icy. But the present moment belongs to these twin opposites wandering through the same dark wood. One party of wanderers argues that there are no distinct trees in the forest, while the other argues that no overarching forest arises from the accretion of trees.

  There’s a middle ground, a path through the forest, a sense in which language and images neither lie nor tell the truth, but provide pictures whose correspondence to what is depicted is always imperfect, but always capable of further versions and revisions—one can approach, if not arrive. Truth, says Nietzsche, is a metaphor we have forgotten is a metaphor, “a mobile army of metaphors . . . a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem fixed, canonic and binding . . . worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses.” Which is to say, if a metaphor is a kind of local transit in its Greek origins and function, as I was asserting in a natural history museum long ago, truth is a metaphor with a flat tire. New Age people are literal-minded, wanting a vast number of contradictory things to be literally true, looking for an absolute point of origin or arrival which will bear an absolute truth, maybe the point at which they can stop traveling. Perhaps my difference with them is that New Age people want to arrive and I want to travel.

  So I trod off through the town to the forest as often as my feet and the allure of information allowed. The town itself had medievally narrow streets, a population that seemed more in retreat from their fond invaders than most towns I saw, and crowds of carriage-drivers hovering hopefully near the center of town, their magnificent heavy horses shifting feet patiently while the drivers talked among themselves and hailed passersby. The forests of Killarney began right at the edge of town, behind a stone wall, and spread up into the heights of MacGillicuddy’s Reeks, the highest mountains in Ireland. The trees immediately inside were huge, each one spreading its branches to carve out a great cone or sphere in the air. Winds made the treetops roar and wave their branches wildly, while the air I moved through below was still and calm.

  By virtue of their verticality, trees resemble the other upright species, human beings; and so these had the stately presence of ancients and witnesses, presiding over the earth and sky they link with root and branch. It was impossible to regard these trees without thinking of their immobility through disasters and revolutions, the immobility of place rather than of truth. It isn’t hard to imagine becoming a tree, as various mortals in the Greek myths did, to imagine one’s feet sinking into the ground and becoming fixed, one’s arms spread out in a kind of benediction become solid enough not to suffer from gravity over centuries, and with these transformations comes a sense of overwhelming peace. The surrealist photographer Man Ray once reflected, after visiting the redwoods near San Francisco, “They are the oldest living things in nature, going back to Egyptian antiquity, their warm-colored, tender bark seems as soft as flesh. Their silence is more eloquent than the roaring torrents and Niagaras, than the reverberating thunder in the Grand Canyon, than the bursting of bombs; and is without menace. The gossiping leaves of the sequoias, one hundred yards above one’s head, are too far away to be heard. I recalled a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens during the first months of the outbreak of war, stopping under an old chestnut tree that had probably survived the French Revolution, a mere pygmy, wishing I could be transformed into a tree until peace came again.”

  Along the path to the ruins of Ross Castle on the lake, the trees became smaller and clustered together, more truly forest-like. In the boggy ground near the water’s edge, birches or aspens had tipped over, their shallow circle of roots still holding onto the black earth, and where they had been uprooted, a pool of water formed. These pools were round too, and reflected the sky through the clearing that had been opened up by the trees’ downfall, while the circle of dirt-clutching roots poised next to each of them suggested the black lid of a lady’s mirrored compact. Daffodils, bluebells, yellow bearded irises, and purple rhododendrons grew in this forest, blurring the boundaries between the wild and the tame. The red deer I saw in a remoter meadow ran when they glimpsed me, not like the deer I know, but with a strange flattened gait that seemed more primordial. When they reached the barrier at the far end of the meadow, however, they wheeled back as though it had all been for pleasure and didn’t seem truly wild at all. They must have been descendants of a herd kept for gentlemen’s pleasure when the forest had been a hunting park, for a plaque in the Dublin Natural History Museum declared all red deer had been introduced or managed since the thirteenth century. I remembered an American wilderness advocate who said, Wilderness without wildlife is just scenery.

  It was scenery that the scenic tourists had come to admire. Scenery is a forest with poetry instead of wolves, and European ideas of nature often derive from this dewolved and much deforested landscape. The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky wrote, “. . . when a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he encounters a tree, it’s a tree made familiar by history, to which it’s been a witness. A tree stands there, as it were, rustling with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed but unchanged by that encounter, returns to his inn or cottage . . . Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree, it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it’s a tossup. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock or terror.” Bewilderment or shock if he still expects the world to be Europe and nature to be scenery, at any rate; pleasure if he likes his emblems unstable, incompletely assimilated into culture. When I was younger, I used to envy Europe for having culture and long lines of history and tradition streaming back from every person and place. Now when I visit, theirs seems a place that poses too narrow, too domesticated a definition of what it means to be human.

  Two of the Irish speakers had already leapt the gap between spiritual and political language with fine poetic talks, and it was interesting that of all the speakers they alone seemed to see Christianity as akin rather than opposed to the more exotic forms of spirituality being described. (Although pre-Christian Celtic culture is of great interest to overseas pagans and New Agers alike, neither group seems to make much of the country’s last fifteen hundred years of spiritual practice, save to point out pagan survivals such as holy wells and the goddess who became St. Bridget. Given that Ireland is an extraordinarily religious country and its religion is overwhelmingly Catholic, this is something of an oversight: the Commission on European Values had reported in 1984, �
�When it comes to belief in ‘the soul,’ in ‘life after death,’ in heaven, and in prayer, the Irish are so far ahead of the rest of the western world that any comparisons are totally irrelevant.”) Dolores Whelan, who organizes opposition to the British nuclear power plant at Sellafield in England (in the Lake District of Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter), which routinely belches radioactive effluents into the Irish Sea, spoke about Celtic spirituality. She recited the mythological history of Ireland from the Fir Bolg and Tuatha Dé Danann to St. Brigid and the present. “Heaven is a foot above your head,” she said, speaking of the capacity to dwell in the imagination. And John O’Donohue, who was a priest and poet as well as a key player in the environmentalists’ fight to protect the stony western expanse called the Burren from tourist development, gave a talk called “Stone as the Tabernacle of Memory” that elicited a near-riot of enthusiasm by its end, as though poetry’s forever shifting imagery rather than prosy literal truth was what the audience really craved, whether they knew it or not. “Landscape is the firstborn of creation,” he began. “It was here long, long before we were even dreamed. It watched us arrive. How strange we must have seemed: separated, single human strays wound around ourselves, belonging neither to the territories of our interiority nor to the outside territories of landscape. To the ancient eye of landscape, we must have seemed haunted.” And he went on to speak of the silence of landscape, the memory of stones, and the presumption of people who imagine they can own land.