Slippery mildewed places. Husky yellow sunlight. Trilling quail, tromboning crows. Snickering and whispering leaves. Dank, dangerous, milky-eyed, shrewd, cacophonous, deep places; decayed, frank, fungal, crepitating, wet.
The wild things grow in the dark. No, that’s an all-too-human, all-too-poetic conceit—still, it has a kind of rhythm. “Where do the wild things grow?”
“In the dark.”
My description, give or take a few adjectives, could refer to two places I’ve been in my life. One, the Salamander Forest down the road from my house, a deciduous copse where my dad taught me how to capture and distinguish the different types of amphibians.
Two, a beach jungle in Costa Rica, where I went with a group of classmates. The reason I haven’t talked about that trip yet is that I was trapped in the unfortunate reality of being seventeen, at the time. It's my personal philosophy that we all have to endure being teenagers just so that our remaining years seem like hopscotch on Easy Street--but we don't have to talk about it at length.
(And by the way, I've been to Easy Street. It's somewhere near Yreka.)
Anyway, the jungle. The trees spread out to tangle with each other, and there was no trail. The underbrush was dense and colorful, black and yellow and red. Our Costa Rican guide, a grinning young man, led us on a wobbling, ducking path, making sure to stop and point out all the gigantic yellow spiders. I kept my arms clutched to my sides, half-terrified that I’d step on a snake. Sharing the space with so many different kinds of beings ignited a sense of claustrophobia that I never knew I possessed—we couldn’t have been in the jungle for more than ten minutes when I emerged, incredibly relieved, onto the scruffy sands next to the water.
A large animal’s bones nestled nearby.
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Ever since I mentioned Winnie the Pooh last week, A.A. Milne has been tugging at the edges of my mind. I think the reason why (other than the fact that I love the idea of hephalumps and woozels), is that the Pooh stories make a point: we know from the beginning that Winnie, that bear of very little brain, is an invention, a childhood fantasy of a boy called Christopher Robin. We know from the beginning that Winnie, Eeyore, and Tigger too are actually stuffed, cuddly toys in a nursery room—yet, as far as the boy and the story are concerned, they live in the Hundred Acre Wood. Ignoring for the moment that the very phrase “Hundred Acre Wood” implies measurement and regulation, Winnie the Pooh is the most widely-known example I could find of a story where imagination—childhood fantasy—is directly linked to a forest.
There’s a lot of power in that idea.
I had a class in college called “Literature and the Environment.” We were taught that our culture, historically, has had two basic attitudes to the nonhumans with which we share our planet. One attitude is that of fear, or opposition—aka “Man must dominate Nature in order to survive”. One of the texts we read to demonstrate this was the Ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, in which King Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu slay a forest’s guardian monster in order to cut down the trees.
The second prevalent cultural attitude is of respect, or awe. Ahhhh. It goes something like this: “Man must bond with Nature in order to be complete. Nature has much to teach Man, and much ability to inspire him. Furthermore, Man is a creature of Nature, so the framing of them as mutually exclusive entities is totally bogus; and wtf, what about the women?”
Okay, give or take a few sentences in that description. Anyway, we start seeing the attitude I’m talking about, in Western culture, at least, with Heraclitus, who said “You can’t step in the same river twice” (no, it wasn’t Disney’s Pocahontas). We witness the revival of this viewpoint much later, with the Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—like Wordsworth, who was transported to feats of grandiloquence by a daffodil (show-off). Across the pond, the American transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau started idealizing a simple, self-sufficient life in the woods; and Thoreau, at least, went on a rant about the inevitability of industrial pollution.
As the world stands today, our species will benefit much more in the long run from the second attitude than from the first. We’ve overtaxed the resources of our habitat to the point where a solution will have to involve a paradigm shift: we have to stop seeing nature as separate from humanity. We have to recognize the fact that we’re biological organisms, and that we are no more evolved than, say, a lizard. In fact, lizards don’t usually go around destroying the ecological web that supports their existence. If being “evolved” means being well-adapted to your species’ particular niche, lizards are looking much better, long term, than us.
Taking this back to a literary level (anyone who rides the coffeeship knows I can't go for more than five minutes without thinking about books), I don’t like the word “setting”. The setting of a novel, or any piece of narrative, is its location, its environs, its atmosphere--but what exactly "sets"? And why does it have to set? Why can’t it hoot and squeak and blossom and rain and run and eat people? The very idea that humans go about their lives in a "setting", the only relevant actors being others of the dominant species, is a complete fabrication. Whether we like it or not, we’re surrounded, and protected, nourished and provoked, by nonhuman lives.
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I have a story coming out this weekend in a webmag called “Brain Harvest: An Almanac of Bad-Ass Speculative Fiction.” Yup: awesomeness in nine words. The story itself, appropriate for such spaz-tastic surroundings, is a bit surreal, a bit funky. It’s called “A Little Wild Mustard.” Maybe I was inspired to write it by the Costa Rican jungle, or the Salamander Forest.
Then again, maybe it grew in the dark.
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