Is nature a kind of language? Home Ground, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud

Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape combines two of my obsessions, nature and words. I am drawn to words as individuals, as auditory and sensual entities in the mouth and ears. I also like to see them as artifacts of culture that march in formation with other words. At the same time, I am drawn to the peculiarities of landscape. I run my hands over the cliff wall of layered pebbles and mud by the creek near my house and wonder how the stream erodes it and how much it presses down on the sediment beneath.

At a reading, I asked Barry Lopez if he thought there was a relationship between Home Ground authors' love for words and their love for the elements of landscape. He thought there was. As I remember, he said that nature presents us with a kind of language. I am still wondering what it is that links the webs of language with the webs of the natural world. Is there a kind of ghostly mirror between the two? Saussure told us that words only exist in relation to each other: the word "chair" occupies a certain territory only because "sofa" encroaches on it from one side and "recliner" from another. So, in a way, does "muskeg," or at least the word "muskeg," exist only in relation to "bog" or "swamp."

Writers and poets have long tried to tease out the relation between nature and language. Rimbaud's poem "Vowels" enlists nature to describe language instead of the other way around. He treats vowels as entities independent of their function in words and constructs a rather arbitrary set of connotations for them. He begins with colors, "A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue," and graduates to elements of nature like glaciers, wrinkles, and flies.

Rimbaud's contemporary, Baudelaire saw a different mystical and obscure relationship between language and nature. His poem, "Correspondences" begins with this stanza:

Nature is a temple where living pillars
release vague or jumbled words.
Man passes through forests of symbols
which observe him with familiar glances.

"Perfumes, colors, and sounds correspond to each other" in "a shadowy and profound unity." (My quick translations -- here's the French and here's an expert English version. The French has addictive, luxurious, sonorous lines that I never tire of reciting. They're often the only nature poems I know by heart, so they have to serve for all occasions when I'm out on a hike.)

Words usually rub up against other words, and rocks rub up against water, dirt, or other rocks. In this age, humans usually define their lives in relation to other humans and human-created artifacts. What happens when human rub against words that rub against rocks? What happens is Home Ground.

Home Ground's project is to bring the fading boundaries between terms into focus, so the particularity of each type of terrain can come into focus as well. Thus, we relearn both the differences between terrains and the intricacies of our own historical and literary relations with terrains. We find out that a "coulee" derives from the French Canadian trappers' term for a "sluggish stream" or seasonal water in a ravine, and that it now refers to a dry, "high-walled valley cut into a hill or escarpment" west of the Missouri. A "buckbrush coulee" refers to a coulee filled with "the browse frequented by deer," perhaps "the height of a buck."

It's tantalizing to think that something as sacred and mysterious as a word could sidle up and kiss or interrogate something as sacred and mysterious as a petrified forest. Home Ground, you might say, gives us a (literally) grounded version of Baudelaire's murky vision. Baudelaire yearns to interpret the "words" we dream that nature is speaking to us. Home Ground examines nature through the accumulated scientific observation and cultural and poetic connotations. It looks at landscape features by looking at the words we've addressed to them through the centuries. Thus, we get a chance to see them as beings with their own existence. It becomes possible for us to address them in the kind of respectful "I-Thou" dynamic the philosopher Martin Buber describes.

This is heady stuff! I am off to read David Abrams' The Spell of the Sensuous, which sets out to describe the original link between early humans' words and sensual interactions with the world.

Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

First, a caveat: my friend Debra Gwartney served as the managing editor for this book, so I have reason for bias. But I'd still like you to trust my praise. I cart this book around and crow over it to friends and family, something I would not do merely out of loyalty. Home Ground has enchanted me. Unlike any reference work I've encountered, it seems at once original and inevitable. It's sui generis: who has done a dictionary of local landscape terms before? Certainly, no one has recruited creative writers to craft precise, often lyrical or humorous definitions, embroidered with quotations from all over American literature. But why not? Once you have such a book, you need and want to consult it.

I saw Barry Lopez present the book in Marin in October. In his grave, kindly way, he proclaimed over and over that it was not really his. His name helps promote it, of course, but Home Ground is neither a single person's brainchild nor an anthology of diverse voices. Rather, it's that odd anomaly, a literary text produced through collaboration. I imagine that a posse of nature writers warmed to this idea because they already wrote to connect with a larger whole, both in human and environmental terms. Of course, they were still writers, and someone had to herd the cats. Debra Gwartney has a lively essay on managing the project and mediating between writers and scientists. She had to judge just how to convey the poetry of the landform without distorting its precise characteristics. Now, even though the book is out, the task of mapping the landscape in words continues. The Home Ground Project is looking for more volunteers of all stripes to compile and edit new definitions.

After the reading, I took Home Ground home and set it on the dining room table. For two weeks, I opened it over breakfast and felt a visceral pleasure--the robin's egg blue sky on the cover, the ample space on each page, the quotes lining the margins, the sketches of landforms. But the sensual reality of the book wouldn't do much for me if the definitions were boring. They were exquisite and often playful. I could read just for pleasure, or I could read to learn those words I'd always glossed over, the words I vaguely knew but which I thought belonged to the experts, words like "playa," "swale," "gooseneck," and "glade." The more technical phrases appeared too, in lucid, simple terms. And then there were the ones that were pure fun, like "thank you ma'am," "looking-glass prairie," "hoodoo," "painted desert," "milk gap," and "chickenhead."

The definitions made me want to get out and notice the country. They conjured memories of long-ago road trips. When was the last time I saw a mesa? Would I ever investigate a "racetrack valley," where rocks leave tracks in the clay where they slide across a dry lakebed? The gathering of definitions made me believe in the beauty and specificity and continuing power of the American landscape. I felt a sense of loss for all the local folk knowledge that is now obscure. But it also heartened me to think that Americans have not only been looters; we've known the ins and outs of the land, paid attention, made it come to life in our words. And we can still reach for those words and for that clear-eyed, delighted way of seeing the land around us. In fact, we must if we are going to save some fraction of it.

This is a book to give and a book to keep in the family. On impulse, I presented it to the child of an old friend. I wrote an inscription to newborn Ansel, who hasn't quite shown his appreciation yet. I wished him joy in both landscape and language throughout his life.

I may not take Home Ground off my dining room table for a while. It links me to my country and to others who find the land essential enough to observe and name in its particulars. Home Ground makes a good companion.