Ammon 1

Thomas Ammon
Prof. Anne Goldman
English 301
10 May 2016
What Do I Think About Humans? I Dont!: Nature as Unconscious Abstract
Unconscious Instead of Thinking Being with Emotions and Dreams and All That Noise
ABSTRACT
We give a lot of lip service as to how wonderful and magical nature is, and we never
follow up on it. People in cramped smoggy cities dream of one day living out in rollicking
pastures, and rained-on rural dwellers do the same with these big cities. Simple grass-is-greener.
We know in our conscious minds that we should be eco-friendly and live in harmony with the
bees and all that, yet even from the most environmentally friendly of us lies an unconscious view
of nature thatbest case scenarioacts as a foot in the door for the kind of actions that stab our
ozone layer in the cheek. Nature does not act, but this does not make it passive. Natureat the
risk of sounding like a stoned Zen platitudesimply is. Nature cannot end, and it cannot be
quantified into binaries like life-death.

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As if dominating the exchange of bits of shiny rock and paper representations thereof
wasnt enough, we narcissists feel the need to see ourselves in the rhythms of a blind idiot nature.
You know when the melancholic person works up the misguided nerve, how they seal every
crack in the garage and sit in the running car. What kills this sack of sad within one or one-and-ahalf hours is the gaseous byproduct of combustion, mostly carbon monoxide. We consider this
confinement of the automobile to be a perversion of its intended use: to get from one place to the
other, pumping these toxic gases out into the wild air so everyone can breathe in a little. God, or
whatever you like to call that who made existing hip, gave us this planet as a gift, and like a fiveyear-old on Christmas morning we promptly threw it in the microwave. Nature better not have
thoughts and emotions like ours, or itd be right pissed.
So why do we insist on talking about nature like it was one of us? I suppose its one thing
for old man Aesop to talk about foxes and grasshoppers as sentient tricksters, but another thing
entirely to reduce the North Wind and the Sun to the status of syphilitic gamblers. (Not to say I
disagree with the moral!) But I understand. There is a logic to it. Where we are mentally right
nowand Im just about as guilty of this as anybodyrequires whittling down abstract concepts
into easily digestible signifiers. We even do this with concepts that we ourselves made up: Uncle
Sam (nations), Mickey Mouse (corporations), Santy Claus (holidays), your heffalumps and
doonkehs (American political parties), and so on.
Just shy of a neat 2,000 years after Everyones Favorite Carpenter lay swaddled in a
sloptrough, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University held a conference
that they called The State of the Planet, after the United States State of the Union address.
(The planet doesnt have a Correspondents Dinner because Seth Meyers isnt going to follow
giraffes and sexual reproduction.) The university commissioned poet laureate Robert Hass to

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come up with one humdinger of a poem, also titled The State of the Planet. One verse runs as
such:
Poetry ought to be able to comprehend the earth,
To set aside, from time to time, its natural idioms
Of ardor and revulsion, and say in a style as sober
As the Latin of Lucretius, who reported to Lady Venus
On the state of things two thousand years ago
"It's your doing that under the wheeling constellations
Of the sky," he wrote, "all nature teems with life
Something of the earth beyond our human dramas. (Hass 50)
Yes, he brings up Lucretius directly addressing reproductive power in the guise of Venus as an
example of humankinds pareidolic need to ascribe its own qualities to the abstract; in this case,
Lucretius ascribes the human capacity to listen to one another to this abstract concept of life and
fertility. How does the rational mind link human qualities to abstract forces? It does not. Theyre
about as linked as swans and elephants. The real stretch in Salvador Dalis paranoiac-critical
activity isnt in linking two symbols one doesnt often think are linked, but in neither of these
symbols being human.
Hass continues:
Your poets, those in the generation after you,
Were the ones who praised the packed seed heads
And the vineyards and the olive groves and called them
Smiling fields. In the years since, weve gotten
Even better at relentless simplification, but its taken
Until our time to crowd out, savagely, the rest
Of life. (Hass 54)

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This need that we have to pigeonhole the abstract into the human is not only inaccurate, but in
fact it is dangerous to the ecology. Whether one is manufacturing tiny plastic exfoliating beads
for fish to collect in their kidneys, or rolling coal in the middle of heavy traffic to stick it to
whatever imagined latte-sipping Terry-Gross-listening corduroy-blazered baldingly-ponytailed
elitist liberal cartoon character rears its ugly Dead-stickered Prius in this idiot bottleneck, if we
see nature as a person, then we can see nature conquered and eliminated if it gets in the way.
Deep down, we know that our hubris is limited, but we get around that by how we view that
which we assert were better than. Of course, even the notion that nature can be eliminated is an
ascription of human quality. To crib a quote from ballistic paperclip man Wernher von Braun:
Nature doesnt know extinction. All it knows is transformation. Basic first law of
thermodynamics. Even Fat Man and Little Boy werent technically destroying matter, but rather
rearranging it at the atomic level, which is scarier. Thats what high modernisms progress-forprogresss-sake gave us, and its even presumptuous to call it modernist since that implies that
progress qua progress is a recent development, a dumb little post-Industrial-Revolution blip. We
should have seen it coming.
Cultural osmosis is the image we have of a work that we know not from direct experience
but from secondhand description and reference. I know the general plot from Citizen Kane off
the top of my head: Charles Foster Kane, whos based off of William Randolph Hearst, is a
massive newspaper tycoon who steers the Spanish-American War and tries to run for New York
governor, and he misses his old sled on his deathbed. Ive never actually seen Citizen Kane. I
cant seem to find a DVD of it to rent, and no one I know has seen it either. Its the greatest film
no one seems to have seen, either due to remnants of William Randolph Hearsts attacks on
Orson Welles, or maybe the film simply doesnt exist and its all a mean-spirited prank. Either

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way, I dont blame people for getting what they know about Henry David Thoreaus Walden
from cultural osmosis. The prose is pretentious and overdone, and this is from someone who
enjoys idly flipping through Finnegans Wake as kind of a challenge. His other stuff is fine.
Anyway, Thoreau-as-narrator keeps doing this personification thing on all the critters of nature.
They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly developed and
precocious even than chickens. The remarkably adult yet innocent expression of their
open and serene eyes is very memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They
suggest not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by experience. (Thoreau
286)
For a man who goes on about how man should strive for a simple life of solitude, he keeps
feeling the need to complicate his quiet forest time-out with anthropomorphism instead of letting
the abstract remain so in his mind. In Slavoj ieks book Demanding the Impossible, he
describes the contrast between how mainstream Western views on the 2011 Arab Spring drift
from cheers for democracy in Egypt to anxiety over possible Islamic fundamentalist insurrection
thus: In Slovenia, we have a proverb that, if you talk too much, you want something: you really
are afraid that something could happen and you talk a lot to make sure that it doesnt. (iek ch.
4) Likewise, Waldens indirect thoughts and actions betray his stated purpose of simple living.
He projects war on two ants having a bit of a tussle on a log:
On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could
hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. [] The smaller red champion had
fastened himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that
field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already
caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to
side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members.
[] Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry
was Conquer or die. (Thoreau 287-288)
War is a sort of conflict, but it is not all conflict. These ants were probably fighting over food.
Thats why most animals fight. Our wars are fought by convincing a bunch of people to run at
another bunch of people and spit fat lead slugs at their mouths until Viscount Archimbaldo and

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the Duke of Shaftsbury can settle and agree on who gets what land. Assigning this sort of conflict
to these two ants normalizes this behavior beyond the bounds of what people do. Well, yknow,
everything else does this too. That makes it okay.
Marilynne Robinson is better at telling her audience what nature means than Thoreau is.
The very name of her novel Housekeeping is a Walden reference. After all, hes tending a house
in a forest. Sylvia lets nature in by leaving the windows open, as opposed to Thoreau who
sweeps every morning. Its not his house. Other than it was able to take a whole train, no one
knows the dimensions of Lake Fingerbone. Thoreau also doesnt know the dimensions of Walden
Pond, but he believes that it could be quantified. Why do this, though? Walden Pond means so
much more as a symbol. Lake Fingerbone is a place of death, but since everything in the town is
in conflict with everything else, its also a place of life. People prefer to keep life and death
separate, and that insistence on separation is yet another demand we have of nature to conform to
whats easy for us to understand. Bodies decompose and putrefy in the ground, fertilizing the soil
and inviting life to the area. Have you seen the area around Mt. St. Helens a few years after its
1980 eruption? Its actually quite nice once all the ash dissipated. Sometimes forest fires are
good for the environment, despite a certain ranger bears objections. Its supposed to act as a
reset button for the ecosystem. Why do you think Ruth and Sylvie burn the house down at the
end of the book? Because it was cold out?
Another natural parallel in Housekeeping is how Sylvie acts when shes in Fingerbone.
She doesnt act with the grain as shes expected by the townsfolk, but she also doesnt
consciously rebel against. Rather, she simply acts how she does. Shes indifferent. Nature doesnt
sympathize with us and enfold us in ivy like all those five-dollar capital-R Romantic poets like to
talk about, and it isnt acting to smite us down and cleanse the planet of this vile human disease

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like your post-George Carlin cynical comedians go on about either. Nature doesnt care. It cant
care. Were the ones with the capacity for caring. If youre going to personify nature at all, go
with this Sylvie route. Its not 100% accurate, but its closer than the man in the moon.
When I was eight and the family was dabbling in regular churchgoing, my mother used to
tell me that thunder was Gods anger. As you might tell from that, this got me afraid to go
outside. I dont want to catch Him in one of His moods. Yet now as Im older and still finding
my spiritual self and what feels right for me, I cant help but feel that its contradictory to ascribe
emotions like wrath and mercy to a Supreme Being and then also say that God is beyond human
comprehension. God has an infinite Alpha-and-Omega nature and a vast plan beyond mortal
understanding, but sometimes he likes to gamble over this Job fella like we do at the horse races.
He has to send the Metatron to communicate with us because hearing His voice directly would
destroy us, but His whole deal can be wrapped up in a two-part book. Doesnt make sense. Little
platitudes like Gods will, God has a plan, God told me last night to run for presidential office,
its ascribing human qualities to God. If humans are imperfect and were comparing Him to us,
isnt that type of cataphatic positive view of God blasphemous? I dont even think we should be
using the pronoun Him. Maybe one of those neat-o singular Theys all the cool kids are using.
Anyway, my point is maybe we should cool it with all the anthropomorphism. Leave human
qualities to describing us people, and maybe a fluffy animal or two.

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SOURCES
Hartshorne, Sarah D.. Lake Fingerbone and Walden Pond: A Commentary on Marilynne
Robinson's "Housekeeping". Modern Language Studies 20.3 (1990): 5057. Web...
Hass, Robert. Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Print.
Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Picador, 2004. Print.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings. New York: Bantam, 2004. Print.
Von Braun, Wernher, "Why I Believe in Immortality," in William Nichols (ed.), The Third Book
of Words to Live By, Simon and Schuster, 1962, pp. 119-120.
iek, Slavoj. Demanding the Impossible. Malden: Polity Press, 2013. eBook.