The Apocrypha of the Wild

Exploring the Sublime in Lake Clark National Park

Part Two: The Ecumenism of the Bear

But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed with no sign of the passing time and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than a simple feeling of existence, a felling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy...
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker

Such is the state Rousseau describes as he sets out from the Island of Saint-Pierre drifting on his back, eyes skyward, in his small boat on the water of the Lake of Bienne. I imagine myself like Rousseau as I sit in a small kayak in the center of Lower Twin Lake. The day is calm, cold even for early fall, and the smooth surface of the lake is reflecting the gossamer clouds above. With the departure of the nesting merlins the songbirds have started to return to this end of the lake and their songs turn this valley into a large amphitheater designed for their performance. I don't know if it is my imagination or if the boat is really moving, just barely, toward the end of the lake where the Chilikadrotna River begins. Like Rousseau, my days are blessed with abundant time, and like Rousseau I enjoy the requiescence of a small boat on a calm lake. I watch the land to see if it is moving, keeping my eye lined up with the tip of the kayak and a spruce on the shore for reference. I think I am moving, but barely. At this rate it would take hours before I needed to paddle to avoid the river.

Eventually I do begin back and as I casually paddle toward the cabin I notice a large splashing near the shore. It is the time of year when the moose lose their inhibition and make themselves known. I have seen the potholes their feet leave in the marshy areas around the lake. I know they are around, but I have not seen a single moose all season. As I row carefully toward the shore, trying to silently slice the paddles into the water, I begin to make out the brown shape in the water. Because it is standing in front of brown and yellow dwarf birches, it is difficult to see the outline and it is not until I am closer that I realize this is no moose. It is a large grizzly bear, wet up to its chest. I'm not sure what it was doing making so much noise in the water, but it is now on the shore walking along the water's edge toward the cabin. I let the kayak glide closer to the shore and then gently turn it parallel to the bear's movement shadowing his path along the shore. He ignores me for about three hundred yards until he reaches the sandy area past the cabin then stops, lifts his upper body, pivots on haunches placing his slightly pigeon-toed feet and snout towards me, and looks directly in my eyes. Although the bear doesn't appear agitated and my kayak is over fairly deep water, a respectable distance from the bear, I suddenly feel uncomfortably close. I wonder if Rousseau would only see the brutish bottom of his hierarchy ranging between "stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man," or if he would recognize the sublime in bear. The idea of the sublime was in the air during his lifetime. Edmunde Burke published his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1756 when Rousseau was 44, and Kant's Critique of Judgment appeared in 1790, only twelve years after his death.

In the second part of his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Rousseau briefly touches on the idea that cultural ideas are acquired successively—he creates an identity between culture and history. Our culture becomes a created latticework of adopted myth, philosophy, science, and art built upon itself over the course of history. Call it what you may—a world-view, cultural outlook, collective unconscious—we often substitute this anthropocentric framework for the world. All of our values and beliefs hang on this latticework and exist within its boundaries like specimens in a bell jar. In creating the noble savage, Rousseau imagines humans predating this framework. These people, free from the negative influences of society, retained a prelapsarian innocence and goodness, but since Rousseau's criterion for judging the relative goodness of both the noble savage and the poisoning power of social structures are based on ethical values from within our social framework his early man never escapes into the authentic world of nature—the world vigorously illustrated by the bear before me. The sublime I sense in the bear is not based on his ability to eat me or his brute strength, but rather the way his existence disturbs our exceptionalism. Although they too would be representatives from the natural world, Rousseau's noble savage would never inspire the unsettling feeling of the sublime because they still represent and adhere to our values—they reinforce our perspective rather than challenge it. The bear doesn't care of goodness or evil or reason, or suffering, beauty, or history. When confronted with the bear, the thorn and thistle of nature red in tooth and claw, I see it outflanking our constructed reality and on every side. We can never reconcile ourselves with the raw nature we see in wilderness and, although anxiety over our received values is often presented as a postmodern idea, the uncomfortable feeling that our values hold no ecumenical authority has been with us for a long time. This is the sublime of Ecclesiastes where all human achievement it reduced to vanity and mist. It is the sublime of Job standing before the whirlwind, whose voice viciously places his suffering and his attempt to grasp the infinite into a larger perspective offering for comparison the image of the leviathan which, like this bear (and by extension all of nature) will make no covenant with man—we are outsiders. We could call the bear a brute and be done with it, but this ignores the uncomfortable fact that nature is in accord with him, the estrangement is our, something obvious in the wilderness but easily forgotten in the human world. When I image our ethics and reason from his perspective, they are illusions and we stare at each other as through a glass, darkly, unable to understand one another.

Looking at ourselves from this perspective has often lead to criticism of the entire human framework and towards advocacy of primitivism and anarchism, but to embrace these is to fundamentally misunderstand how captivated we are by our social artifice. We cannot escape it; it defines the limits of our human experience. Fully realized, arguments for primitivism must, in the end, attack the entire framework, leaving us with the vague and dubious ramblings of anarchist writers. The whole framework unravels at the first moment of deconstruction taking everything that defines humanity—reason, language, ethics—with it. This is a fundamental conflict with any golden-age philosophy which tries to put the fruit back on the tree of knowledge: without the reason and symbolic culture responsible for our alienation from nature, we have no means with which to judge our condition better or worse. Primitivists create a philosophical uroboros using the very same symbolic resources to criticizing them. Even ideas we endow with qualities beyond human dominion, such as Natural Law, in the end are based on reason and exist within its bounds. This is the difficulty Rousseau creates when he invents nobles savages that are at once above the natural world and at one with it.

It seemed like minutes, but was probably only a few seconds before the bear, confident that I offered no threat, turned and started away from the lake, walking over the hill and out of sight. The bear, of course, isn't the leviathan and isn't beyond the power of human technology and strength, but the natural world it represents defies our attempts to contain it both physically and philosophically. I've come here in a sense to escape the human realm and form a dialogue with nature. The bear and everything that inspires the sublime suggests that although we may be able to escape the trappings of the civilized world, neither the Lake of Bienne nor Lower Twin Lake allow us to escape ourselves and any dialogue we attempt will in fact be a monologue. Perhaps this is what Rousseau discovered off the Island of Saint-Pierre which caused him to write, "What is the source of our happiness in such a state? Nothing external to us, nothing apart from ourselves and our own existence" and what Job learned from the whirlwind when he said, "Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust."

Next: The Apocrypha of the Wild

Š2005 Mark Meyer