«Returning to college, I again felt
pressed into a too tight pattern by the texts and taxonomies, and found myself
yearning for a way back out of the words into the wilderness of things. When
classes ended that year, I walked onto a New England highway and stuck out my
thumbs, catching a series of rides westward across the continent. Once the
snow-decked ridges of the Rocky Mountains lifted themselves from the horizon I
stared in happy amazement and stepped out of the last truck, thanking the
driver and making my way into a town where I began performing magic, for tips,
in the local bars. After a fortnight I’d earned enough to purchase a decent
tent and a sleeping bag; I shouldered my backpack and walked into the
mountains.
I had camped a fair amount with
friends and family when growing up, but had never before pitched a tent alone
in the backcountry. As my legs carried me past the last of the phone lines and
into the thick of the forest, as the shadows deepened and the exclusively human
world fell behind me, a great remembering shuddered through my muscles, as
though a soul long buried were striding to the surface. My own real creaturely
life, at last, was what was smelling those scents and hearing the pines rub
against each other. Over the following days and nights, camping under high
passes in snowfields agleam with moonlight, or hiking among rock-studded
meadows articulated with gurgling rills, I found myself sliding through a vast
array of feelings and moods, following thoughts as they meandered and fed into
other insights and knowing– yet very few of these thoughts were embodied in
words. I was thinking, yes, but in shifting shapes and rhythms and dimly colored
vectors, thinking with my senses, feeling my way toward insights and understandings
that had more the form of feelings blooming in my belly than of statements
being spoken within my skull. A kind of spell had been broken; the
school-hardened skein of words had softened, had loosened, had let me squeeze
through and leave it behind like the grid of power lines I’d left at the edge
of that wilderness, and so I was alone with my breath as the woods creaked around me and
turquoise beetles climbed the grass blades and the owls hunkered down and waited
for dusk.
It was there, in that solitude,
that I first noticed how the drift of my thoughts was instilled and steadily
carried by subtle alterations in the landscape. Walking in the woods kept my
thoughts close and completely patterned, while emerging into the wide meadows
opened my ponderings out onto broad vistas of feeling, yielding insights into
the expansive arc of my life and of the word’s unfolding. As the new sun
climbed above the peaks I could see its light roll toward me across the field,
igniting the grasses and the scatered wildflowers, charging the air with warmth
as it approached until it burst upon me as well, gleaming my naked surfaces, wrapping
me in the grin of morning as it rolled on through the stony valley, and I could
feel the petals of my brain slowly opening to meet that warmth. Sunlight was a
mood that colored all my thoughts as I hikes, although if there were no clouds
to break the heat I noticed my reflections melting together by midafternoon. A
kind of languor then seeped into my muscles, blurring the keen edge of my
thinking, as hazy dream logic began to infect insights that’d been perfectly
precise an hour earlier.
The ways of the mind seemed more
manifold and mysterious here than I’d ever realized.» (pp. 111-112)
~ ABRAM, David. 2010. Becoming
Animal – An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books.
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Pedro Cuiça (2022) © Montanhas Rochosas (Canadá) |
Ver: Becoming Animal
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