Home Waters: A Blog

(This is cross-posted at http://earthstewardship.org/)

According to a recent study done at Yale University only 13% of Americans are alarmed about anthropogenic, or human-caused, global warming (AGW), while on the other end of the spectrum 10% are adamantly dismissive and another 15% are at least doubtful about it. Interestingly, the majority of Americans are either concerned (26%) or cautiously concerned (29%) about the theory. If the political culture of my home state is any indication, the deniers in Utah and in mainstream Mormon political culture have the loudest voices and the biggest stages in which to air their views, and I believe this is squeezing out the majority in this state and in our community of faith who, perhaps with more moral clarity and better information, would choose to act to avert the worst consequences of climate change. [Read more…] about An Appeal To Those Concerned But Not Yet Alarmed By Climate Change

Mark Twain was perhaps the first of outside visitors to Mormon Utah, arriving with pen in hand, eager to give account of the strangeness and oddity of Mormon community life. For a Mormon writer like myself who was born in Utah but raised and educated on both coasts, I can sympathize with the difficulty of penetrating such peculiar communities that are seemingly out of sync with mainstream America. Living as I do in a city that is the third largest in the state of Utah and yet close to 90% LDS, I recognize that this is not a typical American experience. But it is also true that probably no group of people makes more fun of Provo than Mormons themselves. Indeed, Utah often feels divided by the equivalent of a Mormon family feud, split by our own ambivalence about ourselves.

But most of the time, I feel that Utah’s unusual sense of place is worthy of wonder and I welcome the chance for those outside the community to see it as I do, because in my eyes it seems so marvelous. Of course at times I feel the frustrations that come with living in a place of exceptional homogeneity and with these frustrations comes the temptation to see Mormon communities, embedded as they are in the landscape and within their own cultural language, as one might see animals in a zoo—as admirable, perhaps, but also as exotic types, fenced off from the lived reality of the writer and, for that matter, the rest of America. But ultimately as a Mormon Utahan, it is often hard to feel inspired by reading accounts of life in Utah, in the small towns as well as in the cities. This is not because I am immune to criticism but because it is tiring to read yet another account written by someone who has not lived intimately and lovingly among the communities about which they write and who can’t quite hide their condescension. I think of Marc Reisner’s account of Mormon environmental shortcomings in Cadillac Desert, for example. I was more sympathetic to his criticisms of Mormon zeal for environmental engineering before I read his summary that Mormons had “banished themselves” to Utah. Or Bill McKibben’s account of Mormon settlement of small towns in Utah, in his otherwise excellent book The End of Nature, as a merely self-imposed test to see what we could make of the desert. It was as if they had never spoken to a Mormon or read anything at all about Mormon history. Until recently the best exception to this rule was Stephen Trimble’s book, Bargaining for Eden, a labor of love and devotion to a state he loves, enough that he would spend years getting to know the humanity and complexity of the culture that seemingly has control of the state’s environment.

Former Senator Bill Bradley once said, about racial tensions in our country, that if we didn’t have a friend of a different race, we were part of the problem. In Utah, the divisions run deep–especially over religion, the environment, partisan affiliation, sexual orientation, and even university affiliation. So I would submit that if religiously active and especially politically conservative Mormons don’t have a friend who sees the world differently, then they are only helping to create the divisions that have beset this state. Likewise, how many progressives in Utah, especially those without a religious orientation, are not just friendly towards but friends with said Mormon conservatives?

I have always been an idealist when it comes to literature. I believe we look to literature to offer us insight into our lives that we otherwise cannot gain and to therefore help us to imagine a broader and more profound meaning of community. New and outside perspectives are therefore vital. But great literature does more than criticize. A more exceptional achievement of art is to see the profound and common humanity not despite but because of the cultural particulars of a place. Indeed this is what characterizes the great literature that has emerged from many of the nation’s most unusual places.

What has inspired these thoughts is Liz Stephens’s memoir, The Days Are Gods, which, in my judgment, is pitch perfect. She understands the strangeness of her pursuit of her own (and the persistence of our particularly American) Western mythology—a deep-seated feeling that she must uproot herself from the fast pace of life in Los Angeles and launch her own proverbial return to the land where she can live simply, where animals and open space are abundant, and where people live rooted lives of simple and shared values. She thematizes the odd relationship this then gives her to the small Mormon community of Wellsville in Cache Valley where she spends three years. She is not afraid to pose the needed questions about this community—about its homogeneity and its seeming superficial awareness of the pain experienced by those of sexual or ethnic difference in their midst, for example—but her own awareness and sensitivity to difference is not her trump card used against these people. For one, she knows them because she has invested every effort to establish relationships with them. She writes: “I do not think the locals are cute and a charming part of the scenery. I think they carry within them something magic, as do, it turns out, people everywhere who have stayed still in one place long enough to accrue this grace: a deep sense of place that I wish I could beg, barter, or steal off of them” (122). She admires their relationship to the land and to animals, their extraordinary intimacy and trust, the wandering, playing children for whom everyone bears responsibility, and their simple pleasures, values that she also understands that places like Los Angeles, for all their multicultural understanding, have long since lost or never had. And she wants these values for herself and her husband, and their Utah-born daughter, and she is willing to work for them, most notably in her determination to understand the community and its history, in her search for her own genealogical story that stems from agricultural life in Oklahoma, and ultimately in her loving tribute to the land and the people that is her memoir. Her writing is a measure of her capacity for wonder in the face of each miraculous day, and this wonder does not exclude, as it often does for writers less patient with Utah’s culture, the human faces that make up her exceptional environment.

But neither places nor people are stone monuments; they are more like slow moving rivers of change. For this reason, the book stands as a bittersweet memorial to the work it takes to have a sense of place. I say bittersweet because she sees the town changing before her eyes, becoming less rooted and less rural every day. The book serves as a warning for me that our own Mormon self-ambivalence might fail to appreciate what we have before it is gone for good. How many more big box stores and restaurant chains will we welcome here before we have lost our own relationship to place? How much more consumerism can we indulge in before it is all gone? Stephens’s book is also bittersweet because we discover that ultimately she must leave the town and the state, a poignant reminder that a sense of place in America today may have to become portable, a way of moving from one place to the next in an increasingly and perhaps irrevocably mobile world. At the very least, a sense of place must be forged with the kind of work she did to belong in Utah no matter where we find ourselves.

For this reader, there is the additional sadness of my home state of Utah losing an outstanding voice. Stephens writes with a light touch, with humor and self-deprecation, and with prose that falls as gently as snow in the still air. The Days Are Gods is a lovely book, worthy of the extraordinary place that inspired it. For Utah’s sake, I selfishly hope for Stephens’s prodigal return.[1]

I recently had the unique opportunity to hear recordings made on cassette tape over thirty years ago, recordings that my mother carefully preserved until she recently transferred them to CD. These included tape recordings that my family and I sent back and forth to each other during my two-year mission in Venezuela in 1985 and 1986. It is a bit surreal, not to mention highly sentimental, to hear your mother’s voice speaking with love and concern for you when you are hundreds of miles away with no direct or immediate communication possible. To hear your grandfather and grandmother’s voices, now long deceased, expressing their love and telling you stories about their own past, and it is certainly strange to hear your own voice, barely twenty years old, telling your parents how much more you appreciate them now that you are far away from them.

But what was perhaps the most powerful recording was that of my brother’s funeral of December 1982 after his tragic suicide. I wrote some reflections about his death here. I listened as my father gave a powerful and articulate tribute to the person Kenny was before his personality and well-being were ravaged by severe mental illness, the boy of quick intelligence, exuberance, and intense compassion and understanding for people. I was stunned by my father’s steely nerves, his emotional control, and his verbal clarity. Until I also listened to myself speaking at this funeral, which happened just one week after he had died, I had forgotten too just how straightforward I had been. I remember feeling out of control emotionally, at least on the inside, but my voice was steady.

But what was particularly important for me was to remember, and what I want to highlight in this post, was how important love was in being able to overcome that experience. In our talks, my father, my brother Bill, and I paid tribute to Kenny’s great love for people of all walks of life. I had forgotten that when I was twelve years old and had spent a month at a boys ranch in Idaho, I was with a group of boys in the woods on a Sunday afternoon, holding a sacred meeting in which we shared our most personal feelings. The question posed to us was: who did we particularly admire and want to be like? I told this story at the funeral because the person I chose was my brother and what I said that I admired in him was his humility, his intelligence, and his compassion. I was always eager for my friends to meet him because I knew that he would take genuine interest in them. My father quoted friends who all described his remarkable ability to take interest in people of any age or in all walks of life, to discern their needs, and to help them describe their feelings. I thought as I listened that he would have made a fantastic counselor. I was surprised that in all these years, I had let his illness overshadow this memory of him. He was a loving person who was easily moved to intense joy by music and great ideas and the enjoyment of friends and family.

I felt at the time, as apparently did my brother Bill, that what love we can sustain for each other in times of need is far more important than understanding the reason why terrible things happen. Without consulting with one another, my father, my brother, and I had each wanted to urge upon those who had come to mourn with us an appreciation for what love does and how important it is to shed it widely. We had, after all, experienced that love in the most profound way imaginable. We were in great suffering and yet everyone was reaching out, people had showed up in droves to the funeral, and we had calls, letters, and words of solace, and an newborn appreciation for one another, for life as a gift, and for the miracle of friendship and family. This was, of course, what characterized Kenny himself. So despite his painful death, love was what outshone his own and our pain.

In the great novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky raises one of the most painful and difficult questions of life. Why does suffering happen, especially to the innocent? I am not claiming Kenny was without blemish, but certainly we all felt he had been victim to a terrible illness and it left us perplexed. Dostoevsky doesn’t offer an intellectual answer. His answer is to allow his reader to understand the profound experience of deep and abiding love, what Paul calls charity. Because love comes, even and especially in the midst of sorrow. And at its most powerful, it causes a release of expectation, a patience with life that is beyond our natural capacity. It is best described in this moment when the protagonist Alyosha hears the life story of his spiritual mentor, Zosima. This is what we read:

“Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn flowers in the flowerbeds near the house had fallen asleep until morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars… Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly as if he had been cut down, threw himself to the earth. He did not know why he was embracing it, he did not try to understand why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kissing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages. “Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears…,” rang in his soul.” (362)”

There was a similar moment in the life of the poet Derek Walcott, when he was a young man. He describes himself falling to his knees on a hill above his small town on the island of St. Lucia, weeping for the earth, for the houses of his people, for everything. And wanting to honor what he felt for the rest of his life by means of his devotion to his art. I believe this is Love and it is what gives birth to our desire for service, for art, for worship, and for devotion.

If it is true that God is Love, then we have overcomplicated the question of God. We debate God, we intellectualize God, and we dispute and argue over how to follow him, but love is the one law that should govern all others. When we give and receive profound love–for God, for humankind, and for the earth–we are in God, with God. This is the one thing without which all else–all right thinking, right acting, and all knowledge and power–amounts to nothing.

I know I am not saying anything new. But listening to these tapes from three decades ago, I am just surprised at how rarely I have remembered or recognized the fullness of God’s glory around me everywhere and what profoundly spiritual experiences the most common forms of human love afford. I was suffering, but in a newfound love for others, for God, and for the fact of existence, I was also experiencing true love, and deep inside it was the cause of the most ecstatic joy, a joy that started to come then and has deepened ever since as a privilege of that terrible loss.

So what can be done? How not to squander this rare chance to love? We can start by paying more reverent and compassionate attention to each other and to this earth, by learning to see with the eyes of love and acknowledging the fundamental and beautiful mystery that is every person and is this life. Religious people and nonreligious people alike could stand to pay more attention to the quality of love we feel for strangers, for enemies, for those different than we are. Nothing defines us more essentially nor provides better opportunities for joy than the love we bear for the world.

William Wordsworth wrote an important book that during his life time vied for the most popular work he ever published. Nowadays it is much less well known. It is called Guide to the Lakes, published first in 1810 and then later expanded in 1835, and in it he provides an elaborate description of the now famous Lake District in England so as to lead his reader into what he hoped would be proper aesthetic appreciation of the area’s qualities. More importantly, he hoped it might be preserved, maybe even as national property, a radical conception that influenced the creation of our own national parks in America and that would not become a political reality in his own country until more than a century later.

I have traveled to the Lake District only twice, so I am no expert on the area, but my experience has been sufficient to understand why its beauty inspired such marvelous poetry, artistry, and devotion from one man. But I have traveled enough in the world to understand that there are a great many places in the world of staggering beauty. Moreover, most places when looked at with the eyes of love, especially with the kind of driving passion of a Wordsworth, a Monet, a Pissarro, or a Derek Walcott, can be transformed into a place of exceptional and an indispensable beauty. There are a great many places in the world that we revere precisely because someone revered them first, someone like John Constable who loved the Stour River Valley in England with such passion that he was willing to risk rejection by the critics of his day because he chose to paint the ordinary scenes of his home rather than the more heroic and fantastical landscapes of mythology and history. Or someone like Wallace Stegner who brought much needed attention to the aesthetic qualities of the less iconic but nevertheless important beauties of the American West. What becomes obvious at closer inspection is that, although undeniably beautiful, these are places that are not so exceptionally beautiful that one could not find adequate or superior substitutes elsewhere. Walden Pond comes to mind.

Places are like human faces, maybe even especially children’s faces. Look long enough and with enough devotion and they all become beautiful, exceptionally so because, like the great English poet John Clare declared of his own beloved country heath, “every trifle makes it dear.” Of course, then we run the risk of failing to see beauty elsewhere, or wanting always to prove that our love triumphs over all others, such as when Wordsworth’s uxorious devotion to his home led him to foolishly declare his lakes and his mountains superior to Scotland’s. I myself am sometimes guilty of declaring Utah Valley mountains more beautiful than Salt Lake’s, but that’s really just an argument against my northern neighbors for their aesthetic and sometimes cultural chauvinism.

What I really want to say is that places deserve lovers, most especially lovers who have the discipline, the drive, the skills, and the will to stick around long enough so that their songs of praise for their homes might be passed on to future generations and convince enough people to stay put and work to keep that place beautiful for future generations. I know tourism is rife with problems. I can’t answer exhaustively the question of how to love beauty sustainably, but we could start maybe by encouraging people to make visits to a place a little longer than a few hours. Can we invite people to see places on the power of their own legs and arms whenever possible and not always and only by mechanized transportation or recreation? Can we suggest that you learn to love home first, just a little bit, before flinging yourself across the world? Just a few thoughts. If we had a deeper culture of appreciation for home, right where we are, when we are there, maybe wanderlust would not be so intense. And maybe then we could build a culture, as Stegner once asked, worthy of our landscapes. I would rather deal with the problem of Wordsworthian chauvinism (i.e., my lakes are the best!!) than too many people seeing every place as equally indistinct and nondescript to their shallow eyes, to their wasted skills of language, unused gifts of visual representation, and flat and unresponsive senses of smell, taste, and hearing.

It isn’t hard to see that the Lake District is beautiful, but I doubt this is because it meets some universally accepted standards of beauty. It is because someone loved it enough to devote their greatest gifts of expression on its behalf. And we were ultimately convinced by the power of his words. So while I recommend a trip to the Lake District, I think a more fulfilling and meaningful trip would be out your back yard and into the world around you—be it a city skyline or a mountainside. Bring a pencil and paper. Open your eyes and ears. See what fortune has given you.

Inspired by my recent travels in the UK, including several visits to some of its most outstanding gardens, I have been thinking about the role a garden can play in teaching us about ourselves in the world. A garden is a literal walk through a figurative world or perhaps it is a figurative walk through a literal world. We can never be sure. It is real but artificially designed. It is nature yet very much a manifestation of culture and values. There is no escaping culture in a garden, but it is the most direct reminder we have in the arts that human culture never escapes the contingencies of nature. They were designed historically to be that transitional space from the house and the surrounding wilderness, and in its most arrogant forms, it is an emphatic statement of the triumph of human conventions of order over the menacing unevenness of things, the entangled world of violent interdependence that has made life possible but which threatens our claims to human exceptionalism. In its more humble forms, it is a way of bowing the head to nature, of inviting the untamed world within a welcoming space of human dwelling. [Read more…] about Gardens and the Art of Self-Reflection

Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” is for me a kind of touchstone. It is the play I know and probably love the best (although “King Lear” is a contender) and the one I have seen most often performed. I read it as an undergraduate and ended up writing my honors thesis on it as my first bona-fide research project. At the time, postcolonial theory was on the rise and all the talk about the play was centering on Prospero’s abuse of Caliban as an emblem of colonial rule. Language was a tool of control: “You taught me language,” Caliban cries, “and my profit on it is I know how to curse!” Little did I know at the time that the many arguments I found that were in sympathy for the many areas of the globe affected by the colonial imposition of Western culture and the research that I did surrounding this character would eventually draw me away from European studies where I thought I was headed and back to the Americas and the Caribbean in particular. This was a great gift.

It wasn’t until many years later that I went back to older interpretations of the play. Maybe because I myself had aged, had daughters of my own, or had taken up the task of writing artistically, but I found Prospero a more sympathetic and intriguing figure. Maybe too the change resulted from reading the play in the Bay Area of California, where concerns about justice took precedent, to reading it in Provo, UT, a place where free expression of religion is paramount. And as I have taken to reading theology of late, I find myself drawn back to these famous words Prospero speaks to his daughter and his future son-in-law. This comes after he performs his art before them, bringing forth illusions, strange and wondrous, that cause them a certain degree of fear.

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,

As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful sir,

Our revels now are ended. These our actors

(As I foretold you) were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air,

And like the baseless fabric of this vision

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And like this insubstantial pageant faded

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

With this one speech Shakespeare pierces through the illusions of art to show their artificiality. Just as we are being moved by the play itself, he shows us its insubstantiality. It is mere illusion that moves us, and this is either because we are fools, his art is insidious and manipulative, or because art is that powerful. It turns out that all three conditions are true.

We are fools, easily deceived by appearances, not just the appearances of reality presented to us in the arts or in commercial and political propaganda, but also by appearances in life. Like those aboard the ship at the play’s opening or like Miranda watching from the shore, our own sufferings are often a product of our failure to understand or wait for the broader purposes of life to become apparent to us. Prospero implies here that mortality itself and all of its manifest substance of cities and transportation and commerce is a pageant of illusions, as transient as spirit. But Shakespeare doesn’t shame us for this foolishness. In fact, the capacity to be moved by life signals a good and teachable heart, one for whom mortality will prove a learning experience.

Art too is insidious, never quite escaping the political conditions in which it emerges. Artists are people of their times and they carry prejudices, blind spots, and they can never fully manage the noise of contradiction of being who they are and where they are. And art cannot retain its purity against the pull of commercial and self-interest. I toured the Harry Potter studios here in England yesterday. They are a monument to the staggering and pervasive power of the imagination of one woman, which then infected thousands more to give more substance to an even more elaborate illusion. As moving as that was to see the power of the imagination on display, it is not innocent. It is also a massive commercial enterprise. These facts are not to be ignored, but neither should they convince us to become overly cynical about the power of art. If so, we will have failed to avail ourselves of the one thing that might help us to see ourselves most clearly for who we are.

Prospero’s art is powerful, and it is not merely a power of representation; it is a power over the natural world. He has struck a partnership that allows him, for a time, to release the energies of the earth in a certain way for certain effects for a certain time. You can never escape the feeling from the play’s beginning that time is of the essence, that what little power Prospero imagines he has over the earth and over others is contingent. When he finally lays down his staff, after briefly flirting with the idea of using his power for revenge, it is perhaps finally apparent to us that he sees himself for the flawed man that he is. This is perhaps the reason why he pleads in the final speech to the audience, “as you from crimes would pardoned me, let your indulgence set me free.” To love art, to finally and ultimately decide that it is worthy of our praise is to enact forgiveness, to see ourselves mercifully and charitably in our foolishness. Because what’s far worse than the foolishness of being moved by illusions, of weeping when we didn’t have to, of pouring our hearts out in compassion for others when in the end it isn’t cost-effective, is to remain unmoved by the great drama of life itself. W.H. Auden imagines Prospero after the end of the play in his great poem “The Sea and the Mirror” speaking to Ariel:

But now all these heavy books are no use to me anymore, for

            Where I go, words carry no weight: it is best,

Then, I surrender their fascinating counsel

            To the silent dissolution of the sea

Which misuses nothing because it values nothing;

            Whereas man overvalues everything

Yet, when he learns the price is pegged to his valuation,

            Complains bitterly he is being ruined which, of course, he is.

To be language users, dreamers, and makers of illusions is our lot. And this means that we make of the world a second nature, as Kant once described it, making and reorganizing the elements in our minds and in our world. And this means we will always overprize, always suffer, and always have insufficient power to achieve our ambitions, even though it also means that dreaming is our only chance.

This play has come full circle for me because now critics are starting to pay attention to the environmental messages implied in Prospero’s relationship to Caliban and perhaps most especially Ariel. A production I saw a number of years ago in Stratford portrayed the ticking of the clock as the melting of the stage itself, presumably due to climate change. We don’t have a lot of time to work with here to learn how to manage our dreams in a world of limits. Shakespeare suggests that such vital awareness is cultivated at the edge of human society, on the frontiers of the wild away from the claims civilization would make on us where nature runs its course independent of our pageants and where we stand the best chance of learning proper humility. It is perhaps too for this reason that Auden argued that “a culture is no better than its woods.”