Where the Wild Things Are

A river in spate, a screaming baby, a snowy mountain peak: such things stir irresistible emotions. They move us because they are out of control. We cannot help but respond to these calls of the wild. I was reacquainted with my own wild inner journey thanks to a chance meeting with Jay Griffiths. I was paying a flying visit to CAT to teach a session of a course with the rather unpromising title of 'Emergency on Planet Earth'. Jay provided the cultural spot yesterday evening and she charmed us all with readings from her new book, Wild: An Elemental Journey.

As I have previously described, my own wild journey is somewhat more domestic, since I no longer fly and reaching anywhere even halfway exotic by land is fairly demanding in terms of time, energy and money. My adventure with the field mouse became considerably more wild than I was able to cope with, when it was followed into the pantry by rats who disturbed my nights, spoiled my food and chewed their way through beams and possibly electrical cables too. I colluded with John the ratman and my landlord's partner in their death by poison, feeling a mixture of disgust, relief and guilt when a total of four dead and putrid remains were variously disposed of.

As with so many aspects of life, the lesson is about balance. We do not need to travel to the ends of the earth to learn about the wild, which is right here on our doorstep and inside our selves. Society and culture are concerned to maintain an appropriate distance between ourselves and the wild. Wiser cultures than our own cherish those gifted persons - shamans, medicine men and wise women - who can travel further into the wild without becoming destroyed by it.

The learning that has stayed with me from Jay's stirring reading is her description of the Nazis as people who could not tolerate wild wandering. She identified the aberrant nature of their key target groups for extermination: the Roma people; those who wandered in their minds; those who strayed off the straight sexual path; and the wandering Jewish race. She did not link this - as Simon Schama does in his weighty study Landscape and Memory - to the primeval forest and the barbarian heritage of the Teutonic people which the Nazi regime sought both to celebrate and to repress through its obsessive bureaucracy.

We might, as questioners were tempted to do last night, see a parallel in the bland uniformity of the market system, which forces the wild in us to escape into violent computer games or derivatives trading. Giving way to the wild risks insanity and isolation; repressing it creates violence and stifles creativity. Where the wild things are, it turns out, is everywhere there is life. Tweet

Revaluing the Wasteland

T. S. Eliot gave the wasteland a bad name. But then he did begin his famous poem with the words:

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Some cruelty! And he doesn't even mention the bluebells.

Yes, yes, I know he had a sort of spiritual wasteland in mind, where humankind had strayed off the path of learning Greek and revelling in high culture. His pessimistic view might have been tempered somewhat if he had strayed off his own path of intellectual endeavour and found his way into the highways and byways of the real Wilderness.

I have a soft spot for Eliot, though. Something about the cadence of his writing rather than the recondite content. And not unconnected to the fact that one of my first boyfriends caught me with a short bit of his verse involving a rose-garden - no doubt the wildest sort of place Eliot himself ever strayed into.

But I digress. What I meant to share with you was the vast range of uses that peasants once put wastelands to. This was before the days of the National Trust, when non-agricultural land was available for foraging rather than recreation. The study by J. M. Neeson called Commoners indicates just how much they were able to provide. Obviously there was grazing and the possibility to gather firewood and other materials that were used for fires — furze (gorse) and bracken (fern). Commoners also took hazel loppings to make hurdles for penning sheep, and fern was also used for animal bedding and, once burnt, its ash was used to make soap. In addition:

'Reed was plentiful and valued most as thatch for roofs and also to cover the stacks, ricks and clamps for all kinds of crops and vegetables. Rushes — bulrushes — were equally plentiful, waterproof, and woven into baskets, mats, hats, chair seats and toys. . . they were also good for bedding, as a netting in the plastering of walls, and wrapping for soft milk cheeses. They made cheap, bright rushlights too' (Neeson, 1989: 166).

The list of foraging crops, especially nuts, berries and fungi is equally long, and as varied as were the possibilities for salad crops and herbs that could be gathered. It is clear from these accounts that the commoning lifestyle offered two other characteristics crucial to a bioregional approach to provisioning: seasonality and shared experience.

The dismantling of the commons was disastrous for commoners but crucial for the growth of the industrial market system, which they were required to staff. Neeson’s account makes clear the link between the ending of subsistence and the population explosion which Malthus and other political economists later bemoaned. She also chronicles how the move from commoner to labourer undermined the resilience and self-reliance of British citizens. Tweet