The timid or ill-shod confine themselves to the land side, where they get comparatively few berries and many scratches; but the more adventurous—making their way through the open swamp which the bushes overhand, wading amid the water andromeda and sphagnum, where the surface quakes for a rod around, and wetting their feet at least with the contents of many an upset and rent pitcher plant—obtain access to the great drooping clusters which no hand has disturbed. There is no wilder and richer sight than is afforded from such a point of view of the edge of a blueberry swamp, when various wild berries are intermixed.

Thoreau, Wild Fruits

About fifteen years ago I drove to West Virginia to backpack in a wilderness area I had not yet been to. The route I planned seemed simple enough, but I underestimated the heat and humidity—and the elevation gain. The first part of the hike was entirely uphill without any break; by the time I reached the summit I had a migraine from exertion. But to my surprise and delight there were wild, low blueberry bushes growing everywhere. This was early August and the berries were perfectly ripe and abundant. I had never tasted so sweet and ambrosial a fruit, and haven’t since. While I cursed the heat on my climb to the top one taste of the warmed berries turned my curses to songs of praise.

That night I found a spot to set up camp under a spruce tree and near a small stream. I awoke to the sun beaming into my tent and thought I had slept in later than I had anticipated. After exiting my tent however I realized the sun was the near full moon and it was not late morning but sometime in the middle of the night. It was as if the blueberries I gorged myself on had blurred the boundaries between night and day, dreaming and waking.

They are of various sizes, colors, and flavors, but I prefer the large and more acid blue ones with a bloom. These embody for me the essence and flavor of the swamp. When they are thick and large, bending the bushes with their weight, few fruits are so handsome a sight.

Thoreau, Wild Fruits

This past spring my son and I planted three high blueberry bushes in a raised bed, amending the soil to their preferred acidity. I diligently covered them all spring to protect the flowers from late frosts. Our first harvest was earlier than expected, and for the first year, more abundant than expected. The flavor is unlike anything you can buy in the store, and much like Thoreau, we prefer the large, tart ones with a healthy bloom. When they are warmed by the sun there is a flavor almost like rosemary or thyme that you can faintly detect—a flavor both woody and herbaceous, one that reminds you that there are some varieties of blueberries that are evergreen.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Thoreau, Walden

How do we handle our encounters and relationships with ourselves and others? Carelessly and roughly, knocking off the unripe berries in our excitement to pick the ripe ones? If you wish to harvest as many as possible as quickly as possible you will find it far easier to disregard the not-yet-ripe berries and that all your berries have lost their bloom. If you wish to preserve the bloom, and ensure that those who have not yet ripened live long enough to do so, it takes delicate and precise handling—the kind of care that cannot be automated or optimized. I make sure to point out to my son the protective bloom on the berries and to handle them gently to preserve them. We inevitably knock some of the still-green berries mixed in with the ripe ones and apologize for our carelessness.

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

Thoreau, Walden

There is a family-run fruit farm not too far from our house that I go to at least once a week in the summer months. You can pick your own blueberries and gooseberries and raspberries and black raspberries and elderberries and apples and, if the spring is kind, cherries (this year the frost got to the flowers). Those are special moments for my son and me, to go spend time in the rows of berries, not worrying about the lapse of time, where we need to be or what we need to do. It is difficult with a young child to allow for a broad margin, to not sacrifice the bloom of the moment to necessary and coarse labors. How much better is our time spent picking berries?

relation to time, to space; growth and decay, doing and not doing, labor and rest; what removes the bloom? what preserves it? what creates it?

Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, “to fresh woods and pastures new,” or, while the sun was setting, made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and laid up a store for several days. The fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not been known there since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither from the country’s hills.

Thoreau, Walden

There was a time not long ago when I knew where to look for wild fruits in my vicinity. Things have changed, either because of development or disease, and now I am unsure where to seek out those gifts. But I always stay vigilant when my son and I go on excursions, and finding unexpected berry patches is always cause for celebration. Recently my son has become aware of economics and comments frequently that “things shouldn’t cost money.” Paying for food especially is hard for him to grasp. So I encourage his nascent sense of justice both by agreeing with him but also by trying to help him relate to the world differently. How do you preserve your flavor and essence? If you would taste a berry you must pick it; if you would be at home in the world you must experience the world as home.

Men at length stands in such a relation to Nature as the animals which pluck and eat as they go. The fields and hills are a table constantly spread. Diet drinks, cordials, wines of all kinds and qualities are bottles up in the skins of countless berries for the refreshment of animals, and they quaff them at every turn. They seem offered to us not so much for food as for sociality, inviting us to a picnic with Nature. We pluck and eat in remembrance of her. It is a sort of sacrament, a communion—the not forbidden fruits, which no serpent tempts us to eat. Slight and innocent savors which relate us to Nature, make us her guests, and entitle us to her regard and protection.

Thoreau, Wild Fruits

Despite my vigilance I have a poison ivy rash on my left arm. Now that all the leaves have (mostly) returned, migrating from their own southern haven, the air is once again heavy with moisture. This humidity aggravates the rash, makes the temptation to scrape my skin impossible to resist. It is a blessing, this rash—an artifact of contact, a shrine to touch. I say all the leaves have mostly returned because it seems that, despite being two thirds of the way through the month of leafing out, there are still some trees—the largest and oldest—who are sluggish. It seems late to my mind and makes me worry.

I remain convinced that there is more life to be found on (or just off) the human-made trails than there is off them. We make them not just for our own enjoyment but for the enjoyment of all. One need not venture into the unknown and untrodden to find evidence of our neighbors. Trails are the arteries of the forest. Yesterday I observed several garter snakes, american toads, salamanders, millipedes, and countless birds and small rodents from the middle of a wooden trail. Every time I have ventured off trail to explore I have felt utterly alone—even the trees and plants feel distant. The path may be narrow but it is not empty, your marginal companions are wide and broad.

PM, Beaver Marsh

How life-giving must this intense heat feel for cold-blooded creatures. Their habits and behavior mirror the seasons perfectly. At least a dozen snapping turtles were swimming in the shallow marsh, moving much faster than I was despite carrying worlds on their backs. Their liveliness was invigorating and I began to feel a bit cold-blooded myself. Wetlands like these are fonts of creation and can bring the dead back to life.

The wood thrushes have returned; the woods are filled with summer bird songs—warblers, tanagers, thrushes. Two turkeys flew across the river. As I walk I find myself obsessively checking for ticks. Millipedes are numerous, sometimes making it difficult to walk without stepping on them. A red eft crawls through the moss.

I was watching the birds—sparrows, cardinals, and finches mostly—at my feeder the other day and thought it odd that every one of them was so wary, paranoid even—constantly scanning their surroundings, nervously and quickly grabbing a seed and then immediately resuming their scan. This is a reliable and safe source of food for them yet they remain anxious. Just the other day my son and some of his school friends were playing in the woods near the school. After pointing out the poison ivy nearby and reminding them avoid it there were some who were unfazed and walked right through anyway. Contrast this with some of the people I know who refuse to spend any time outside out of fear for ticks and tick-borne disease.

Certainly the birds have a point, despite the gift of free food one should still remain alert for danger—there is real risk leaving your home. But why should it be otherwise? Why should I believe that I can live without risk, without danger, without having to be alert to it at all times? Every nonhuman animal moves through the world with some trepidation, why should I expect to be free from that?

These past two weeks have been bad pain weeks.

Caregiving is incredibly physically demanding—as is having a young son. Working out constantly is the main way I try to keep up with those demands but I have a tendency to overdo it, especially with my bad back and spine. I know I shouldn’t push myself as hard as I do, workout as intensely or as frequently, but aside from genuinely enjoying it I am terrified that I will one day lose whatever ability I currently have to care for my brother and son. During periods like this, when my chronic pain flares up, I cannot allow myself to rest or recover but am compelled to push myself, instead hoping I can unlock the correct sequence of stretches and movements to bring relief, like entering the password that instantly alleviates my pain.

How much of my life am I spending working on mobility and strength and conditioning? The older I get the harder these things are to achieve or maintain and the more time and effort I need to spend on them. It is, I fear, somewhat of an addiction—an addiction to endless growth, endless mobility, endless health, endless life.

Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave describes the battle for life and death. The party who emerges as master does not fear death. The desire for freedom, recognition, and sovereignty raises the master above concern for bare life. It is fear of dying that induces the future slave to subordinate himself to the Other. Preferring servitude to the threat of death, the slave clings to bare life… The slave does not venture as far as death, and therefore becomes a vassal who labors.

Work and bare life are closely related. Both constitute reactions to the negativity of death. Today, the defense of bare life is intensifying into the absolutization and festishization of health.

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

I am a slave. I have been living bare life, barely. “I workout to be strong enough to care for my brother,” I say, and while true enough I also don’t know when to stop, don’t know when enough is enough. I cling to life barely because it seems there is nothing else I can do. But why should it be otherwise? Why should I believe that I can live without discomfort, without having experiencing varying degrees of pain at all times? Surely every nonhuman animal moves through the world with some level of discomfort, why should I expect to be free from that?

Master Ssu, Master Yu, Master Li, and Master Lai were all four talking together. “Who can look upon nonbeing as his head, on life as his back, and on death as his rump?” they said. “Who knows that life and death, existence and annihilation, are all a single body? I will be his friend!”

The four men looked at each other and smiled. There was no disagreement in their hearts and so the four of them became friends.

All at once Master Yu fell ill. Master Ssu went to ask how he was. “Amazing” said Master Yu. “The Creator is making me all crookedy like this! My back sticks up like a hunchback and my vital organs are on top of me. My chin is hidden in my navel, my shoulders are up above my head, and my pigtail points at the sky. It must be some dislocation of the yin and yang!”

Yet he seemed calm at heart and unconcerned. Dragging himself haltingly to the well, he looked at his reflection and said, “My, my! So the Creator is making me all crookedy like this!”

“Do you resent it?” asked Master Ssu.

“Why no, what would I resent? If the process continues, perhaps in time he'll transform my left arm into a rooster. In that case I'll keep watch on the night. Or perhaps in time he'll transform my right arm into a crossbow pellet and I'll shoot down an owl for roasting. Or perhaps in time he'll transform my buttocks into cartwheels. Then, with my spirit for a horse, I'll climb up and go for a ride. What need will I ever have for a carriage again?

“I received life because the time had come; I will lose it because the order of things passes on. Be content with this time and dwell in this order and then neither sorrow nor joy can touch you. In ancient times this was called the `freeing of the bound.' There are those who cannot free themselves, because they are bound by things. But nothing can ever win against Heaven—that's the way it's always been. What would I have to resent?”

Zhuangzi, Watson trans.

These men are free, they are masters and not slaves. I know that if I continue to stay active then chances are good my quality of life will remain high as I get older, at least compared to the alternative. It is likely that my spinal issues won’t progress as quickly if I continue to stay active. But the quality of my life now is poor—bare life begets bare life; as Thoreau says, “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” I feel spent now and cannot imagine the exchange rate will be favorable in 10, 20, or 30 years time.

Capitalism absolutizes bare life. Its telos is not the good life. Capitalism’s compulsive accumulation and growth is specifically aimed against death, which counts as absolute loss. For Aristotle, merely accumulating capital merits scorn because it has no concern for the good life—only for bare life:

So some people believe that this is the task of household management, and go on thinking that they should maintain their store of money or increase it without limit. The reason they are so disposed, however, is that they are preoccupied with living, not with living well.

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

It is somewhat startling to consider that I have been, without realizing it, defending my bare life, promoting it even. There is an irony in being a caregiver for someone like my brother: on the one hand his condition will only progressively worsen throughout his life and mine; on the other hand, so will mine, and laboring to keep myself as healthy as possible, while necessary to continue to care for him, is closing the gap between our abilities. I am so preoccupied with prolonging my diminishing physical capacity that I am barely living.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Walden

Greeting my pain as a friend and knowing the whole and genuine meanness of it requires embracing death, freeing myself from the fetishizing of health and the slavery of bare life. I don’t know how to do this. It seems helpful to frame it in these terms, to admit and acknowledge that I have been living what is not life, but I fear it is not enough.

What is affirmed [in eroticism] is not bare life—which flees the negativity of death. Instead, the impulse to live, heightened to the utmost and affirmed, approaches the impulse to die. Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death.

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

I have long thought that Thoreau, despite his puritanical tendencies when talking about chastity and sex, is extremely an erotic writer—if “Eros is the medium for intensifying life to the point of death” then I would argue Thoreau was primarily concerned with eroticism. There are too many examples to point to but take as paradigmatic this extremely important journal entry from September 7th, 1851:

We sometimes experience a mere fullness of life, which does not find any channels to flow into. We are stimulated, but to no obvious purpose… We are receiving our portion of the infinite. The art of life! Was there ever anything memorable written upon it? By what disciplines to secure the most life, with what care to watch our thoughts. To observe what transpires, not in the street, but in the mind and heart of me! I do not remember any page which will tell me how to spend this afternoon. I do not so much wish to know how to economize time as how to spend it, by what means to grow rich, that the day may not have been in vain… How to live. How to get the most life. As if you were to teach the young hunter how to entrap his game. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over all fields on that errand, and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax.

This theme—intensifying life to the point of death—preoccupies and pervades all his writings, even his political essays and lectures, but perhaps finds its purest expression in this journal entry. The comment about teaching a young hunter to entrap his game points to the necessarily erotic relationship between life and death, but later, while writing Walden, this life-intensifying-to-the-point-of-death eroticism finds fuller expression at the culmination of the penultimate ‘Spring’ chapter:

We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp,—tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! 

This non-economy of erotic Spring stands in stark contrast to the human economy that began Walden. What began exploring the quiet desperation of bare life ends with an overwhelming abundance of erotic life.

In a society where everyone is an entrepreneur of the self, the economy of survival reigns. it stands diametrically opposed to the non-economy of eros and death. Neoliberalism, with its uninhibited ego- and achievement-impulses, constitutes a social order from which eros has vanished entirely. The society of positivity, from which negativity has disappeared, is a society of bare life, which is dominated exclusively by the concern “to make sure of survival” in the face of discontinuity. This is a slave’s life. Concern for bare life, for survival alone, strips life of all vitality…

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

Concerning myself with survival alone has stripped my life of all vitality. As I continue to struggle through finding meaning and value and purpose in caring for my brother I think it important not to become mired in everything that is not life. Despite my efforts—or perhaps because of my effort—to avoid living a bare life, to avoid falling into the same desperate trap that ensnares so many around me, the very things I began doing to escape that trap have themselves become the snare.

Even Thoreau commented on this in Walden:

I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also. 

It is no secret that caffeine (but not only caffeine) consumption and overconsumption is intimately connected with market demands to produce more and more, thereby increasing the demand for more stimulants—the relationship between coarse labors and eating and drinking coarsely is ouroboros-like. So I spit out my tail. But if my cup had become more transparent immediately after abstaining it has since grown cloudy and murky—not because I have started drinking caffeine again but because whatever clarity I was afforded by my initial abstinence has now worn off.

As an entrepreneur of the self, the achievement-subject is free insofar as he or she is not subjugated to a commanding and exploiting Other. However, the suject is still not really free because he or she now engages in self-exploitation—and does so of his or own free will… The neoliberal dictum of freedom finds expression in the paradoxical imperitve, Be free. But this plunges the achievement-subject into depression and exhaustion. Even though Foucault’s “ethics of the self” stands opposed to political repression and allo-exploitation in general, it is blind to the violence of the freedom that underlies auto-exploitation. …You can exercises even greater constraint than You should. Auto-compulsion proves more fatal than allo-compulsion, because there is no way to resist oneself.

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

Whatever coarse labors I have felt less compelled to do since abstaining from caffeine have nonetheless plunged me into exhaustion. Generally speaking I think my mood has improved these past months, my patience increased as well. At first I felt more energetic and I even slept better—easier time falling asleep and easier time waking up. But the exhaustion has returned, tempting me to bite my own tail again.

Initially, back when I started professionally caring for my brother over 15 years ago, I struggled with the switch from pursuing a creative life to pursuing a life of caregiving. I felt it was the better path morally—spiritually even—to care for my brother than to perform and teach and music—labors that didn’t seem to matter that much, at least not in the same way that caring for someone who cannot care for themselves did. And so I found my footing and began to walk that path, though I frequently found my shoes were caked with shit and piss. Naturally I had to stop making music, stop creating, stop performing. There was no time and besides I had more important things to do.

In the past three or four years I started writing mainly as therapy, but it quickly became something I enjoyed and looked forward to. It seemed to be a creative pursuit that could—I hoped—coexist with the life of a caregiver. I began writing music again too, rehearsing and recording with some old friends, and even playing a few scattered shows. However, trying to spend what little free time and energy I had making music or writing only made it harder for me to take care of my brother. Maybe I could do both and not plunge into depression and exhaustion if I overconsumed caffeine…

Yet even these past two caffeine-free months I still feel just as exhausted and exploited as I did before. Somewhere along the way I began to equate my creative pursuits with the You can and caregiving with the You should imperative. Over the course of the 15 or so years taking care of my brother being creative slowly transformed into a coarse labor, a distraction from my primary, more elevated and noble labor of caregiving. Time spent rehearsing, writing and reading, making music—they were taking away precious resources from what was really important. And yet now, I feel more and more like caregiving has become the coarse labor, or more accurately, that I am performing those labors coarsely.

Against the popular or common sentiment that creative pursuits or hobbies can help insulate me from the devastation of difficult work like caregiving, my own experiences are a bit harder to parse. The You can proves to be impossible to overcome, with or without caffeine. I find myself stuck somewhere between the You can and the You should, each of them coarsely feeding on the other. I at once desire to be creative, to touch the source of things, and to share what results, and also to devote my life to caring for my brother. I cannot, it seems, do either for very long, without feeling compelling or pulled towards the other, and there is no balancing them, because each of them demands everything that I am.

My son was riding his bike up and down the alley by our house and I found myself bracing for some terrible accident, broken limbs and bloodied knees—that sort of thing. Not that I had any reason to worry but because, even now, going on seven years of being a parent, I still find myself getting lost in the abyss that is imagining the worst-case scenario. In the summers we go to a family cottage on Lake Michigan and always take a ferry trip to Mackinac Island. Without fail, we sit on the open top deck and right at the edge (so my son can crane over the side and watch the waves). Visions of him tumbling overboard fill my head the entire drive up to the cottage, yet while we are actually physically sitting on the boat, with the wind in our faces and my arms securely around him, I have never once felt like he was unsafe.

In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes a moment of panic while traveling to the Amazon in Ecuador. Landslides are a common occurrence on those mountain passes and on one particular occasion the bus he was on got caught between several:

Traffic was backed up in both directions, and we were trapped by a series of landslides scattered over a distance of several kilometers. The mountain above was starting to fall on us. At one point a rock crashed down onto our roof. I was scared.

He notes, however, that no one else on the bus was fazed. Sensing that his experience of that moment was out of sync with the people around him he began to feel a sense of alienation, first from his fellow passengers, then from his own body:

This discrepancy between my perception of the world and that of those around me sundered me from the world and those living in it. All I was left with were my own thoughts of future dangers spinning themselves out of control. And then something more disturbing happened. Because I sensed that my thoughts were out of joint with those around me, I soon began to doubt their connection to what I had always trusted to be there for me: my own living body, the body that would otherwise give a home to my thoughts and locate this home in a world whose palpable reality I shared with others. I came, in other words, to feel a tenuous sense of existence without location—a sense of deracination that put into question my very being. For if the risks I was so sure of didn’t exist—after all, no one else on that bus seemed frightened that the mountain would fall on us—then why should I trust my bodily connection to that world? Why should I trust '“my” connection to “my” body? And if i didn’t have a body what was “I”? Was I even alive? Thinking like this, my thought ran wild.

These feelings—thoughts of future dangers spinning out of control, of being so mistrusting of your own sense of the world that you begin to doubt your very being—are familiar to me, and I imagine to most parents. In addition to reminding me of how I felt for the better part of two years after my son was born, Kohn’s words also reminded me of Thoreau’s infamous contact passage from his first trip to the Maine woods:

I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

There is a shared experience here, between Kohn and Thoreau, even including the aftermath of these rupturing events. For the next day or two both continued to feel the anxiety of this disconnection. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau’s description of the return journey is filled with anxiety and unease, describing waterfalls and portages with uncharacteristic nervousness. Kohn describes the racing thoughts of what might have happened, “different dangerous scenarios,” that would not relent even a day after the landslides had been cleared and they were able to pass safely through. Yet in both cases they were able to find a path out of the abyss and back into the world.

For Thoreau this path was an encounter with a Penobscot man, Louis Neptune, whom at first he didn’t recognize: “…we discovered two canoes, with two men in each, turning up this stream from Shad Pond, one keeping the opposite side of a small island before us, while the other approached the side where we were standing, examining the banks carefully for muskrats as they came along. The last proved to be Louis Neptune and his companion, now, at last, on their way up to Chesuncook after moose, but they were so disguised that we hardly knew them.” This was enough to bring Thoreau back to the present moment, to the actual world and its inhabitants, and to his own body.

Kohn had a similar encounter, but with an indigenous bird. After deciding to go for a walk with his companion he spotted a tanager and grabbed his binoculars to get a better look: “I rolled the focusing knob and the moment that bird’s thick black beak became sharp I experienced a sudden shift. My sense of separation simply dissolved. And, like the tanager coming into focus, I snapped back into the world of life.”

In all three cases it is symbolic thought that has proliferated, cancer-like, unchecked and untethered to the larger world beyond the human.

One of Kohn’s points is that symbolic thought isn’t separate from but emerges out of other registers of thought but that this separation is exactly what symbolic thought has a propensity to do:

We tend to assume that because something like the symbolic is exceptionally human and thus novel it must also be radically separate from that which it comes… If, as I claim, our distinctively human thoughts stand in continuity with the forest’s thoughts insofar as both are in some way or other the products of the semiosis that is intrinsic to life, then an anthropology beyond the human must find a way to account for the distinctive qualities of human thought without losing sight of its relation to these more pervasive semiotic logics.

[Panic and its dissipation] point both to the real dangers of unfettered symbolic thought and to how such thought can be regrounded. Watching birds regrounded my thoughts, and by extension my emerging self, by re-creating the semiotic environment in which symbolic reference is itself nested. Through the artifice of my binoculars I became indexically aligned with a bird, thanks to the fact that I was able to appreciate its image now coming into sharp focus right there in front of me. This event reimmersed me in something… a knowable (and shareable) environment, and the assurance, for the moment, of some sort of existence, tangibly located in a here and now that extended beyond me but of which I too could come to be a part.

I am new to semiotics and admittedly know very little, only as much as I have read (and understood) so far in Kohn’s book. But contemplating these three scenarios side-by-side-by-side reminds me of the importance of those modes and registers of thought outside of the human and symbolic. Kohn doesn’t mention this (perhaps he will later in the book) but I have a feeling that much of our technology also functions as some sort of hyper-symbolic realm, generating entire worlds disconnected from the elemental conditions that gave rise to them.

We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. Every generation makes the discovery, that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?

Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

The older I get the harder it is to push myself into uncomfortable situations. Not difficult ones, and not even dangerous ones—just uncomfortable. Yet it is still something I believe is important, not just for me, but for my son as well. In those uncomfortable situations I am forced to confront the world and my body—I cannot hide behind the comfort of the symbolic. These are situations where I cannot avoid the discomfort that accompanies embodiment, both within and without. The elements insist and I cannot stop them; I hike miles into the woods and have no choice but to hike back, despite my body wanting to stop. Allowing myself to feel this kind of discomfort has long been a way for me to reground, to reconnect to the wider world around me, to include myself in the world rather than isolating myself from it.

I didn’t intend to talk about both of these things, instead attempting to just present some of my scattered thoughts in a scattered way. But I do think there might be some connection between these two.

Attempting to balance creative pursuits and caregiving is impossible, perhaps, because balancing is an act of the achievement-subject, and the creative, non-symbolic forces of the world, Nature rightly read, can only cause imbalance.

Eros is a relationship to the Other situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability. Being able not to be able represents its negative counterpart… A successful relationship with the Other finds expression as a kind of failure. Only by way of being able not to be able does the Other appear.

…Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

Eros is not just about passion and the erotic, but concerns, necessarily, the Other, and that gulf between self and Other is where creativity resides. “Therefore,” as Byung-Chul Han says, “in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist.”

For Thoreau and Kohn both, an experience of the Other was what led them out of the symbolic abyss and back into their bodies and the world. The distance between themselves and the Other was what allowed them to leave the symbolic and come into contact with their bodies, with creativity, with Nature. But that distance is crucial and collapsing it—whether through the symbolic or through an aversion to the discomfort of that distance—annihilates not just the Other but Eros, Life.

I very much feel that I am able not to be able. Perhaps my failures at both caregiving and at writing words and music, is, actually, a good sign.

In the past five days I have stumbled upon as many carcasses. These are places I frequent regularly so the presence of these new bodies is obvious—it isn’t the case that the melting snow has revealed bodies that perished earlier in the season, these are recent visitors. Having survived the winter they were sacrificed to the vernal gods, their blood mingling with the melting snow as an offering. When I was younger I regularly fasted, especially this time of year. One day out of the week I abstained from food entirely—not for health benefits or weight loss or protest, but perhaps for the challenge of it. It seems petty now, knowing what I know. And yet, I am still in this body and it is once again spring; the thawing ground will not produce food for some months. The earth hungers and takes back her own. How could I not participate? And so once more I will fast.

We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp,—tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence.

from ‘Spring’ in Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

For the past several weeks the barred owl has not been in the hemlock tree. The last time I saw it there was the week of Christmas, before it really snowed and temperatures dropped significantly. Perhaps there is some correlation—do owls or other birds of prey take shelter, like a mini hibernation, during extreme cold snaps? The hawks haven’t been deterred at all. Today, there were two deer at the base of the hemlock tree—a mother and child—and still no owl. I can’t recall a time in the past year, morning or evening, I visited this tree and the owl wasn’t there. Both of these creatures has a sort of mythopoetic significance to me, and I get the feeling that the deer have symbolically replaced the owl.

Also this time last year I was looking for skunk cabbages in these woods. Now the snow is much too deep, still over a foot in places, and even its thermogenic properties are overwhelmed by the snow at present. But there are other signs, other helpers the spring employs to turn the season. In the same swampy area I normally look for skunk cabbages I watched several bluebirds fly back and forth in the forest understory—an unusual sight for February. If the skunk cabbages, with their summer altars, thaw the earth and change the season from the ground up, the bluebirds, carrying spring on their back, pull warmth from the south to melt our icy hearts. What is the turning of the wheel of the year but a type of convection, and spring is when the bluebirds and skunk cabbages impart their warmth and take turns pushing and pulling to keep the wheel in motion.

More abundant than the skunk cabbages now are the deer, who are still surprisingly fattened despite the very harsh cold and snow of January, and who I imagine are very grateful that it was a mast year last autumn. They are still foraging, digging up the snow in many places, taking advantage of the over abundance of acorns still remaining on the forest floor. I found some recent evidence of beaver activity in a place I’ve never seen before, near a stream bank that cuts through the woods where the deer like to congregate. I felt a persistent sense of amazement and wonder at these signs—the deer mother and child under the owl tree; the bluebirds in the skunk cabbage patch; a close encounter with a deer; trees chewed down by beavers.

…we come into this world expecting it—all of it—to be alive. That the world is alive, that to be means to participate in this aliveness that is encountered everywhere and in everything, is the meeting-point between panpsychism as philosophy and animism as practice. The expectation that the world is alive and must be treated as such is also, no less significantly, what appears to be a universal feature among humans, innate in the newly born, acted upon as a matter of course by the child.

…socialization into adulthood currently sees to it that this expectation be banished and given up as—exactly—”childish.”

…In seeking to root out, tooth and nail, all signs of our innate affinity to nature and “childish” openness to communicating and interacting with everything encountered in the outside natural world, so-called anthropomorphism has been virtually banished. We this have it backward: it is not that we are projecting a “subjective” liveliness and agency onto the so-called external world (take as a blank slate); on the contrary, we are addressed by, and respond to, the liveliness and manifestations of agency that we encounter as the very fabric of the world. That this is so is not a timeless truth, however, immune to change. Indeed, the longer and more effectively we look upon and treat all those other-than-human agents as nothing of the sort, as objects not subjects, the more they will tend to become so.

Cosmologies of the Anthropocene, Arne Johan Vetlesen

Deep snow drifts, bright sun, warm wind from the south. Low 40s (F) which is about 40 degrees warmer than it has been the past few weeks. Surface of the beaver pond is completely frozen and covered in snow; the snow on the very top of the lodge was melted, almost like the warmth from inside had melted a hole in the top, acting as a chimney—you could see the mud and sticks just beneath the dome of melted snow and ice. Crows, jays, and cardinals were the most active and noisy, though a Carolina chickadee flitted across the edge of the pond. An area that is normally flooded and deeper than the tops of my boots was frozen solid—it had always been a wet and marshy area, on the far side of the pond near a stand of pine trees, but after the beavers moved in it has remained submerged. There were tracks all throughout the meadows and early succession forest leading up to and surrounding the pond and this area was no different. So I decided to take advantage of the now frozen ground and follow them through the brambles.

It wasn’t always clear whose tracks I was following. Several led to a series of pine trees and were all chained together. Underneath the pine trees the snow had been pushed away and the bare ground and pine needles were clearly visible—spots the deer would lay (there were piles of deer droppings in these spots too); I followed the tracks between the pine trees and found a few of these spots. Other tracks and trails crossed in several places, though I’m not sure who made them, possibly coyotes—the pond is surrounded by farmland on one side and there are signs up about coyotes so it’s possible, but all the tracks were too indistinct, the sudden warmth already softening all the hard edges.  

I kept my head down most of the time, mainly to avoid getting caught up in branches and thorns, but also to keep the sun out of my eyes. At some point the path I was following led to a clearing. I was genuinely turned around and unsure of where I was in relation to the beaver pond. In the clearing, just as there were chains of deer beds under the pine trees near the edge of the pond, there were areas where the snow had been packed down and worn away from use connected by small paths. These however were filled with bones and clumps of rabbit fur and urine and feces, though noticeably absent of any blood. A ribcage, spine, and pelvis were partly buried in the snow in one of these spots, in a way that looked slightly unusual—almost as if it had been intentionally placed in that position. It was, if I’m honest, slightly disconcerting stumbling upon what seemed to an altar. It was an uneasy feeling, like I shouldn’t have been there, like I had entered a sacred and terrifying place without permission.

To enter life, be food.

Linda Hogan

In his book The Nordic Animist Year, Rune Rasmussen says that the old heathen yule occurs around the first full moon after the first new moon after the winter solstice. Given that these dates fluctuate, sometimes significantly, there is a wide range for when the old yule would have been celebrated—anywhere from early January to early February. This winter the solstice fell just two days after a new moon, meaning that old yule would have been celebrated now—the first full moon after the first new moon after the winter solstice.

Last year at this time, the end of January, I was already looking for signs of spring—skunk cabbages mainly. The previous week has been, while not unusual, at the extreme low end of temperature range for winter, with over night lows as cold as -15°F. This followed a severe storm that dropped a foot and a half of snow in 24 hours. It is curious to me that the delayed old yule this year coincides with a much colder and snowier winter than last. It is almost as if we have an entire extra month of winter. Despite today’s full moon also coinciding with Imbolc and the roughly halfway point between the winter solstice and spring equinox, this February still very much belongs to winter for now.

The barred owl I usually see perched in the same eastern hemlock has not been there the past few times I’ve visited, today included. The deer and squirrel tracks were plentiful and I wonder if they had as much trouble walking through the snow as I did. In several places the squirrels had dug tunnels under the snow, presumably they were looking for food on the ground, but it reminded me more of the types of tunnels and dwellings I would attempt to dig out of the snow when I was a child. Surely the squirrels enjoy playing in the snow as much as human children do. The past few nights I’ve come across a large buck frolicking in the snow near the road—scooping his antlers and throwing snow all around him.

Will Buckingham wrote an excellent post about divination in Taiwan, viewing divination as play and gamification:

I, too, have found this a surprisingly useful practice. That is not to say I believe in the gods. I don’t. But acting as if I do seems a curiously helpful way of navigating some of life’s trickier choices.

If divination does not necessarily imply belief, this is because it can be understood as analogous, in certain important respects, to a game. This is an idea that I take, in part, from the anthropologist Stéphanie Homola, who argues that in divination, belief is beside the point. For Homola, what is crucial to playing a game well is not belief, but instead, a commitment, or willingness to accept the game’s rules of engagement. Or, if belief is at stake, the only thing one needs to believe is that here is a game worth playing.

What divinatory practices do the deer and squirrels play with?

I was immediately reminded of something else Rune as said regarding animism as a practice, that the troll you’re offering a beer to doesn’t care if you believe in him or not, he’d rather have the beer than your belief. Divination, then, might be one way to develop and nurture relationships to the gods, playfully. Is it that different from asking our friends for advice?

The stag didn’t have anything useful to tell me, only that I should bath in the snow more frequently.

In this playful spirit I got out my yarrow stalks and turned to the Yijing (I Ching), curious about whether spring will be late or early this year: ䷩ 42, Increase 益, which consists of the trigrams for thunder (lower trigam) and wind (upper trigram). Thunder is associated with spring, with the impulse to grow, the manifestation of the heavenly power in the earth; it is energy and movement and potential. Wind is more of a messenger, conveying the arousing energy of thunder, giving direction to the impulse to grow; it is possibility and pattern and ideas.

THE JUDGMENT

INCREASE. It furthers one To undertake something. It furthers one to cross the great water.

THE IMAGE

Wind and thunder: the image of INCREASE. Thus the superior man: If he sees good, he imitates it; If he has faults, he rids himself of them.

There are not many places in the county where I can escape the sound of cars. I am not the first person who came here for snowy solace, human or otherwise. Where the human tracks end deer and maybe fox continue, so I follow those. Exploring unknown trails in dense, young forests after fresh snow is always risky. Not only are there no human sounds reaching me here but no animal sounds either, aside from the swishing of my arms against my coat and my boots in the snow. If it weren’t for these tracks I wouldn’t know any inhabited these woods.

The tracks take me to the edge of the woods—there are much larger trees—oaks and hickories and even some larger beeches and maples—and to beginning of farmland, or what once was farmland. I immediately see and hear birds—first a red-bellied woodpecker flying from tree top to tree top, then a crow and a hawk. Squirrels are running up and down the larger trees. A small stream, mostly frozen, cuts through the area and the forest opens up and thins out on the other side. It appears that the woods thin but it’s only because there are much larger and more mature trees in this area, the edge of the woods.

All of the forests I know were cut down at some point in the last century. It is always fascinating to me how there never seems to be much in the way of wildlife found within the younger forests that are attempting to regrow. They are most abundant on the edges of these areas, the boundary between the human and the natural—the artificial and arbitrary boundary. Do these animals not know we, human animals, in all our wisdom and generosity, have set aside a place all for them? Why do they continue to encroach on our side of the line?

The excess of life in those edges is what has always attracted me to them, and no doubt that is what attracts others as well. Remnants of land once cultivated still provides nourishment—huge wolf trees that produce vast quantities of mast as well as shelter, overgrown fields with wildflowers and grasses and young tender plants perfect for browsing, escaped fruit trees and other crops, etc. Despite their neglect now that there was once an effort to cultivate the land still has an effect. The dense new growth forests offer very little precisely because they have been neglected and abandoned. Perhaps this is why we continue to develop the land outside the cities, turning farmland into developments—we’ve abandoned the cities and flee to the edges where there is still some sign of life.

It is curious to me to see people I know, who, when they reach the edges of their identity and realize the interior has been neglected, react by filling themselves in with some new identity rather than explore the edges of who they are. Some I know and have known, when confronted with the opportunity to reside in the borderlands, have taken residence in some new town instead. Middle age, especially, seems to be the catalyst for many of these relocations and conversions. Many people have converted to ‘new’ religious traditions, though from my perspective it is less a conversion and more of a backfilling—they seem to be using these belief systems as a barricade against the inevitable cracks in their identities. If there seems to be judgment on my part I suppose that is true enough. Not because I don’t understand why but because I am disappointed—disappointed because I hoped we would dwell in these cracks together.

Bayo Akomolafe explains this as a betrayal of the crack, the crack being “an ontological agent that reads you and spills you, actively disrupting the identity, shape, and ritual of the observer.” He describes three ways that we betray these cracks, three ways that which has cracked—empire, identity, totalizing forces and systems of all kinds and types—recaptures “our relationship to what exceeds it.” The crack reveals an excess that spills out and bubbles up; our failure to dwell in that crack, to be faithful to it, takes three forms: transformation, romanticization, resignation.

The first betrayal—turning the crack into a doorway: “My breakdown became my breakthrough” “My wound is my gift” “What didn't kill me made me stronger” “I'm grateful for my trauma—it taught me so much.” This is… metabolizing the crack. Taking what leaked beyond optimization and folding it back into the progress narrative (the crack had value after all—it made you better!) The betrayal isn't that transformation sometimes happens. Sometimes it does. The betrayal is demanding that the crack justify itself through transformation. Requiring it to become useful. Being loyal only to cracks that pay off. Weird fidelity stays with cracks that go nowhere. That teach nothing. That remain cracks.

The second betrayal—aestheticizing the crack: “'I'm beautifully broken” “My darkness is my depth” “Normal people are boring—we wounded ones are interesting” “I don't want to heal—healing is for cowards” This is… still optimization but now optimizing for brokenness rather than wholeness. Still making the crack valuable—just valuable as aesthetic, as identity, as distinction. The romanticizer is still asking: What do I get from this crack? The answer is just different: I get depth, meaning, specialness, an interesting persona. Weird fidelity doesn't romanticize. The crack isn't beautiful. It's not ugly either. It's just... owed. It's debt. It's the cost of coherence announcing itself. There's nothing romantic about a debt collector.

The third betrayal—collapsing into the crack: “Nothing matters” “Everything's broken anyway” “Why bother” “There's no outside, so I'll just give up.” This looks like fidelity but it's actually abandonment. It's using the crack as an excuse to stop being available. It's nihilism dressed as radical acceptance. The resigned person isn't staying with the crack—they're using the crack to justify not staying with anything. They've made the crack into a final answer rather than an ongoing question. Weird fidelity isn't resignation. It's active. It requires presence. It takes effort to stay loyal to what won't resolve, to not collapse into either hope or despair.

And to be clear, the betrayals aren’t a moral failing per se, rather they are “trained reflexes. They're what coherent bodies do. But naming them might help us notice when we're doing them.”

Have I been attempting to journal or write because I want those are activities I find valuable or meaningful? or is writing as I do here and elsewhere another betrayal? At times it feels my interiority—that those cracks and excesses of my identity and being—has been colonized by those empires of betrayal. I have been attempting to journal privately now for decades; this space has been my most consistent and longest lasting attempt. I usually stop writing or journaling privately because if it isn’t for someone other than me why even bother? The possibility of sharing my interior with others is somewhat motivating, though this too is problematic because what if what I end up writing is a betrayal? Further, maybe I don’t actually want to write anything at all. Part of the empire of betrayal’s (self-)colonizing effect is that it tricks us into believing we have something to say, something that needs to be said, something that needs sharing, something that needs healing, something that needs metabolized, romanticized, resolved

The year is not new but neither is it old; the earth groans and the birds still empty the feeders. Somehow there is continuity without continuity, repetition without repetition, sameness without sameness. I struggle to keep my inner hearth burning these days. I am colder now than I’ve ever been—common enough as we age, but difficult to accept nonetheless. Layering will only work if I have heat to trap; if my fire is out I am just smothering the ashes. If my body is a temple then it seems the altar has been abandoned.

My son has a fascination with the elements, as most kids do, but especially water and fire. When we go camping he is eager to help start and maintain the fire and to see what happens when certain organic items are placed within it. He has expressed, much to my surprise, a desire to make fire using only sticks and friction. I’m not sure where he learned about this but it is also something I wish to learn. I know how to build a good fire that will burn through the night but to make fire is not a skill I’ve yet learned.

I’ve been gathering materials to make a bow drill and attempt to make fire. Sycamore seems to be a good wood—not too hard nor too soft—and there is an abundance of it around our home, situated in a river valley where they like the grow. A friend generously gifted me some dogbane fibers I will braid into cordage to use for the bow. I am unsure what tools and resources I will need to reignite the fire in my belly, however.

There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill. It finally melts the great snow, and in January or July is only buried under a thicker or thinner covering. In the coldest day it flows somewhere, and the snow melts around every tree. This field of winter rye, which sprouted late in the fall, and now speedily dissolves the snow, is where the fire is very thinly covered. We feel warmed by it. In the winter, warmth stands for all virtue, and we resort in thought to a trickling rill, with its bare stones shining in the sun, and to warm springs in the woods, with as much eagerness as rabbits and robins. The steam which rises from swamps and pools is as dear and domestic as that of our own kettle. What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day, when the meadow mice come out by the wall-sides, and the chickadee lisps in the defiles of the wood? The warmth comes directly from the sun, and is not radiated from the earth, as in summer; and when we feel his beams on our backs as we are treading some snowy dell, we are grateful as for a special kindness, and bless the sun which has followed us into that by-place.

This subterranean fire has its altar in each man's breast; for in the coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveler cherishes a warmer fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart. There is the south. Thither have all birds and insects migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are gathered the robin and the lark.

Thoreau, A Winter Walk

Such persons—their minds are intent, their faces are tranquil, their foreheads are broad and plain. They are cool like the autumn, warm like the spring; their joy and their anger intermingle with the four seasons.

Zhuangzi, Brook Ziporyn translation

Several faces—some plant and some animal—watch as I walk, tranquil and unbothered by my chilly presence.