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Question: If the goal for Gus Orviston is to achieve "native intelligence"---a necessary state in the journey toward Orgainzed Innocence---how does each poem help us understand the quest for native intelligence?
NATIVE: a person who "indigenous to a limited geographical area-a space boundaried by mountains,rivers, or coastline (not by latitudes, longitudes, or state and county lines), with its own peculiar mixture of weeds, trees,bugs, birds, flowers, streams, hills, rocks, and critters (including people), its own nuances of rain, wind, and seasonal change." (Duncan 72-3). A person who sees himself or herself as a member of the ecosystem and a key member of the human community. A person who learns from nature's perspective" of the world as well as from other people's perspectives of the world. A person who has faith in himself and the world. A loving, empathetic, faithful, ecocentric, and spiritual person.
NON-NATIVE: a person who "awakes in the morning in a body in a bed in a room in a building on a street in a county in a state in a nation." (Duncan 72-3). A person who views nature from an anthropocentric lens and who does not learn from nature nor the people within his or her community. A person without faith in himself nor the world. A non-native rejects his family, companionship, society, and faith / spirituality.
NATIVE INTELLIGENCE: "Native intelligence develops through an unspoken or soft-spoken relationship with the interwoven things (of his natural and human communities): it evolves as the native involves himself in his region." (Duncan 72-3). Native intelligence has a grateful and optimistic perspective on family, faith, nature, society, and self.
“Organized innocence” is a perspective that sees and revalue the innocent perspective of the world as unified, coherent, and benevolent through the lens of the irreverent, experienced perspective. It does not ignore the failings of humans and their institutions, nor the destructive powers of nature and nature’s God, but seeks to avoid any contribution to human / societal failings and environmental destruction from dwelling too long on the seeming imperfections in nature, humans, and God.
PAIR 1:
Not All There
I turned to speak to God,
About the world’s despair;
But to make bad matters worse,
I found God wasn’t there.
God turned to speak to me
(Don’t anybody laugh)
God found I wasn’t there—
At least not over half.
-Robert Frost
Originally appeared in the April 1936 issue of Poetry magazine.
---Review page 49 in The River Why and Gus's irreverent questioning of the existence of God in nature. How does this Frost poem help us understand that Gus is only of the Experienced perspective and "not all there"?
Pair 2
Accidentally on Purpose
The Universe is but the Thing of things,
The things but balls all going round in rings.
Some mighty huge, some mighty tiny,
All of them radiant and mighty shiny.
They mean to tell us all was rolling blind
Till accidentally it hit on mind
In an albino monkey in the jungle,
And even then it had to grope and bungle,
Till Darwin came to earth upon a year
To show the evolution how to steer.
They mean to tell us, though, the Omnibus
Had no real purpose until it got to us.
Never believe it. At the very worst
It must have had the purpose from the first
To produce purpose as the fitter bred:
We were just purpose coming to a head.
Whose purpose was it, His or Hers or Its?
Let's leave that to the scientific wits.
Grant me intention, purpose and design --
That's near enough for me to the divine.
And yet with all this help of head and brain,
How happily instinctive we remain.
Our best guide upward farther to the light:
Passionate preference such as love at sight.
-Robert Frost, In the Clearing, 1962
---Review page 23 in The River Why and develop how you think Gus's passionate preference for fishing and then for intact river ecosystems will lead to faith in self and the world?
Pair 3:
Lines Composed a Few Mile Above Tintern Abbey on the banks of the River Wye, July 13, 1798*
John Constable
*First published in 1798, as the concluding poem of Lyrical Ballads. Composed on July 13, 1798, while Wordsworth and his sister were returning by the valley of the Wye, in south Wales, to Bristol after a walking tour of several days. "Not a line of it was altered and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol."
. . .For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
-William Wordsworth
---Review page 49 in The River Why and Gus's irreverent questioning of the existence of God in nature. This poem on the "river Wye" is alluded to in Duncan's title.
How does this Wordsworth poem help us understand that Gus will likely travel through his Experienced perspective of and rejection of "a divine presence interfused" in nature in order to develop native intelligence?
4 Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973.
---Review pages 25 and 60 in The River Why and how Gus's obsession with fishing and rivers makes him unlike his socially contructed peers. How doe this Wendell Berry poem develop that Gus's "Most Out of It"ness is good?
What lines of the poem should Gus follow to achieve "native intelligence"?
Pair 5:
Piute Creek
One granite ridge
A tree would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart
Words and books
Like a small creek of a small ledge
Gone in the dry air.
A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
No one loves rock yet we are here.
Night chills. A flick
In the moonlight
Slips into shadow:
Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.
---Review pages 49 and 50 in The River Why and how Gus's obsession with fishing and rivers allows him to view himself as a member of the ecosystem.
What lines of the poem should encourage this environmental perspective of man's relationship to nature and how does this connect to the definition of"native intelligence"?
-Gary Snyder No Nature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
Burning the Small Dead
Burning the small dead
branches
broke from beneath
thick spreading whitebark pine.
a hundred summers
snowmelt rock and air
hiss in a twisted bough. sierra granite;
Mt. Ritter-
black rock twice as old.
Deneb, Altair
windy fire
--Gary Snyder No Nature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
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