Wilderness and Wildness

Wilderness south of Machtesh Ramon, Israel

Sometimes people just give up on civilization and head out into the wild. It’s a Romantic notion. Some of those people are prepared for the wild. Some are naive.

In many religions, there are stories of people who sought out God or enlightenment away from civilization. The story of the temptation of Christ is one early one. After being baptized, Jesus is supposed to have fasted for forty days and nights in the Judean desert. The “Desert Fathers” were Christian hermits of the third century who abandoned the cities of the “pagan world” to live in solitude in the desert of Egypt. Anthony the Great was the first known ascetic to go directly into the wilderness.

Gauguin's landscape

When I was in high school, I was charmed by the biography of the painter, Paul Gauguin. I had fallen into my own Impressionist period, and discovered Gauguin’s (a Post-Impressionist) art and writing. I liked his primitivist style and philosophy. And I loved that in 1891, broke and frustrated by his lack of recognition, he sailed to the tropics. He wrote that he wanted to escape European civilization and “everything that is artificial and conventional.”

Gauguin spent his remaining years living in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. He wasn’t really living in the “wilderness” and he was interacting with the natives and even clashed with colonial forces. But, he did escape civilization as he knew it.

A reproduction of Thoreau's little cabin

Closer to our own time is Henry David Thoreau, American author, naturalist, and philosopher best known for his book Walden. That book is his reflections on his time spent living independently in a cabin beside Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Thoreau returned to civilization and didn’t really have it all that rough in the woods and Concord wasn’t that much of a walk away. But his self-imposed isolation helped him get a perspective on the civilization he left behind. And many people since then have followed in his footsteps and tried to escape from civilization – even if it wasn’t very far or for very long.

Self-portrait of McCandless at his camp that was found undeveloped in his camera after his death.

Christopher McCandless is one modern escapee who took those of the past much more seriously. His story is told well in the Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild and in a good movie version of that book.

McCandless took the notion of living civilization behind and decided to live off the land in Alaska. He had some book knowledge of survival but was more fueled by literary Romanticism.

Disenchanted with his parents’ lives and wealth and materialism in general, he set out across the country, took on the name Alexander Supertramp, and finally ended up in Alaska.

Unfortunately, he did it at the wrong time of the year and without the proper equipment and knowledge. His odyssey lasted only 113 days before he died of starvation in August 1992.

But the bus that he ended up living in has become a destination for a kind of Romantic tourist who probably has the same kind of dream. Maybe Chris’ death has become a good lesson for what doesn’t work if you want to escape.

If you read or watch these stories, you can view some of these individuals as idealistic or naive. That is true with McCandless who I see as both of those things.

I feel the same way about Tim Treadwell whose idealism pushed him to protect a habitat he loved through his activism and filmmaking. His story is told in a really unusual documentary film, Grizzly Man.

Tim Treadwell was an environmentalist, amateur naturalist, eco-warrior and documentary filmmaker. He lived with the grizzly bears of Katmai National Park in Alaska.

The documentary was made by Werner Herzog who had access to over 100 hours of video shot by Timothy Treadwell.

Treadwell spent thirteen summers in Katmai alone or with is girlfriend learning about the grizzly bears and developing a “relationship” with them.  In the film, you see Treadwell’s sanity slipping away. It is not unlike the portrait of McCandlees in Kakauer’s book. Though the madness may come from  different places in these two cases, you get the feeling that the wilderness and isolation is part of the madness. No wonder Thoreau occasionally walked into Concord to get some cookies.

Treadwell was an idealist, a failed actor, a recovered alcoholic and yet someone we can admire as a truth-seeker. Herzog takes that view. But, in that thirteenth summer of living among the bears without any protection, his luck ran out as he and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were killed and eaten by a bear.

Kaczynski's cabin

If you want to look at an extreme, take the case of Ted Kaczynski, another primitivist who deeply criticized civilization and technology. Of course, he is known to us now as “The Unabomber” and he is serving a lifetime sentence without parole in a federal prison.

Like McCandless and Thoreau, he was educated. My own theory is that a college education will expose you to all kinds of ideas that can change your life for better or worse – because they are the kinds of ideas that lead to dreaming.

He was an academic but quit his math professorship at the University of California at Berkeley to live in a remote cabin without running water or electricity in the wilds of Montana. He rejected civilization.

Sounds a bit like Thoreau.

In Montana, Kaczynski was self-sufficient. He learned tracking, edible plant identification, and primitive “technologies.” He was there from 1971 until 1996. He built a box of a “cabin” (more like a shed) that wasn’t unlike Thoreau’s cabin. In his time there, he saw the wilderness around his cabin disappearing.

It is easy to see that Kaczynski slid into madness over the years because he realized that he could not really escape from society and technology. He has been called a “neo-Luddite” and “eco-terrorist” but both terms bother me. They demean Luddites and anyonyone involved in ecological work. He was a madman.

From 1978 to 1995, he created 16 bombs that blew up and caused the death of three people and the injuring of 23. He was arrested in 1996 at his cabin. They found 40,000 handwritten journal pages about bomb-making, his targets, and the typed manuscript of his “manifesto.”  I wouldn’t even link to his manifesto here, but it is online and he has continued to write and even be published from prison.

Better that you should read some of the best writers who have considered wilderness and wildness. It’s a pretty long list.

My own favorites include Edward Abbey, Rick Bass, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Loren Eiseley, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, John Muir, Gary Snyder and Lewis Thomas.

Read them. Maybe you can escape in your armchair. I will continue to escape to Paradelle for now.

Moon Lore 4 – Waxing and Waning

The International Space Station can be seen as a small object in upper left of this image of the moon in the early evening Jan. 4,2012 in the skies over the Houston area flying at an altitude of 390.8 kilometers (242.8 miles). The space station can occasionally be seen in the night sky with the naked eye and a pair of field binoculars. Image credit: NASA/Lauren Harnett

The moon regularly seems to disappear and then return. The waxing (increasing) and waning (decrease) in the Moon’s appearance to primitive peoples seemed to be similar to our own life and death cycle – and perhaps, to our rebirth.

Stories which associate the moon with the origin of death are found especially around the Pacific region. According to J. G. Frazer’s The Belief in Immortality and The Worship of the Dead, in Fiji, it is said that the moon suggested that mankind should return as he did. But the rat god, Ra Kalavo, would not permit this, insisting that men should die like rats.

In Australia, the Wotjobaluk aborigines say that the moon used to revive the dead until an old man said that this should stop.

The Cham have it that the goddess of good luck used to revive the dead but the sky-god sent her to the moon so she could not do this any more.

A waning Moon is sometimes considered an unlucky time for a marriage or birth.

In South Africa, it is considered unlucky to start a journey or begin any important work during the last quarter of the Moon.

In Cornwall, if a boy was born during a waning Moon, they said that the next birth would be a girl.

In Wales, if you moved from one house to another during the Crescent Moon you would have more than enough prosperity in your life.

We know now that the lunar phase of the moon is the appearance of the illuminated (lit) portion of the Moon as seen by an observer, usually on Earth. The lunar phases change cyclically as the Moon orbits the Earth, according to the changing relative positions of the Earth, Moon, and Sun.

One half of the lunar surface is always illuminated by the Sun (except during lunar eclipses), and hence is bright, but the portion of the illuminated hemisphere that is visible to an observer can vary from about 100% (full moon) to 0% (new moon).

There are names for the phases

Phase	Northern Hemisphere	Southern Hemisphere	Visibility	Standard time of culmination (mid-phase)
New moon	Not visible, traditionally Moon’s first visible crescent		after sunset	12 noon
Waxing crescent moon	Right 1–49% visible	Left 1–49% visible	afternoon and post-dusk	3 pm
First quarter moon	Right 50% visible	Left 50% visible	afternoon and early night	6 pm
Waxing gibbous moon	Right 51–99% visible	Left 51–99% visible	late afternoon and most of night	9 pm
Full moon	Fully visible	Fully visible	sunset to sunrise (all night)	12 midnight
Waning gibbous moon	Left 51–99% visible	Right 51–99% visible	most of night and early morning	3 am
Third quarter moon	Left 50% visible	Right 50% visible	late night and morning	6 am
Waning crescent moon	Left 1–49% visible	Right 1–49% visible	pre-dawn and morning	9 am
Dark moon	Not visible, traditionally Moon’s last visible crescent		before sunrise	12 noon

Rereading Moby Dick

When I read Moby Dick for the first time, it was the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. It wasn’t required reading. I had read Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”  for tenth grade English and liked it, so I decided to find his other stories in the library.

I liked Bartleby because it was so odd. Bartleby is a kind of clerk, a copyist, “who obstinately refuses to go on doing the sort of writing demanded of him.”  It seems that in the spring of 1851, Melville felt the same way about his own work on Moby-Dick. Maybe Melville’s writing frustrations came out in his story of a writer “who forsakes conventional modes because of an irresistible preoccupation with the most baffling philosophical questions.”

Herman Melville, 1860

The novel I picked up next was  The Confidence-Man.  I chose that novel because it was shorter than the other books. It is subtitled “His Masquerade” and it was the last major novel written by Herman Melville. It was published on April 1, 1857, presumably the exact day of the novel’s setting.

It is about a bunch of steamboat passengers who individual stories connect in that Canterbury Tales-style that is actually pretty popular today in novels, films and TV programs. They move their way down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans.

The con man of the book’s title sneaks aboard on April Fool’s Day and tests the confidence and trust of the passengers. It’s an odd book, but I enjoyed it. I recall it as being funny. I have never reread it.

After this novel, Melville stopped writing novels. He became a professional lecturer, mostly speaking about the sea travels of his younger life and books. Then he worked as as a federal government employee in New York City. He continued to write poetry, but published no major prose work again.

And then there’s Moby Dick.  By the time he was writing it. he had already written books that had sold well. They were books that took people away from their lives to the oceans and islands far away that they would never be able to visit in any other way.

But Moby-Dick wasn’t a critical nor a commercial success.

Melville wrote a number of books after it, but would die a virtually unknown writer.

But Moby-Dick is famous. There are jokes and allusions to it all over our culture. Non-readers have encountered the story somewhere, even if it was only a film or comic book version.

The resurgence happened after World War I. The “Melville Revival” in the early 20th century centered on Moby-Dick, which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world literature.

He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America.  It was rediscovered by ex-pats in Paris and others who saw it as an explanation of what was happening in America (and the world?)  especially as it related to issues like authority and nature.

Do a search on Amazon.com for “Moby Dick” and it  gives you almost 4000 results. A Google search on “Moby Dick” results in more than 26,000 hits.

It was his first three books that brought him to the public’s attention. The first, Typee, was a bestseller. But his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten.

I have always felt sad for Melville that he died in obscurity and didn’t witness Moby-Dick resurfacing in the 20th century as one of the great American novels. Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891)  is still best known for Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd.

I will admit that when I reread Moby-Dick, I skip around. The whale anatomy chapters can be deleted and the book still works for me. (But that’s because I already read them before and they are still, at least partially, in my head.)

A few months ago, I heard a radio interview with Nathaniel Philbrick who lists it as his favorite book. He has written a book called Why Read Moby-Dick?

He says he refers back to it almost daily and finds it “full of great wisdom.”  He sees the whale inter-chapters as “wormholes of metaphysical poetry that are truly revelatory.”

Look at Philbrick’s other books and his life and you understand why.  After grad school, Philbrick worked for four years at Sailing World magazine; wrote/edited several sailing books; moved to Nantucket in 1986; wrote a history of the island and wrote  In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.

In the Heart of the Sea is the story of the Essex which, in 1819, left Nantucket for the South Pacific with twenty crew members aboard. In the middle of the South Pacific the ship was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale.

Sound familiar?

The crew drifted for more than ninety days in three tiny whaleboats, succumbing to weather, hunger, disease, and ultimately turning to drastic measures in the fight for survival. (Philbrick has also written a version of the story for younger readers called Revenge of the Whale: The True Story of the Whaleship Essex.

Ahab in Huston's film played by Gregory Peck

Philbrick admits that Moby-Dick a difficult book to read.  I agree with him that it is not a book for students in high school and maybe not even for college. It should be read after you’ve had some “life experience.”  This may also be the case with Shakespeare, who Melville admired and certainly tried to imitate or outdo in some sections of the novel.

On the NPR radio program I heard, Philbrick said that the novel is  “as close to being our American Bible as we have.”

I also find many of the passages poetic.

from Chapter 51 “The Spirit Spout”

While gliding through these latter waves in that one serene and moonlit night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver and by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude. On such a silent night, a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.

As a kid, I saw the movie, with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, first.  Later, I read the classic comic book version.  I came to the novel itself when I was fifteen.

The crew of the Pequod is mostly whites, but blacks, Indians, Filipinos, and a South Sea Islander are all there under the command of a monomaniacal, revenge-seeking captain.

Philbrick says that the book is also an allegory of mid-19th century America. After all, Melville was writing around 1850 (it was published in 1851) and the madness of the Civil War was sitting in front of him.  The fugitive slave law had just been passed and Melville’s father-in-law was the judge who upheld it. That law said that people in free states were complicit in slavery and had to return slaves to their owners.  Slavery was everybody’s business.

When do I take a copy of the novel off the shelf to reread?

It tends to be in winter. It has something to do with cabin fever – even though I haven’t gotten around to building my cabin yet.

My motivation for rereading it is not so different from the motivation of the novel’s narrator, Ishmael.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.
(via Project Gutenberg)

Sometimes I can fight off that “November in my soul” with a trip to the Atlantic Ocean which is not too far away from Paradelle. But the wintery ocean and beaches (which can be Romantic and wonderful) don’t always do it for me.

So, I return to the novel for a few days.

The New Bedford Whaling Museum’s 16th annual Moby-Dick Marathon was last weekend and they celebrated the 160th anniversary of Melville’s masterpiece with a 25-hour nonstop reading of the book during a weekend of activities and events. There was a livestream of the reading and I dropped in and out and let some of the readers read aloud sections of the book for me. So, the rereading for 2012 began.

Here are a few links from their weekend.

• “Visualizing Melville” Exhibit
• “Imagining Moby” Exhibit
• Matt Kish’s ”One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick”
• ​Moby Dick Marathon 2012 Poster   (download and print, illustration by Dan Vasconcellos)

The Noosphere and the Omega Point

Noosphere is a word is derived from the Greek nous “mind” and sphaira “sphere.”  It was introduced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1922 to mean the “sphere of human thought” and it was part of his idea of a cosmogenesis.

The concept was expanded in lectures given by Vladimir Vernadsky at Sorbonne so that the Noosphere was seen as the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth. Phase one is the geosphere (inanimate matter) followed by the biosphere (biological life).

In this third phase of the noosphere, human thought  fundamentally transforms the biosphere. Teilhard believed that the noosphere would emerges and exist through the interaction of human minds. As mankind creates more complex social networks, the noosphere grows in awareness.

Teilhard de Chardin and Vernadsky and even others before them had no way of knowing that almost a hundred years later there would be social networks connecting human thought in a digital realm called the Internet.

Teilhard’s Law of Complexity/Consciousness attempts to explain evolution in the universe as ever increasing in its integration and unification. This progression would ultimately lead to an Omega Point of thought and consciousness.

There are stories, poetry and philosophy, from Henri Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Carl Jung, and others that examine consciousness. But Teilhard’s Noosphere as a layer of intelligence enveloping the earth (which he saw as more spiritual than scientific) has been a starting place for  scientific research.

Remember the 70 “eggs” that generate random numbers and record departures from randomness that are part of the Global Brain?  The noosphere is part of what is being studied by the Global Consciousness Project. They are looking at patterns that shouldn’t be there, but are there. Not mind over matter, but a connection of mind and matter.

In The Future of Man, Teilhard writes about intellectual and social evolution, the coming of ultra-humanity and the impact of scientific discoveries on traditional religious dogma.

Others continue to think and write about this topic: Manifesto for the Noosphere: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Human Consciousness is one such book. And Neurosphere: The Convergence of Evolution, Group Mind, and the Internet, as noted in its subtitle, is examining technology merging with the human body itself via electronic prosthetics, direct neural implants, and the blurring boundaries between human and machine. What Dulchinos calls the Neurosphere in that book might also be called the Global Brain, or God, Group Mind or the Noosphere.

Watch this news story for a simplified explanation.

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955, was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest, but he trained as a paleontologist and geologist. (He took part in the discovery of both Piltdown Man and Peking Man.) His ideas about the Omega Point and the Noosphere were not accepted by the Catholic Church, and it censured several of his books. The book he is probably best known for is The Phenomenon of Man. His idea that just as living organisms sprung from inorganic matter and evolved into ever more complex thinking beings, we humans are evolving toward an “omega point” is one I find hopeful, whether you see it, as Teilhard did, as being as being a convergence with the Divine, or as human progression.

Buying an Island

Beatles Island

Readers of this blog know that I have a thing for islands.  If I won the lottery, I would definitely pack up and move Paradelle to an island that I could own. It sounds crazy, but rich people do it.

This isn’t a new obsession. I remember as a kid reading that Marlon Brando had bought Tetiaroa in the South Pacific back in 1965. It’s not just an island; it’s an entire atoll comprised of 13 “motus”, or islands. He was there to film Mutiny of the Bounty and didn’t leave until 1990 when his health required more conventional lodgings. It has been sold to a hotelier and it will be turned into a luxury “eco-resort.”

For now, I have to settle for armchair island hopping via reading Private Islands magazine and checking out the map of islands of the famous.

Johhny Depp, for example, bought a 45-acre place in the Bahamas for $3.6 million, so that he could vanish off the radar with family and friends.  Country music couple Tim McGraw and Faith Hill also own a 17 acre island in the Bahamas. Just big enough without being too much to clean.

And Nicolas Cage has a 40-acre island there which was on the market for $3 million. That doesn’t sound like all that much money for an island. (He also has a a home on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, which is nice, but not the same thing, as far as I am concerned.)

The Bahamas seems to be the area. Must have some tax advantages too. Eddie Murphy bought a place back in 2007. Long Cay, also known as Rooster Cay, cost $15 million for 15.4-acres near near Nassau.

Magician David Copperfield has several privately-owned islands called Musha Cay in the southern Bahamas.

Moving away from he Bahamas, Leonardo DiCaprio owns an island off the coast of Belize that is a sprawling 104-acres.

Mel's island

Mel Gibson owns Mago Island in Fiji. The 8.4-square-mile island cost him $15 million in 2005.  It is one of the largest privately-owned islands in the South Pacific, spanning across about 5,400 acres.

And if tropical islands of sand and sun aren’t your thing, you can follow in the footprints of two singer.

Back in the 1967, John Lennon bought a secluded, peaceful island in Ireland’s rustic Clew Bay for just £1,700. It is a 19-acre Dorinish Island which is was going to use as a holiday retreat. But that didn’t happen and it fell into disuse, had some hippie squatters, and then after John’s death in 1980, the island was sold. Yoko Ono sold it for £30,000 and donated the money to an Irish children’s charity. So, it’s back to being grazing land for sheep and cattle, and the site of occassional pilgrimages from Beatles fans.

Celine Dion owns an island located on the Riviere des Mille Iles in her home province of Quebec, Canada. But then you’ll have tourists riding by to take pictures of your towering French-style chateau. So annoying.

I bought my lottery tickets today. So, back to my browsing. Let’s see what is for sale. That 100 foot waterfall in Chile is a nice amenity…