This week I've been reading Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths. The book describes seven years of travels Griffiths made among aboriginal peoples in different corners of the world, seeking to understand how closeness with the land sustained and enriched their lives. Having undertaken them at a point when her own life seemed unsustainable and meaningless, these investigations have more than an academic significance.
I've been enjoying the book very much, and may write a longer review at some point. In passing, I'd describe it a furious book, both in the sense that it's fueled by a visceral anger at the ways western society has distanced people from intimacy with the earth, and in the way it strives breathlessly to convey the vitality of the wild places she visits and the significance they take on for those who dwell there. Sometimes I almost break a sweat reading this.
I've always been interested in continuities between natural processes and language. Here's Griffiths on the confluence of language and rivers:
Rivers flow like language--we say that someone is "fluent" in a language, their speech flows like a river. Languages, like rivers, run roughly the same course, but always change their details: you never step in the same language twice, because a meaning has shifted here, a connotation has just been formed there. Rivers and languages are both gloriously wild. Careless of their courses, rivers won't run straight. Both languages and rivers are extravagant--who cares how a river wastes its meanderings? Who asks why language wastes its windings in splendid, luxurious, uneconomic curls of meaning? And then there are rivers that double back, meet themselves returning from an aside in the conversation they were having with the land....[I]magine how in a season of fast flowing water, the river would push for a more direct route, going straight from one tine to the other....Similarly, language, finding a more rapid route to communicate, will leave unused obsolete words behind, still in the dictionary and perhaps in memory but no longer in the "currency" of the language, where the language is flowing fastest.
I wonder if at some point Griffiths readThe River Why.
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