Spirit of Wilderness

Reason explores spirit with disbelief. This disbelief makes good fiction. Assumptions that can be uttered aren't. Why say what you don't believe?

It's not easy to investigate the spirit of wilderness. Spirit as super natural suggests the natural does not include it, but natural includes spiritual in every particular. The puritan wanted protection from the thing in itself called spirit of wilderness, inversely applied rituals of scapegoats to the wood. You cannot drive spirit from wood. Spirit is in the man. Things were upside down in his mind. He thought he was a tantamount Hebrew in the wilderness, as in Mather's, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), but he was a spiritual one, wanted to drive the Leviticus scapegoat  out of the camp with their sins pronounced on its head. It was driven into the wilderness and delivered to the "spirit of the wilderness." He thought the sins outside him. There were inside.

Pharmakoi
Something similar occurred in ancient Greece with the pharmakoi, that annual Greek rite of propitiation. Actors, pharmakoi, a man and a woman taken from the village were ritually executed. They were given gifts of figs and cake in the village, then scourged and driven out. The people threw squill bulbs and stalks at them. These "victims" were volunteers chosen for their ugliness, meant to show the people's repugnance of their sins. The rite celebrated their emergence from barbarism, from when human sacrifice was a literal practice. Pharmakoi supposedly evince higher civilization.

Considering this expulsion of the man/woman some argue Adam and Eve are types of pharmakoi, driven out of the garden, except there was no society to be cleansed. The word for these celebrants translates literally, human medicine, which derives from the word for medicine, pharmakon. They were their own medicine, the means by which "people restore harmony to their world through scapegoat sacrifice, i.e. blame and retaliation."

In other times a victim of this rite might have been a captive warrior cannibalized to steal his power. The medicine then was a cure for weakness. Newcomb recounts a ritual where Central Texas Tonkawas consumed a Comanche captive's heart. We're talking 19th century. The objective was to take the "spirit power. If the enemy were courageous he would thus acquire his courage" (W. W. Newcomb. The Indians of Texas, 152.) This human medicine is different from the Greek rite. The pharmakoi were a substitute for the entire people. To restore health to the tribe they transferred societal guilt to the representative man/woman. Rohde says that

"the pharmakoi were the marginalized. That could include the king, but more commonly the pharmakoi were the unwanted, "polluted" people such as murderers (note their listing in 22:15), the deformed, or foreigners. They were scapegoated by a community in order to avert evils such as disease and other catastrophes. They were ritually led "outside" via a special gate of the city to purify that city; then they were either exiled or possibly put to death (Harrison: 96). Before they were hunted out of cities, they were "cleansed" by being beaten with branches of a fig tree and with squills, which were believed to have purifying capabilities (Rohde: 590)."
But Phamakoi weren't any such thing as the lower class, the poor of garbage dumps or murderers. They were the sin bearers of a sacrament, a purification. In discussion of the outside and the inside in the purging of the body politic, what was once inside, such as the pharmakoi in the town or the goat in the yard, is cast out as a scapegoat, to bear the sins of them all: "if the word pharmakos that Plato does not use still resonates within the text...if the outside is always-already part of the inside," a mystery of expiation is at work, but not "the status of the concepts 'present' and 'absent', 'body' and 'soul', 'center' and 'periphery', for of course all this is a play, not a reality, and the sins come back and again. Poison is also a cure embodied in Socrates expulsion as a scapegoat from the city to his death. But not only Socrates. Beware Sociology  making all things into itself.

Mark R. Bredin says, "Girard sees in Greek myth the phenomenon of people blaming others for the violence in themselves. This "other" is the pharmakos. Girard calls the pharmakos "the victim" whom we kill believing that we are rooting out violence and creating peace (1996: 163). Alison expresses it well: "We are all, always and everywhere, immensely violent creatures, and the only way which we have to control this violence is the search for collective unanimity against a victim" (1998:21). This phenomenon in society Girard calls "single victim mechanism.... In sum, the pharmakos is one who is blamed and is then condemned in order to restore peace to the community."

The sacrifices' ugliness represents its sin, whether less human or more. The inevitable anthropomorphism of the scapegoat in the imagination is more than just a likeness from mammals. It projects outwards from the mind into the world. There is an inside and outside, understood poetically and they do not exclude each other. Spiritual scapegoats come in the form of a man, the malformation of a man, so called a monster. This monster has human likenesses even if it is a man lobster with jaws and legs. This imagination opposes a spirit that comes in the beatified form as an angel.

Puritans

II.

Puritan preoccupations that Indians were devils and the pawns of devils resulted in cultural deconstructions proving them guilty of racism and genocide. These trace psychologies of extermination to similar episodes of the Hebrews in Canaan. There is however one huge exception. The New Testament had no extermination policy. Puritan exterminations were not perpetuated with New Testament approval, so the Puritans had to make them up from the Old. The New Testament church concluded gentiles could not even be made to be circumcised let alone decapitated. So puritans sought Old Testament justification of their fear and prejudice. However the Old Testament was not the cause of the Puritan practice either. The cause was the English. This is obvious whenever the English colonists are contrasted with the Germans of Philadelphia who shared their biblical beliefs but shunned the English doctrines of extermination and assimilation.

English Only's progeny was slavery (called freedom), extinction of species (called prosperity) and destruction of the ocean and atmosphere (called dominion). De-constructionalists think the masculine caused extinction, but it was a national, ethnic, appalling cruelty: the "theological rigor [that] entered into what now seems an appalling cruelty toward Indians," (Garry Wills. Under God. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1990, 142) Draw a line from the behavior of the puritan against Indians in America to the behavior of the British empire in India. There are endless permutations of the negative effects of English nation hood in the world. The English transferred it en masse to the Americas, the Americans presumably will transfer it to the Chinese who swallow up all smaller groups in between. Each act of digestion is an acquisition. The domination is justified like this, assimilate or die.

There is a huge effort to defeat the recognition that this pattern has occurred among assimilated peoples. The substituted paradigm is that the puritans were afraid of the dark wood and their defensiveness was so extreme they exterminated the wood and the native from religious causes and doctrines. But fear made the doctrine, not doctrine the fear. The British were hardwired as a nation to domination and destruction and propagandized the west with such notions even while they colonized the east. Fear and doctrine hand over the appalling modern notion to America that it is England's racist/chauvinist twin of not only national but gender masculine sins.

How can we conduct an inquiry into the spirit of wilderness in this context, when the Azazel  itself, to which the Leviticus scapegoat was released, is seen as a manufactured justification, a function of racism of Hebrew justification of genocide? It is in our interest to note that the ice caps are now the Indians, fresh water society is dissolving in saline and wilderness is falling off the side of the world.

Emendation note: 
There is no end to discovery. Lately surfaced is the etymology of Azazel by Skeat:

The most famous example in English (and many other languages whose translations of the bible are based on the same sources) is "scapegoat" which is a mistranslation of the word Azazel (In Hebrew: עזאזל) originated by William Tyndale in his 1530 Bible, and appropriated in the King James Version of the Bible (Leviticus chapter 16) in 1611. Confounded by the word, Tyndale had interpreted Azazel as ez ozel - literally, "the goat that departs"; hence "(e)scape goat." According to the Talmud, Yoma 67b, Azazel is a contraction of az (harsh) and eil (strong) and refers to the most rugged of mountains. This identification is supported by Rashi, the great Medieval grammarian, who interpreted Azazel to be the name of a specific mountain or cliff over which the goat was driven^[3]. According to R.H. Charles, it was called so for its reputation as the holding place of the fallen angel of the same name^[4]. Modern scholars generally reject Tyndale's interpretation and favor one related to a fallen angel/evil demon interpretation. Today in modern Hebrew Azazel is used derogatorily, as in lekh la-Azazel ("go to Azazel"), as in "go to hell".

Leviticus

Elaborations of this spirit of wilderness fictionalize the original text in Leviticus 16 where the bare facts  express a desire for the clean over the unclean, something that hardly exists outside the orthodox. The point is not that there is a spirit of wilderness, but  that there is sin of every kind causing infection and skin disease, that society is made unclean by exposure, so "keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean" (15.31), an early FEMA.

The Goat

Much repetition of the unclean required a ceremonial address called the Day of Atonement. In one aspect of this, a goat selected by lot from two, was "used for making atonement by sending it into the desert" (10). It was called "the live goat" because it wasn't killed but escorted out by a keeper and released, but before this a ceremonial transference occurred where the priest would "lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites-all their sins-and put them on the goat's head" (21). In this way it was released to the spirit of the wilderness. There was a kind of play on this ritual for people who had been sacrificing goats in"the open fields" (17.5) to "goat idols," meaning they were expiating their own sins. Whatever reality this speaks of is incomprehensible to the modern, as if we were to lay hands on the head of some scientist who cut the antennae off Monarch butterflies and send them into the desert.

Spirit of Wilderness

For Barry Lopez the wolverine enlivens the force of natural wilderness as the bear does for Momaday. We know we are less human by the loss of the wilderness contrast. One of four mammals will become extinct. Forests of the north, coyote and elk in storm, dead fall fires in yarrow meadows armed, dogs, men, tent, truck, prevent the hunger of the bear. But this is small stuff to the scapegoated  puritan fear of the spirit. It has a name in Leviticus that Barry Lopez does not mention because the names of the gods are politicized depending on who uses them. Once above the outbuildings of a flour mill near ASU was the proud declaration "Ashtaroth" written high above. This was not a misspelling of Ashcroft. The ambiguity of the world of spirits to a people who have no gods is that power and money mix up an argument about consequence and cause and make a literature out of it. They are all gone out of the way, there is none that does good. There is a dominant group of new pietists, newscasters and reporters who proclaim this morality of disconnect from the comfort of their desks. They have the compassion of a war reporter living off amputees while pretending to be a conscience, just as the English puritan lived off the smallpox exterminador and the monetizers of home mortgages live off public consumption. When these fail they express the greatest compassion for the failed, but it is for themselves. Surely no one expects to end this discussion with a conclusion.

Jerusalem Analogy

First light is breaking for the maintenance of the natural. Last year's hatchlings were overcome with a swarm of ants. We have now a load of topsoil and materials and begin a new habitation, a likely place against a wall with a high spot put there years ago as an island for tortoises to stand on in case of a big flood, for some run wild, irrigation comes every two weeks. Beneath a red oak sapling and a Mexican buckeye, climbing rose, ruella and mallow there is an area once entirely claimed by a giant chinaberry which, with a giant oleander, was completely taken up by the root. When you are four feet down the job is easier.

First you hardly see her. Out of the spot in the center of your vision she emerges though you have stared fixedly for a minute. Then she appears, lifts a head, lifts a foreleg, pauses, puts it down, lifts its opposite, pauses, puts it down. The peace of her slowness, the pace takes her in contemplation, stopped action, pause, wait, but then you look up and she is gone! A walking meditation without intent.

All pruned up, ready for yearlings, I need my son, day labor to arise, thinking of Milton where God exact[s] day labor, light denied. There is light. This labor is light. Milton's blindness is affecting Samson. He revisits every day of his life. The scenes of paradise play in front of his eyes at night. He wakes seeing but unseeing to write them down in the day. Who does not know it? Dark, dark, dark amidst the blaze of noon. Samson pictures the time. One day we will wake to what we've done. Work now, weep later.

I go wake the help. It took only an hour with the budding biologist to clean old mortar off cement block, mix new dirt with old. Logs are good, but the ant inhabitants of the old world need convincing. Pyracantha above, earth beneath, what more could a tortoise want? Four yearlings took off under a log without looking around. Now they attend to the empress' grape leaves, nopalitos, hibiscus, dandelions.

Ants of the world are still loose. What shall we do? No poisons allowed. Vinegar the top of logs surrounding the large pen? BD comes over to talk, lifts an inquiring mind. Happily he loses interest. We have the theory, the practice and we have the reflections.

Those tortoises lived veritably on top of an ant hill it turned out. Ants had usurped their home. They were huddled under rocks out of the way of the ants whose territory went down a foot. It's a fight with no purpose than survival? Nobody at 7-11 thinks that. Nobody at home thinks that. They think there is a right, just apply it to the behavior of others. Themselves they indulge. New Jerusalem is like the tortoise den, outside the gates are idolaters and dogs. Pharmkoi! Astrologers. Fortune tellers are living on an ant hill. The solution of paradise restored is work the ground.

Making New Species

With species passing out of existence so fast they can't be counted it should be good news new species are making. Except the new is old and there the whole time. If not a misunderstanding, what is this new species? Call it a Bean with a capacity to change its being by changing its mind. In biology this would be a Lamarkian sense of passing on acquired habits. In evolution this mechanism of survival done over a long enough time absolves the investigator from empirical exams. What is the new Bean? Natural selection of genetic variants is the means of acquisition, not acquired characteristics or soft inheritance. What is the new Bean? It is the realization against all odds and comedic uproar of the news that a man is a tree. Ha, ha.

Gully Plug and Willow

To gully plug and willow, reforest stream banks with native willows erased by concentrated

livestock-caused erosion,
livestock power plants,
cement grazed the stream bank
channels of water and air,

native willows hold the banks, feed the inhabitants, give medicine (aspirin). Erosion heads the list for uninhabitants. Stock trails to water, trails erode to gullies, the direct cause of stream bank loss is grazing out the willows. (Leopold, "Pioneers and Gullies").

Willowing replants the banks,
all Undertakers in the Planting,
a metaphor of oceans, atmospheres: plug the gullies.
Plug the gullies!

Sixth Extinction

In search of meaning, to overlook the same, universities prevented finding out, think tanks prevented thinking. Along came a spider, "leave the scientists out, no need bother about the end of bio, the end of man." They said this while they tried to decide whether to extinct the cat or the rabbit first, forgetting the snake and the mouse. Who can think of everything? Against all ancient logic and practice, which thought nature the sole epic, man defeated nature and became the epic himself! It was called the Sixth Extinction.

A linear examination showed all studies to be further denials. Way before The Black Swan proved human expertise corrupt, "it is, rather, largely the result of work by people with PhDs" says David Orr c. 1990, 1950 proved too soon to talk of junkyard shells cast off by *autodactylmorphs. How wonderfully we void the question of wilderness, its true nature. What does it mean that "science has conquered nature but nature must not be conquered?" Is this the product of natural forces, Co2, or things buried before the age began, above us in air and under in the sea? The epic says it is. The metaphor about a giant metaphor prepares reality.

Working back, working around, we come on the Noah/Jonah pariah cast into the sea to save the ship lest everyone drown. Jonah in the fish is no graveyard, it is a way of saying yes. Before he is cast upon the beach Noah Meets the Wilderness, which is what we do when we throw our outcasts out, put them up on our sins, tie their hands and drive them out. We manufacture the horse from sin, donkeys, mules anything to carry them. They threw them overboard in the past, but did not want to throw Paul to save themselves because he saved them all (Acts 27). Cases are never the same, he is their salvation, not a pariah. How to tell apart, pariah from savior?

That is exactly our problem, put another way, dents where there should be prints. Wolf print forces dent our car hoods at night and in the morning we learn what they have wreaked. This is not to analyze either nature or human acts. We reach far below to the hidden recess of consciousness that makes the act. Call it sin, call it crime, or not, do anything to avoid the obvious to own, not somebody else. Crimes are against some law. Sins the same. What is the law? Deny that.

Yeats said he would "lie down where all the ladders start."
On 25 October 1987 the subject in this pic said,
"Aey go get a big chair, reach the stars."

Wilderness Lost! Sins' Decommissioned Subway Car.

The epic sadness that comes from contemplation of wilderness lost is not as great as the encounter itself. Melancholy says you can never measure up. You cannot measure wilderness at all. Its boundaries beyond comprehension, scale. What it does to the senses is so exhilarating that we give up our lives for it even while we perversely tear it down in word and deed. Nineteenth century explorers and farmers considered all fellow inhabitants of the wilderness vermin, whether fox or eagle, bear or native, to be exterminated.

This is the wilderness of the test,  where Paul went to the backside desert, Israel wandered 40 years, Jesus went on the mountain to give solitude from civilization. That book of Isms of the 20th century examined those harmful effects of civilization with benefits and viola, civilization is treated the same as wilderness, loved/hated, sought and fled. When the scapegoat is driven out of civilization, where does it go, where does it take our sins and crimes? Into the wilderness. We're not supposed to use that word sin, but where did sins come from but the civil, the psyche, the man. Where do they go? They pass out into the world, the ocean, the mountain, the desert, the river, the forest glade.

What happens to them there? We don't hear  anymore. Like decommissioned NYC subway cars, stripped and sunk to the bottom of the sea to oxidize and rust into nothing, turned back to the elements, it is an alchemy, but they do not become the elements they were.  Take the spirit, materialize it, purge it and bury it. This is the course of life the civil follows. Send it into the wilderness.

Why the elders were silent

while

earth

burned

around them?

It was the fire in the tub.

Over

them,

in them,

rub a dub dub.

Some Landscapes / Heart of the Spirit Wilderness

We raise a tongue in the animal wild for the snout of Fox and the eyes that watch, the still hunt mountain peak of ears, owl eyes. Civilization's burdens were heavy for mountain let alone plain. Ranch against fish, consumption against Fox.

Saguaro Mule Deer

Bodies everywhere in the spirit wild, the eyes of 1) prickly pear 2) Mule Deer 3) Saguaro, three species and a fourth, prickly pear mule deer 4) rock towers, ask, "enemy or friend?" Au natural  is the  answer in words we understand that the angel spoke to Joshua and Joshu: "neither!"

The mountain faced a masquerade of reason in the mountaineer, lassoed saguaros shot and hung. Civilization's burdened bubble, ranch against fish, consumption against Fox, rooster tail conscience cleaves to the mouth, "oh God!" It punches a tire off the hard pan to raise a tongue for the snout of Fox, the eyes that watch, still hunt on the mountain of Four Peak ears, owl eyes.

These saguaros saw the mouth of Danes. Not really Danes. Cold mouths unnerving, scape justice, not letting go, Spirit Heart pumping. "A pile of cans," mutters stream. Hunt asks elk, flint pile quartz, "where are you now? I am coming." Self-reliant  flushed  xylene, radioactive, will-thwarting, looks out on mirror mountain. Not mine, nor hunt, nor ranch nor fish, four wheel shop and dump! Wild Crowd Faces Depression! At last, warm and fed, entertained, but bored in bed, this man projects the face of mountain. Oil, gold questions, asked. Is that mask eternity? Arms, Legs, Thigh, Head ride the Back of Beast, design the crotch. Human bone twists bare bald sky, bodies disembody. Where are you hiding? A head remains. It needs some Ichabod Crane-ium to decapitate. Who put the headless horseman Head Man, Topknot Showing? In the Mazatal buttocks a woman is prepared (but not the Woman of the Wilderness, for the present you are spared). Prickly Poppy twists its grip around the naked kudzu cruciform.

Four Peaks

Prickly Poppy

There is no inherent wilderness connotes a response "culturally devised," without intrinsic "savageness...or bleakness." Landscape denotes mountain without response, brute fact, without thought. What could sound more plausible than to say "what we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans--a mountain of the mind?" (Robert Macfarlane. Mountains of the Mind. London: Granta Books, 2003, 18,19)

If we say the mountain collaborates the doubled image of the mountaineer, sees itself in the man and his emotions provoked, the mountaineer is a collaboration of forces, a mountain anthropos.  Faces stare from the mountainsides, saguaro and canyon, as if life flowed on in the vast light sky, the born world without him! A mule deer saguaro for sure, but with ears of a prickly pear. Why is it looking? A vision of nature that never says a word. Landscapes tell the human cultural devise that collaborates physical forms extrinsic to nature, self identified, primitivism, rock art, verbal self-reflexion, Wordsworth's Lucy, geologic science, Darwin's Macfarlane. Do not deny perfect science, so careful to rule itself out as a cultural construct, perfectly.

Back of the Beast, and its rider.
Arms, Legs, Thighs, Heads

Head Man, Lock of Hair, Topknot Showing

Perfectly permanently anthropomorphically anthropos so intrinsic the vision of a bug corrects it, collaborations of grasshoppers, semantics of earth, terra obligata, terrestiva imperativita.

Grand Canyon Kachina

Creation discovered by science was an archetype of mountain, a wilderness beyond and in the human. Then science conferred itself Audacious and said to the mountain, move! For audacity we like the third side of Grand Canyon Kachina, who dances this rock.

What is wilderness? I will tell.
It is crowded beneath a bear that opens its mouth.
The tail is cedar,  bronze bones are subway tubes.
Is wilderness a man, to be so greeting him,
sons of men to be so glistening?
A wake-worn wilderness of undersides like potsherds of a trail. What could one capture to trap and pierce the nose?
Think deep white hair!
Beg mercy when you tie down with the eye that tongue put on a leash for girls.
Harpoon the head of gold, spear iron, fire its back down a row of shields.
You have it, strip off the coat, take flashes of light as your own. You can do it.

The Two

Supreme Court

Our Supreme Court is dressed sky blue. It looks a colloquy up close, first of three, just The Two. Say like angels they are servants as ourselves, were it fit to bow, the rock giants serve? They will not bow to you though wordless form deform.  Self recognition is better as self similarity the human has skewed. Similarity, a reflection, in the case of  bent is true, communication that identifies itself.

No matter how much the mountain is made to dissemble the view(er) and valued for the same, the question asked is not how empirical a mutual universe. It is hard to talk of spirit. MacFarlane poses Pieter Bruegel in Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1556) against no physical form collaborating mind. Faceless interchangeable cogs of pen and ink, folly of human, not fish, repeat, act also in Spring (1565) and Summer (1568): "Out of the mouth of a large beached fish tumble many smaller fish...the land and water are overrun by fish: a two-legged fish walks off with another fish in its mouth, a fish hand from a tree, and a fish-bird flies... (Nadine M. Orenstein. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints.Yale University Press, 2001,140). We don't call self identification a fish of mud or the mind. Mind fish are imaginative, not collaborative, not real, but mean to show a maxim, like an orc studied by an anthropologist outside the physical forms one could collaborate. Mind mountains conform to the pre-existing deaf.

Round the century turn Yeats "reformed," denied "power to the symbols...perceiving that irresponsible play with them brings danger. The images that really matter to men of genius and culture are the images which are not chosen but given...." (Austin Warren. Rage for Order. Chicago, 1948, 73).

Not chosen, but given, young C. S. Lewis in 1921, walked up Yeats' stairwell, "a long stairway lined with rather wicked pictures by Blake--all devils and monsters." saw cultural perspective, age, feelings: "it would be ridiculous to record it all; I could give you the insanity of the man without his eloquence and presence, which are very great. I could never have believed that he was so like his own poetry" (Letters. Edited by W. H. Lewis. NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1966. 56, 57).

Empiricist codes, esoteric Buddhists, religious puritans, or whatever theory of reality codifies a cultural norm like Yeats' symbols becomes dangerous when tempted to extrinsic, external practice, meaning give law to others. Practice law on yourself. Really you must do. Science doesn't mind doing it, neither does religion. Bruegel finds symbols that come to him (with some Bosch). Int he universal of his later work Yeats makes "a general defense of a more variously comprehensive universe than a positivist science will admit" (Warren 82). A nice way of saying there is conflict between the mountain of the mind-formed culture and what is "given." Close the eyes. If symbols come from the "given," let them come to the pure in heart, not the acculturate.