A QUICK HISTORY:

ART'S CONNECTION TO NATURE
& HOW IT WAS LOST

VICTOR GREENTREE

Aldous Huxley wrote an essay called "Wordsworth in the Tropics" that chided the European romantics who lived in a mild, idyllic climate and did not face the harsh natural realities of natives in jungles or tundras. Thus discredited, it was inevitable for cynicism to crop up and for urbanization to begin to take hold of our imaginations.

Art in the future, by needs, must be earth centered. It must, by needs, link us to shamanism of old and to our future: a drive towards a unitary world. It should, by needs, awaken in us a spiritual feeling for the nature forces around us and make us feel a connectedness. We know that the earth grows smaller and smaller each day. We can no longer exist as separate nations. We look for a sense of renewed religious belief that is necessary for human beings. And the answer is the earth, itself--in the feeling of oneness and unity that it gives to us. We are all members of the same bio-world. Wherever, however, we live, we all have the same needs for air and water. We all have the same needs for nutrition. We all see the same sky, touch the trees and plants, have communions with the other animals around us. These are factors which bind us together into one, a unified whole celebrating Our Mother Earth's spirit.

Yet, in the rat race of our modern metropolis ghettos, shooting up our media-pusher product addictions each 24 hours, all awareness is lost. Our art has become "big city" and no longer speaks to us of these important matters. And we have forsaken our poetry.

For, if language is the most effectual difference between us and other species, then poetry is our most quintessential art. Until recent times, poetry has had a close tie to nature. It is no mere accident that our two most renowned novels, Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn, are "about" a whale and a river respectively and our most acclaimed poem, Leaves of Grass. The poem that everyone has to memorize in the tenth grade begins: "This is the forest primeval... ." Not only were there artists specifically dedicated to nature, like the Romantics and the Transcendentalists, but nature was one of poetry's most important sources of imagery.

To oversimplify to make a point, poetry can be separated into two things. First, it describes human life, either the poet's world or a fictitious story. This description is generally constructed of poetical statements. Second, it often attempts, with poets so inclined, to reveal an ethereal, higher realm beyond life. And here, the poet resorts to pure pictures or images.

Poets (and by extension artists) have always found that by describing some facet of the Earth, creating in the minds of their audiences a vision of the wild, they could touch some deep human experience and understanding. The language of English speaking poets was rooted in the guttural tones and sights of Old English, Germanic Anglo-Saxon, whose flow and weave of words made the earth available:

Wynter wakeneth al my care
Nou thise leaves waxeth bare;

Language, said Leibnitz, mirrors a nation's spiritual life, its mentality and culture. This does seem applicable to the foundations of English. The Anglo-Saxons were pagans, worshipers of Freya and Frey. Their organization was tribal and rural rather than urban and, as Margaret Schlauch tells us in The Gift of Language (Dover Publications, Inc.), their language was hardy, "without superfluity and abstraction," a direct expression of connection to the land. Their words for the earth were a sensual experience: rain, stone, star, man, sun, water, bone. And their verbs were strong and direct: ride, run, eat, think, leap. And the language itself had an earthy rhythm, even ending a sentence in a preposition and even when the meaning had no connection to nature:

Berath me husl to.

This directness to the earth was weakened by the influx of Latin which brought "a vocabulary of town and church:" abbot, altar, hymn, street, copper, and abstractions by compounding: com-miserate, pre-face, col-laborate. The invasion of the Normans and their French (French became the official language of Britain for 300 years) further altered English by adding "an urbane vocabulary from the fields of law, philosophy, military science, architecture, etc." and words that were "long, conceptual and vague:" contrition, transubstantiation, reverence, obligation, domination. Still, English speaking poets incorporated these changes and made them their own "even devising new meters and rhythms." And Anglo-Saxon was still a powerful force with its earthladen feelings:

When the daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh! the dozy, over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale.
Shakespeare

Although "nature" long has been recognized as a category for poetic and literary analysis, few, if any, scholars have made this simple connection between the earth and language. There are a number of reasons for this. First, just because it is so simple and obvious, it seems to have escaped attention. Second, literaturists are not focused upon psychology or religion. None that I know of, until recently, discussed literature from the point of view of Jung's collective unconscious, or a species memory ( except for Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns of Poetry, 1934). Thus, "love of nature" is attributed to the Romanticists or Wordsworth. It is used as a way of categorizing the thematic materials of certain literary groups or eras. If, however, "nature" is seen as archetypal symbols meaningful to the psyches of all humans, then era and culture, and particularly the urban cultures from Greek Athens to the modern city, can be seen as detractors which separate man and poetry from their true beings.

Furthermore, modern writers who now take a symbolic unconscious approach are not sensitive to, or practitioners of, the old aboriginal earth religions. They thus think in psychotherapeutic terms of "analysis," individual growth and "individuation," rather than in the earth-mental set of the collective mind of the tribe. The archetypes discussed may be diverse, while the "tribal will" usually was expressed in a fertility cyclic calendar wheel of earth seasons which went beyond individual personality to explain the similarity of all humans and to link them to all other living things.

Finally, critics are usually interested in an intellectual understanding of a particular work of art. Artists and writers, however, operate from a different perspective. The writer puts precise and exact words, one after another, on a page, just as painters make one brush stroke followed by the next. Often, the artist could not tell you exactly why he does such and such. He just knows that it fits into the whole that he is creating. So, when I speak of "nature in poetry," I am concerning myself with language as a tool, the act of putting words together to form images, and not the usual concerns of literary scholarship. Not with themes, motives, historic movements, "landscape" even--but with specific kinds of artistic pictures.

This emphasizes the act of creation itself and recognizes the true importance of art: as ritual, ceremony, incantation.

But, to continue: As the focus of the world changed from farm and village to city, poets still maintained the vision of nature. Babette Deutsch describes Thomas Hardy's work as "a look at the worst" and "the misery of a sentient life." Hardy lived at a crucial time that "compelled him to witness the decay of the agricultural order and its natural pieties." Yet she finds his work "repeatedly relieved" by lyric images: "he speaks of hearing a frail, gaunt, wind beaten thrush singing 'as of joy illimited.'" And, "Even though Hardy has no 'blessed Hope,' he has an eye for the May month flapping 'its glad green leaves like wings,' for 'the full-starred heavens that winter sees.'"

And even so--and before our present disassociation became complete--our best twentieth century poets did not abandon nature--but still used its evocative powers in famous poems. Auden, for example, often placed it in juxtaposition to the terror of the mechanical:

Nursing mothers point a sly
Index finger at a sky
Crimson with the setting sun.
In the valley of the fox,
Gleams the barrel of a gun.

While Dylan Thomas maintained a pure nature trance indebted to his Welsh roots:

Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,
Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
And there this night I walk in the white giant's thigh
Where barren as boulders women lie longing still...

And Nabakov:

My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun;
Twinned iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule--when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged--
For we are most artistically caged.

And Eliot:

April is the cruelist month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire...

And even terrified, neurotic Sylvia Plath in a clear moment:

I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.

However, on the whole, the seeds of dissolution were planted long ago with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Gradually, the focus shifted from the country to the city. The response of poets was Romanticism. Romanticism was a backlash, a desperate attempt to counter the inevitable force of the city and the machine with a romanticized nature-worship. As such, it was open to criticism and ridicule. Aldous Huxley wrote an essay called "Wordsworth in the Tropics" that chided the European romantics who lived in a mild, idyllic climate and did not face the harsh natural realities of natives in jungles or tundras. Thus discredited, it was inevitable for cynicism to crop up and for urbanization to begin to take hold of our imaginations.

As we come to contemporary art, we must shift away from poetry because, after its glorious output of the 1920s, it has been outshone by the visual arts and music. The trend to city-ness and put on has been a gradual one. In the 1920s, the Dadaists created a "nihilistic" movement which attacked all conventional standards of aesthetics and behavior and "spat in the eye of the world." At the same time, Dadaists and Surrealists began using mass produced, machine made objects in their constructions and George Antheil wrote "Ballet Mechanique." But it was not until the 1950s and the advent of television that the real change in the human race occurred. Our culture became "non-verbal," "non-literate." As a literary form, the comic book replaced the novel and poem. We accepted the city as the only positive place. Norman Mailer gave us the street smart "white Negro" and Woody Allen gave us Manhattan as two modern role models. Claes Oldenburg in an interview on Pop Art said, "Take a cigarette butt and make it heroic."

Sometime in the early 1960s, Susan Sonntag wrote an essay in which she described a new art form: Camp Art. Camp Art was the art of the time. It was city art. Sonntag called it "a private code among urban cliques." It was "Kitsch." Harold Rosenburg described Kitsch as "the daily art of our time ... all those cheap, cute, sentimental artifacts found everywhere in western industrial societies ... an inevitable consequence of the industrial revolution, a mass produced art for a middle class philistine in their tastes because they lack formal education and have lost contact with traditional folk culture." That is, for a middle class that had forgotten the Humanities of western, English speaking civilization. At first, the urban was taken as a joke, a put-on. Art that was so bad that it was good. Its purpose originally was a way to sensitize us, a way to laugh at and deride the urban, mod world that was not us, that was created by Madison Ave. (do you ever hear that term any more?), Hollywood and "the establishment."

I remember an important event that I and many people of my generation attended. It was the showing, I believe in 1966, of the entire Batman movie serial. As kids in the 1940s, when we went to the movies every Saturday afternoon for 25 cents, one chapter of an adventure serial was shown before the feature film. Now, all of this ridiculous pap that was put into our heads as youngsters was assembled into one three and a half hour ordeal of fifteen consecutive episodes! It was splendid, because we understood what we were seeing.

It was inevitable that Camp should be introduced to most of us with a comic book character that had been turned into serialized shorts. In the first place, it was an example of that modern artistic vehicle, the adaptation: novels into films, films into television series, songs into commercials. What makes the adaptation so typically part of our time is that the decision to adapt is rarely made for artistic reasons but for profit. The ultimate adaptations are the feature movies that run on television with the introductory message: "edited (censored) for television" and those cut right in the middle of a poignant scene with five minutes of commercials.

And secondly, comics are the basis of so much of our modern culture. The comic book is perfect. It is literature that is non-literary, visual, and it began as a part of the ideal communication of metropolises: the newspaper, a cursory, daily shot of paranoia and blah for the masses. Perhaps the comic book's essence was made clearest in "Classic Comics." "Classic Comics" tried to translate the greatest novels in the English language into some simple, mass produced pictures and a romantic, adventure action story. They were great for disinterested students who wanted to get through the sophomore year without really reading Ivanhoe and The Scarlet Letter. The comic book, also the model for Pop Art, to some extent Hard Edge Art, Junk Poetry, and such movie hokum as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, "Roger Rabbit", "The Ninja Turtles", and Pulp Fiction, brought in new qualities to art. Its imagery was no longer nature. The city was its backdrop. And its heroes were city heroes, no longer the nature-vegetation gods and goddesses of yore. They were Supermen of technology, from outer space, newspaper reporters and wealthy philanthropists in disguise. They were street-smart crusaders and victims: cops, ghetto riders, attorneys and general hospital doctors, with big city jobs to do.

And, gradually, our attitudes began to change. What was originally satiric and deriding came to be believed. Nature no longer existed except in some place called "the wilderness." You know, there are many, many people alive in cities who have never seen the stars at night: no wonder they are insane. And, a new generation of young people came whose entire experience was urban, who had been reared on television. At a very young age, every Saturday and Sunday, they were fed endless hours of television cartoons, video comics, and then, as they grew older, they were gradually weaned to live shows with mindless plots and characters. Therefore, these young people, when they were exposed to Pop Art and "Kitsch," took it seriously rather than as a put-on. They thought it was the real thing.

Film was still an outgrowth of the novel, but television broke with our heritage because it was an extension of the comic book instead of the novel. In fact, when the Batman serial was re-adapted into a television series, that marked the beginning of the end of Camp--"a private code among urban cliques"--and its transformation back into the high art of the masses. Television, like the comics, is an abbreviated format, usually half an hour. Also, like comics, the programs are in a series and are intended for the widest mass audience. Film, on the other hand, like the novel, has a relatively extended length, one and a half to three hours, and is a singular creation. For these reasons, it is possible to develop character much more deeply and thus to explore themes and plots of greater intellectual content. Also, there is much more time to show setting and use setting artistically as a part of the imagery of the story. For these reasons, the Batman, Superman, Popeye, etc. movies, though derived from comic books, are separate creations that, if good, have transcended their original creations. Finally, consideration is given to film as an art media while television is a strictly commercial media. For these reasons, the advent of television markedly affected our consciousness as nothing had before. Now a whole nation, and not just its kids, was hooked on comic books. The comic book heroes have come to be juxtaposed against another urban invention, Woody Allen's Manhat tan--anti-heroes whose problems were not man's relation to cosmos and earth but the psychological ordeals of human relationships. Webster's Third International lists three definitions of a "humanist":

1) a person who pursues the study of humanities. Humanities are defined as the branches of learning regarded as having primarily a cultural character including languages, literature, history, mathematics and philosophy. 2) a person who is devoted to human welfare and 3) a person who subscribes to man-centered doctrines of philosophy, science and religion.

Until 20 years ago, when one used the term "humanities" in our society, it most generally meant the first definition: culture. Now, popular usage sees it as being the last two: human welfare devoted and man-centered. We now have a modern American world where few young people want a Liberal Arts education or even know what it is. In California, literature is not even offered in many junior colleges.

At the same time, we have seen the rise of a new school of psychotherapy, Humanistic Psychology. Originally, therapy, modeled after Freud, was individual. But Rogers and others brought in group therapy. Group therapy emphasizes interpersonal relationships, how one functions positively in a group. The subject is more often the immediate events between group members or ones immediate problems with people outside the group than oneself, alone. Gestalt therapy inventor, Fritz Perls, created a important experiential, existential model of human beings. But when asked by a group member about the symbolic interpretation of dreams, he replied: "I don't know what a symbol is." In individual therapy, much more time is allowed for depth exploration of dreams and other symbols. These symbols, if we follow the ideas of Carl Jung, often have archetypal meanings, express a collective human consciousness that is often nature-oriented. Rivers, trees, snakes, the moon express a life within us that is not found in our presently constituted cities or interpersonal relationships. In our collective nightmare world of the city where all archetypal images have been lost, save Alan Ginsberg's "Moloch," the monster, the machine--itself a distortion of the letter "M," originally the hieroglyphic for water--there is not much sense in deeply exploring nature symbolism except as an expression of alienation from one's surroundings.

This new meaning of humanism has led to another avenue of popular art that is social-welfare oriented. Beginning with the sit-coms of the 60s-- like All in the Family, Maude, MASH, WKRP in Cincinnati through to Lou Grant, Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and Murphy Brown--this popular art has explored pressing social issues and interpersonal conflicts in cities. Of course, when the New Right took over in the 80s, we saw the demise of social-welfare art in favor of other aspects of big city life: fascist, mindless violence and sensational, technologic special effects--that is, no art at all. Then, beginning in the 90s, when the Clintons brought east&west coast yuppie sophistication, and the new age hit mass culture, social-welfare stopped needing the guise of comedy/drama and became the focus of the afternoon talk show, 12 Step confessional crowd: Oprah, Rosie and Montel.

Social-welfare art is something that was, and is, needed. We should applaud it and encourage it--as well as the positive values of Humanistic Psychology and therapy. What is upsetting though, along with the other technologic, demographic changes we have witnessed, is how this movement has contributed to a limitation of the Humanistic really, to a new big city definition for ourselves. As artists, we should try to redeem what has been lost, to prove once again that our heritage is correct: that art describes some facet of the earth, our collective racial memory, and in doing so can touch some deep human experience and understanding.

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