Solitude: by Luanne Armstrong

Solitude:
I have now had three weeks of fairly intense solitude and it has left me wondering how people who sail around the world solo, or row across the ocean, solo, or go on long journeys alone manage. Or what abut all those early European explorers, freezing in the arctic, dying in the jungle, crossing deserts and dying of thirst? Why did they do it? What drove them? How did they cope with the solitude, the loneliness and the absence of their friends and family?

And in all the stories of early pioneer days, there are always stories of hermits, recluses, people who chose to live alone with almost no human contact. On the hill just to the north of our farm are the remains of a man named Bill Haley, who lived very much alone with only a herd of goats for company. But there are lots of other stories in our area of people who had left family or friends to live alone. It was the pioneer era, and so many people were naturally separated from everything they had known.

I have often wondered how that was bearable for some people. What was it like, in the days when a letter took three to six months to arrive, for people to be separated for the rest of their lives from everything they had once known as familiar and dear? And I know it still goes on but at least, e-mail is now almost instantaneous.

Research reports that prisoners stuck in solitary confinement go crazy fairly quickly. What happens to people who voluntarily choose solitude – to monks in caves, hermits in their wilderness? Herd animals in zoos separated from their natural habitat and their natural companions also go crazy pretty quickly – we’re not much different than them.

Human beings are animals who live in groups; we live in families, tribes, clans, communities. The more I read novels, the more convinced I am that the basic human plot, at the centre of all of our stories, is the unbinding and rebinding of a sense of family. John Gardner, a famous novelist and writing teacher, said that there are only two plots in all of literature: someone comes to town or someone leaves town. Very much the same thing. Because human beings desperately need to be with other people and often have an equally hard time getting along with them, the endless human saga is full of the push and pull of people leaving their families and then coming home again or leaving one family and forming another kind of family.

In my case, I have briefly left a very full chaotic, and rewarding life, full of people, animals, plants and community, at my farm, for one that has had mostly only books, words, language and writing in it. Despite all the best gadgets of modern communication: internet, email, Facebook, phone, I still felt alone. Electronic people are not the same as real people. My electronic students, however brilliant, are not the same as living, breathing bodies in a classroom.

It was a productive time, in terms of writing, no question, but one can only live with words and idea for so long. After that, I, at least, need people, need voices, need contact. And I also need to be outside, with animals, plants and the living, breathing world. Here in Saskatchewan, I did go for long walks and soaked up the smells and sights and sounds of the prairie, a place I really only know from stories about it.

The future vision that some science fiction writers have had, of people living in self-contained rooms, surrounded by electronic toys, is so impossible that it is almost funny. People simply wouldn’t survive like that, or at least, not for long. I believe that many of the problems of modern life are caused by sheer human loneliness, people who no longer have sane and structured human contact. By this, I don’t mean the right wing vision of rigid and hierarchical nuclear families, where initiative, ideas and creativity are stifled. But of families that nurture, sustain and care for each other. I am quite sure they exist and they are still the best way for people to live. When they work.

For most of its history, humanity has lived in small groups of two to three hundred people and evolved distinct ways for such groups to get along. The survival of our ancestors depended on such communal understanding. We no longer no know much about this because now because we believe we always have the choice to leave. But for those of us who have chosen to stay in one place, take care of the place we love and the people who live there with us, leaving is never a choice at all. And maybe that is a very good thing.

Writing about Interbeing: Human/nonhuman Part One

Writing After Nature:
Luanne Armstrong


It would begin with the dogs howling.
“Here he comes, “ my mom would say. “It’s Wally Johnson, the dogs are howling because he smells like death.”
And sure enough, when Wally’s old green Austin pickup rattled into our yard, we would run out to meet him because the back would always have several dead animals in it. We kids would gather around, fascinated as he explained what they were and where he had caught them. Wally was a trapper and his life and his livelihood was animals, their lives and their deaths. In order to track, trap and kill animals, he had gathered a broad and expert knowledge of place, wilderness, animal habitats, animal behaviour and his own survival throughout the winter, snowshoeing from small trapper’s cabin to cabin, living on animals he trapped or shot. Wally was a man of his time and understanding; he loved birds, fish and deer. Everything else, especially predator animals, he believed should be exterminated. Even at the age of seven or eight, I knew he was wrong and I argued with him about it. And Wally, to his credit, listened carefully and gravely to my arguments and then argued back. In Grade Four, I wrote an essay titled “The Balance of Nature,” to encapsulate my arguments. So in an odd way, reaction to Wally was the beginning of my environmental understanding.
Because I grew up on a farm on the edge of wilderness, because my father was a subsistence farmer always fighting with weeds, weather, coyotes, bears, ravens hawks and owls, because my mother loved all animals, I grew up with a contradictory and conflicted view of human-nature relationships. My brothers and my sister and I spent out time when we were not in school, either working on the farm or exploring the wood and lakeshore around the farm. And because as a child I lived far more intensely in my relationships with animals than I did with people, I was never quite sure where my loyalties should, or did lie.

I am still not sure although I am sure that I am not a fan of Western Civilization or the false idea of ‘progress.’ I do think change and resilience are both factors that continue to profoundly affect human nonhuman relationships as well as writing about such relationships.
In my own Kootenay Columbia region of the world, new residents and visitors often perceive this place as a somewhat peaceful near-wilderness. But in fact much of the fish population in Kootenay Lake is artificially maintained, the main rivers all have multiple dams on them, the forests have all been logged and least once and sometimes twice, many of the animal populations are at risk, and environmentalists fight to keep giant ski resorts off the glaciers, methane drilling out of the last few undisturbed areas, private power projects off the smaller creeks. In my own wandering around, in my relationships with the dwellers that live there with me, including wasps, mosquitoes, bears, birds, frogs, dogs, pigs, horses, cows, and one demanding cat, I watch as parts of it change and parts of it stay the same.
These days, I am a part time farmer, a full time writer, and a sort of academic. I write stories and poems and I go for walks and write a lot about the thoughts and ideas that emerge while I am walking around. I also read pretty constantly books about place, or nature or animals. And if I start from walking around, from looking at what is going on with the people around me, as well as animals, both domestic and wild, birds, insects, plants, trees and the interrelationships among them, then the questions that arise connect me both to the local and the global; how we live, ethically, here and elsewhere, I am always both leaving and coming home, always both in a place of discovery and a place of familiarity. I live in a place where there is constant interaction with the non-human world and the contradictions between how both myself and other people interact with this world continue to puzzle, fascinate and confound me. And these contradictions are constantly being made sharper and more poignant both by the growing environmental crisis in the world, the resulting growth of environmental awareness, particularly in the sciences and some other sectors of humanity, and the changing nature of our relationship with the non human world. In fact, as warnings of environmental problems continue from many quarters, the stakes get higher and higher. The environmental problems, if you are paying attention, will scare you into the heebie jeebies, global warming, water scarcity, oil shortages, polluted oceans with giant floating islands of plastic…and even if many of these effects will be mitigated by environmental efforts, there is still enough there to give any conscious person, especially those of us with grandchildren, at least pause for thought.
And some consideration of the irony of it all. After all, what will be the vaunted philosophy of humanity, the loftiness of the human story and the illusion of our superiority if life on earth as we know is undone by something so powerful and mundane as the weather?
Or, as Kate Rigby, an Australian writer who has done of lot of thoughtful writing on this subject puts it:

“…the incredibly complex and diverse matrix of life into which scientists now believe modern humans evolved some forty thousand years ago currently appears to be changing in ways that cannot but seem privative. Pollution, habit loss, global warming: none of this might spell the end of life on Earth; but the tidal wave of extinction that such anthropogenic factors is now engendering surely threatens the particular oikos, the planetary community of living beings into which humanity was born, and to which we owe our evolutionary emergence. Are we then in the midst of our own endgame?” (Issue 39 - 40, September 2006 Australia Humanities Review)

Such warnings continue almost nonstop these days and in the meantime, very little changes, or seems to change, in the modern way of life. So what then is the role, or should be the role, or could be the role of writers in general, and nonfiction writers in particular, who want or choose to write about the nonhuman world?

As Rigby continues:

We are going to need the very best science and the greatest technical ingenuity that we can muster both in moving towards a post-fossil-fuel economy and in preparing ourselves for the potentially catastrophic climate change impacts that are now already inevitable. However, climate change is not just a technical problem requiring a technical ‘fix’. Both in its causes and effects it is also a socio-economic, political, cultural, and ethical problem."

And that is where the writers must, and I hope will, start to weigh in, in bigger andstronger numbers than they have done so far.