Revelation and Amplification
There’s a passage from Ed Yong’s An Immense World that I think about often. It changed how I understand the world. Yong says smell, to canines, isn’t simple:
[W]hen a dog sniffs, structures within its nose split that airstream in two. Most of the air heads down into the lungs, but a smaller tributary, which is for smell and smell alone, zooms to the back of the snout. There it enters a labyrinth of thin bony walls that are plastered with a sticky sheet called the olfactory epithelium. This is where smells are first detected. The epithelium is full of long neurons… Humans share the same machinery, but dogs just have more of everything… [O]dorants that enter their noses tend to stay there, and are merely replenished by every sniff.
People flush out scent quickly, but dogs retain it, circulating it in and out. It’s why my nine-month-old labrador puppy wants to sniff the creekbed near our house so intently. She’s experiencing it in high-def.
An Immense World is memorable because it is the kind of accessible yet research-grounded writing that allows humans to better understand everything around us. It provides context and vocabulary for our habitat and animal companions, yet it’s literary. In this era where scientists have to fight to keep their work alive, we need good writing about nature. Wong’s is the type of writing that demonstrates how the arts aren’t separate from other realms. Science, conservation, and observational writing – and good writing in these areas – encourage greater expression of our humanness. Art is enriched by its connections to the natural world, and these talk back to nature and amplify its beauty. Just as in Ruth Asawa’s delicate structures inspired by plants and shells, or in Vija Celmins sketches of ocean waves and night skies, it’s the human, artistic impulse that says let me record this and show you. This enriches my life, and it will also enrich yours to experience it.
Though ostensibly dissimilar from each other, two works of nonfiction from the past few years also demonstrate this kind of recording, or more accurately, this kind of revelation and amplification. Each argues for greater focus on the natural world as a way to augment our humanity. Robert Moor’s In Trees is a series of experiential essays designed to demonstrate how human life can be improved by looking to our arboreal companions: Their systems offer both a model for humanity and a reflection of our internal structures. A tree isn’t just metonymy for our lineage, or a representation of our neural map. He argues that it presents a way to endure and form better bonds. Moor sees trees as instructive. “A tree…,” he writes, “is not only a living being. It is also a way of being. Put very simply, that way of being—what philosophers call arborescence—consists of three simultaneous processes: branching, pruning, and gnarling.” The author travels far and wide in his search for tree-based experiences: He climbs to the top of the tallest redwoods while Sir David Attenborough observes from a lawn chair, and he interacts with protestors living in canopies as a form of resistance. To him, “A tree is not just a tree. It is also, always, a symbol.”
A quieter, almost reverent approach to enriching the human experience through observation is found in Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare. The English journalist encounters an abandoned leveret–a baby hare–in the field surrounding her house, and she raises it in her home with the hope of releasing it if it survives. Rather than didacticism or certitude, Dalton’s work presents an approach that is hyper-focused only on moments: a memoir that’s meditative and reflective, couched in the author’s fresh honesty about her own initial unfamiliarity with the species. Raising Hare remains in the realm of the real rather than the idealized. There’s uneasy tension beneath the narrative that propels it forward, but this keeps it from being cloying. Dalton balances the tension with the protagonist’s determination to do everything in her power to save the hare. She tells us that hares resist domestication, that they are likely to die in captivity, and that hers is unlikely to survive. In so doing, she builds a mystery into her tale.
Both authors use narrative structure as a means to elucidate the great potential of our natural existence. Neither story is without tragedy or loss. Realism reigns. Moor reveals his shifting mind, Dalton her nervous persistence. In each case, the textual structure is shaped by the same forces that shaped the human writing it. Moor chooses a structure organized with a highly prescriptive notion of a tree’s physical components. Dalton’s vignettes are organized in a manner I’d typically label organic, though that word works for either if we’re talking about mirroring structures. While Moor’s is rigid, Dalton’s story unfolds gently, chronologically, with the experience of her research augmenting her description of small moments. The natural world, too, presents forms that are both orderly and fluid. To juxtapose these books is also to consider nature’s shapes and containers–much like human narrative constructions we’ve invented to contain our thoughts–these alter our sensory experience and our perception.
There’s a danger in trying to oversimplify or make the natural world into a symbol. Moor and Dalton each resist anthropomorphizing their subjects, allowing each subject its thingness without having to make it cute or define its right to exist in our own terms. Moor says his “aim has never been to anthropomorphize [trees]. Quite the opposite: I hope to arborize humanity.” At times, his “arborizing” ideal and organization feel forced, but his resistance to making trees important because they have human traits is significant. Dalton’s approach to the hare is deliberate, intended to give herself a measure of protection against potential loss if the leveret dies. She won’t let herself name it; she won’t let herself think of it as a pet. Both authors make the case that nature doesn’t have to justify its existence to deserve protection.
In Trees and Raising Hare, each demonstrates the writers’ comfort with not knowing. Moor writes, “I had decided to let my mind grow like a tree, but the more I learned about trees, the less I seemed to know.” So too does Dalton have to come to terms with the reality of the hare in front of her, despite how it occasionally conflicts with the sparse written record she discovers in her research. It’s significant that these natural world authors allow themselves the vulnerability of being unsure on the page. The desire for a permanent kind of unchangeable knowing is used constantly as an argument against scientific progression. These stories offer a model for continuing to seek answers.
The protagonist’s human reaction to what they observe and feel is also relevant, another piece of the narrative. Dalton’s observation of her feelings is meditative in the sense that she is able to observe them from the outside, consider their effect even as she experiences them. At one point she says she “felt absurd, for my emotional reaction.” What’s interesting is that the reader, too, feels an emotional connection to the hare. Despite not naming it, despite all attempts to keep the human-animal relationship detached, Dalton gets pulled in, and she doesn’t want the hare to die. Neither do we.
The stories' human protagonists are as much a part of the narrative as their purported subjects. Dalton changes her routines in her household to suit the hare:
I listened to the landscape. It was quiet enough to hear the thrum of the wind over the ground, and the boom as it struck the wood. Quiet enough, during lulls in the wind, to hear the calls of individual birds. It was a soundscape of sky and timber and earth, not the artificial echo and din of a human home, and I resolved to be far more conscious and careful from now on of every clattering pan, gushing tap or raised voice, and how they might sound to the leveret.
She becomes the other animal in her own tale. Her behavior alters. Moor’s work includes the same awareness that conscious effort to care for and about nature reshapes a human life. “The question then becomes,” he writes,
How do we contort other living things—and, just as importantly, contort ourselves around other living things—in a way that respects their unruly essence? What philosophy should we follow? How do we create, of the earth, a piece of careful, collaborative, and ever-living art?
In both cases, the protagonists recognize that it’s not possible to remain unchanged by nature if one wishes to live with more environmental consciousness, yet neither sees it as a bad thing to be shaped or changed. It just is. Once again, Moor’s superimposed organizational strategy can feel unnecessary, but it’s possible to look beyond the branching, rooting, gnarling convention to take in the author’s earnest hope for humanity.
Dalton and Moor both find peace in their experience–not an abiding or obliterating peace, but a fresh way to take in the world. Both hyper-focused experiences are positive. Dalton’s euphonic prose demonstrates it best: “In truth,” she writes,
the animal soothed me. I took to slipping away from my desk just to look at it, amazed by its calmness and tranquil demeanour. I couldn’t help but compare its serenity and steadiness to the sense of frenetic activity that had pervaded my life for years, marked by constant vigilance, unpredictability and stress.
Moor shows us how “[t]hinking in trees has helped me see myself as kin to other species.” His tone is more eager, his entry into the essays more obtuse. But he employs a similar kind of hope.
When Dalton reflects on the “precious and fleeting” moments with her charge, and Moor studies the world from the tops of trees, the reader, too, is able to pause. Both narratives pull us in, immersing us in the writer’s careful study. “If it is possible,” Dalton writes, “as William Blake would have it, ‘to see a world in a grain of sand,’ then perhaps we can see all nature in a hare…,” or, as Moor says, a tree…their “simplicity and intricacy, fragility and glory, transience and beauty.” We’re made better by noticing, reflecting, and reassessing our own place.
