I have been reading things I thought were selected without pattern from across my range of dilettantish interests.  But not so — they’ve turned out to be a lot more connected than I was expecting.

Item: A permaculturist has suggested that I plant a chestnut orchard at the farm.  The soil isn’t ideal for that, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading to find out how possible that can be. Penn State knows a lot about disease-resistant hybrids. The American Chestnut Foundation has an interesting program to back-cross resistant hybrids with native chestnuts to try and restore something like the original tree to its original range. Chestnuts sound interesting, and tasty.

Item: From reading various tweets about Native American politics, I came to hear about a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer called Braiding Sweetgrass. Dr. Kimmerer is a botanist who wrote about the interface between Native lore and our emerging understanding of ecological dynamics. A great deal of it is about forests.  There’s a chapter entitled “Learning the Grammar of Animacy”, in which she talks about learning the language of a place, by listening. (Some form of the word “listen” occurs 78 times in 350 e-book pages.) Her thesis is that tens of thousands of years 0f coevolution gave Natives the language they need to understand their ecosystem, and “language” is used literally.

“The very best scientists are humble enough to listen.”

“The language scientists speak, however precise,is based on a profound error in grammar, an omission, a grave loss in translation from the native languages of these shores.”

“I come here to listen, to nestle in the curve of the roots in a soft hollow of pine needles…”

Item: The Overstory by Richard Powers has been sitting on my bookshelf for a year. It begins and ends with a chestnut tree. (no spoiler) It has oblique references to J.R.R. Tolkien in several places, as much of the environmentalist movement does. This is a brilliant novel, and reading it immediately after Braiding Sweetgrass was a shock of familiarity. Kimmerer’s ideas underlie Powers’s novel like a hyporheic flow.  Towards the end, this line jumped out:

His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. “It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They’re not that hard to hear.”  The man chuckles. “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492.” (p.493)

Item: Megan Fontenot talks about apocalypse and healing in the latest issue of Tolkien Studies. She draws connections between Tolkien and the shamanic tradition. She says our lack of communication with the forest is a consequence of the Fall.

Here, the break that Eliade identifies between heaven and earth appears also between humankind and “nature”. Communication has been broken off in this relationship also, is indeed impossible, save to a privileged few.

So, are we buying into the idea that Native Americans are prelapsarian? The subject is well represented on line; Google would be happy to provide me with a few thousand documents. I don’t think I’ll read them. Such matters are too subtle for me, and better left to the theologians.  I’m just going to marvel at how I thought I was randomly choosing books and papers from a broad set of interests, and ended up instead with a tightly-coupled network. I’ve included two vertices on the graph without grey circles, to represent influences mentioned by the authors, but which I haven’t read myself.

Network of recent reading

Works Cited

Fontenot, Megan N. “The Art of Eternal Disaster: Tolkien’s Apocalypse and the Road to Healing.” Tolkien Studies, vol. 16, 2019, p. 91-109. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tks.2019.0008.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. United States, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Powers, Richard. The Overstory: A Novel. United States, W. W. Norton, 2018.