The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry

2. Divided against Ourselves

       ฀   Divided฀against฀Ourselves฀ ฀ ฀ Wendell฀Berry The only hope then lies not in identification with either pole of opposition, but in discovering a more inclusive, sustaining reality—some larger grammar in which the words culture and wilderness may both be spoken. —John Elder, Imagining the Earth 24 Divided against Ourselves ฀ is one of a long line of thinkers attempting to overcome (or at least respond to) the modern split between human and nonhuman nature. Throughout his work Berry has addressed modern alienation by opposing the setting of culture and nature at odds, and by arguing for the importance of understanding the interrelation and interdependence between the human and nonhuman worlds. By applying Tuan’s place-space framework to Berry’s poetics, we can more easily comprehend Berry’s response to this modern dilemma. In his place- and space-conscious poetry, which emerges from his Kentucky farming background and Protestant heritage, Berry stresses the need for people to recover an active, physical, sustainable relationship with the landscape around them and thereby discover the extent to which we both depend on, and ultimately fail to comprehend, the transhuman world. Berry’s work, with its focus on the interaction between the domestic and the wild, offers a keen sense of place- and space-consciousness that repeatedly emphasizes the extent to which we are both connected to and essentially ignorant of wild nature. In addition to offering a theory and vocabulary with which to analyze Berry’s poetry, the place-space framework also provides tools that allow us to evaluate and criticize Berry’s response to this modern rift. For instance, an examination of the terminology Berry occasionally uses in his essays— specifically, oppositional terms like “culture” and “nature,” “domesticity” and “wildness”—reveals that despite his obvious commitment to attitudes I am calling place- and space-consciousness, his vocabulary at times threatens to undermine the very project he undertakes in his poetry; in many ways it reinforces the dualism he strives to overcome. This terminology lacks the ability to communicate concisely and adequately the concepts and values Berry wants to convey in his work. Consequently, a need exists for a vocabulary capable of succinctly describing the attitudes Berry and other ecopoets want to articulate. Tuan’s place-space framework offers just such a vocabulary. ฀฀ my analysis of Berry’s use of the limiting civilization /wilderness vocabulary, I want to look at some central themes appearing in his poetry and use them to further elucidate the Tuanian place-space Wendell Berry 25 synergism. There is little question that Wendell Berry is a place-maker as I defined it in chapter 1; that is, he attempts to move his audience out of an existence in an abstract space where we are simply visitors in an unknown neighborhood and into a recognition of our present surroundings as place and thus as home. Critics have extensively discussed this aspect of Berry’s writing, most prominently with regard to his prose. Scott Russell Sanders, for instance, compares Berry’s fiction to that of writers like Hardy, in whose novels “landscape is no mere scenery, no flimsy stage set, but rather the energizing medium from which human lives emerge and by which those lives are bounded and measured” (“Speaking” 183). Sanders contrasts Berry to another Kentucky author, Bobbie Ann Mason, in whose fiction “nature supplies an occasional metaphor to illustrate a character’s dilemma—a tulip tree cut down when it was about to bloom, a rabbit with crushed legs on the highway—exactly as K-Mart or Cat Chow or the Phil Donahue Show supply analogues” (191). For Berry, on the other hand, “no matter how much the land has been neglected or abused, no matter how ignorant of their environment people may have become, nature is the medium in which life transpires, and its prime source of values and meaning and purpose” (191). Scott Slovic makes a similar point regarding Berry’s essays, noting that “Berry manages to suggest that both the language and the ideas of his essay originate somehow in the natural place and in his family’s long association with the place rather than in his own mind. Rather than making the land part of him, he and his essay grow out of the land” (127–128). The same goes for Berry’s verse, in which he aims for the type of poetry Thoreau said “is nothing but...