Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast

In Awe of the Body: Physical Contact, Indulgence Shopping, and Nature Writing

In Awe of the Body Physical Contact, Indulgence Shopping, and Nature Writing prisCilla patoN I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might, but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. —Henry David Thoreau, “Ktaadn” (71) T hese lines from the “Ktaadn” section of Thoreau’s The Maine Woods precede his famous outburst, “the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!” The physicality of existence as practical necessity gives way to unbounded awe, though that awe is paradoxically expressed by the exclamation “common sense” and literally grounded on the mountain. Such consciousness of the self located in place as both pragmatic and mystifying distinguishes the hiking, fishing, canoeing Thoreau from the airier Emerson of the lecture circuit. Nonetheless, it is rare for Thoreau to refer explicitly to his body—except as a low maintenance presence that needs not what others desire: central heating, luxury apparel, or gourmet fare. Thoreau, and perhaps we have something to be thankful for here, does not share with us his aches, pains, itches, 228 • Nature as Commodity or carnal longings (if any). Though Thoreau states that to “write with gusto,” “The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind,” his works still assume a nineteenth-century discretion and idealism.1 The tendency of his prose in Walden, for example, is to transcend rather quickly the individual body and to abstract and universalize from sensation: his morning bath becomes like an ancient religious ritual, and his bean hoeing in the warm sun becomes the embodiment of some heavenly thought. Sustained focus on “this matter to which” we are bound—the body itself with mouth, hair, skin, alimentary and sexual organs—has to wait for Walt Whitman. By itself, the move toward open discussion of the body does not guarantee understanding or valuing of “contact,” however elemental and potent that contact might be. As Thoreau in “Walking” wishes to reclaim “man” as “part and parcel of Nature,” so might we wish to reclaim the Body for Nature. In claiming the Body for Nature, I do not intend a promotion of nudism or naturism (though an appropriate camp lies on the east side of New Hampshire’s White Mountains for those who dare to bare during black fly season.) Rather, the Body for and in Nature involves recognizing how sensations draw us into our surroundings or make us shrink away, how preconceptions and social circumstances direct the possibilities of the body, and how sensory perceptions become symbiotic with intellectual, moral, and emotional existence. To reclaim the body for nature, it is worth considering intersections of intellectual and social trends that, as disparate as they initially seem, influence attitudes toward and use of the environment. These include confusion over the value of the concrete and the ineffable in the economy and the environment; related concepts of mind/body dualism; romantic myths of contact that challenge such dualism ; contemporary social and consumer trends that in “enhancing” the body undermine vital contact and threaten endangered ecologies like the Northern Forest; and alternatives to commodified attention to the body in contemporary nature writing and in intellectual discourse. Robert Frost’s insights into the interplay of mind, body, and place will be useful throughout, and his poem “To Earthward” brings to the discussion an intimate intensity. This work, which dates from Frost’s residence in the New Hampshire mountains, dramatizes experience crossing back and forth over the membrane of self. Like Thoreau’s “Ktaadn,” “To Earth- iN awe oF the body • 229 ward” assumes an essential need for contact, yet finds that contact unnerving , paradoxically uncanny and elusive in its reality. The significance of “contact” with earth is usually taken for granted, even as bodily attention in all meanings of the phrase was and remains a key element of nature writing and of ecological awareness. After all, it is through the body that we inhabit a world populated by many others —like those bodies that raise Thoreau’s hackles on Ktaadn. Environmental degradation is not just a vague assault on the idea of “Mother Nature ”: it is specific damage to biotic systems—forests, watersheds, coastal zones—and the organisms that constitute those systems. Environmental organizations focus on researched facts and scientific paradigms to “prove” damage, economic impact, or success in recovering ecosystems. This is certainly...