In the First Country of Places: Nature, Poetry and Childhood Memory
Chawla, Louise (1994).
Albany: State University of New York Press; 234 pages. $20.95. ISBN 0791420744.
Louise Chawla has invited us into a clearing, an aletheia, for a conversation about nature, childhood, and memories. With the grace of a sensitive teacher, Chawla, who presently is a fellow at the Norwegian Center for Child Research, talks with us about the enduring intellectual and existential question of our culture, that is, what is the relationship between human beings and nature? And she shares her journey in search for more insight into this profound question, a journey that has taken her into the history of philosophy, into the world of poetry, and into intense conversations with Edith Cobb, one of the great teachers for people concerned with children and environments.
In the First Country of Places: Nature, Poetry and Childhood Memory, a work which evolved from Chawla's dissertation in environmental psychology and is published as part of the State University of New York Press Series in Environmental Phenomenology, begins with Chawla's question about the importance of childhood memories of nature as the grounding for creativity. She returns to Cobb's proposal: creativity is born in children's exploration of and relationship to the natural world and it is to this place that creative people return again and again for inspiration
to renew the power and impulse to create at its very source...a living sense of a dynamic relationship with the outer world. In these memories the child appears to experience both a sense of discontinuity, an awareness of his own unique separateness and identity, and also a continuity, a renewal of relationship with nature and process (p. 154).
Cobb's insights, recorded in her book The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, came from an examination of the autobiographies of many creative people who lived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of whom Wordsworth was seminal. But Chawla poses a disturbing question: in the face of modernity and the changed physical and cultural conditions of a capitalist, industrial world, can childhood memories of nature still serve as a source of inspiration? Has the world changed too much for a romantic vision to endure?
As one way of addressing this question, Chawla brings five American poets into the clearing: William Bronk, David Ignatow, Audre Lorde, Marie Ponsot, and Henry Weinfield. Through an intense examination of their poetry, critiques, and interviews, she offers to us their thinking, beliefs, and feelings about childhood, childhood memories, and nature.
Before inviting each of the poets to join the conversation, Chawla places their work into a philosophical and cultural context so that we may hear their words and understand their standpoints. Using Gadamer's hermeneutic method, she circles around the topics which will be offered and reoffered by the different voices in the course of the book. She places her own work in the tradition of phenomenology and gives us a brief view of her belief (rooted in Husserl and Heideigger) that life is embodied and universal, and also historically placed in time and bounded by 'meaningful geographic settings - whether real or imaginary' (p. 13).
Further, Chawla tells the story of the Western view of children through a review of two conflicting traditions which she refers to as the 'science of childhood' and the 'poetry of childhood.' She traces the scientific interpretation of childhood through Descartes, Comte, Piaget, and Freud. This interpretation reifies dualistic structures of thought and experience and proposes a hierarchical course of development, from the 'childishness' of childhood to more adult and sophisticated understandings of the world. She juxtaposes this with ideas from the romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge, New World Transcendentalists, and a review of the work of M.H. Abrams, all of whom offer a very different view of childhood as the time of a clearer, unclouded knowledge of the world. Chawla does not try to resolve these traditions, but rather suggests that they are embedded in our culture today; we still revere childhood, and we still demand that it be put away.
What is of interest in Chawla's presentation of each of the five poets is her ability to focus on the struggle of each to live in a world where such tensions remain unresolved and yet to make sense of it through their poetry and their lives. These poets are similar, yet different, from one another: similar because they share a life in the milieu of modernity, and because each grew up in the U.S. or Canada; different because three are men and two women, one is black and four white, three from secure middle class homes and two from struggling immigrant families; three grew up in cities and two in rural areas. They range in age from early 30s to 70. What interests Chawla and what she shares with us, is the way in which each has assessed and constructed the role of childhood and childhood memories for their lives and their poetry, and how each places himself or herself in the world of humans and the world of nature. As each poet is brought into the clearing to offer insights into the world, each of their voices is given full attention. Each speaks and is given full presence.
Chawla uses Emerson's notion of the poet to describe William Bronk: 'I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me' (p. 48). Bronk compares his work to the music of rhapsody in which a higher spirit plays upon a human instrument. He says, 'I am the instrument of the world's passion' (p. 59). Consequently, Bronk has no need for autobiography and personal memory which would distract him from his true calling of selfless attention to the world. His poetry reflects his attention to the details of his local environment and effectively articulates the modern dilemma of the self in confrontation with a scientific account of nature. He feels that people construct worlds through stratagems of reason to defend against nature, which eventually takes away all that it gives. We impose place identity on unbounded terrain and we impose measure on infinite time to root ourselves in nature's vastness. Through this account, the temporal sentient self is ultimately eclipsed by infinite nature. For Bronk there is no self, only nature. In his poetry, even the figure of the large Victorian house in which he has lived since the age of two holds no sway against nature's engulfment. When children appear in his poems, they are caught in the same predicament as adults, futilely seeking the comfort of believing they are someplace at sometime.
Like Bronk, Henry Weinfield is in essential confrontation with nature. Because all beauties must die in nature, and dreams of social justice and paradise fail in history, Weinfield finds nature and history to be the adversaries of desire. Since reality is consistent disappointment, his desire finds fulfilment in the beauty of the intellect's own creations. His poetry has little tie to mundane physical experience of the world. His emphasis on transcendence in the world of ideas has drawn him away from sensory experience, including childhood experiences of nature. The landscapes that appear in his poetry are not the landscapes of his personal experience; they are the landscapes of literary tradition that exist in an ideal and abstract world of words. Personal memory and autobiography have no importance in Weinfield's timeless and universal world of words. He believes that the self-conscious adult can never return to the innocence of youth, and he confers no special poetic status on the language of children since all language is metaphoric. He agrees with Mallarme that the poet as an individual must die to be reborn as an artist who can transform the accidents of daily life into the universal melodies of verse.
David Ignatow has also experienced separation from nature. Yet his life follows the romantic spiral of childhood immersion in nature, followed by adult estrangement and discord, and finally, in old age, reconciliation. His development is expressed in his largely autobiographical poetry. As a child growing up in Brooklyn, he felt at one with an animated and benevolent nature. As an adult working at unskilled jobs that threatened his life as a writer, he began to realize that he was up against a different order of reality than Whitman's transcendent harmony. The city had replaced nature as the dominant fact of life. He rejected traditional rhythms and metrical compositions as the product of an agricultural society in tune with nature's cycles and found a contemporary rhythm and beat in the excitement, unpredictability, and meaningless material processes; and he found no intimations of divinity in even the most exalted and mystical moments. Ignatow attributes his serenity and peace in old age to achieving recognition as a writer, a satisfying job, and a fulfilling family life and safe home. His late work shows an acceptance of natural processes setting things and life in order, and a renewed tolerance of the impulse to animism.
Chawla's presentation of Audre Lorde and Marie Ponsot and their relationship with nature offers a different perspective, one characterized by connection throughout life in spite of changes in their lives. At an early age, Lorde's mother (a native of Grenada) introduced her to a symbiotic relationship with the natural world through lyrical descriptions of her homeland. As a child, the only green space Lorde ever saw was a pocket park in her own neighborhood in Harlem. Ordinary and shabby as this park may have been, she believes such places of beauty and serenity in childhood are generative and become the scraps out of which people quilt their dreams. Lorde makes these pleasant memories the core of her dreams, and further, her painful experiences are interpreted as guides. When you are born fat, black, female, and almost blind, she says, survival is a daily challenge. The circumstances of her birth led to her need to articulate what it is to be an outsider, to survive, and to negotiate the conflict between dreams and reality. The preservation of memories is critical to her desire to rescue the voices of women, children, and oppressed peoples from historic silence. In reconstructing her heritage in what she calls a biomythography, she draws on West African philosophy; and further, she incorporates West African notions of an animated and maternal nature into her poetry and finds inspiration in the creative use of language by children. In writing her own life, she feels she is writing a myth moving under untold lives.
Like Lorde, Marie Ponsot had a mother who introduced her to nature as a generative force, as an ally. She treasures images of New York City from her youth that are porous to nature and in adulthood she gravitates to places where nature and the city converge. She believes that places and things preserve memory, and memory makes places and things sacred. As she grows older, she consistently meets the world and her memories on new terms, reinhabiting present forms of beloved childhood places and practices. Something in the moment changes the way she remembers the past, then the way she remembers the past informs the way is seeing the present. She exploits this phenomenon in her poems that seek to 'haul this place now up through that place then.' Much of her later poetry has the character of riddles. She says the alertness required to solve riddles initiates memory, which she probes for accurate self-definition. This searching for personal identity is critical for her concern with women's silence, a sensibility she herself struggled with. Ponsot maintained a private, domestic identity, publishing only at the urging and insistence of close friends because she did not feel she had a message that needed to be spread. In her poetry she articulates her maternal connection with the past and the future through her mother and her children, and the places of her life. Chawla's style of writing gives each of the above five poets space to speak for themselves. But she also queries them and their work when she reminds us of her beginning question: can Wordsworth, as presented through Edith Cobb, be taken as authority regarding the creative significance of childhood memories of nature? The answer is clearly, no. The questions Wordsworth struggled with at the dawn of modernity have exacerbated. We are now faced with the recognition that childhood is critical to the development of 'self' and yet denied the usefulness of that knowledge because the experience of childhood is contradicted and denied.
One of the most interesting insights Chawla shares with us is her discovery of the role of gender in placing value on both childhood and memories and also in the placement of self and species in the universe. She interviewed the three male poets first, and shares with us her surprise at their expressions of their place in the natural world. And then she interviewed the two women poets, Lorde and Ponsot, and felt much more congruence with her own experience. This leads her into an inquiry into the ways in which nature is engendered into our culture and how such learning is differentiated by gender. All three of the male poets, Bronk, Ignatow and Weinfield, expressed a view that they 'find themselves caught in a confrontation between mind and nature, when they are conscious that, in the final analysis, neither any human mind, nor any human ends, can survive nature's engulfment' (p. 147). They believe that humans stand outside nature; yet each poet attempts, in the face of this condition, to affirm life and make it meaningful through art and poetry.
The women poets were not struggling in the face of a vast and powerful world of nature, nor did they experience their lives as insignificant in the face of its wonder. The two women poets have a different reading of the place of humans in the universe. They avoid the tragic opposition, asking instead how they can separate themselves from nature. Their view is tied to a belief in renewal and perpetuity - through birth and death, continuity and change.
Chawla tries to understand these different standpoints and questions what kinds of experiences lead someone to take these various positions. She offers three activities, spoken of by the women poets, which may have generated a different sense of being in the world and the importance of childhood memories: childwatching, 'redoing time,' and the experience of models of care. Both Ponsot and Lorde had children, and speak of the hours of childwatching as reminders of their own childhood now recollected through the childhood of others. Childwatching engages us, as adults, in an animate world of wonder and activity. Another condition identified by Ponsot is the work of people who 'redo time' in the sense that they are relegated to the cyclical world of physical necessity: 'a world of daily and seasonal tasks that are never completed, for which no name, fame, or great wealth accrue' (p.l64). Those engaged in such work are bound by rhythms and repetition, and are conversant with a form of time that is about cycles rather than progression. The third important experience of which the two women spoke is the importance of a caring adult who, by introducing a child to the world and appreciation of it, sets in place an openness and vulnerability to otherness. Chawla suggests that although these three experiences- childwatching, redoing time, and models of care -are not given place in the annals of intellectual and empirical history, they may be a key to a different sensibility of life.
The book ends with the chapter, 'A Recollective Psychology,' an exploration of how people use past experience to meet the present and the future. Because memories are reconstructed within cultural stories, there are some traditions which frame what is known in a given time. Most often we employ these stories and live them without consciously attending to them. Poets are often an exception, searching and re-searching to understand the roots of their experiences, and it is for this reason that Chawla has engaged them in our conversation.
Given a perspective that we 'half-create and half-perceive in response to a surrounding reality' (p. 174), Chawla engages us in a new direction of conversation in which she asks us to consider what kind of attitude might we wish to engender in our children. What cultural stories might we wish to frame? And given the current ecological crisis, why not promote a 'self-understanding [which] can acknowledge and promote natural attitudes of connection to nature and to childhood' (p. 172)? She raises this question to psychology as a discipline and practice, and to all of us engaged in work with children.
As a beginning guide to our continuing conversation about this question, Chawla reviews the work of the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser, who developed a model of human consciousness that does not pit one form of experience and understanding against the other, but rather suggests that humans have many modes of experience and perception. He argues that simultaneously, we experience the world as embodied, instinctive creatures through emotional, mythical, analytical and rational modes. All modes of knowing, if open and accessible, can be used to understand the world, our relations with each other, and our place on the earth.
Using Gebser as a guide, Chawla offers those of us engaged in the worlds of children and nature a guide, building on Lorde's and Ponsot's observations of their experience of connection. She suggests that we attend more carefully to the consideration of language as the mediator of the physical world, listening for connotations as much as denotations which serve to reveal the world to us. Further, the engagement of empathy, which can dissolve the separation between self and other, can be fostered, an intense act of perception akin to 'inseeing.' And finally, she returns directly to the women poets' experience of models of care, suggesting that having a caring human being introduce the world to us is generative to both naming and inseeing.
At some level, Chawla's suggestions are not new. But what is insightful is the way in which each of the five poets, seen through Chawla's eyes and mind, engaged (or did not) in these three activities, and their interpretation of the world in light of these experiences. Listening to their voices enables us to circle round to recollect a value of childhood memory and its generative role in forming a relationship with the natural world.
In the extended conversation with the author offered in In the First Country of Places, we have covered so much ground, have thought and re-thought extensive literary and theoretical constructs. We have been, in dialogue, half perceiving and half constructing the world with Chawla. And we leave this clearing not with any definitive answers to the question of childhood memories and nature, but rather with a greater appreciation of how others have constructed their place in the world. 'This book has argued that people's feelings for nature- whether they be separation, alienation, or collaborative trust -are ultimately leaps of faith in an uncertain world' (p. 192). Knowing how these five extraordinary poets and one exceptional author/teacher have chosen to structure their place in the world is a provocative and profound story. This recollection opens a clearing for each of us as readers to rethink our places; the first which are our own childhoods and the many other places we inhabit in cultures and on the earth and to which we may lead our children.
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