CHRISTIE'S PROGRESS JOURNAL: NOVEMBER 1-9, 2004

11-1-04 For my Culture of Nature course, I read an interview of Scott Russell Sanders. The Interview was conducted by my professor, Mark Allister, and included in the book that Mark edited, called Eco-Man: New Perspectives on Masculinity and Nature, published by the University of Virginia Press, in Charlottesville, in 2004. Here are some things that I found interesting from that interview:

-“MA: American culture, particularly academic culture, has typically separated science and spirituality, but you’ve written that ‘the geography of land and the geography of spirit…are one terrain.’…

SRS: “…I can’t help but think of that riveting line from Blake: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, the world would appear to man as it is—infinite.’ Not only infinite, I would add, but one, a single unfolding reality. We parse that unity into bits with language and numbers and concepts. We talk about ‘spirit’ and ‘matter,’ ‘culture’ and ‘nature,’ ‘I’ and ‘you,’ quarks and kangaroos and Oedipal complexes. And of course that dividing-up of reality is handy; it enables us to talk and think about the universe instead of merely dwelling here; it gives rise to art and religion as well as science. The trouble comes when we take the imaginary lines we draw on the universe for real divisions. (46)”

-“SRS: In the long run and on the largest scale, we need to transform our culture. In place of pop media that sell stuff by exploiting narcissism, violence, cheap sex, and hedonism, we need to foster a culture that addresses our capacity for imagination, creativity, affection, curiosity, and compassion. Such a change will only come about as part of a larger transformation of our society from one based on money and consumption to one based on conservation, simplicity, and a regard for the common good. That’s an enormous task, of course, and to many people it might seem an impossible one. However long the odds, though, I’d rather work for a more humane culture than simply drift along with the one we have. One way or another, it’s going to disappear—either because it will self-destruct or because we’ll create something better. Every one of us can help in that effort—through the books we write, through our teaching, through the way we go about our jobs, through what we say over the supper table or at the high school gym, through our work in the community. (49)”

-SRS: “Women are more likely to recognize their bonds with the rest of life and with the earth, if only because they experience the cycles of wildness in their own bodies every month, and because many of them bear and care for children. Men are just as fully natural, of course, but they’re more likely to imagine themselves apart, triumphing over nature with money or machines. (51)”

-“SRS: Our bodies are made to delight in the planet! Turn healthy children loose outdoors and watch them taste and listen, watch them stare, watch them sniff the air. They exult in the natural world. Our kids would be better off if we let them spend more time playing in vacant lots or turning over rocks in creeks, instead of sitting in front of screens or rushing from homework to lessons. We grown-ups would be better off if we took walks after supper and simple opened ourselves to the world. (52)”

-SRS: “[M]uch of what’s called ‘progress’ in America impoverishes our way of life and damages the earth. (53)”

-SRS: “We are made of nature. Our bodies, our senses, our minds, our language are all shaped by nature. They draw their vitality from their wildness. So the fact is I don’t think of myself as a nature writer. I think of myself as a writer who remembers what our ancestors have known for thousands of years, which is that the earth is our precious and irreplaceable home. I don’t just write about ferns and waterfalls and red-tailed hawks. I write about people and the things people do. I write about weddings and funerals, about doing science and baking bread, about the stuff of daily life. But I never forget that our lives flow out of the wild world and back into it again. (53)”

-There is another essay included in the book Eco-Man, called Deerslayer With A Degree, by John Tallmadge. In it, he wrote: “Thoreau’s wilderness, like Cooper’s and Emerson’s, is an ideal constructed on Romantic principles, according to which virtue, strength, eloquence, and piety are absorbed through the skin from Nature itself. (22)”

11-4-04 I’ve been reading through more of Russell Zguta’s book, Russian Minstrels. Here are some interesting things that I found:

-“[T]he earliest skomorokhi were probably pagan priests, the rustic counterparts of the urban volkhvy, who ministered to the people of the countryside in a variety of ways, ranging from fortune telling and healing to presiding over their sundry community festivals and celebrations. (15)”

-“While it may be impossible to say with any degree of certainty how far back the origins of the skomorokhi extend, one can reasonable begin their history as professional minstrels with the date 988. In fact 988, which marks the official conversion of Kievan Rus’ to Christianity, was only the first of three turning points in the long history of the skomorokhi. A second such turning point came in 1571, during the reign of Ivan IV, when the geographic center of their activity shifted from Novgorod to Moscow, marking the beginning of a period of rapid decline. This decline culminated in a third and final turning point, their formal proscription by Aleksei in 1648. 

-In spite of Vladimir’s effort to swiftly and thoroughly transform his people from a nation of heathens to one of enlightened Christians, he fell far short of his ideal. To be sure, many of the pagan idols in Kiev and the other cities were torn down and publicly dishonored. It was urban paganism, however, that was officially disavowed and forsaken. The majority of the people in the countryside were largely unaffected by the conversion and would not be affected for a long time to come; they continued to practice the ancient cult of their ancestors and to call upon the skomorokhi for spiritual guidance. (15)”

-“[The skomorokhi] played sundry musical instruments; sang; danced; recited epichs, fables, proverbs, and riddles; presented theatrical skits and puppet shows; walked on tightropes; leapt through hoops; and juggled knives and other objects. (16)” (*Puppet theatre: pozorishche)

-“The skomorokhi, as we have seen, very early adopted a rather flamboyant costume consisting of a brightly colored, knee-length, girded tunic, which made them stand out from the rest of the population as Western or foreign. (21)”

-“[T]hey [skomorokhi] continued to maintain a strong spiritual link to the pagan tradition that gave them birth: this is apparent from the continuing abuse and persecution of the ecclesiastical authorities, who were evidently not in the least convinced that the new skomorokhi were different from the old. (22)”

-“In the so-called ‘Pravilo,’ a collection of fifty-three church canons attributed to Maksim, Bishop of Belgorod  (1187-900, the penitent sinner is warned to shun ‘the dancing games of the unclean and abhorrent before God skomorokhi.’ (23)”

 -“Were the skomorokhi connected somehow to either of these or to some other heresy, or were they simply being singled out once again as a threat to the church because of their persistent identification with the pagan elements of Old Russian culture?...I believe the latter to be the case...There is little doubt that paganism continued to permeate the social and cultural life of Pskov long after the introduction of Christianity and that the church authorities viewed this as a serious problem as late as the sixteenth century. (29)”

-“It is clear from references to the skomorokhi in Muscovite charters from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that the minstrel-entertainers in the northeast were considerably more mobile than their counterparts in the northwest, apparently because of the constant threat of sanctions and persecution by the church. One can better appreciate the nature and extent of this persecution by reading the anonymous ‘Instruction’ on church discipline addressed to all clergy and faithful of the late fifteenth century, where the skomorokhi and those who associate with or listen to them are explicitly barred from Holy Communion for a year and are declared anathema (in effect, are excommunicated). Should any Orthodox Christian persist in his associations with them, he is to be kept physically out of the church, his stipend for its upkeep is to be spurned, and no priest is ever to set foot in his house. (31)”(*Accused of satanic games and witchcraft.)

-“So the Muscovite skomorokhi, faced with relentless hostility from the ecclesiastical authorities, found it only necessary for professional reasons (in order to reach a wider audience), but also expedient for personal reasons (to elude the authorities), to take to the road…This brings to mind E.K. Chambers’ poignant description of the medieval minstrel in the West: ‘To travel long miles in wind and rain, to stand wet to the skin and hungry and footsore, making the slow bourgeois laugh while the heart was bitter within; such must have been the daily fate of many amongst the humbler minstrels at least. And at the end to die like a dog in a ditch, under the ban of the Church and with the prospect of eternal damnation before the soul.’ (32)”

-“One finds them in all of the major cities and towns including Novgorod, Moscow, Riazan, Tver, Viatka, Tula, Mozhaisk, Toropets, Kolomna, Nizhnii Novgorod, and others. Some lived in the towns; others preferred rural hamlets and villages. When a number of them settled in a rural community, they frequently gave their name to it; thus, there were at least eighteen villages with the name Skomorokhovo in three of the five provinces (piatini) of Novgorod, dating back to the late fifteenth century. (34)"

11-7-04 I read an article from the January 1994 Russian Review, by Dale E. Peterson. The article is called: “Samovar Life”: Russian Nurture and Russian Nature in the Rural Prose of Valentin Rasputin.

-In a scene from Rasputin’s The Last Phase (1970), he alludes to the idea of nature, or the country, as rehabilitation. Peterson said, “Rasputin’s scene rehearses how a repatriated prodigal son (or daughter) undergoes an involuntary regression and apparent regeneration in a country place. (81)”

-Again this sort of nature-as-therapy is shown in a scene where Liusia, who is not comfortable being in the company of her family members, “chooses to divert herself with a stroll in the forest, hunting at leisure for mushrooms along the way.” (82)

-Rasputin refers to the dwindling of reverent nature, saying, “Now the ditch has been filled in, the earth has been packed down, burying all the terrors once connected with it; yet another mysterious place which had once inspired a reverential awe was gone--there were fewer and fewer places like that remaining in the world.” (82)

-“For Rasputin, the ‘last phase’ of modern cultural amnesia has left rural Russia on the verge of extinction. But, even twenty years ago, he tentatively suggested that renewed contact with an endangered and despoiled Russian nature could actively nurture nearly obliterated values. (82)”

-Peterson notes a traditional Russian folk lyric which promises the return of all Russian souls to moist mother earth: “From the mother of God church/ Into the moist mother earth/ Toward our birth kin.” (83)

-“Dostoevsky is simply not Dostoevsky without those climactic, tearful episodes of bowing and prostration to the maternal earth at the literal and figurative ‘crossroads’ of life. And Tolstoy is hardly Tolstoy without those periodic returns of wayward sons to the ancient, cyclical rhythms of the peasant collectives of hunters and tillers. (83)”

-“…an earth-rooted species. By conviction and by convention, the national literary precedent maintains that the Russians are an agrarian race, a people most at home in the world when they are truly on and of the native earth. (83)”

-“Rasputin’s particular biography attached him to a location that had been spared, until recent times, the rude disruptions of officially mandated Soviet progress. His native Siberian region, like the quiet villages of the Russian north that spawned his fellow ethnic conversationist, Vasilii Belov, had not undergone that ambitious relocations and collectivization that transformed the inherited peasant culture of the rich black-earth districts of Russia and Ukraine. (85)”

-“[W]hat most distinguishes Rasputin amid his generation of ‘village prose’ writers is his truly extraordinary vision of a delicate symbiotic relation between Russia’s naturally provided landscape and Russian cultural nurturance. That subject is most particularly dramatized in an interconnected ‘trilogy’ of works that address the central trauma Rasputin’s imagination keeps revisiting: the socially commanded inundation of traditional Russia by the floodwaters of progress and hydroelectric power. The journalist who had to cover the official story of the flooding of his native village and the construction of the Ust’-Ilimsk Sea has become a major post-Soviet literary voice of conservationism and cultural conservatism. (86)”

-“Rasputin, at least in 1972, joins and partly subverts a long Russian tradition of disowning the ‘race’ of urban living. (86)”

-“A childhood spent in close touch with Siberian nature connects the dawn of environmental awareness with a respect and awe for the often violent cycles of renewal. (87)”

-In his story, Down and Back With the Current, Rasputin writes of the main character’s (Victor’s) shock at not being able to recognize a once-familiar natural area. Peterson wrote, “Compared to what it once was, it is a leveled and degraded world. The river has been swallowed up in a vast pool: ‘From edge to edge the water lay supine and muffled in one ungraspable expanse, pressing its weight upon the forlorn, low-lying shore; the sky above it was vacant.’ Uninspiring and unforbidding, this flat water is invaded by motorboats that bounce and drone among the waterlogged stumps of former forests. ‘No pure and ancient mystery hovered on high over these waters…the feeling of eternity left, closed shut under a tight lid’. (88)”

-Peterson compares such an experience of foreign-looking familiar landscape to Turgenev’s Bezhin Meadow. He goes on to say, “Victor suddenly wanders into a newly appeared meadow that resuscitates the old Russia: ‘Here it was spacious, radiant, and festive. Growing separately, so as not to block one another’s light or draw the earth’s moisture from one another, stood in fashionable majesty two full magnificent birches with broad-spread and heavy-bedecked boughs, exactly like two grand ladies…and it was so remarkable and joyous here that you wanted to weep from this inexpressible, unworldly happiness.’ (88)

-Victor also, like Turgenev’s hunter, comes across a scruffy, adventurous peasant lad who inspires sagging hopes; navigating through the dangers of a treacherous sunken forest, the boy leads the returned writer to the fresh water that still flows amid the stagnant ‘sea’ of the man-made reservoir. The village samovars require that tea be brewed from a daily supply of this clear river water. (88-9)”   (*All is connected in a web of life.)

-Here is a section of Rasputin’s Farewell to Matera: “Matera, both the island and the village, was impossible to imagine without the larch tree in the common pasture. It rose and towered over all the rest like a shepherd towers over his flock spread out on grazing land. It did resemble a shepherd conducting his ancient guard duty. But no one, no matter how literate, referred to that tree, despite the gender of larch as ‘she,’ no, it was a he, the ‘tsar-larch’--it stood so eternal, powerful, and mighty…And apparently it had grown so high and so strong that it was decided in the heavens for the sake of general order and measure to shorten it. Without its crown the larch squatted and seemed weaker but, no, it had not lost its powerful, majestic aspect; it became very likely even more awesome and imperious. It’s not known when the superstition was born that it was the tsar-larch that held the island firm to the river’s bottom, to solid ground, and that as long as it stood so would Matera…The sold standing survivor, the insubordinate tsar-larch, continued to rule over everything around it (vlastvovat’ nado vsem vokrug). But everything around it was empty. (91)”

-“In a bold and important departure from the norms of secular Soviet realism, Rasputin had concluded his dire allegory of cultural and environmental death with a native touch of Gogolian ‘magic realism’ that asserted the survival of ghostly, powerful presences in the collective mentality of his homeland. (92)”

-In Rasputin’s The Fire, “The relentless progress of the fire is interrupted by extended commentaries in which the narrator’s voice freely joins the distressed internal monologue of Ivan Petrovich. Both relay to the reader the shrieks of an environment being stripped defenseless by a new nomadism. Unsupported by the patient, renewable labor of planting annual crops and family roots, life on the banks of the Angara has become a bivouac existence…After the floodwaters had removed the old villages, a deluge of day workers and traveling technicians swamped the old collective culture.

-Yet the raging inferno that threatens annihilation sheds a sometimes harsh, sometimes oddly reassuring light on a badly degraded land and culture. The fire illuminates many things. It exposes, as the walls of the storehouses crumble, the unconscionable hoarding of the district officials. (93)”

-Here is an excerpt from Rasputin’s The Fire: “But by now the young pines along the bank were stretching in response, yielding up to the first warmth, and the air smelled a bit scorched….The spring had found even this earth, and the earth was waking up. Now it would take roll call to see what had survived and what had died off, what had been added and what diminished by people’s doing; and it would gather what hadn’t perished and remained intact into one living mass to prepare it for delivery….No land is without its kith and kin.” In response to this, Peterson wrote: “Even devastated and denuded, the immolated land makes a silent appeal for the traditional nurture that can restore health to the natural and cultural environment of rural Russia.

-Despite the despair and bereavement that often accompany Rasputin’s tales of an altered homeland, what lends distinction to his writing is an unaltered faith in the ancestral voices that inhere in the Russian land itself. When Rasputin himself declares at the end of The Fire that no land is without its ‘kith and kin’ (bezrodnoi), he is again affirming and exploiting a native Russian etymological connection, an ancestral genealogical poem, that links the tribe (rod), the homeland (rodina), nature (priroda), the folk (narod), and even the staple rye grain (rozh‘), in a single organic identity of native landscape and ethnic culture. In all of Rasputin’s writing, the rural folk of the Russian village culture, no matter how displaced or disrupted, remain in communion with a violated land that still carries the moral memory of an agrarian commonwealth despite the surrounding modern economy of predatory development.

-The environmentalism of Valentin Rasputin envisions a natural conjunction of ecological and ethnic conservation. In a famous essay, ‘Irkutsk Lives,’ his voice testifies to a faith in the native land of a source of the tribes, a locus gentis: ‘A man cannot stand firmly on his feet, cannot live confidently if he does not feel intimately the deeds and destinies of his forebears, if he does not appreciate inside his answerability for the place granted him in the great order of being. The epic source of strength we have from our motherland is no longer given to just a few chosen warriors but has for us al an immense importance and healing power.’ (95-6)” (*This is a powerful call for environmental stewardship.)

11-8-04 I read a chapter from Jenny Price’s book, Flight Maps, called: When Birds Were Hats, and I found that in the late 1800s birds were thought of as extraordinarily lovely creatures. Here’s something she wrote that will help me as I think about how to make the Firebird puppet for my show:

-"‘The exquisite purity of their plumage,’ Chapman enthused, attracted ‘every lover of the beautiful.’ Birds, many agreed with him, were beautiful. ‘What marvels of grace!…How lovely…[and] delicate…What music of motion…[and] brilliance of color!’ The destruction of such God-given beauty would ‘reduce the glad and joyous earth to an oppressive silence campaign on behalf of beauty on earth…’ (81)”

11-9-04 I read Lewis B. Smedes’ chapter, Respect for Prosperity, in his book, Mere Morality: What God Expects From Ordinary People. He speaks of human stewardship toward Earth, saying:

- “When the Lord God created a being who transcended brute creation and set him in control (Gen. 1:26), the primary purpose was to provide a caretaker; we were given dominion over things in order to take care of them. Man and woman were set within a finite garden and made tenders of it for God and for his future caretakers. Because the human population would grow while the garden remained constant, careful nurture was necessary for the earth to remain a fitting habitation to the third and fourth generations. As Genesis 3 tells us, in a great moral disturbance, known as the Fall, humanity took one of its most calamitous turns. Cavalierly, we cast off our calling to be caretakers. We have consumed the precious wealth of the earth as if it were an infinite resource. We have corrupted the air and water as if no one would ever need to breathe or drink after us. We have buried our chemical and nuclear poisons in its bowels as if it had an infinite digestive tract. We have subdued the earth, as God said, but we have done it without care. And careless subjugation is inhuman exploitation. Therefore, we have undermined the foundation of our property rights at the core, for we were made to own only so that we could take better care…Owning things is good only if our owning keeps faith with our calling to take care of the earth and of our brothers and sisters who inhabit it. (188)