Terrain of Language
The Understory: Issue Nineteen
I’m pleased you found The Understory—my biweekly essays with critical perspectives on climate change. If you’re here for the first time, hello! Enter your email below to get issues to your inbox, free.
In the Oxford Junior Dictionary (OJD) 2007 edition, an astute reader noticed a strange sleight of hand. A series of words that describe nature and the countryside had gone missing between editions. I invite you to say these omitted words aloud as a kind of summoning spell: acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. When pressed to respond why these words had been removed, Vineeta Gupta who was then head of children’s dictionaries at the Oxford University Press remarked that the OJD was a curated selection of 10,000 words and phrases that “reflect the consensus experience of modern-day childhood.” That list of words shifts between editions based on the editorial insight into contemporary childhood. Gupta further elaborated:
“When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance. That was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed.”
In the stead of these fifty or so words were those reflecting the consensus childhood experience of our current technoscapes: attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail. As Macfarlane further elucidates in sharing this story in his book, Landmarks:
“Do we want an alphabet for children that begins ‘A is for Acorn, B is for Buttercup, C is for Conker’; or one that begins ‘A is for Attachment, B is for Block-Graph, C is for Chatroom?’...The substitutions made in the [Oxford Junior] dictionary—the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual—are a small but significant symptom of the simulated life we increasingly live. Children are now (and valuably) adept ecologists of the technoscape, with numerous terms for file types but few for different trees and creatures.”
I share Macfarlane’s lamentation and resistance to subordinate life lived outdoors in connection with the more-than-human world for the indoor, 24/7 simulated technoscape. One of the running questions throughout The Understory has thus been how we might restore our individual and societal connections to recognize our interdependence rather than dominion over the planet. To live reciprocally—not taking more than we need and looking for ways to regenerate a healthier planet. It struck me in reviewing the story of omission of natural language from contemporary discourse that language is both a symptom and a symbol of our separation from the natural world. In Issue Sixteen Reflections David Abram distinguishes between cultures that talk about nature and those who talk to nature. If we neither spend our days talking to the more-than-human world and our “scalpel-sharp words” (Macfarlane) to precisely describe that world are diminishing, our terrain of language and our practices around it becomes a crucial cultural bridge to understanding and imagining lives of greater reciprocity instead of continued depletion.
This issue seeks to bring our attention to the power of language and the practices surrounding its usage in connecting us more deeply with the natural world. We will enchant the shimmering wings of moths, listen in on the “talked names” of the Apache landscape in Cibecue, Arizona, and travel across the Songlines of Australia. Eventually, we will arrive at how language as a memory tool becomes essential in adapting humanity to a changing climate. Just as we have cast away words and a broader language of interdependence and connection with the natural world, we can also restore it. For language is our creation and our own momentary choice. How we use language and create meaning within it is only limited by our imagination and determination to bring forth what is most important. This issue is dedicated to remembering the power of language to bring forth the world we choose to see.
Blunted Precision
"We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know."
– Life Is A Miracle, Wendell Berry
We are often challenged to find the particular words, let alone the precise language that binds us in reciprocity to the natural world and beings around us. We see a bird, but cannot invoke its name. We admire a tree, but struggle to recall which type it is. We encounter a small river flowing across the coastal plain and never knew to call it a rife. Our child holds a gneiss rock shimmering with quartz and asks what rests in their palm.
In our contemporary moment, most of us have a blunted precision in addressing the natural landscapes that surround us and that reside in our memories. In first reading Macfarlane’s Landmarks, I was struck by the evocation of language and the dedication to its precision. Macfarlane selected the muses for each chapter—Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd, Barry Lopez, Richard Skelton, Richard Jeffries, Jacquetta Hawkes, John Muir—for their shared sensibility that “to use language well is to use it particularly: precision of utterance as both a form of lyricism and a species of attention." Each chapter concludes with a glossary, numbering nine in total, with what likely amounts to two-thousand words, what Macfarlane describes as a:
“word-hoard of the astonishing lexis for landscape that exists in the comprision of islands, rivers, strands, fells, lochs, cities, towns, corries, hedgerows, fields and edgelands uneasily known as Britain and Ireland...I sought to gather grit as well as pearls: landscape offer us experiences of great grace and beauty, but also despair, hard labour and death. Thus the discomforts of hansper and aingealach, alongside the dazzle of ammil and haze-fire.”
The thousands of words Macfarlane shares do indeed form the beginnings of a kind of Terra Britannica as he set out to write with terms used by fishermen, farmers, sailors, scientists, crofters, mountaineers, soldiers, shepherds, walkers, and unrecorded ordinary others over millennia. In most cases, the words shared escape the grasp of not only mainstream lexicons, but even the mutterings of those very communities where they originated. The loss is much broader than just our precision of language, but rather represents a larger symbolic cultural loss. We have lost words and phrases not because they have fallen out of favour, but rather because our lives have fallen out of the kind of integration with the natural world that makes them meaningful and demands their invocation. David Abram likes to speak of the “taste of a word or phrase.” However, without the direct, felt experience with that which we choose to speak, how might we even know the taste?
Our natural landscape lexicon is now the purview of a few remaining naturalist authors like Macfarlane and teams of toponymists within our governments. In Canada, place names are “authorized” through a national committee called the Geographical Names Board of Canada. The appointment of officials and roles in our society that relegate the selection of language to describe place is a symptom of our independence from the natural world. No longer is our place language emergent from individuals whose occupation is in relationship with the land, but rather this responsibility has become the purview of a small group of outsourced official experts working in offices. I do not mean to insinuate irresponsible behaviour in how these experts designate language, but rather to reflect on the cultural condition that we find ourselves in where the government has become the custodian and guardian of place language because of the distanced relationship of ordinary citizens to the more-than-human world.
Enchanting Lost Words
As recounted to Emergence Magazine in this interview well worth listening to (for Macfarlane’s reading of “Otter” at 1:11:00 alone), illustrator Jackie Morris contacted Macfarlane to see if he wanted to collaborate with her to make what she called “a beautiful protest” of the fifty “nature” words Oxford University Press had removed from the OJD. This invitation resulted in two beautiful books, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. Macfarlane’s approach was to evoke each of the omitted OJD words with a “summoning spell.” In the introduction to The Lost Words Macfarlane writes:
“You hold in your hands a spellbook for conjuring back these lost words. To read it you will need to seek, find and speak...it holds not poems but spells of many kinds that might just, by the old, strong magic of being spoken aloud, unfold dreams and songs, and summon lost words back into the mouth and the mind’s eye.”
This possibility of holding lost words in the “mind’s eye” creates an integral linkage between the physical worlds and our words of imagination and dreaming. Our ability to conjure mental images not only manifests them in our minds, but as we shall soon see, can also bring the material world into being. I invite you to this enchantment of “moth”:
The Lost Words and The Lost Spells are in a way counterspells to our contemporary lifestyles disconnected from the more-than-human world. As Morris desired, the books are indeed beautiful, but they are also protests. The aversion to loss of not just these fifty or so “nature” words, but more significantly the relationships that are implied within each of them has struck a global chord, catalyzing manifestations of the book into theatre, film, music, card games, and puzzles. As Macfarlane humbly notes, “it’s nothing to do with us anymore: it’s to do with love and hope and fear and loss.” A bus driver went so far as to raise £30,000 to put a copy of The Lost Words in every primary, secondary, and special school in all of Scotland, some of which had to be delivered by sea kayak to schools on remote islands. The authors generously shared a free version of their Explorer’s Guide to The Lost Spells containing lessons and activities which you can download here.
What The Lost Words reminds us is that words can be a bridge between worlds. Words can connect us with the once seen, and perhaps even the lost. Once gone from our language, words lose their potency to evoke. By putting words into continuous practice, building our own terrains of language, we come into relationship with those words and what they represent once again. The next two sections will look at cultures who have built practices where invocation of language is the vital linkage between the human and the more-than-human worlds.
Speaking Landscapes into Being
While spending time with the Apache in Cibecue, Arizona, Yale anthropologist Keith Basso started to notice an undercurrent language as he became more attuned to the rhythms of life in the village. As shared in Stalking with Stories(1984), Basso overheard an Apache cowboy speaking quietly to himself while stringing a fence. As Basso leaned in to hear what he was saying, he discovered that the man was reciting a string of place names, one after one, in a verse without pause for nearly ten minutes. These place names took the form of long phrases: “big cottonwood trees standing spreading here and there;” “coarse textured rocks lie above in compact cluster;” “water flows down on top of regular succession of flat rocks.” When Basso asked the man what he’d been saying, the man replied that he “talked names” to himself” because “I like to ride that way in my mind.”
Basso researched the 1,100 person community from the Western Apache settlement of Cibecue, eventually mapping 104 square kilometres and recording 296 Apache location names across the landscape. As Basso recounts, by reciting a series of place-names, the Apache are “travelling in their minds” across the landscape. When asked why they do this, another Apache man told Basso “because those names are good to say.” This practice of naming landscapes and all the animate objects within them by travelling within one’s mind is not unique to the Apache. As David Abram writes in The Spell of the Sensuous, the intertwining of landscapes with linguistic memory is common to almost all Indigenous oral cultures.
This is a good point in the essay to pause if you are so inclined. For what I am about to share about Aboriginal Songlines took me three different books to begin to understand. Even then, I am only beginning to grasp its totality. Perhaps we should not be surprised to find this level of complexity in something that has developed over 55,000 years. For the concepts embedded within the Songlines are so contrary to our Western views of creation, time, and human orientation to other species that it may take time well beyond this essay to unfold. But I think the pursuit is highly worthwhile, as it is a radical imagining of our relationship of language to everything that makes up our world.
Let’s begin with Bruce Chatwin’s journey in Aboriginal Australia as shared in dialogue with Arkady in Songlines (1987):
'So the land,' I said, 'must first exist as a concept in the mind? Then it must be sung? Only then can it be said to exist?'
[Arkady] 'True,'
'In other words, "to exist" is "to be perceived"?'
[Arkady] 'Yes'
[Arkady] 'In Aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead land: since, if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die.'
In Aboriginal culture, language and the words within it are not simply communicative for human utility, but existential. Singing sustains the animate earth and everything on it, and was similarly essential to how everything was first created. As Chatwin writes, “the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score...Each totemic Ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints.” These trails are called Songlines and are still travelled to this day on “Walkabout.”
In searching for a description of the Aboriginal creation story, I found Wade Davis’ in The Wayfinders the most approachable:
“The Ancestors walked as they sang, and when it was time to stop, they slept. In their dreams they conceived the events of the following days, points of creation that fused one into another until every creature, every stream and stone, all space and time became part of the whole, the divine manifestation of one great seminal impulse....The paths taken by the Ancestors have never been forgotten. They are the Songlines, precise itineraries followed even today as people travel across the template of the physical world. As Aboriginals track the Songlines and chat the stories of the first dawning, they become part of the Ancestors and enter Dreamtime, which is neither a dream nor a measure of the passage of time. It is the very realm of the Ancestors, a parallel universe where the ordinary laws of time, space, and motion do not apply, where past, future, and present merge into one.”
If you notice, there is a semantic distinction between wake and sleep. Both are vital states of becoming, and “Dreamtime” is a state of being in relationship rather than a description of awakeness. The world is formed by singing in the waking hours, and reconstituted in our sleep by connecting with Ancestors. Every Aboriginal band is composed of individuals from different totemic clans (animal, plant, power) which gives them access to different Songlines. Together all the totemic clans represent all of creation, and yet individually each is responsible for a specific lineage of creation. By chanting any part of a song cycle, that person becomes linked to their totem and the Ancestor that first wandered across the dreaming earth. Because the Ancestors traced every Songline to bring the world into existence, all the songs are reconnective where what was becomes what is—the past is the present. Our Western notions of time are irrelevant. Abrams describes it as a “time out of time.” As Davis goes on to explain:
“In the Aboriginal universe there is no past, present, or future. In not one of the hundreds of dialects spoken at the moment of contact was there a word for time. There is no notion of linear progression, no goal of improvement, no idealization of the possibility of change. To the contrary, the entire logos of the Dreaming is stasis, constancy, balance, and consistency. The entire purpose of humanity is not to improve anything. It is to engage in the ritual and ceremonial activities deemed to be essential for the maintenance of the world precisely as it was at the moment of creation.”
This is what is meant by a language becoming existential. Without the movements and sacred Dreaming rituals, the Songlines cease to exist, and therefore the earth will become the “dead land” as shared by Chatwin. Without memory, which in effect brings the past into the present, there is no present, nor a future. Or as Abram says, “The coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology...It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.” What I think Abram means, and more broadly what the Songlines instruct, vital language contextualizes with the animate earth. Singing is necessary to continuously recreate creation. The Songlines tell us that without continuously singing our world into being, the landscape and everything that is a part of it becomes lost, including us.
Dreaming as Adaptation
The climate movement is starting to awaken to the realization that Indigenous ways of knowing provide vital intelligence into our future capacity to be adaptive in the face of collapse. In 2020, The New York Times Magazine featured “The Great Climate Migration” anticipating that by 2070, one in three people will live in places that are nearly uninhabitable, sparking a migration of a scale that civilization has never seen. Our understanding and interrelationships with landscapes will once again become integral to our survival. As the research of anthropologist Helen Payne revealed, Songlines are cultural memory tools of viable routes against the harsh terrain of Australia. She found that Dreaming sites along Songlines contained either a source of water, a potential shelter, a high vantage point good for hunting, or a cluster of these characteristics. These Dreaming sites were the only places that had such features across the whole of the desert. It is through the memory of the Songlines that we can sustain life, as contained within them are the myriad landscape features that are essential to survival.
The notion of progress or the lack thereof in the Aboriginal worldview is also vital as we consider what it might actually look like to live sustainably on the planet. Because there is no notion of progress and because the entire world has already been created, it implies that there can be no imperfection in the world. As a counter to our continuous search for “solutions” to “problems,” Chatwin shares that the spiritual life of Dreaming has a single aim: “to keep the land the way it was and should be.” In that wisdom is another lesson for our survival amidst a changing climate—to remember that our role is to restore the land to what it should be, and protect what it always was.
I would like to conclude with a question I am frequently asked. What can I do as an individual to mitigate the climate crisis? While that answer varies for everyone, one of the things I learned from probing the depths of language within this essay is the power of integrating a practice of enchantments of the more-than-human world into our daily lives. Speak the landscape to yourself as you are doing the dishes, standing in line at the grocery store, eating lunch at your desk. Seek out the words that describe the more-than-human worlds so you can build language to be in relationship with it.
What we can learn from the Macfarlane and Morris’ Lost projects, from the Cibecue Apaches string of place names, and from the Aboriginal Songlines is that language resides in our minds whether awake or asleep. Regardless of place or moment in time, we can choose to increase our interdependence with the natural world by enchanting counterspells to our simulated technoscapes. We must begin to speak the words before we can speak the language. And if we can learn to speak the language of the more-than-human world, we can interconnect what has been disconnected. “The roots of individual words reach out and intermesh, their stems lean and criss-cross, and their outgrowths branch and clasp,” says Robert Macfarlane. It starts by remembering what we should be grasping for, and continues in our daily practice of enchanting what is worth recalling.
Conclusion
From the moment the various European colonists spanned out across North America and the Dutch & British reached the shores of Australia, settlers have struggled to comprehend the intertwining of place with linguistic memory that is common to nearly all Indigenous, oral cultures around the world. Newcomers are slowly awakening to the realization of the power of language to bind us to the more-than-human world, as a bridge to being in relationship with the land and all that it contains. We can resist the blunted words of “mountain,” “bird,” “water,” and “tree” in favour of a more precise language that speaks not just about but also to the natural world.
Living in reciprocity with the natural world extends beyond our actions and into our speaking and imaginings. By investing in a richer terrain of language, one laden with “scalpel-sharp words” that cherish and enchant the world that we value, we will be more heartened defenders of the natural world by being in relationship to it. What we can learn from the spells of Macfarlane, from the talked names of the Apache, and from the auditory mnemonics of the Aboriginal Songlines, is that language, spoken and heard, is essential to lives of interdependence that heal the cultural divisions of our simulated technoscapes.
Language is a human creation. By being intentional in what we invoke and how we practice speaking, we can use the power of language to bring forth the world that we all know is possible. By singing the animate earth, we continue creation.
Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead.
Adam
If you liked this Issue, please subscribe. The Understory is free and will come to your inbox weekly.
In between issues I share my own reflections and those I have heard from readers. While the term community is often overused and thus abused, The Understory is a community of readers who value the comments of others. Please reply to this email or leave a comment on the website with any reflections you feel comfortable sharing 🙏.
Why I Write The Understory
We have crossed the climate-change threshold from emerging to urgent, which demands a transformative response. The scale of the issue demands not only continuous focus but also the courage to take bold action. I've found that a persistence of climate consciousness improves resilience to the noise and distractions of daily life in service of a bigger (and most of the time invisible) long-term cause.
The Understory is my way of organizing the natural and human-made curiosities that capture my attention. Within the words, research, and actions of others lies the inspiration for personal and organizational journeys. I hope that my work here will help to inform not just my persistent consciousness, but yours as well.
Have loved this quote from Wendell so much, thanks for including it here. "We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know." – Life Is A Miracle, Wendell Berry
A key question is how we get folks, especially when they are young, out into nature to begin to help them appreciate and care for it. I love the recapturing and invocations of the collaborations (the moth-paintings and moths), yet we also need that people simply be outside in nature to experience it *as* themselves.
I know you're reading Tyson Yunkaporta, who says succinctly, "You want to know what your purpose is? I'll tell you, it's simple, to take care of the land." You elucidate the quality and character of that care clearly in the resources you've shared. It is a co-creative activity in the Creation that is ongoing, eternally present. If we can meet that with the depth of gratitude and reciprocity it calls us to, much will solve itself.
The saying and singing of the landscape is right there in the word: "en-chant-ing"
More from Tyson. From an interview: "you talk about the fact that humans, at least at the moment are the custodial species for the earth. Tell us about that, and what does that mean?
Tyson: Yeah. Well, that comes out a lot of our old stories from all over. It’s our purpose for being here. Our emergence in this system has been because the system had need of a custodial species for its long longevity, but also to maintain increase within the system. So increase as opposed to growth. So not growing in the size of the system, but increasing the relatedness within the system, all of the connectivity, those infinite combinatorials, we’re supposed to oversee that. And about everything we do is supposed to work in with that, our culture, everything else, it’s not supposed to be something that’s separate from nature. There isn’t even supposed to be a separate concept for nature because we are nature. We occupy a very important ecological niche. It’s not an apex niche or anything like that either.
Tyson: We have a very important ecological niche. We’re supposed to be in this habitat, and anywhere where we’re not there, you might think of it as untouched wilderness, but that place will be dying because it needs us there. Those trees have evolved over a long time to even just need our urine. If you’re not pissing on the ground in those places, those plants will be suffering over time and you’ll see dieback in places, and wonder why is there a dieback happening there? And I’m looking at it and thinking, well, that needs a couple of decades of people pissing on those trees to make that place work again. And to be bringing shellfish and things up from the coast and sitting down and camping there because, those the things that are coming in from there. That environment is depending on us bringing those things into it just in our cultural practice, taking fish from the river and eating it there. I guess the same way with the bears and the salmon, those forests need those salmon there and the bears eating the salmon off in the trees because the trees have come to depend on what’s coming out of the salmon."
https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcripts/transcript-of-episode-66-tyson-yunkaporta-on-indigenous-knowledge/
And to prove his point, this article talks precisely about the Salmon, and what they bring up stream to feed the forest, and thus the bears and moose. https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-oceans-mysterious-vitamin-deficiency/
Returning to your thesis, we do clearly need to be the caretakers and become those who can love, serve, preserve and enrich the land. I want to live in such a culture.
Yet another wonderful soulful insight into the relationship between the natural environment and the people who live within it. Of course I am attracted to your words on the First Nation people of Australia, as I am Australian. Their rich relationship with the environment spanning over 60,000 years can teach us a great deal. How is it that the mutualism of their dual relationship with the environment has been spoiled by the other inhabitants of Australia, who over only 250 years have changed that relationship into a one way symbiotic gain, where the environment has not received the care needed? Of course the First Nation's people are and have been very concerned that their caretaking that has been of the highest level is not considered and applauded, and that the environment is at peril.
When you speak about Songlines, I can't help but think of the Songline that is mirrored in the massive highway across the Nullabor plain from Perth to Adelaide, being accurately replicated to the Songline. The walking routes so carefully majestic in their understanding of place, astrology and geograpy, and then so beautifully spoken and song, and sometimes drawn and written into the being of every generation, and so soulfully passed down to family. An Aboriginal Elder told me that we don't own the land, "it owns us". In those 3 simple words she enunciated the fullness of an important part of their cultural beliefs. In the movie called “Australia” with Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, you can see the Elder man calling home the lost boy. Not the greatest movie but it does mention Songlines.
One of the many elements I admire of our First Nation people is their true existential nature and understanding of their place and purpose in the story of life. They don't mention time, as a man made construct, but they do value ancestors and descendants, and being in the present moment.
When I worked at a university I looked after the marketing and events of a social science faculty. Amongst that faculty was the School of Anthropology. Two of the professors of Anthropology had worked for years with some indigenous communities at the top of Australia, as the local mobs mapped out the stories, the water holes, the food resources, the sacred places, the safe from the weather places, and the resting places. The map was an atlas of all that information, written and illustrated. it was one of the most beautiful artworks I had ever seen. The atlas was replicated by the State Library, as the original was to return to its home. I had the task to collect from the airport two Elders who would speak to the media and academic staff and students about the Atlas before they took it home. In the journey from the airport to the campus, I lost my directions a bit. I pulled over to look up the street directory and re-navigate my route. They both laughed hard at me, and said, "you don't even know your own land". They asked me if I wished them to call my grandmother so she could "sing" me home. What a wonderful time I had hosting those women.
Even though I was brought up in a non-indigenous home, I think my parents had an inkling about the power of nature. My mother always made me hang out the washing in bare feet to make a daily connection to the earth. My father who taught me to swim believed that learning to float was important for safety, but it also had a spiritual connection to the environment. As you lay flat in the water he used to say "are you in communication with the water or the sky?" always made me/ still does make me really deeply think about that connection.
Adam as you use your language here to open these conversations, know that your heartfelt words are appreciated, and may they bring conscious thought to action in making our world a healthier place.