Lost in the idea of woods

The landscape architect husband of a friend told me that all students of landscape architecture read a book called Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, so I'm having a look. Literary critic Robert Pogue Harrison argues that western culture has always constructed the forest as that from which civilization, or law, or enlightenment frees us. Building out ideas of Giambattista Vico with more than a few Heideggerian ideas, Harrison imagines that humans used to live like animals in the eternal twilight of dense forests, until one day stumbling on a forest clearing during a storm. There they discovered the sky, and the vertical, Jove!, and abstraction - and the seeds for civilization were planted. From now on, the one sheltering canopies of forests block access to the sky.

As human settlements in clearings pushed the forest away, civilization at the center became ever more "utopian," ever more abstract. After a certain point that's not a good thing, as the reminder of the shadow - furnished especially by poets who travel from the metropole to the forest's edge province and report back what they have seen - keeps civilization tethered to the earth. In our deforested present, even the idea of what forest meant and should mean is nearly lost.

It's an odd sort of argument for keeping forests - we need their limitation. But that humans might have been civilized in and with forests is never considered. Instead, forests are places of disorientation and enchantment, places humans get lost. Representative is his eloquent description of the great Mother Goddess of the 30,000 years of human history before we finding a clearing, one of whose final forms was Artemis. (Next in line comes Dionysus.)

[Artemis] is the noumenal spirit of the forests which gives birth to a multiplicity of species (forms) that preserve their originary kinship within the forests’ network of material interdependence. In her wild woodlands there are no irreducible distinctions—no noise that does not sound like a response to some other noise, no tree that does not fuse into the arboreal confusion. The diversity of species in the forest belongs to the same phylogeny, so much so that in heightened moments of perception they appear as mere versions of each other—the fern a version of the dragonfly, the robin a version of its supporting branch, the reptile’s rustle a version of the rivulet’s trickle, the wildflower a version of the ray of light that reaches it through the canopy. ([Chicago: 1993], 29-30)

This is certainly very poetic. It sounds like a formular for getting lost in the woods, for heightening our disorientation, luxuriating in its supposed dissolution of distinctions. It doesn't sound like the way forests are known by those who dwell there, who need to know what's safe and who's kin - and do. They know that the "network of material interdependence" is not an abstraction. Noises do respond to other noises- not echoes but conversations. We get lost in the woods when we blur and conflate the way Harrison's "heightened moments of perception" do; luckily, the people of the forest - not just human people - have taught us ways not to get lost. 

The image of forests Harrison synthesizes is indeed a deep part of western culture - a part of what's allowed it in recent centuries to uproot so much of the natural world. But what a distorted image it is! At this point it feels like a landlubber's account of the sea.