Seeing Ents and Meaning on a Stalk in an Orchard
Bringing wildness to domestication
SEAL. Writer. Revealing extraordinary meaning in everyday events. Also dispatches on figs and dogs.
Welcome back to What then? This essay touches on the core theme of my book which is in editing at the moment.
In the words of Goethe, a motto to live by: “Without haste, but without rest!”
On! On!
1. “Son of man, can these bones live?”—Ezekiel
One of the hopes of our age is that meaning can arise from within, as if it were fated, as if we were born to be x, whether x is an actor, accountant, astronaut, or anything except what we are in this exact moment in time. Or that meaning follows the law of consumerism, and if we want to be x, then we can wish it, buy it, snort it, pop it, steal it, LLM it, or find it at the bottom of a never-ending doom scroll with red-rimmed eyes. Or even that x ought to be handed to us by Big Brother or a glorious Cause.
This is the inevitable result of our modern environment, the traits that make it both exceptional and challenging: unancestral, undangerous, undeadly, and unengaging. In a word, domesticated.
I explore a contrast in this piece: meaning in life is more likely to be found by perceptually engaging with a “wild” environment, and meaninglessness is more likely when mentally constructing a relationship to a “domesticated” environment.
I am aware this sounds uselessly abstract. So let us ground it in sand and sweat, which is where I first woke up to the idea.
2. A stalk in an orchard
I was on a stalk through a string of remote Afghan villages on a moonless night. We were walking along a twelve inch wide irrigation canal of packed dirt. I could smell the soil. I could see the cloudy whiteness of the stars through the thick pomegranate branches woven overhead. I could feel the micro rivets in the footpath. I knew enemy were sleeping nearby, at times within a few dozen meters, though they were not the target on this night. This has a way of making the air feel alive, as if it were charged with an invisible current of electricity, as if I were more closely conscious of soil, bark, wind, and cloud. I remember pausing the team and taking a moment to look out at the woods beneath my night vision goggles. The grainy green glow was replaced by inky black until my eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Before me, I could make out the knotty lines in the bark of the tree nearest me. I saw deep, amber eyes slowly blink open in its trunk, its arms reaching out to me with wooden palms held upward in a sign of supplication, its cello-like voice singing in the night.
I saw an Ent.
And not for the first time.
Allow me to elaborate.
3. The virtue of an enemy
In a wild environment, every single thing on earth is rich with meaning. Every single thing. I was so attuned that the world around me came alive, and on that stalk I was reminded of the sensation I got when I read of Merry and Pippin meeting Treebeard in Fanghorn. This truth struck me harder each time I returned home from a combat zone and found things flat and one dimensional. Walking through a grocery store, or the halls of Columbia, or even the epic gorges of Ithaca did not provide the same stimulus—the domesticated environment simply felt meaningless. I looked around and asked myself “Where are the Ents?”
I missed those who hunted me. They made me better. They made the Ents come true. Maybe the burned and bloody trenches of France were what made the Ents come true for Tolkien.
4. Wildness in domestication
It was then I realized I had an insight into the human condition: I had one foot in the wild world and another in the domesticated. I walked a bridge between the ancient and the modern worlds. I have personally felt what so many ethnographers have written so eloquently about when they lived with pre-state savages in the wild.
There are, not surprisingly, no studies on the impacts of stalking in the wild on the soul. So I did my own. It forms the basis of almost every essay I have written here at What then? and it is the subject of my book, which is being edited at the moment.
What, then, is the “wild” and why does it lead to engagement and meaning? The wild is sand, wood, snow, and sea, which means we feel acid flooded legs and hammering hearts. We earn a strangely attuned sense of smell for flowers, feces, and the sweaty feathers or fatigues of the enemy. We see snakes and snipers and savages. And where the flesh goes, the mind follows. We want to be more attuned and we want to read the wind in the slim swirling columns of smoke from wood fires in case we need to take a long shot. No longer do we experience what existential philosophers call the “absurd,” in which humans who need meaning tremble in terror of a meaningless universe. It becomes clear that if we do not engage deeply and perceptually with the world around us, then we will not live long. Suddenly, in the face of immediate and deadly consequences, we perceive meaning all around us.
Now let us turn to the “domesticated” environment. It is useless to elaborate on the technologies that are allowing us to become so safe and soft: escalators, phones, computers, trains, planes, and automobiles. It is useful, however, to focus on what this does to our minds. The world becomes abstract. And why would it not? When does a paved walking trail drag us out of our skulls and channel our attention into our next foot step so that we do not take a little stumble off a thousand foot cliff? When does it remind us that each and every second may be our last? That we are sons and daughters of Mother Nature? We therefore rarely perceptually engage with our environment—we may now construct it. Just like we build Whole Foods, snug homes, noble sounding institutions, and grand theories, we now try—and fail—to “build” meaning in life, as if it could be quickly cobbled together in the same way we build our weekly schedules.
And all the while, there are those who have resisted domestication through some unworded and primeval intuition. These are those who suffer more deeply in life. They feel more deeply. They hear a question lingering in the back of their minds: “I have all of these possessions. I have attained luxury and stability and no longer crawl and stalk for berry and meat. I have my smart phone, my job, my investments. So what am I missing?”
The difference between the wild and the domestic is the difference between a free flying butterfly of purple, black, and red, and a butterfly gilded gold lying dead on a desk.
This is the difference between revealing meaning within our interactions with the world and trying to construct meaning on top of our world.
What then?
What can we do about it?
5. Ezekial saw the center of the situation
“Son of man, thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to see, and see not, and have ears to hear, and hear not.”
The significant point is we may not be able to bring the wild world to our domesticated world, nor should we—but we can bring a wild mode of mind to it. The environment is one thing; how we perceive it is another.
Let us demolish this rebellious house-of-the-mind. Let us listen to our prophet and dwell in our world with our senses cranked up to the maximum, for we are not merely brains floating six feet above the earth: we are eyes, ears, hands, feet, blood, and flesh. We are sparks of wakefulness built to suffer, sweat, bleed, crawl, sprint, risk, sing, and sit in silence.
There are many ways to do this: spaceflight, skydiving, Muay Thai, traveling to the Third World, growing a garden, taking a long slow walk in the woods.
For my part, this is one of the reasons I love journaling and writing. I can plant my knuckles in the soil and use my eyes and ears to put words to the subtle intonation in a voice; the impact of an abstract idea on millions of human lives; the sinuous veins in a fig leaf; the scent of a mutts musky fur; and the flicker in a pupil in the midst of irises like galaxies of copper, azure, sea grey, and emerald green. Every observation we make accumulates and sinks down to the subterranean chambers of our subconscious. The pen is a shovel and the paper a sift.
This is merely one of many ways to perceptually engage with the domesticated world.
One of many way to make a poem of life.
One of many ways to see the Ents in the woods.
