We should want our “Nature” moody, cognisant and weird—not supine, pristine and passive, argues Greg Frey

The Green Man at Rosslyn Chapel

We are always happy to cross-post Greg Frey’s brilliant columns, where he muses on politics, culture and ecology, from his “radical gardening” perspective. This one is about “letting the land weird you out”.

GREG FREY:

Despite being raised a good secular boy, I like my nature spirits. If we can agree that there is some animating force that makes a rose grow, and we know that that rose is connected via all kinds of threads to the soil, my own breath, the subterranean water courses etc., then why not think of all those things as one thing?

And give it a name? At least for a bit. Just to see what happens.

It’s somewhere in between the Western rationalist impulse to see all the things of this world as separate and distinct, and the Cosmic Oneness that’s the zenith of all spiritual traditions. 

My teacher in this: Dead Papa Toothwort, a spirit summoned by Max Porter in his novel (one of my favourite novels!) Lanny. They’re a version of the Green Man, Gawain’s Green Knight, Herne the Hunter, Jack of the Hedge etc:

Dressed as a barn owl with car-tyre arms

As old as time

Jangingling in his various skins, wearing a tarpaulin gloaming coat, drunk on the village, ripe with feeling

He splits and wobbles, divides and reassembles, coughs up a plastic pot and a petrified condom

Finds his face made of long-buried tannic acid bottles

I also like my nature spirits when they’re rebelling against the romantic vision of nature as Pure and Simple and Good. I prefer them honest, ambivalent, weird:

Green and leafy, born of dark gaps in Sunday school nightmares, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth, threat and agony growing together, tree demon, uncle and dad, king of the hawthorn and hops, harvest and hope, threat of starvation

Watches all the adorable decomposition

That’s more like it.

I don’t fuck with Nature as Perfect and Good, not just because I don’t think it’s true, but also because this sort of idealism tends to have nasty political consequences. (See Nature under the British Empire, or Nazi Germany, or Stalin.)

It’s also boring and constantly disappointing. When Nature’s not supine, pristine and passive it’s doing a whole load of other interesting things, like being alive.

I like my nature spirits animate, cognizant (in some unfathomable way), impulsive (in both senses), self-organising and full of contradictions. In a word, moody.  

Tetchy Papa Toothwort should never sleep in the afternoon; he doesn’t know who he is

Why should life in human skin be the only thing capable of moods? Of being more than one thing at once? Of having competing urges all the (goddamn) time?

This might trouble you. Isn’t this anthropomorphism?

I defer to Astrida Neimanis (discovered through this episode of the ever-brilliant Future Ecologies podcast):

…my short answer to that leveling of that charge of anthropomorphism is always like, why do we think humans felt those things first, or had those things first? We learn our feelings, I think, from the world around us, we learn sensation, we learn inter-relationality, we learn communication, we learn language, from all of these things.

So then to say, you know, to hold all of that stuff close to us and say, "No, this belongs to humans. And it's ethically wrong to consider that another kind of being would be tired or be angry or be upset or need a hug" is I think, even more anthropocentric in a way — because it like it hogs... it hogs all of those great words and feelings and sensations…

“Only one thing can cheer up crotchety Toothwort and that’s his listening” (from Lanny)

We are circling around a well-trodden debate here. Glastonbury-in-the-rain-after-a-long-weekender-well-trodden. That is, the grey, boggy, bit sad question: Nature or Culture?

Nature is conflict, barbarity, family, old, messy 

Culture is civility, order, new, tidy

Or

Nature is perfection, purity, grace, god even

Culture is human, tragic, destructive, fallen 

Or 

Nature is culture is nature is culture is nature

Culture is nature is culture is nature is culture

But even then: you mix all your paints together, you get brown.

Dead Papa Toothwort moves us on. 

It’s re-enchantment without the nostalgia, a more general aliveness that is not so bounded and a name for the thing that emerges between us all. It’s something to relate to. Something the scholars might say has a kind of “legibility” while “remaining subversive”.

It makes you wanna squint at it, and maybe see some new shapes coming out of the gloom. 

https://open.substack.com/pub/gregfrey/p/5-let-the-land-weird-you-out