Spiritual Sunday
I am excited about my friend John Gatta’s most recent book, Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture, which is a worthy successor to a book of his that I wrote about earlier this year (Making Nature Sacred). Exploring what it means, “existentially and spiritually, for human beings to inhabit a particular site or dwelling place on this earth,” John argues that it is “imperative to recover humanity’s connection with some form of sacred geography.” He believes that
the health, if not survival, of our increasingly urbanized civilization depends on finding means to reclaim the original ground of our being in spiritually revitalized earth.
At one point John cites Max Weber’s belief that “post-Enlightenment rationalism” has led to “an all-but-inevitable disenchantment of the world,” but he looks at authors who counter this. Some of them do so in explicitly religious terms, such as Barry Lopez, Wendell Barry, Denise Levertov, and Gary Snyder. For the Buddhist Snyder, John writes,
the “real work” falling to inhabitants of the United States is that of “becoming native to North America,” learning to accept primary citizenship in “the continent itself,” its land and creatures, rather than in the nation state. To feel at home in this land, Snyder insists, one must aspire to know it from the ground up. He believes that “to know the spirit of a place” likewise calls for a realization “that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made up of parts, each of which is whole.”
John connects Snyder’s ideas with the Romans’ “genius loci” (spirit of place), often symbolized by gods associated with rivers, streams and groves. This hit home with me as I recently finished The Aeneid and was struck by Virgil’s many examples. For instance, a symbolic serpent appears at the shrine that Aeneas constructs for his father Anchises:
And as he finished speaking, a huge serpent
Slid over the ground, seven shining loops, surrounding
The Tomb, peacefully gliding around the altars,
Dappled with blue and gold, such iridescence
As rainbow gives to cloud, when the sun strikes it.
Aeneas stood amazed; and the great serpent
Crawled to the bowls and cups, tasted the offerings,
And slid again, without a hint of menace,
Under the altar stone. Intent, Aeneas
Resumed the rites; the serpent might have been,
For all he knew, a guardian of the altar,
Or some familiar spirit of Anchises.
John elaborates:
Identified with a discrete, unseen guardian spirit felt to inhabit a given locale, the genius loci principle affirmed the inherently religious potential of place, within the polytheistic or animistic world views of premodern peoples.
I note in passing that it is not only the Enlightenment that has warred with local spirits. The Wife of Bath complains of Christian friars ridding the land of fairies:
In the old days of King Arthur,
Of whom Britons speak great honor,
This land was all filled full of supernatural creatures.
The elf-queen, with her jolly company,
Danced very often in many a green mead.
This was the old belief, as I read;
I speak of many hundred years ago.
But now no man can see any more elves,
For now the great charity and prayers
Of licensed beggars and other holy friars,
That overrun every land and every stream,
As thick as specks of dust in the sun-beam,
Blessing halls, chambers, kitchens, bedrooms,
Cities, towns, castles, high towers,
Villages, barns, stables, dairies —
This makes it that there are no fairies.
Although he practices eco-criticism, however, John doesn’t only find the genius loci in nature but also in domestic structures. Thus, in his first chapter he looks at how houses themselves can have a spiritual dimension.
Literature plays an important role in this process, both detecting spirituality within place and bestowing it. Imagination half creates and half perceives, in Wordsworth’s memorable formulation, and John also cites Coleridge’s theories of the Imagination. For Coleridge,
Imagination carries an ecological meaning by way of defining and affirming our participation in a comprehensive community of Creation extending beyond humankind.
Using the Ancient Mariner as an example, John points out that it is a failure of imagination that leads the mariner to kill the albatross. He does not understand that he himself is part of a greater whole. By the end of the poem, however, the mariner understands his connectedness and feels driven to go out and preach this revelation to the world:
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
Many American authors have also used religious frameworks to understand this Imagination:
That the Imagination might be construed to bear some form of religious meaning and purpose has likewise shaped the poetic of American writers as diverse as Thoreau, Emerson, Muir, and Levertov. Thoreau, for example, in his famous deep-cut passage from the “Spring” chapter of Walden, describes the course of creation, witnessed throughout the course of nature, as a divinely engendered, evolutionary process. Marveling at “this hieroglyphic”—that is, sacred script—he finds inscribed in the railroad’s thawing sandbank, he declares himself “as affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,–had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about.”
John also mentions Emerson, who saw the poet as organically participating in “the life of God.” And then there’s Levertov, whose religious poems I have turned to time and again for these Sunday posts. Levertov writes that “the imagination which synergizes intellect, emotion, and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God.”
John’s book helps me understand why we find spiritual significance in settings, both in the world and in literature. The two are inextricably bound up with each other so that to experience a place and to read about it in literature cannot be separated. Twain’s Mississippi River, Willa Cather’s Nebraska, Richard Shelton’s Sonoran Desert, James Baldwin’s New York City are half perceived and half created, the reality and the spirit feeding off and enhancing each other. Spirits of Place is an important book.
