Conversations on Human and Animal Spirituality in “Coming Into Animal Presence” https://ift.tt/dzaIpXv
Should the woolly mammoth become the state fossil of South Carolina? asks John Lane’s opening essay, “Chronophilia,” in his recently released collection of essays, Coming into Animal Presence. The question was first posed in 2014 by eight-year-old Olivia McConnell, an aspiring scientist who noticed that her state lacked an official state fossil. Her inquiry unexpectedly sparked a debate in the State House about religion and environmentalism and whether the two can coexist peacefully. Throughout his book, Lane takes that debate further: Might religion and environmentalism begin to blur or support one another? Or are they mutually exclusive? Can we learn from and incorporate animal cultures into our human lives and spirituality?
In fifteen essays that span his decades-long career as a professor of creative writing and environmental studies, Lane grapples with these questions, while simultaneously considering the lives and work of colleagues who also straddled that line, some more able than others to reconcile the two domains. Though the essays sometimes feel only loosely related, Coming into Animal Presence is a worthwhile read that explores human and animal spirituality through storytelling, natural imagery, and personal questioning, creating an opportunity for the reader to formulate their own answers to some of life’s biggest questions.
One of the fundamental questions in the environmental humanities is how we distinguish between nature and culture — or whether they are actually indistinguishable. John Lane eases us into this line of questioning, using his background as a poet to discuss how natural and human worlds merge:
“Poetry helps us transgress the line between human and nonhuman—it helps us blur being—all the while understanding the clear differences. I can’t be a bird although I might long to be. I can only watch and wish. Blurring means standing in common cause. It means understanding our common plight, the common cause of life.”
This “common plight” threads through Lane’s essays, from his encounters with alligators and “hairy-dicked” cows in the Florida wilderness in the 1970s and 80s to his collection of roadkill pelts for the fledgling Goodall Environmental Studies Center at Wofford College to his return as a retiree to a Bahamian island he’d visited as a younger man, only to discover it, too, has fallen victim to commercialism and globalization (or was it always that way?). He implies, rather than states, his belief that it is impossible to delineate between natural and human spaces. “I loved rivers and mountains and found endless beauty and joy there,” he states in his essay “Ant Farm.” “I even loved suburbs and cities, and because of natural historians and field scientists like [E.O.] Wilson, I learned to pay attention to the vast and endless gyrations of the universe.” Lane goes on to chronicle the evolution of his spirituality and lands on a sort of environmental mysticism that surpasses agnosticism but remains unnamed. “I believe in everything in particular —” he starts, as if reciting a modified version of the Apostle’s Creed, “— the ten thousand things, the great bursting forth of life into myriad forms, worlds without end.”
At only 138 pages, this slim volume dips into the history of Lane’s career, religion, and deep, complex friendships with other environmentalists like Barry Lopez and James Kilgo, in memory of whom the book is dedicated. Coming into Animal Presence is one of a three-part series that includes Neighborhood Hawks and Coyote Settles the South, and one gets the feeling that this latest work is a continuation of conversations begun in those works, though it begins more conversations than it concludes, even in the two elegies to Lopez and Kilgo, and it at times feels more like an assemblage of environmentally-minded thoughts and experiences rather than a fully realized collection. Lane himself suggests as much in the introduction: “I did not see any of them fitting together until they did.”
There is room throughout to make clearer connections between the individual essays, to make clearer Lane’s larger points and purpose. But, then, perhaps the work acts more as exploration for a man in the age of retirement, searching for connections in the loose threads of his life. Lane’s essay “The Bear in the Freezer” is the most indicative of this rumination. In the early days of the Goodall Environmental Studies Center, Lane acquired a bear skull donated from a young bear who had died after getting its head stuck in a mayonnaise jar. After retirement, Lane kept the skull as a memento mori. “I look up and remember that, like the bear, I too will die … When I sit to write, the bear says to me ‘Get down first and smell the earth. Get close to it … How deep the soul can delve. How dark the passage.’”
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