Landscape as Villain?

by Laura Crum

“It is not possible to be quite sane here. The region has a mood that both excites and perverts its people.”

“Was it the wild rock coast and the reckless wind in the beaten trees and the gaunt booming crashes of breakers under the rocks that taught her this dark freedom?”

“Much of Robinson Jeffers’ poetry is a study of what the strange landscape around Carmel and Big Sur can do to people. It is a ‘haunted country,’ according to Jeffers.”

These quotes are from the book, “Robinson Jeffers, Poet of California,” which I have just finished reading. I was inspired to read this book because Jeffers is much quoted in the Tom Killion book I read previously (California’s Wild Edge), and Killion recommends this biography of Jeffer’s life. I found it fascinating.

As with many books I’ve deeply enjoyed, I tend to engage in mental arguments with the author. And in this book my arguments centered on two things—sense of place, and the nature of God. Today I am going to write about “place” (as the easier subject), and save God for another day.

As the quotes above tell, Jeffers was aware of the disturbing energy that swirls around the coast from Carmel through Big Sur. It is palpable to me—I’ve been there often and I never fail to feel it. I could no more live on the “south coast” than I could live on the moon. It would break my heart with its fierce, uncompromising, almost hostile nature. Beautiful, yes—but not friendly.

Jeffers chose to live there, and the inhuman ghosts of Big Sur/Carmel underlie his writing, as well as his life. It was a choice that perhaps suited him, but it would not suit me.

It’s all about place. Different places speak with very different voices and tell very dissimilar energetic stories. Not all places will embrace you and protect you, no matter how much you love them and how long you make them your home. Some places, like Big Sur and the high Sierra, will never be comforting to a human heart. They can thrill you and challenge you, yes. They are beautiful and desirable, yes. They are inspiring to visit. But they are not steady, kind, lifetime companions. Big Sur is oddly haunted and the Sierra heights are aloof. Too wild, too harsh, too steep, too rocky, too windblown—you name it—they are overwhelming to human consciousness. Certain sad human endings, I think, come from a failure to understand how places in/on the earth speak to our hearts. Make your home in a place that will never condescend to be your friend, and watch what happens.

But there are some valleys, some meadows, some protected hollows in the coastal hills (as here in the most inland arc of the Monterey Bay) that will comfort you. They will take care of you, in so much as landscape can love the animal creatures that walk around on her. Vast and intangible energy, but none the less love. These places are friendly and fond. It is there in the soft color of the light, the gentle, relaxed feeling of the land, the freedom of the native plants. It is there in the winter sunlight of a certain southern exposure where I live on this California coast, and it is there in the way of the wild things, plant and animal, that have been here before men walked on this ground. There are places that will nurture you. If you love them long enough, you come to trust them. And your trust is not misplaced. They will protect you.

Love is possible. Love between person and place. But not all places are fitted to love people. A person needs to pay attention to the nuances of the light. Is it warm or cold? Does it soothe you with a calm strength, or challenge you with its restless energy?

Those who choose the wilder, storm-tossed places-- as Robinson Jeffers chose an exposed headland near Carmel, above Big Sur-- are not choosing wrongly. But they are choosing a certain loneliness that will not go away. Such places/choices can make great art; they possibly make an inspiring human, if that being is strong enough. But these places will never hold you in their lap, as a mother holds a child. And there are places that will do this. I live in one.

 Judging by the stories in the book I just finished reading, a great many people who lived near Jeffers ended up caught in the wild meshes of a truly untamable land, and came to sad and untimely ends—driven there, as far as I can tell, partly by the inhumanly beautiful and awful (in the old sense of the word) landscape. Jeffers seems to understand this, and to some degree relish the drama of it all. I can’t say that I feel the same.

To those who can read a sense of place and see clearly, the choice is there. The choice is yours.

California's Wild Edge

                                                by Laura Crum

            The title of this blog post is also the title of the book I’m currently reading. A present from a friend, the book is another collaborative effort between the woodblock print artist Tom Killion and the poet Gary Snyder. Both the words and the illustrations are equally beautiful and evocative of the California coast—where I was born and raised and where I hope to live until I die.

            I particularly like the title of this book. I have always seen this coast as the wild edge of the world. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat on my horse, looking out over the Monterey Bay from the spot in the nearby hills that we call the “Lookout,” and thought that I was gazing out at the ragged fringe of the continent. If I could see far enough across the vast blue, I would see Japan. (The Lookout features prominently in my last two novels—“Going, Gone” and “Barnstorming”—for those who have read those books.)

            Anyway, I’m really enjoying this book about the California coast. Today I thought I’d give you a few photos of my own that illustrate what the “wild edge” is to me and some quotes from the book that touched me. I’ll try and attribute the quotes correctly. Many of them are by the poet Robinson Jeffers. I love his description of his wife, Una Call-- “more like a woman in a Scotch ballad, passionate, untamed, and rather heroic—or like a falcon—than like an ordinary person.”

            Here, I think, is one of his last poems (1951), one that Tom Killion describes as something that “still might serve as a guide for all aspiring artists of the coast—poets, painters or woodblock carvers.” It’s titled “The Beauty of Things.”

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things—earth, stone and water,

Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars—

The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,

And unhuman nature its towering reality—

For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock

And water and sky are constant—to feel

Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural

Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.

The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,

The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

And “Orion in December evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.”

And “There is yet one ocean and then no more, God whom you shine to walks there naked, on the final Pacific, not in a man’s form.

The torch answered: Have I kindled a morning?

For again, this old world’s end is the gate of a world fire new, of your wild future, wild as a hawk’s dream”

And here, in a poem about Jeffers ghost by Robert Hass:

“He shuddered briefly and stared down the long valley where the headland rose

And the lean gum trees rattled in the wind above Point Sur;

Alive, he had littered the mind’s coast

With ghosts of Indians and granite and the dead fleshed

Bodies of desire. That work was done

And, whether done well or not, it had occupied him

As the hawks and sea were occupied.

Now he could not say what bought him back.

He had imagined resurrection once: the lover of a woman…

So she burned and he came, a ghost in khaki and stunned skin,

And she fled with him. He had imagined, though he had not written,

The later moment in the pasture, in moonlight like pale stone,

When she lay beside him with an after-tenderness in all her bones,

Having become entirely what she was, though aware that the thing

Beside her was, again, just so much cheese-soft flesh

And jellied eye rotting in the pools of bone.

Anguish afterwards perhaps, but he had not thought afterwards.

Human anguish made him cold.

He told himself the cries of men in war were no more conscious

Nor less savage than the shrill repetition of the Steller’s jay

Flashing through live oaks up Mal Paso Canyon

And that the oaks, rooted and growing toward their grace,

Were—as species go—

More beautiful.”

And:

I am a child of California’s wild edge.

If you want a tame creature

To sit by your side,

I am not that thing.

Wind and water, stone and sky—

These speak to me.

The female moon longs

For Orion the archer,

As he strides across the night.

This would be you and me

In that dark room.

There is a Tom Russell song that Andy used to sings bits of—about the coast near Big Sur. The part I remember goes like this:

“The south coast is a wild coast and lonesome

You might win a card game in Jolon

But the lion still rules Amaranca

And a man there is always alone.”

It’s a sad song—but it sticks in your mind.

So yeah, it all seems to fit together. And here are a few photos I’ve taken of horsemen on the wild edge-- just for fun.