A revelatory moment in my evolution as a resolutely pragmatist thinker—I do not say theorist—came early in my reading of Marx, where he says something to the effect that the cultivation of crops, the revolution that made for civilization, changed the chemical composition of the soil itself. That was all it took to convince me that human nature was always already a dimension of Nature as we can experience and/or know it, not a force or presence imposed upon an external object that was evolving absent the activity of sentient beings.
Marx himself elaborated on this insight in various iterations of his labor theory of value, which was rooted in the prior claim that the labor process as human beings developed it was the “everlasting Nature-imposed condition” of life as such, and so was common to every phase of human existence. The “compulsion to work,” as Freud later defined the most creative and destructive drive of the unconscious, was a useful theoretical graft on Marxism, so conceived, which allowed us to see that the urge to change material circumstances in the name of self-mastery was an internally generated psychological imperative as well as an inherited social condition.
Armed with these ideas, I enjoyed asking my students to designate anything that was natural—original, unchanged by human being—in their purview, while sitting in the basement classrooms of the River Dorms that flank the Raritan on the New Brunswick campus of Rutgers University. They’d start with the trees they could see, and the river itself, of course, which are clearly natural features that would have happened, or would somehow just “be there,” in our absence, like the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear. Well, not quite, I’d say, those trees were planted and have been tended by grounds crews—some of them are invasive species from elsewhere, where they probably didn’t belong to begin with—and that river has long been diverted by human habitation and modified by human wastes.
What else? And so on, unto infinity: you can see where this would go. My point was that all of what we know and/or experience as the natural landscape is artificial—real, fundamental, but artificial. Man-made, as we used to say, or “unnatural” in the sense that there’s nothing left on the earth that came “before” us, no antecedent we haven’t revised or reinvented. Natural settings are not just hard to come by, in other words, they’re impossible to find if by them we mean objects that have remained untouched or unchanged by that part of Nature we call homo sapiens.
It seems a truism, I know, but once you live by it, you realize that you’re never alone, not even when completing the most solitary tasks, like writing a book, when it’s just you and the blank page, or taking a walk in the park, where you go to be alone with your thoughts. For better or worse, social labor saturates every move you make, and every breath you take.
The ideas you bring to the page are moments in a conversation with previous writers on your subject, dead or alive, even if you have chosen to evade them; the surfaces that bear your weight are still churning with dead labor, no matter how solid the ground beneath your feet; the air you can’t taste or touch, and never stop to think about as you breathe, is warming, cooling, and changing as you inhale and exhale it.
And now, finally, speaking of never being alone in an unnatural place that is nevertheless graceful because it doesn't try to wrest right angles from the geological contours of the slate that grounds the space . . . I walked home from the girlfriend’s place this morning, about two meandering miles that take me through the North Woods of Central Park. It’s a complicated, delightful set of trails that offer new choices about every eighth of a mile, each attached to collateral decisions about the incline you’re willing to endure, up or down, and the general direction you want to take. You don’t strive or stride in these environs, you drift toward a destination unless, like me, you’re huffing and puffing up a steep hill with your cane thumping in time at the apposite angle.
I was enjoying the solitude of sunrise about a quarter mile in at 97th Street when I realized that the 8-foot green benches lining the macadam walkways carry plaques in memoriam of some resident, typically a local: "In loving memory of Max Enriquez, who lived on West 104th Street, 1978 to . . . ." Three or four of these benches are usually conjoined, so each lineup convenes a little neighborhood unto itself, like the cemetery scenes in Thornton Wilder’s "Our Town," where the dead gossip about the living—Simon Stimson, the town drunk who’s “seen a peck of troubles,” is a favorite topic—and try to convince the newly deceased Emily Gibbs (nee Webb) to stay in her place, in the ground, forever out of sight of her grieving family.
Wilder’s play came to mind, and made me laugh, because the plaques do make you remember the dead, and they do so in a theatrical, neighborly, companionable way, allowing you to imagine a visit with them, a moment when you could ask old Max what 104th Street was like, say, forty years ago when he moved there. Does that sound like a bleak prospect? Aside from its “meta-theatrical” aspect—the Stage Manager who directly addresses the audience is the main character—the play itself is as flinty and spare as New Hampshire in winter: it’s performed on a bare stage with almost no props. And wouldn’t you know, according to Wikipedia, “Our Town” was banned from East Germany in 1946 because the Soviet authorities deemed it depressing enough to induce an unwanted wave of suicides among war-traumatized citizens.
But I remember the play differently. It was the first production in which my big sister was a player, as a junior in high school, in 1962. She had a small part, as I remember the dual roles of George Gibbs’s younger sister and the unnamed Woman from among the Dead. But she seemed at home up there on stage. And she glowed afterward.
She was weird, a rebel with some clues but no cause out there in the wind-scoured western suburbs of Chicago, where the prairie had been paved many times over. She introduced me to Elvis, and Ritchie Valens, then took me to coffee houses (like ”Grendel’s Fen” in Glen Ellyn) to listen to folk music and smoke mostly cigarettes, opening up a world well beyond my parochial interests in sports and sex. She stayed involved in the theater all her life; most of her friends were people you’d probably meet backstage after a makeshift community production of “The Crucible.”
She died young, like Emily Webb would have, before getting married and giving birth. She’s never returned to us, though, apart from my dreams, and the occasional reminder from my little brother of her insane sense of humor. But this morning, I could see her sitting with me on one of those green benches in the park, laughing at the goofy dogs and saying good morning to the rueful owners who followed. I could hear her telling me what to do all over again, knowing I wouldn’t listen to her good advice. She was there, I was sure of it.
Hello, Patty. Been a while, hasn’t it?