Barry Lopez

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Barry Lopez is in Perth for the writers festival, and he joins us at a valiantly early time from the ABC studios there. Welcome to The Book Show Barry Lopez.

Barry Lopez: Thank you Ramona. I'm going to tell my wife that I was valiant.

Ramona Koval: Yes, you tell her that! This book is a kind of encyclopaedia for terms of geography in different American micro-landscapes, and it started for you with the words 'flat iron', 'cowbelly' and 'Detroit riprap'. Let's talk about what those words mean and why they led to this book.

Barry Lopez: Well, if I can back up one more step, I'm an avid reader, as I know you are, and I would come across terms and not really be sure what they meant, they were popular terms or regional terms, and I've had that sensitivity I think all my life. In fact I just finished a novel by Tim Winton and noticed as I was going through that there were many casually used...you know, just part-of-a-sentence terms, and I wasn't sure what they meant but I knew most Australian readers would probably know right away what it meant.

So in my own landscape in North America, Debra and I decided let's see if we can get together with people who really care about language, poets and writers, many of whom we knew, and put together a list of 800 or 900 terms like 'cowbelly' and give these terms to these very different kinds of writers and set up a board of academics and make sure we didn't stray too far from the centre, and have them write brief essays, nothing more than about 300 words, mostly shorter, about what that term meant.

It wasn't an effort to make an encyclopaedia, it was as much as it was an effort to celebrate language and the relationship between language and places that people say they love. I could tell you what a 'cowbelly' is now that we've both used the word...

Ramona Koval: Yes, please do, we're all on the edge of our seats now.

Barry Lopez: Well, I'm sure you see a similar thing in Australia where a stream is flowing in a relatively flat land and the water at the edges of the stream is barely moving, and that means the finest particles of clay and silt fall out of the water, they're not being carried by the current anymore, so if you step off the bank your foot sinks right away into the softest of soft silt, and the comparison is with your hand on the belly of a cow, so that part of the bottom of a stream is called the cowbelly.

Ramona Koval: Yes, because probably a geographer or an environmental scientist would have a world for that that could be applied to any such silty spot in the whole world, but you're interested in preserving the particular language in a particular landscape, aren't you.

Barry Lopez: I am, and actually I would, if the opportunity arose, I would love to work with a couple of editors in Australia to put a similar book together for Australia. I know that this landscape is replete with terms that are engaging. The thing about a word like 'cowbelly' is that a scientist might use it or an environmentalist or something like that, but it's a word that was made up by somebody who experienced the land...

Ramona Koval: And a cow.

Barry Lopez: And a cow, yes, so a person who's living in the real world. And as soon as you know the softness of a...you know, there's a term 'velvet nosed' for horses, that the nose is so soft it's like running your hand over velvet. All of that for a writer translates into emotional feelings about the sense of touch. So I'd love to find out, talking to Australian writers, what those terms are. There's a practical side to this because there's litigation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, about the fate of landscapes. And if you look over some of the transcripts in these altercations in a court room, what you see is that a lot of people don't know what they're talking about. They use a word like 'river' or 'hill' or 'desert' but it doesn't raise any particular image for them, it's like a box they've thrown something in. And if you can be precise with your terms about the object that you're trying to describe, then I think in court you arrive at a much better decision about what fate is going to be assigned to a stretch of landscape.

Ramona Koval: And the loss of this particular language, the flattening out of it and making all hills a hill, and all rivers a river, what else do we lose with that, when we lose a particularity of landscape? I guess we lose the history of it.

Barry Lopez: You do, Ramona, you're right, you lose a sense of the history of a place but you also lose a sense of belonging. I travel and I'm very, very wary of being pan-cultural, of saying, well, you know, Australians and Americans and Canadians, whatever, we all think the same. No, we don't. And it's perilous to go into a contentious area like the fate of landscapes and say, 'Oh well, we all really feel the same thing, we all want the same thing.' No, we don't all want the same thing. What we really want is informed and deferential conversation, and to have an informed conversation you've got to have these terms that are precise and evocative. It puts a person in a frame of mind where they realise they're talking about something animate, something real.

The philosopher Martin Buber makes a distinction between what he calls an I/it relationship and an I/thou relationship. And I think all over the world, in my experience, when people have been long resident in a place, they have an I/thou relationship with the place, and ethical issues rise up for them that don't arise when the newcomer comes in for whom the landscape is often just an 'it', a thing that is going to be manipulated and utilised and deformed and punished and made to deliver something of value before it will be respected. That's a terrible kind of conversation to have in the 21st century because you can pick the paper up this morning and somewhere in the first few pages you'll find some train wreck issue about the breakdown between people and their sense of responsibility to their home places. They're embarrassed by it.

So when you lose this language you lose precision but you lose also intimacy, and I think in the end maybe that's the worst thing. In every place I've ever been I meet sophisticated people who are informed about the world and they're so desperately lonely they're one-inch from breaking down in tears. And the loneliness comes from having cut themselves off from almost everything, cut themselves off from their own families, cut themselves off from their places, and to get back into that you have to have an informed conversation, a beautiful conversation about whatever it is that you claim to love.

Ramona Koval: Some of the writers that you've chosen, people like Jon Krakauer, we know him because he's a Colorado mountaineer, he's the author of Into Thin Air, Into the Wild. He tells us the story of chimney and stockstone and flake, but he's pretty straightforward and prosaic about his rocks, isn't he, he's not as poetic as someone like William DeBuys, he's written a definition of the word 'ripple' and of course he talks about the ripple on the water, the ripple of sand, but he says, 'They also radiate across the surface of our thoughts where they abide as the metaphor and epitome of lingering effect and continuing implication,' which is a fantastically poetic and lovely definition of the word 'ripple' and something you won't get in another kind of book, I think.

Barry Lopez: I think only the kinds of writers we put together could develop a book that has...as you've so succinctly pointed out, here's Jon Krakauer and a very straightforward definition of a chimney (because he's a climber we gave him that term, we knew he'd do very well with it), and Bill DeBuys is an extremely sensitive writer who's not very well known. And that's what I wanted, I wanted a group of people, some of whom were, if you will, household names, and others of whom were just really good writers who maybe weren't commercial. That's especially true for some of the poets.

And since I'm in Australia and Jon won't hear this, I'd like to tell you briefly an anecdote about the atmosphere around the production of this book. When Debra and I got a budget from the publisher, we had to be...I insisted that everyone be paid, everybody has to be paid and no matter how well or how little known you were, you were going to be paid the same thing. That seemed an imperative. But when I talked to Jon Krakauer and I told him, I said, 'Jon, I have to apologise, I'm not able to pay you that much, but here's what it is.' And he said, 'I would be embarrassed to take a cheque from you. I have been so blessed because my books have sold so well, I must do this for the token dollar and let's leave it at that.' So there were other writers who were very well known who did...I mean, this was not a weekend project, this took four years and some of the writers had to go back and forth with the board of geographers so that they could write...

Ramona Koval: And what about that relationship between the board of geographers and..? How did you manage that one?

Barry Lopez: It was hair-pulling, Ramona. And actually Debra, my wife, of the two of us editing she was the one that was the miracle worker. She did not lose a single one of our 45 writers, although some of them said, 'You know what, I'm done. I'm so tired of having my language scrutinised by somebody who is not a writer.' So she mediated all of that. We chose a geographic board of women and men who were readers, who understood that language does something in addition to define. Each word has a connotation and a denotation working for it, and we wanted people who were expert in the denotation of the word to make common cause with people who were expert in the connotation of the term.

And, as you pointed out with Bill DuBuys' brief little essay about the word 'ripple', he infused that definition with something that makes you think very differently about that phenomenon when you watch the wind. You know, when I got up this morning I watched the wind move across the water here in Perth, and it's a lovely thing. I feel privileged to see the wind active on the surface of the water, an invisible thing making these ripples on the surface of the water. So I knew Bill could bring that, but maybe he wasn't aware of some technical issues that the geographers were aware of. So in the end we all shook hands.

Ramona Koval: With the geographers, were they worried about too loose definitions or things that weren't precise or that were confusing or inflating something which could be explained pretty simply and quickly with a diagram perhaps?

Barry Lopez: Yes, they were, and we just put our arms around them and said, 'Thank you, thank you very much for your thoughts.' And I'm pretending that we just went on without paying any attention to them but we did, and Debra and I learned a lot mediating between the sciences and the humanities. That's an area that I've worked in and I think a lot of young people I meet in university today are interested in things that have a formal history in the humanities but they are also interested in things that have...the formal history of the subject is in the sciences.

Ramona Koval: I was going to say that in another arena you've collaborated with socio-biologist EO Wilson in the design of a university curriculum combining the sciences and humanities in a new undergraduate major. It's quite a long time since CP Snow wrote about the 'two cultures' of science and the humanities. What's your connection with that and what's the idea behind it?

Barry Lopez: You know, if you'll allow me to enter a rarefied place, Ramona, what's behind it is reconciliation. You mentioned at the top of the show this work that I've done with Desmond Tutu, and when we first had a chance to sit down and talk, of course we were talking about...one of the things that was obvious to talk about was the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa, and I told Desmond, you know what I'm really interested in is reconciliation within the self, reconciliation in the family, what some people call the war in the kitchen.

And when it comes to something like the sciences and the humanities, you have people in the humanities and people in the sciences who believe they and they alone hold the truth. Well, nobody has the truth. The best we can do is have an open-ended conversation and be courteous and respectful toward each other's grasp of something that's ineffable, ungraspable.

So when Ed Wilson and I were invited to develop an undergraduate program I said to Ed, whom I knew, 'You know, you say in your book Consilience that it bothers you when someone says science is a way of knowing, you want them to say it's the way of knowing, and if we're going to design this degree for young women and men who want a genuine grounding in the humanities and in the sciences and we convey to them that in the end science has really got hold of the only truth worth holding on to, we're misrepresenting the effort here and we're cheating the students.'

I said, what we're really doing is designing a degree in...I mean, this is a rarefied term, but it's a degree in comparative epistemology. To help students understand that when they face these really difficult political questions, questions of social organisation and racial issues et cetera, when you're looking at stuff that is that destructive and heart-breaking all over the world, you've got to be prepared to listen to someone else and not sit there and think that when they've finished talking you'll tell them the right way to go. And in order to prepare students to work and have flexibility in politics, you've got to expose them to different ways of knowing and not privilege one over the other.

Ramona Koval: Yes, it's a two-way street, isn't it, because so much talk of the planet and the environment is in terms of...I suppose semi-religious terms, and isn't it possible though to be a rationalist, to believe that the science we know now can inform our drive towards the protection of the planet rather than anchoring the position in a spiritual framework?

Barry Lopez: Oh I don't think either one serves us by itself. I don't know if I'm comfortable, if I may disagree a little bit with you about the notion of religion. I don't think religion, which is a formalisation of spiritual belief, plays as important a role as human awareness that there is something beyond the human. Philosophers use this word 'reverence' which is a virtue, and reverence is a capacity to feel the presence of something that is completely beyond human understanding and human control. So there is a component, I think, just in the establishment and maintenance of just relationships with each other and with what we call the physical world or nature that has got to be ethical and informed by reverence and, if you will, spiritual.

But the clarity that can come for us as rational beings...the rational mind is a particular kind of mind, it's not everybody's choice, and I don't mean by that that the other choice is to be crazy. The rational way to approach something is just one way to get at it. But science brings something that is peculiar to itself, and it's been very interesting to me in reading the history, say, of particle physics or of evolutionary biology to see how often people who make that their pursuit, their professional life, come to moments of profound spiritual awareness.

So the thing would be to get the best people around the table and when extremely difficult political questions are in front us and say let's get the most grown up, the most mature people to sit at a table and say among us what is it that we know, and what can we do with what we know that is not being done by government, it's not being done by business people, for the most part.

Ramona Koval: I was reading about your own religious background and your education in Catholicism and an early tendency to be interested in the monastic life.

Barry Lopez: Yes. You know, when you're young you're attracted to so many things and later you really don't understand why you had that attraction, but if you probe it you see that there was a longing that informed it. I went to school in a conventional way and I grew up in a Roman Catholic family. I never had a violent break with Roman Catholicism, I simply walked away because I had been among too many people for whom Roman Catholicism was not the relevant metaphor, and I came to understand that their struggle to establish ethical relationships with everything around them was at the heart of what had been my religious experience, and I guess I've put those two things together.

But I think what attracted me to monasticism was when I was very little, seven or eight years old, someone told me that...and this was a time when people were terrified of what was going to happen with what was then called the atomic bomb and nuclear warfare. And as a frightened child I thought, my God, this can't happen, we can't have this. And someone told me that the reason there was no war that destroyed everything was because in thousands of monasteries all over the world women and men were praying for peace and praying for reconciliation.

And I think as a little boy I identified with that, and I thought if I will do anything with my life it would be to be in one of these places and to simply pray that no harm would come to people I didn't even know, that no harm would come to strangers. So there's been an evolution for me of...I wouldn't say I moved into some kind of a different religious landscape, I just became much more respectful of and filled with wonder about other people's ways of knowing and other people's ways of believing what I was trained to call 'God'.

Ramona Koval: So instead of praying, you write.

Barry Lopez: Well, you know, it's the same thing, Ramona, it comes from the same frame of mind, respect for language, an acute awareness of the reader as a companion, not as somebody you're instructing. I said long ago to somebody in an interview...I kind of forgot it and then read the interview and thought, oh yes, I did mean that. He said, 'It seems to me that your work is your prayer,' and yes, it is.

Ramona Koval: I think it was in an interview in the Georgia Review that you say that you've got to work out how to be socially responsible as an artist and a writer. So it's no good just to be an artist and a writer. How do you mean about 'socially responsible', because there's a kind of great Soviet history of people who are being socially constructive writers and artists, which didn't lead them into a very happy place.

Barry Lopez: No, it didn't, and it's different for every woman and man who writes or paints or dances or photographs or directs theatrical productions, it's different for all of us. I think an important thing to emphasise is that each person has a way of seeing the world that no-one else has. And in times like ours you don't need to be a prophet of doom to understand that at many levels humanity all over the Earth is threatened. If you care at all about the people you love, you must find in yourself the way that you and you alone are going to be active.

And my thought has been if you are a writer or an artist I think it's good to be aware that you come in contact with other people who are susceptible to...their imaginations are open and you must have respect for their imaginations and therefore that leads you to a sense of being socially responsible in what you do. How you work that...you can't tell someone else how to work that out, but I'm more aware now in 2010 than I was in, say, 1970 that my work had to have an ethical foundation. There's nothing here that denies your own artistic vision. The artistic vision that is driving you, that compels you, that causes you to lose friendships and marriages because you're so devoted to the work that you're doing, that for me is a holy thing.

And everyone who is really working hard with their gift, whatever they've been given, knows that it's never a smooth road and you hurt people you don't wish to hurt, it's a tough place for many people to be. But at the same time I think in a world like ours if you're able to tell a story or if you're able to dance on the stage or make a painting that opens people up to the full wonder of the world, whether your subject is dark or not it really makes no difference, it's just the complexity of the world you're opening people up to. If you have the power to do that, then with it must come a responsibility. And then you explore that responsibility and say what can I do with my artistic vision that will leave me at the end of my life as someone about whom it is said 'her work helped'. I think those three words 'her work helped' at the end of your life, that's what you want as an artist or a writer.

Ramona Koval: You use the word 'holy' there, and in another interview you were talking about a life of resistance, to resist things that you didn't approve of, I suppose. You said 'A life of resistance is a life of wariness about everything that's attractive, and evil is so attractive that you almost always accommodate yourself to it.' It's a very hair-shirted approach, isn't it?

Barry Lopez: I don't think so.

Ramona Koval: Where's the fun, Barry, where's the fun in it?

Barry Lopez: Here's the funny thing, I can't tell you how many people have met me and when they find that I'm irreverent and filled with jokes and a prankster and that that's my personality too, they say, 'Oh my God, I read everything you've written and you're so serious, gravitas all the time.' No, but you know there is a time and now is one of them, talking with you, you're serious about your work, I'm serious about my work and many of your listeners are serious about their lives. We could all make a laugh-fest out of our time together but time is too precious. I do have more fun than you might imagine from reading what I write.

I love to play with people and my grandchildren and my children, they're used to raising an eyebrow at some ridiculous pun that Grandpa is trying to make work or the way he creates Christmas presents and things like that. You've got to have that sense of playfulness around people. I mean, look at somebody like the Dalai Lama or Desmond Tutu. Desmond, with all respect I have for the archbishop, he's a bit of an imp. You know, he's very playful. And you see in those two public personages the marriage of gravitas and humour, and I don't have the gift for it, I don't know how to do it on the page. I sit in front of my typewriter and it all gets very serious like I've gotten here with you. But if you'd like to get together for a few laughs, Ramona, I'd be glad to.

Ramona Koval: Well, in an essay in Granta a few years ago...this ties into what we just said...you wrote about salmon spawning on the McKenzie River near your home in Oregon, and you talked about a spike in salmon numbers after years of falling numbers and how this was not evidence of a reversal in fortunes, even though it was tempting to think of it that way. This feeds in to the global warming conversation, and I think you wanted to talk about simple and complex explanations and the ease of making them, and we've just been talking about the ease of joking and the seriousness of talking seriously, and one is more fun than the other sometimes.

Barry Lopez: I think if it's fun, one is more fun all the time. It's a very delicate thing and, as I said, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu have a wonderful gift for putting people at ease because when you're with them you say, ah, they have the whole thing, they can laugh and they can weep in the presence of God. And I would like to say that I do that as a writer, but I don't know how to bring that sense of humour and lightness and accepting us, falling in love with humanity for all of its flaws, accepting the whole thing, I don't know how to do it all the time.

Ramona Koval: But with this idea about the salmon, it's easier to say lots more salmon have come back, everything's going to be fine. But what was the reason for those salmon coming back? Because it wasn't fine.

Barry Lopez: No, and scientifically it's too complicated to say. These great big salmon spawn in front of my house and I've watched them for 40 years now do that and I live with a sense of dread that one day they won't come back. So some years there are a few, some years there are many more. What the explanation for it is beyond, I think, anybody's ability to state clearly and succinctly.

When I use the word 'wary' I'm recalling a very particular time travelling with Inuit Eskimo people in northern Baffin Island. We had some trouble with weather and I remember a senior man who was with us and the way he conducted himself was not to focus on the immediate difficulties that we were having as a small group of people travelling in brutal weather conditions. His awareness was of something much larger, much more threatening, and I though that's a lesson I'll never forget, the presence in a society of people who remain wary of quick answers about anything, whose focus is on the Four Horsemen that are out there on the horizon.

We've known as a civilisation from our Greek and Roman roots that we talk about the Four Horsemen, not because it's something that comes up in the Bible but because it's something that resonates with us. Trouble is out there on the horizon and every once in a while it has a name; a dictator or an event. But because you identify trouble and do something about it doesn't mean that trouble disappears. One thing we know is that probably the best we can do is reduce the level of cruelty around the world.

But turning the world into nothing but light, that's not going to happen, and I would say that's not a very good idea anyway. There's some profound tension between the way we're drawn to darkness and the way we're drawn to light that makes us come fully alive. And I think any fully grown woman or fully grown man has got to come to some peace with the interior parts of themselves that don't mean others any good and figure out how to curb them and to not let them go into the world, to make of your life some kind of leaning toward the light but not act as though there is no darkness.

Ramona Koval: How do you see this conversation we have about global warming, as if there are two side to a debate really?

Barry Lopez: If you would ask me that question I'd look around in the room and say, 'Where's Tim Flannery?', somebody who has really as a scientist looked at all of this material and arrived at a certain conclusion about what it all means. Yes, scientists apparently in their petty human ways made jokes about people who didn't believe in what they were trying to warn us about and then it all became heavily politicised. But as far as I know, global warming, which is probably better described as global climate change, is something that we are going to have to face in the immediate future and it's not going to be easy or good for us to make these adjustments. People in Australia and people in South Africa, they see the evidence in front of them. People in Alaska see the evidence in front of them. That's not so true in, say, the United States in the middle latitudes where the presence of global climate change is not as dramatic.

But the question of whether or not human beings have caused this is really not the important question. It's like saying 'The house is on fire and before we put the fire out...'

Ramona Koval: 'Who did it?'

Barry Lopez: Yes, right, 'Was it the kids? Were the kids playing with matches? Or was it mice that ate through the electric wires, so it's an act of nature?' The thing is the house is on fire, so you put the fire out and then if you're really interested in assigning blame then you can do that later. It's so sad, so deeply sad to me that an issue like this which threatens all of humankind has been turned into a political football by people with really no imagination, and they represent an abrogation of serious responsibility to other human beings.

Ramona Koval: Are you optimistic?

Barry Lopez: No. I used to say that I wasn't optimistic but I was hopeful. Actually in the last few months I've realised that hope for me is a kind of place-holder, that the thing that's really bright for me now is...I use another word and that's 'faith', and I don't mean anything religious by that. It's a faith in other women and men I've met all over the world who are full of compassion for all of us and are activists in one area or another, and these people are working day and night to take care of all of the rest of us. Most of them don't have anything to do with government.

So, am I optimistic? No, but I must tell you I've seen some of the worst, the most God-awful things in the world, and I have not lost my faith in the spirit and strength and courage of the women and men I've met around the world. We're going to do something, it will be hard, but we're going to do something and we'll be all right.

Ramona Koval: We've got our fingers crossed. Barry Lopez, thank you so much for being on The Book Show again today.

Barry Lopez: Thank you Ramona.

Ramona Koval: Barry Lopez's latest book, the one we started talking about, is called Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, it's edited by Barry Lopez and his wife Debra Gwartney, it's published by Trinity.

Publications

Title: Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

Author: edited by Debra Gwartney and Barry Lopez

Publisher: Trinity