I’m not sure John Steffler’s book Forty-One Pages: On Poetry, Language and Wilderness really belongs as part of this project. It’s a collection of essays and poems and fragments of thought on a variety of topics; I am primarily interested in Steffler’s thinking about what he calls “wilderness,” though, and perhaps, for that reason, it fits here. I honestly don’t know. I read the book between sessions at a conference I was at earlier this month, and my notes are, to say the least, cryptic. And Steffler’s arguments are complex; I doubt I’ll be able to do them justice. Nevertheless, I’ll try to make something out of his book. Perhaps by writing about it, I’ll come to know whether it’s actually part of this project or not.

In part, this is a a book about writing, about the blank page: “The page is a performance space,” Steffler writes. “It is an area framed by expectation and practiced conjecture: a ritual space, a forum for appearances and disappearances” (2). When we write, he continues, “[w]e speak to someone or something absent. We detach our words, our intentions, from ourselves and send them out of leave them to be found. We hunt inside ourselves, watch for a birth in language on an inner page and give a performance in words” (2). “[A]t the heart of literature,” he argues, is 

a speaking to someone or something absent or distant. This involves a faith in space and time and perhaps a belief in fate or destiny: that the message (the information, the thought, the wish) that has been sent or left will travel or wait unchanged, intact, and meet with its intended recipient at some future time. This is clearly at work in a letter or a prayer but also in every poem, story and song, every diary entry and tombstone inscription. (2)

Steffler’s meditations on writing, on the page, almost immediately shift to thoughts about language and the effect his own language, English, has on his thinking and on the culture he is part of, and those thoughts bring him to what I think is his primary concern, the relationship between our culture, and ourselves, and what he thinks of as “wilderness”:

I must say here that as time has passed I have come to think of the shared vision or world view implied in my language (and in what I know of a few other Western or Indo-European languages) as being based on a kind of delusion, a delusion of human species pre-eminence, of human world-ownership, of the world being naturally organized into an agreed-upon sphere of recognized entities like the furnishings of a vast human home—with the sky, stars, Earth, and all its creatures and materials labelled and arranged like theatre props around the central human actors, and notions of time, causation, ownership, hierarchy, and personhood embedded in the rules and mechanics of grammar. I think of my language as both a brilliant technology—a rich tool for expression and for knowing the world—and as a kind of brainwashing it is good to question. (14)

“Key assumptions rooted in Western tradition and encoded in my native language have led to the wide-ranging extirpation of plant and animal species, the unsustainable degradation of the planet’s environment, and the assimilation, homogenization and destruction of divergent local human cultures,” Steffler continues. “What seems to be at work in the world—especially in the post-Enlightenment, Western world—is a massive objectification of its many beings, a depersonalization of nature” (14-15). 

Steffler’s assumption is that “human language reflects and in turn shapes a culture’s world view” (15). Language, he writes, 

is a technology we carry with us for processing experience, and in writing, in giving words visual form and fixing them on a solid surface, we capture experience and record it. That’s obvious. The intention to write is in some ways similar to the intention to take photographs. It stimulates close observation, analysis, a search for patterns, relationships and processes—meaning, resonance—in the world around us and in our lives and our relationships with others. (15-16)

However, “in cultures like the one that dominates twenty-first century North America, language as a means of perceiving and knowing is in some ways restrictive,” he contends. “Words often function like line drawings. They isolate and demarcate things. With cultural reinforcement, they can invent things and set boundaries between one thing and another, while the unnamed world remains a phenomenal wave or totality without distinct or permanent inner or outer edges” (16). That “unnamed world”—a world outside of language—is what Steffler means when he writes about “wilderness.”

Despite his suspicion of language—or the effects that our language has on our understanding of the world—Steffler suggests that certain forms of language, such as poetry, can allow us to grasp that “unnamed world”:

Words—even in contemporary English—can be used to speak of the world experienced as an integrated body, a wholeness, or perhaps as a current of energy inhabiting all phenomena simultaneously. Poetry often attempts to speak of or allude to aspects of reality experienced in this way. . . . Poetry uses language to re-integrate or fuse experience into currents or waves of perception and understanding, to offer multiple meanings, ambiguities and contradictions as familiar significant phenomena. (16-17)

Since Steffler is a poet, his belief in poetry is not surprising. In contrast to poetry, he suggests, “contemporary English in its normal (non-poetic) use as a technology for analyzing and knowing the world brings with it built-in assumptions, habits and purposes. It channels experience. It inclines us to value some phenomena more than others. I suspect that in its twenty-first-century North American form it is blind, or nearly blind, to much of the universe” (17). That blindness troubles him deeply, and I would argue that his sense of unease with the effects contemporary English has on our understanding of the universe is the core of this book.

Steffler suggests that some languages are not “as noun-heavy as Indo-European languages,” although in his experience of language, 

the act of naming things seems to arrest or slow down the action of time and break the ever-changing flow of phenomena into separate enduring entities—an array of stereotypes—and thereby foreground space, making spatial continuity the platform of our idea of the world and time and ungraspable abstraction. We—in the culture I’ve inherited—live in the instant between past and future, but we can’t figure out how. We insist that the present fills available space and only gradually becomes history. (17)

“Named things, with reinforcement from anthropocentric culture,” he continues, “can come to seem like discrete concrete entities whose interactions can be imagined mechanistically in a billiard-ball-like chain of causal encounters rather than as connected things, as changing aspects of an integrated continuous process” (17). That sense of separation, that illusion of linear causality, is one of the metaphorical violences language effects on our understanding of the world.

Steffler is concerned with the link between that metaphorical violence and the destruction our culture is wreaking on the natural world. He notes that the biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his book Half-Earth, argues that “the only way to avoid environmental collapse and a catastrophic loss of biodiversity is to set aside roughly half the Earth as unimpaired wilderness” (24). That suggestion, Steffler notes, puts Wilson at odds with the biologists who see the Anthropocene “as a natural outcome of humanity’s evolutionary success and accept it as a new geological epoch in which wilderness will cease to exist” (24). “Wilson rejects the idea that humanity has either the wisdom or the right to henceforth treat the entire Earth as its farm and to continue exterminating nuisance or useless species and engineering new life forms to suit human needs,” Steffler continues, noting that Wilson refers to the Anthropocene as the Sixth Extinction (24). For Steffler, the concept of Half-Earth “is easy to grasp but at the same time so radical, so disruptive, that it fills the mind with wild surmise. How could we carry out such an enterprise? What changes would we have to make in our way of thinking to make such a thing possible? These questions have become a through-line in my thinking” (25).

Steffler tries to imagine how other cultures might relate to the natural world in a way that doesn’t create mass extinctions. “To imagine extending a degree of personhood to creatures, places and features in the natural world, to imagine respecting their mystery and otherness, their living character, and feeling a degree of kinship with them is, I think, to have a glimpse of precisely what is involved in the animist world view,” he suggests (36). That world view, he continues, 

was common everywhere prior to the monotheistic-scientific-industrial eras and thus can suggest ways to transform our idea of wilderness and its value to us. Honouring the otherness and mystery of the natural world is no more fraught with ignorance and superstition than honouring the otherness and mystery of our fellow humans. A new appreciation for nature’s sacred rights seems to be needed, since scientific data alone are not persuading us to curb our exploitation of the Earth.  (36)

Wilson’s notion of Half-Earth, Steffler continues, by setting “aside half the Earth as a sacred wilderness,” would make the planet “seem infinite” (36). “In the imagination, the presence of unknown territory is the spatial equivalent of unspent time—a future before us, which, to be the future, must be unknown,” he argues. “To trust that the Earth holds a treasure of undomesticated wilderness is to feel that we have before us an endless store of life” (36).

That word “wilderness” is, as I’ve suggested, at the heart of this book. Wilderness exists beyond language and culture, and so it can only be experienced directly:

In thinking about the limitations of language in relation to wilderness, I am thinking of the experience of wilderness. Since wilderness, as I define it, is outside culture and since language is inseparable from culture, wilderness, if it can be experienced directly and immediately, must be experienced wordlessly, non-conceptually, non-categorically. But few people apart from mystics, artists, spiritual practitioners, some deep ecologists and shamans will ever want a direct experience of wilderness. The closest most of us will ever get is likely our first months of life . . . bouts of madness or near-madness, maybe great beauty, maybe sexual rapture, maybe serious disease or accident, maybe the experience of dying if we’re conscious for any of it. (61)

I’m not sure such an appreciation is possible, or that it is anything more than a Romantic fantasy. Steffler’s words here remind me of Robert Graves’s poem “The Cool Web,”  which, like Steffler’s argument here, posits a rupture between language and a direct experience of the world. Moreover, Indigenous people have language and culture, and yet their understanding or experience of the natural world is different from that of post-Enlightenment Western capitalist modernity, as Steffler acknowledges. And yet this sense that it is possible to experience the world without language is something Steffler returns to repeatedly in the book.

That non-linguistic experience of the world is one thing; to set half the planet aside as a nature reserve would necessarily require language:

The appreciation of wild nature and the commitment to practical measures for preserving and restoring tracts of wilderness are another matter. Here language is involved in an essential way because fostering areas of wild nature in the midst of a domesticated environment is a cultural undertaking. And it’s not just that language is needed in order to work out the political, economic, legal and organizational logistics of setting aside wildlife reserves or preserving wetlands and woodlots, or indeed to work out whether reserves should be created when these disenfranchise people who depend on access to those lands for subsistence or for maintaining a traditional way of life. There is a relationship between an enriched enjoyment of language and an enriched appreciation for the complex living reality of the natural world as both a sensory experience and a body of knowledge and ideas, a web of narratives. (61)

Without realizing it, Steffler has touched upon one of the problems with Wilson’s proposal: it would very likely exclude Indigenous peoples from the reserves he proposes, the way that they were evicted from lands that later became national parks in Canada. That’s the problem with thinking about “wilderness” as something without language, and therefore without human connections or habitations: we come to think of wilderness as defined by an absence of human activity, when for most of our species’s history, traditional cultures functioned as stewards and managers of ecosystems in important and nuanced ways.

That notion of “a web of narratives” leads Steffler into a discussion of writing about nature, or environmental literature. This genre begins with Thoreau; other examples include Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, and Canadian poets (Robert Bringhurst, Louise Halfe, Tim Lilburn, Don McKay, Jan Zwicky) (61-62). He also cites Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks and Paul Evans’s Field Notes from the Edge as examples. English nature writers particularly interest Steffler, because they tend to focus on the connection between language and environmental restoration, perhaps because “England has for a long time been a largely domesticated landscape,” in comparison to North America (62). That discussion leads to a brief analysis of Margaret Atwood’s poem “The Animals in that Country.” That poem’s distinction between the anthropomorphized animals of “that country” (Europe) and the unknown animals of this one (Canada) fascinates and I think troubles Steffler. He notes, correctly, that the “this country” of the poem, the one in which animals are merely glimpsed from behind the windshield of a vehicle travelling down a dark highway, is not a geographical space but rather a cultural one. “If I were not travelling so fast in this car,” he writes, 

if I were to stop and get out and grope my way into the roadside woods and sit and wait until my eyes got used to the dark, things would look different. If the animal passed close to me here I would probably be briefly frightened, at least surprised, as the animal also would be, seeing me here unexpectedly. But I might be able to say what kind of animal it is. (65)

In the same way, spending a lifetime in that forest would likely mean he would come to know the animal “in familiar detail,” from “encounters, stories, legends, from a whole web of shared knowledge” (65). According to Steffler,

seeing nature as unalterably alien and nameless can produce a culture that diverges further and further from its natural environment, a culture that evolves an ever thicker artificial shell and directs its energies into escapist fantasies. This seems to be what’s happening now, not only in “this country” but throughout Western civilization. We strive for a technological utopia while our efforts are destroying the natural environment on which our survival depends. (67)

Our culture as a whole needs to get out of the car and walk into the woods, in other words. That’s one of the reasons walking interests me: it’s a way to come to know the world that’s in a much deeper way than our typical modes of transportation allow.

Thinking along these lines brings Steffler to a consideration of Indigenous people and Canada’s ongoing colonial behaviour. “There is a convention among non-Indigenous writers in Canada—if they wish to avoid controversy—to write little or nothing about Indigenous people and issues,” he notes, “unless the writers are working alongside Indigenous people on matters such as treaty rights, land claims and the legacy of residential schools, or unless they have been accepted into an Indigenous community and can write of shared experience rather than as outside observers” (69). As a result, “many non-Indigenous writers choose to keep silent about the presence of Indigenous people in Canadian history, territory and culture” (69). “But it seems to me,” he continues, 

that it would show wilful ignorance or at least complacent naivety for me to go on thinking about the relationship between wilderness on the page and the role of wilderness in the dominant culture of this continent . . . without recognizing that I’ve entered other people’s home, that there are people whose ancestors have lived in this landscape for thousands of years and who no doubt think of it and know it in ways that are very different from mine, who probably don’t see it as wilderness in the way I do, who probably see it imbued with a history very different from the one I am capable of imagining. (69)

That might be true, but it also ignores the long history of colonial practices of misunderstanding and misrepresenting Indigenous peoples. Perhaps it would be better simply to attend to Indigenous voices, something he suggests in the very next paragraph:

I believe that being overly discreet and shy about Indigenous issues only serves to further marginalize Indigenous people and, perhaps most significantly—since there is an increasing number of Indigenous writers speaking eloquently for their communities and themselves—it serves to allow colonizers’ descendants to avoid taking an honest, responsible look at their history—it’s my own—and how those colonizers came to occupy and use territory the way they did. How their descendants still do. (70)

This section of the book is suffused with regret and shame at the history Steffler (and all settlers and descendants of settlers in this country) have inherited:

My ancestors should have sought to join and merge with the people who lived here authentically, who had drawn their identity from thousands of years of intimate knowledge of this land. Instead they scorned them or disregarded them or feared them and pushed them aside. So, I have inherited the land as ‘raw nature.’ The history I learned to read here is the history of geology and biology. On top of that is the recent history of industry, mining, roads, power lines, logging, and farming. (72)

The realities of power and racism prevented settlers from joining with the people who lived here, of course, and yet Steffler argues that even though they have been evicted, the presence of those original inhabitants remains:

Where I live the old forests have been cleared and have partly grown back. The long-time first human inhabitants were evicted. There is nothing left of them that I can see. And yet their absence and their accumulated lives are here all the time. It is something general, something nameless I experience as I walk in the woods. Perhaps they have left everything of themselves in what I see. (72)

At this point, I think that Steffler acknowledges the contradictions in his definition of “wilderness,” if only obliquely, and the problems in thinking about the land as something beyond language: “I want the land in itself to remain beyond names, unknown, eternal, bound to survive human stupidity; and yet I wish I could say it is as deeply my home as the home of the Anishinaabe” (72). The Anishinaabe, of course, understood the land through language and culture as well as through experience, or rather, their experience of the land was shaped through their language and culture. Why, then, ask the land to remain something unknown, beyond language? 

The land cannot be his home the way it was (or is) the home of the Anishinaabe because of the failure of settler mythologies:

What mythology did I inherit from my elders and surrounding culture? What narratives coloured the weather and landscape around me? I didn’t learn about Biboon and the Memegwesi as a child. I didn’t glimpse Artemis in the Ontario forest or sense Apollo in the sky. What I inherited was a combination of scientific materialism and generic Christianity. The scientific materialism taught that there is an infinite complex of physical systems at work all around in both animate and inanimate things—systems to learn about, admire and manipulate—and that every event and phenomenon is the result of explicable physical causes. Christianity taught that this is all charged with divinity and also moral meaning because it is God’s Creation within which humanity is being judged. The potential tension and incompatibility between the scientific and religious elements of this mythology were politely ignored. (73)

I posted part of that quotation on Facebook when I read it, because I think there’s something quite true in it, and I think that it helps to explain why settlers appropriate Indigenous stories and myths: it’s because they need them in order to indigenize themselves, in order to imagine themselves as belonging here. Immediately someone responded, suggesting that there are many mythologies (from Star Wars to Marvel comics) one can take on. I think that response missed the point: those narratives are, to say the least, shallow and inconsequential (sorry Star Wars fans) and they cannot give someone like Steffler the sense of rootedness he is searching for. That rootedness is only available in Indigenous narratives, and yet those stories are off-limits because they do not belong to descendants of settlers. Had settlers actually joined with the people they found in this land when they arrived, of course, the situation would be very different. Perhaps Steffler’s sense of being rootless is one of the many consequences of the form of colonialism we continue to perpetrate.

“In any case,” Steffler continues, it soon seemed to me that what I valued most in the natural world was wilderness, its fierce and mysterious nonhuman otherness”: 

I disliked hearing nature tamed in human narratives. I did not want to channel or ritualize my response to the seasons, to the rising and setting sun, to the stars or to anything in nature through reference to Christ or Persephone or any mythic figures. I wanted a more direct encounter with—a respect for—the things themselves, more in animistic than scientific terms. I wanted to let myself respond to trees beyond their names, beyond what I think I know of them, sensing them extended through space and time joined with other life forms and elements we normally think of as separate. 

Why this push into wilderness, this distrust of culture? Perhaps because I am stranded between cultures here. Or I am ashamed of my culture because of the harm it has done. (74)

But even that animistic encounter would necessarily be through language—perhaps through an Indigenous language, and I think Steffler realizes that:

Most of the Indigenous languages that evolved in this landscape and contain the legacy of human life here are spoken, if at all, but a minority of the country’s current population. It’s deeply encouraging that an Indigenous cultural resurgence is now underway, with the result that many Indigenous languages are being restored to active use. (81)

Nevertheless, those languages are, Steffler feels, unavailable to him, and his own language, English, is compromised by its history:

My language, English, is a deeply encoded history on a transparent sheet that has been slid across this landscape and continent after the old voices were silenced or went underground. There is little direct connection between my language and what lies beneath it. I am looking down into the depth of the land and the past as though from inside a glass-bottomed boat. 

I have to bore holes into that glass bottom, let the land, weather and old ghosts into the English-Canadian boat. I have to sink the boat, dissolve its hull, make English not English, make my words—ancient words rooted in Europe and the Middle East and all the people who have moved through that world—open containers, hollow my words so they can hold scoops of the world here, so that my language will register as English, be understood by all the English speakers, and yet be something else inside, the language of this place. (81)

I think what Steffler is describing here is a form of poetic language that can somehow transcend the colonial history of English and reach towards some kind of authentic “language of this place.” Of course, such languages already exist, as Steffler notes. However, he writes,

I have not learned Ojibwe; I have not even tried. Perhaps I’ve not done so out of fear of being rebuffed by the Anishinaabe or because I’m afraid of being accused of cultural appropriation. I value the few Indigenous words and place names I know. They feel like links to an underlying reality, to the deep land here, to its human history and perhaps to its authentic future. (81-82)

From my experience learning (or trying to learn) Plains Cree, I doubt that Steffler’s fears have any bearing in reality. Nevertheless, if he’s like me, Steffler would be unlikely to achieve any kind of fluency in Ojibwe. What he might learn, though, is something about the connection between that language and the land, and he might begin to put away his desire for a direct, non-linguistic connection to the land, along with (perhaps) the word “wilderness.”

Despite his sense that his connection to the land is inauthentic, Steffler does argue that he has a relationship with it:“although the land I live on is stolen land, land my ancestors barged into, I do have a deep relationship with it. It is the substance of my mind. Its life, its presence, is seamlessly part of my own life. The exchange is like breathing. The communication is much more ancient than words” (82). Nevertheless, he continues, 

I imagine there is a depth of experience, a richness of understanding, that comes only from having an intricate inherited relationship to a place, from having a sense of a history and ancestry that are palpably local, and from having a similar sense that one’s language is the creation of one’s people, their specific language, born from their interaction with the still-present, familiar, immediate world. (82)

That kind of relationship would be very different from the desire of Western culture to try to control things, a desire that is constantly subverted by wilderness, which “not only surrounds our culture; it invades it. Where we discover the things we’ve made are out of control or breaking down is a place where wilderness begins” (85). Our bodies, because they can’t be entirely controlled, are part of wilderness, as are our unconscious minds, our creativity, desires, and impulses (86). “In many ways we are still mysteries to ourselves,” Steffler writes (86).

“My guess is that if your gods are animals or part-human-part-animal you do not see yourself as essentially or entirely distinct from other creatures,” he continues (86). I think Steffler is on to something there, and that sentence made me think about the Cree and Saulteaux stories I’ve read, and their strangeness compared to the English or European stories I’m used to. Perhaps in figures like the Elder Brother (there’s no snow on the ground so I’m not going to spell out his name) we see a connection between humans and other animals. But even though Steffler makes this suggestion, he also believes that 

we made ourselves human by rebelling against nature—by taking more for ourselves than nature offers our fellow creatures—but now it seems we can retain our humanity only by accepting nature—accepting limits to what we make of ourselves. Perhaps the essence of the human was always in the tension between our limitless longing and our mortality, in our need to come to terms with this mystery. Perhaps the difficult, necessary practice of reconciling our desires and imaginations with the natural limiting conditions of our lives gives us a dignity and a kind of majesty that our celebrated gods with their easy immortality can never match. (87)

Were Indigenous cultures engaged in that kind of rebellion against nature? I don’t think so. Weren’t they trying to live in harmony or relationship with the land? Isn’t Steffler describing the culture that grew up in Europe over the past thousand years and spread all over the planet like a virus?

Steffler continues to think about the notion that, in an “acultural state,” 

the experience of wilderness and the self’s experience of the world” would see the self being dispersed, having “its life in the surrounding phenomena as part of the environment, as part of a network of active creatures and elements. Experience then is not a matter of projecting emotions and values into external things but of actually participating in those things, being constituted by them. (99)

Of course, the notion of an “acultural state” is a fiction; all human societies have cultures, ways of looking at the world, languages. Nevertheless, Steffler wants to see both the differences between wilderness and ourselves, and to claim that poetry might be able to bridge those differences:

Wilderness is made up of constant movement, constant change, which means individual things dying that do not want to die and individual things being born that exult in being alive, and this constant combined process, this life made up of birth and death, is what the self embraces in wilderness, and its fierce energy and joy is what the poet can bring back to people bent over and focussed on the consequences of each gain and loss, on the reprieve and demands of each birth, the loss and opportunity of each death. The human heart wearies, gripping things like that. (100)

And yet, he continues to seek that non-linguistic or unmediated experience of the world:

No words, however beautiful, terrifying, surprising, or disorienting, can serve as a substitute for the unmediated experience of the real world any more than the virtual reality of the computer monitor or TV screen can substitute for raw reality. Language shapes our experience of reality but can’t replace it. We evolved in the natural world over millions of years. The energies and unconscious meaning we draw from being alive on the Earth are different from and more powerful than anything we get from an artificial symbolic system, however intimately our minds are aligned with it. (107)

I’m still convinced that this desire for “the unmediated experience of the real world” is a dead end and a mistake; all human cultures have language, and yet non-Western cultures have a fundamentally different (and, arguably, less destructive and more holistic) way of understanding or experiencing the world. Shouldn’t Steffler be more interested in learning from those cultures than in seeking something that he’s not going to find?

So, does Forty-One Pages: On Poetry, Language and Wilderness belong in this project? I’m still not sure. I think it might, if only because it’s an example of a descendant of settlers trying to come to terms what that means. My larger project, too, is going to be an attempt to understand what it means to be a descendant of settlers living on Treaty 4 territory in southern Saskatchewan. And yet, I do think that the term “wilderness” and the desire Steffler has for an experience of the world unmediated by language is a false start. It would be better, I think, for him to overcome his fears and learn a little Ojibwe, even if he’s never fluent enough to write poetry in that language. Perhaps I’m being too hard on Steffler; perhaps his desire for experience unmediated by language is connected to his desire to make poetry that captures, paradoxically, non-linguistic experience in language. That’s a possibility. I’m not sure.

Work Cited

 Steffler, John. Forty-One Pages: On Poetry, Language and Wilderness, University of Regina Press, 2019.