Ed. note: This post is an excerpt from Stagtine, written by Daniel Firth Griffith. You can find out more about the book and kincentric rewilding here.
Introduction
I AM
I have a story to tell you. But first an introduction, something I think you will find useful on the journey ahead but also something that I give you permission to skip entirely if that is your flavor.
What you hold in your hands is a record of the land and its fourlegged cousins speaking to us. A journal of their gifts, a schoolboy’s scribbled attempt to recount their tutelage. It can be read as an undomesticated memoir or a mystic fable, that is your choice.
Where you place it on your library shelf is also your choice. It can be cordial to the likes of Tolkien, Livy, and Doerr, their stories and linguistic prominences wrapping, like a fine gift, the deeper narratives of change, or perhaps next to the lost druidic fires encircling the leaden story stones of The Mabinogion. If you have a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, perhaps you can place them together? Osmosis is a magical thing and the Brothers have so much to give.
Regardless, this tale is concerned with everything too small for industry, too humdrum for capitalism, and too localized to do any good in your environmental projects. If it does anything, I hope this work illumines who you already are and what you already know, awakening in you a fervor to meet cows like Paddy and Nelly and goats like Mara. Not me. God, what an awful waste that would be of the precious time you have left.
I only hope this memoir or fable or whatever you decide it to be carries their thoughts, their wisdoms, fine enough. It invites you to open your eyes, to look, to see life as they, at least, know it to be. This is not a paradigm-building book. This is a spell-breaking book. And I have a story to tell you.
The Nature of Wildness
In some general sense, stories are both grounded in and transported by characters. They are neat or untidy symbols that point to various aspects of ourselves or our world. They also wave to us, signaling to come, to look, to see, to inhabit their story, making it, slowly, our story. Closing the book, we awaken to new life, for the story that we thought was the book and its characters and its world now walk amongst us in ours. The veil between worlds is torn when we wake up. That is the power of story.
Of all the characters in this particular story, I submit “Wildness” as our faithful protagonist. She is, I believe, the autonomous acceptance of the basic conditions as they are. She is presentness. Many take possession of her spirit to describe that which lives over there or beyond that hedge or fence. If you follow their path, you will find yourself where you do not want to be. Stuck, forcibly but kindheartedly, in the muck and mire of her womb. Others capture her and force her to lead wilderness walks as if she can only be found if you pay her to guide you from your suburban and consumeristic lives. Wildness is who we become when we accept life as it is and not push for life as it could be. Wildness is found in the present and the autonomous acceptance of the magic that is here, in this moment, waiting for us. We will explore this idea at greater length throughout this book.
It is improper to leave this moment without observing the general hilarity that our language contains a word for wildness or wilderness. Like its synonym, the environment, wildness as a word is worthless in the truest sense, as it is worthless to describe the air as blue or a wafting white when we all know that it is not a color at all and every color at once. I use it in this book, alongside the term rewilding, of which I have the same opinions, painfully but purposefully to bring us together and not because I like it. One day, we will call this “life” and that will be good enough. Until then, “wildness” is here with us.
The Heart of Memory
Language is running away from us. Fewer and fewer approach the intimacies of philology or their fading realities with a cultivated sensitivity to the sensuous curvature of their characters, the deeply nuanced panoply of their lexicon, the demanding horsepower of their metaphor and story, and the daft draft that rhythm and rhyme, abaft in their craft, staff as they graft meaning with time.
Irish poet John O’Donohue wrote that words and their sounds erupt from the “mountain beneath the soul.” These sounds, these words, hold our world as the dark silence seeks echo. This resonance is memory. Language holds memory like the soul holds light and our words hold worlds. The heart of memory is the art of curiosity on time, like paint on canvas and caves. It lives in questions but it may only live in time.
But even ghosts grow tired. Deep in the entrails of earth there is a strange loneliness. Not because nothing is there but because someone used to be there, alive and furtive, and now is not there and their loneliness is felt in the vacuum. Kincentric rewilding, what we will soon learn about together, is the daily habit of challenging the myth of progress, of “information glut,” as Neil Postman put it, in tool form.1 But it cannot be the art of going back. Going back is trying to resuscitate that which memory was and not enlivening that which memory is, today. Memory walks forward, like language. “Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds,” writes novelist Anthony Doerr. And these worlds are resting places for memory, a home for those whose souls have passed but also those whose work is not yet done. We are the dreams of our ancestors. And, in some general way, memory is the carrying of our lives with us as both ours and also them who have made us who we are. Memory is the dreams our grandchildren play in.
Rewilding, or what I present as kincentric rewilding, is the awakening of memory, the rising together into ancient dreams as a collective memoir of individuals and not just a collective, like loving letters cast carefully in crafted words within the most wonderfully magical sentences.
