2. Whitman 1 Introduction

2.5 Nature Mysticism

Postponing for a good while yet a closer look at Whitman's unique embraciveness, we turn now to the general consideration of what nature mysticism might entail. Any label on mysticism is misleading because PCM postulates that mystic union must at root be the same state for each mystic, but as a label on a particular form of embraciveness it might be useful. An Englishman, Richard Jefferies, is often referred to as a 'Nature Mystic', sometimes together with Whitman; Krishnamurti's notebooks, written through most of his life include frequent descriptions of nature, and opened my eyes in my twenties to nature in a way that no writer I had encountered up to then had been able to do — since then I have sought connections with mysticism and nature.

What in Whitman could be called a nature mystic? If you lose your identity to the universe, or somehow expand to be the universe, then you embrace nature, and I would suggest that nature can be of a special significance to the mystic, though obviously this depends on temperament. It will not usually be part of the mystic's life who follows via negativa, or generally of those with a renunciative emphasis, though we must be wary of these distinctions. In Leaves, Whitman's celebration is so comprehensive, and so inclusive of man's arts and industries, that nature, in the modern sense of being in opposition to industrial and urban life, does not stand out. It is a comment of his to Bucke that gives us an interesting insight into his attitude to writing on nature (Bucke had suggested writing about a magnificent waterfall):
"All such things need to be at least the third or fourth remove; in itself it would be too much for nine out of ten readers. Very few care for natural objects themselves, rocks, rain, hail, wild animals, tangled forests, weeds, mud, common Nature. They want her in a shape fit for reading about in a rocking-chair, or as ornaments in china, marble or bronze. The real things are, far more than they would own, disgusting, revolting to them." Whitman adds: "This may be a reason of the dislike of Leaves of Grass by the majority."⁴⁹
In Leaves the descriptions of nature are often in the form of lists, but effective in spite of that. There is a prose description in Specimen Days that perhaps comes closest to telling us how Whitman really sees nature:
1 September: I should not take either the biggest or the most picturesque tree to illustrate it. Here is one of my favorite now before me, a fine yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps ninety feet high, and four feet thick at the butt. How strong, vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity in all weathers, this gusty-tempered little whiffet, man, that runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But, if they don't, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons — or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. ('Cut this out,' as the quack mediciners say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of these voiceless companions and read the foregoing, and think.

One lesson from affiliating a tree — perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherencey, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse — what more general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude towards each other, (even towards ourselves,) than morbid trouble about seems, (generally temporarily seems too,) and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about the sane slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character, books, friendship, marriage — humanity's invisible foundations and hold-together? (As the all-basis, the nerve, the great sympathetic, the plenum within humanity, giving stamp to everything, is necessarily invisible.) ⁵⁰

As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning walk,

I have seen where the she-bird the mocking-bird sat on her nest in the briers hatching her brood.
I have seen the he-bird also,

I have paus'd to hear him at hand inflating his throat and joyfully singing.

Not for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes,

But subtle, clandestine, away beyond,

A charge transmitted and gift occult for those being born.

('Starting from Paumanok' v. 11)
I am usually wary of the term 'occult', as mentioned before, but in this instance I like it, and sympathise with it. I also find in the song of birds, when I am in a receptive mood, something that I cannot find a word for, it is so delightful and evoking, but would accept the word 'occult' to describe it, or any part of nature when I am receptive. Have you ever been in the middle of a field of maize (corn) in summer? The march of rows of these eight-foot plants in all directions with their short aerial roots at the base of their thickened stems is extraordinary, perhaps 'occult', as are many plants and animals if you look at them as if for the first time, without the deadening of familiarity.

Richard Jefferies takes the 'alien' nature of Nature a step further, as we shall see. He was a contemporary of Whitman, though born in 1848 when Whitman was already thirty-one; he died young, five years before Whitman, in 1887. He was born in England, the son of a farmer struggling against the industrial age (Bucke too was born in England to a farming family, in 1837), and was a journalist and writer by profession, much as Whitman. That he is considered as a mystic is due to his book The Story of My Heart⁵², which was published in 1883 (about the same time as Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Bucke's biography of Whitman). The Story of My Heart is as unique and different from the rest of the world's mystical literature as the Tao Teh Ching, or Leaves of Grass. At times there is an extraordinary parallel with Whitman, and at other times he seems to say the opposite. Jefferies' love of nature runs along the same stream as Whitman's thoughts in 'The Lesson of a Tree', only he describes his raptures at greater length, and in terms of the empowering of his 'soul life'. Again and again he describes how he seeks solitary moments away from his family and work, and climbs a local hill, or seeks the sea, and strides across the human-remote countryside or beach in order to wrest the nourishment for his soul-life from nature; or he lies under a tree or by a brook and stares up at the sky and lets it fill him. His book is a careful prose, and in great contrast to Whitman's free verse, but he sings of nature, and, oddly for a Victorian Englishman, the body too:

Where Whitman is at pains to praise the body and the soul equally, letting neither 'abase' itself before the other, Jefferies is quite sure that the soul is higher, more important, and that the soul or the spirit is entirely lacking in nature, in the rocks, trees and sky, where Whitman sees 'God's handkerchief 'dropped at every corner. Jefferies goes further: he comments on the immense inhospitability of nature, the very sun that sends him into raptures burns and kills, the very sea is an undrinkable poison. It is a baffling contrast to Whitman at first, and is not easily resolvable; however we can leave it for now as a mark of the genuine expression of a mystic: that it is unique, and will not agree with another's tale of the ultimate. We can also find references in his book to having lived a hard life; one has the impression that he was as poor as Whitman, and as unpractised in economics, but his situation was worse, for he had a wife and children to support. The sheer hardness of extracting a living in Victorian England for a man so averse to the material spirit of that age may have found expression in his views on the in-humanness of nature: he even mentions all the hideous sea creatures, and finds dogs and horses alien to him. Yet his soul is never so uplifted as under a tree! Or by the sky or sea; rarely can you find such an extensive and sensitive relaying of a rapture with nature.

I don't agree with Jefferies about the alien and hostile nature of our environment — it is not even a question of agreeing or not, but of emphasis. He had his reasons for his emphasis; my emphasis is different, for different reasons. Firstly, I have dim recollections of previous existences as animals, and secondly, if you take a dog or a cat, it is the similarities with us that strike me all the time: if you leave out the intellectual, their emotional life has so much in common with us. As to the overall indifference of nature and human commerce to the individual: Jefferies overlooks our interdependence — in primitive times an instinctive cooperation with each other and the rhythms of nature ensured survival; in present times this translates into our technologically-based distribution of skills and activities that make it possible, for example, to buy a sandwich and cup of tea in a café. I don't know how to grow wheat, how to grind it and make it into bread, I cannot build lorries for its transport, bend huge pieces of steel for the chassis or cast metals for engine parts, weld and rivet the bodywork; I don't know how to grow tea, make ships for its transport, or extract gas from the earth to boil my water; I don't know how to milk a cow, or to grow sugar cane, or even what sugar cane looks like. I happen to know a little bit about computers; but even then it is probably humanly impossible to understand one totally, from the quantum theory of n- and p-type semiconductors in the chips, to logic gates, to chip manufacture, to software, to hardware to the making of plastic for the cases. So when the cashier uses a computer to bill me for my lunch in the café he or she may be in awe of someone who 'understands' this technology, but I am in awe of my sandwich and drink, or rather, how it got there. This interdependence that makes the simple acts of our lives possible, is to me a miracle that lifts my soul, as much as the beauty of a tree, or the so expressive curve of a limb. Jefferies is too much of a loner to see this, and perhaps for this reason sees Nature as inhospitable. But, I am not attacking Jefferies in the slightest: he has given us something quite unique in his Story, and if he were with me now perhaps he would like my views on interdependence, and perhaps he wouldn't. He was certainly at a loss to the human bustle and apparent purposelessness of the great throng of people viewed from the steps of the Royal Exchange in Victorian London, and rails against the work-ethic that prevented people from having time to reflect and be with nature (he shared this with both Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau).

Jefferies presents us with contradictions — so much the better! But in his attitude to the eternal, he is quite classical in his discoveries, and unusually honest in admitting that he doesn't know what happens after death. He knows that this moment is eternal however; he is not worried that death may dissolve him completely, body and soul, for all of that is not now. In the following passage he is lying on the grass by a tumulus, the burial-place of a warrior of some two thousand years previous:

I dip my hand in the brook and feel the stream; in an instant the particles of water which first touched me have floated yards down the current, my hand remains there. I take my hand away, and the flow — the time — of the brook does not exist for me. The great clock of the firmament, the sun and the stars, the crescent moon, the earth circling two thousand times, is no more to me than the flow of the brook when my hand is withdrawn; my soul has never been, and never can be, dipped in time.⁵⁵

Krishnamurti on the other hand, universally known as a teacher, is rarely considered a nature mystic despite the fact that this dimension of him is often noticeable. His obstinate refusal to adopt poetic terms or traditional Hindu terms (thought he knew them) gave his message an unusual strength, but the beauty in Krishnamurti's writings comes from his serenity of mind, and never more so than when he wrote about nature. Perhaps the best of his many 'notebooks' is The Only Revolution, which introduces each section with keenly observed natural scenes, though not observed in the way that a naturalist would. Here are some examples:

The two big owls, calling to each other, never disturbed that silence, and a distant dog barking at the late moon was part of this immensity. The dew was especially heavy, and as the sun came up over the hill it was sparkling with many colours and with the glow that comes with the sun's first rays.

The delicate leaves of the jacaranda were heavy with dew, and birds came to have their morning baths, fluttering their wings so the dew on those delicate leaves filled their feathers. The crows were particularly persistent; they would hop from one branch to another, pushing their heads through the leaves, fluttering their wings, and preening themselves. There were about half-a-dozen of them on that one heavy branch, and there were many other birds, scattered all over the tree, taking their morning bath.

And this silence spread, and seemed to go beyond the hills. There were the usual noises of children shouting, and laughter; and the farm began to wake up.

It was going to be a cool day, and now the hills were taking on the light of the sun. They were very old hills — probably the oldest in the world — with oddly shaped rocks that seemed to be carved out with great care, balanced one on top of the other; but no wind or touch could loosen them from this balance.

It was a valley far removed from towns, and the road through it led to another village. The road was rough and there were no cars or buses to disturb the ancient quietness of this valley. There were bullock carts, but their movement was a part of the hills. There was a dry river bed that only flowed with water after heavy rains, and the colour was a mixture of red, yellow and brown; and it, too, seemed to move with the hills. And the villagers who walked silently by were like the rocks.

The day wore on and towards the end of the evening, as the sun was setting over the western hills, the silence came in from afar, over the hills, through the trees, covering the little bushes and the ancient banyan. And as the stars became brilliant, so the silence grew into great intensity; you could hardly bear it.

The little lamps of the village were put out, and with sleep the intensity of that silence grew deeper, wider and incredibly over-powering. Even the hills became more quiet, for they, too, had stopped their whisperings, their movement, and seemed to lose their immense weight.⁵⁶

Almost all the tables were taken by people talking very loudly and laughing. At a table nearby a woman was surreptitiously feeding her dog with the meat she could not eat. They all seemed to have huge helpings, and it was not a pleasant sight to see people eating; perhaps it may be barbarous to eat publicly. A man across the room had filled himself with wine and meat and was just lighting a big cigar, and a look of beatitude came over his fat face. His equally fat wife lit a cigarette. Both of them appeared to be lost to the world.

And there they were, the yellow daffodils, and nobody seemed to care. They were there for decorative purposes that had no meaning at all; and as you watched them their yellow brilliance filled the noisy room. Colour has this strange effect upon the eye. It wasn't so much that the eye absorbed the colour, as that the colour seemed to fill your being. You were that colour; you didn't become that colour — you were of it, without identification or name: the anonymity which is innocence. Where there is no anonymity there is violence, in all its different forms.

But you forgot the world, the smoke-filled room, the cruelty of man, and the red, ugly meat; those shapely daffodils seemed to take you beyond all time.

Love is like that. In it there in no time, space or identity. It is the identity that breeds pleasure and pain; it is the identity that brings hate and war and builds a wall around people, around each one, each family and community. Man reaches over the wall to the other man — but he too is enclosed; morality is a word that bridges the two, and so it becomes ugly and vain.

Love isn't like that; it is like the wood across the way, always renewing itself because it is always dying. There is no permanency in it, which thought seeks; it is a movement which thought can never understand, touch or feel. The feeling of thought and the feeling of love are two different things; the one leads to bondage and the other to the flowering of goodness. The flowering is not within the area of any society, of any culture or of any religion, whereas the bondage belongs to all societies, religious beliefs and faiths in otherness. Love is anonymous, therefore not violent. Pleasure is violent, for desire and will are moving factors in it. Love cannot be begotten by thought, or by good works. The denial of the total process of thought becomes the beauty of action which is love. Without this there is no bliss of truth.

And over there, on that table, were the daffodils. (page 145)
This is vintage Krishnamurti, and not primarily a description of nature, but is included because it shows many of his concerns and how he related them to nature. In the daffodils he 'forgot the world'; for Krishnamurti, more like Jefferies than like Whitman, was not the 'rough' type that allows for the common, coarse and good-natured. The following passage shows again Krishnamurti's sensitivity to nature (he is speaking to Asit Chandmal):
"Have you noticed, sir, " he said, "that when you enter a forest, for the first time there is a strange atmosphere, as if nature, the trees, do not want you to enter. You hesitate, and say 'It's alright,' and walk in quietly. The second day the resistance is less. And the third day it is gone."

I do not communicate with nature, and so this was something I had never discussed with Krishnamurti.⁵⁷

The charm of Huysman's creation is that it is so absurd that you have to laugh, and of course in the end, Des Essientes has to face his human bankruptcy, and retreat from his anal precipice. Literature will always abound with such creations; American Psycho is a similar caricature of the man who has everything and knows everything on the subject of food, etiquette, music, and dress-code, and who seeks an impossible and outrageous final solution. This modern inheritor of Des Essientes' mantle doesn't even have to escape nature: there isn't any in his world to escape from.

More puzzling to us can be the attack on nature from those we might expect to love it. Lawrence surprised us earlier in his criticism of Whitman, perhaps just a peevish sort of appreciation in fact, it is hard to tell behind the ticking-off he delivers. Lawrence is the supposed champion of the sexual instincts and their spiritual dimension, and elsewhere he says that 'The Americans are not worthy of their Whitman'. It may be odder still to consider him as anti-nature, but consider his tirade against the soil in chapter nine of Studies in Classic American Literature, on Dana's Two Years Before The Mast. Lawrence is about to demolish the sea as a great source of expansion of a man's soul (remember that Whitman writes endlessly about the sea), but starts with mother earth. He says:
What happens when you idealize the soil, the mother-earth, and really go back to it? Then with overwhelming conviction it is borne in upon you, as it was upon Thomas Hardy, that the whole scheme of things is against you. The whole massive rolling of natural fate is coming down on you like a slow glacier, to crush you to extinction. As an idealist.

Thomas Hardy's pessimism is an absolutely true finding. It is the absolutely true statement of the idealist's last realization, as he wrestles with the bitter soil of the beloved mother-earth. He loves her, loves her, loves her. And she just entangles and crushes him like a slow Laocoön snake. The idealist must perish, says mother-earth. Then let him perish.

The great imaginative love of the soil itself! Tolstoy had it, and Thomas Hardy. And both are driven to a kind of fanatic denial of life, as a result.⁵⁸
In the first sentence of the above quote lies, perhaps, Lawrence's confusion. To idealise the soil is not the same as going back to it. Certainly, to go back to it in the sense of growing your own food, curing your own leather and heating with wood you chop yourself, may crush you; maybe you will die in the attempt like the hero in Jean de Florette, but that is not the same as to idealise it. And certainly not the same thing as to love it, in the way that Whitman, Jefferies, and Krishnamurti do. Love expands, it does not crush or drive you to a fanatic denial of life. Poor Lawrence. One wonders if one could substitute 'women' for 'nature' in the above passage, and extend this analysis to the whole of his works. Perhaps Studies in Classic American Literature was just written in one of Lawrence's off-periods. I suspect that at the heart of Lawrence's attack on Whitman is the concept of otherness (I am not sure where it originates, but it is important for Lawrence), meaning something outside of oneself and alien to oneself. Women represent otherness to Lawrence, and so can nature: Lawrence has drawn a boundary around himself and perhaps is instinctively hostile to a man who refuses to do so. For when Lawrence does permit something within his orb he is sensitive and insightful into it, as he shows so often in his writings. Consider the scene in The Rainbow when Tom Brangwen (who has blue eyes incidentally!) comforts his step-daughter as her mother is in labour: the child is insisting blindly and obsessively on her mother, and in the end Brangwen takes her out in the rain and the dark to feed the cows with him:
It was raining. The child was suddenly still, shocked, finding the rain on its face, the darkness.

'We'll just give the cows their something-to-eat, afore they go to bed,' Brangwen was saying to her, holding her close and sure.

There was a trickling of water into the butt, a burst of rain-drops, sputtering on to her shawl, and the light of the lantern swinging, flashing on a wet pavement and the base of a wet wall. Otherwise it was a black darkness: one breathed darkness.

He opened the doors, upper and lower, and they entered into the high dry barn that smelled warm even if it were not warm. He hung the lantern on the nail and shut the door. They were in another world now. The light shed softly on the timbered barn, on the white-washed walls, and the great heap of hay; instruments cast their shadows largely, a ladder rose to the dark arch of a loft. Outside there was the driving rain, inside, the softly-illuminated stillness and calmness of the barn.

Holding the child on one arm, he set about preparing the food for the cows, filling a pan with chopped hay and brewer's grains and a little meal. The child, all wonder, watched what he did. A new being was created in her for the new conditions. Sometimes, a little spasm, eddying from the bygone storm of sobbing, shook her small body. Her eyes were wide and wondering, pathetic. She was silent, quite still.⁵⁹
A new being was created in her for the new conditions. Lawrence is saying no more or less than Whitman by showing that we have this capacity to be the universe, or whatever presents itself of it at any time. The child became the barn and its tools and hay and snuffing cows — if we read the passage attentively so do we, and it is a tribute to Lawrence's gifts that we do. And for the child the new world displaced the previous one, and every parent will recognise this scene — Brangwen's instincts as a father were good. Lawrence writes from sensitive observation, and in a language of his own making; perhaps the language of Whitman, this bold, bright, American bigness, simply hurt him, and he had to deny it.

To go back to the idea of boundaries: modern terminology includes a psychological concept of boundary, and of an individual's mental health somehow depending on the proper maintenance of boundaries. Whitman is obviously a man with boundaries in this sense: as we saw from his biographers, he could 'freeze' out bores, and many other accounts of him suggest a rock of a man — hardly one from whom his identity had leaked out. I am reminded of an Indian story from Ramakrishna of a snake who came upon an enlightened monk, and was so impressed that he asked the monk how to achieve enlightenment⁶⁰. The monk told him that for a start he would have to adopt non-violence, and not to bite and poison the village folk who were in terror of him. The snake readily agreed, but the monk was surprised some months later to meet him again in a sorry state: the snake was battered and half-starved. 'I have followed your advice, holy one,' said the snake, 'I have followed the path of non-violence, and meditated, but the villagers now take every opportunity to beat me with sticks, and I hardly dare venture out.' The monk replied, 'But I did not advise you to stop hissing.' To love nature is part of an expansiveness in which one loses ones boundaries, but only in one sense: there is no reason for the 'smaller' person to stop defending itself against attack or danger.

Before returning to the love of nature (and of trees in particular) I am inclined to comment on a spate of articles published at the time of writing and expressing a once-again fashionable distaste for nature. Quentin Crisp, in a defence of his love for people and also in defence of the concept of doing little more than breathing and blinking as opposed to wasting time with hobbies, says this about nature:
I have never tarried for long in the countryside and I hope I never shall. People try to sell me the countryside by saying, "Well, you like to get out of the city sometimes don't you." "No."

"Well, it's nice to get some fresh air into your lungs occasionally, isn't it?" "No."

We can keep this dialog up for hours, but I remain unshaken. I don't like leaves, I don't like blades of grass. I like steel and glass and cement — all things that are inanimate and do not threaten me. The only living thing I like is people.⁶¹
If you can like people enough then perhaps there is no need for nature. Other articles interviewing London city dwellers are uncovering an anti-nature current in recent thinking, perhaps a reaction to the 'good life' prophets of recent decades who advocated growing your own food and so on, an over-optimistic return to Nature that soon brings one up against its intractability.

After looking at individuals with a range of attitudes towards nature, it may be worth reflecting on three cases where mystics have claimed that their moment of transformation or enlightenment actually took place in Nature, that is under a tree. The best known is undoubtedly the case of the Buddha who is said to have been enlightened under the 'Bo' tree, a descendent of which is treated as a shrine to Buddhism to this day, and receives thousands of visitors every year in Northern India. As we saw in the previous chapter, Krishnamurti was also enlightened under a tree, in his case a pepper tree in Ojai Valley California. There is a photograph of it in Asit Chandmal's photo-diary of Krishnamurti, and one can even see that a low wall has been built around it to indicate its special importance.⁶²

The third example of enlightenment under a tree is that of Rajneesh, at the age of twenty-one, who described the experiences in the transcripts of one of his talks ('The Discipline of Transcendence, lecture #21'). It was on the 21st March 1953, and was the culmination of seven days of 'let-go', where his previously intense period of disciplined meditation had led him to a point of despair, and hopelessness. He gave up his usual practices, to the surprise of the family he lived with, and took to laying in his room or sitting in the local park with no aim or purpose. Something was growing in him, something that took him over — the 'whole' entered him, and worked upon him; he says hope disappeared (for he had worked so hard for this goal, over many lifetimes), he no longer strived for anything. He was in an abyss — but with no fear, because there was no-one was there to be afraid. On the seventh night he felt stifled and oppressed in his small room (like Krishnamurti in his room in Ojai), an expansion that was so intense bore down on him that nothing made sense to him (a professor of philosophy) — and found himself, at about midnight, to be out of doors, and heading for the park. The gates were closed so he had to climb over them, and was drawn towards a large tree (possibly a mulberry). Under that tree he finally 'shattered' — his past disappeared, it no longer belonged to him, as if it was a story told to him by someone else; boundaries and distinctions were disappearing — mind was disappearing. Mind was receding, rushing away, but he had no urge to cling to it. It felt so intense, painfully intense, that he could only compare the experience to giving birth. Or was he going to die? He was not afraid — nothing more was needed, those last seven days had been so blissful that he was complete, but something was coming, a birth or a death. All the polarities were meeting, all the opposites were meeting in him: he had become the source of all; he was drowning in ecstacy. For the first time he experienced reality. Under the tree, for about three hours (though time had ceased for him), the new state took root in him, settled him, and marked his permanent transition to the enlightened state. (More on Rajneesh in the next chapter.)

Of course, I am not suggesting in these discussions of Nature that all mystics have to love nature and be enlightened under trees; many a mystic will have found nature harsh and unforgiving, and a force to be treated with caution. Many mystics describe only their soul, and have no interest in the outside world, let alone be poetic about it. However, I would suggest that an unfanciful sensitivity to nature is a sign of a possible mystic; one who simply is, cannot fail to fall into some kind of harmony with everything else that simply is, as with Whitman's tree. In the Sartre section of this book we will see again how a tree figures strongly in what could be a mystical experience.