[I recently read Theo Pauline Nestor’s Writing Is My Drink, but my review won’t be published at Shelf Awareness for another week or two.]
I remember from Natalie Goldberg this thing that I also recognize in Theo Pauline Nestor: an aversion to the outdoors, a lack of appreciation for nature. It is apparently something to be avoided, cleaned off your shoes if you accidentally step in it, and this is every bit as disturbing to me as the people who react to the idea of exercise by saying that they “don’t like to sweat.” What!! What a bizarre concept, to not like to sweat. Sweat is not the first or primary goal of exercise, I want to tell them, any more than getting dirty is the primary goal of going outside; but both results (and they cross over quite a bit) feel good because they are of the nature of their parent: exercise, and the outdoors.
Nestor writes, of camping: “life’s hard enough; why turn it into a three-ring circus by trying to rub sticks together just so you can boil water for morning coffee?” And then later, in praise of her medium: “writing comes from the wild place, from the home of the undomesticated, the untamed, the feral.” As if that is a good thing. How can the undomesticated, the untamed, the feral, the wild place, be a good thing if camping is a bad thing? And oh how simplistic (and ill-informed) her picture of camping: that it involves rubbing sticks together, for chrissakes, to make coffee!
Why the disconnect? Why does art have to take place in clean and civilized environs? Don’t get me wrong, I like a good coffeeshop too; but I worry that there’s something missing from a person who appreciates art and beauty and yet thinks camping is an unnecessary complication. Some of us feel that camping is a necessary reduction in complications, in fact: think on that for a moment. You can even forgo the coffee and use trees and sky as your stimulant! I want to be clear that I very much enjoyed Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Nestor’s Writing Is My Drink, and I found both useful. But I think I’m bound to identify better with Philip Connors and Christine Byl, artists unafraid to get dirty.
Filed under: musings | Tagged: authors, nature, writing craft |
pagesofjulia 
you are so ready for a new neighborhood…
Maybe…
This is very interesting, since this dichotomy (city=clean, nature=dirt) is completely different from how it appears in my writing, though obviously it’s fairly common. (For one thing, “city person uncomfortable in nature” can be really funny — Woody Allen has used this, as have many others).
In my writing, the urban is never clean and tidy. It is not post-apocalyptic, but it could appear so. Graffiti, no cars or public transportation (my characters get a lot of exercise), pretty regular coffee but only intermittent access to milk, using the stove to heat a cold apartment. No phones. It’s largely based on living in NY during the 1970s. Urban yes, but not clean or civilized. Even now, I walk a mile or two almost every day.
Also, don’t like to sweat? Yeesh. My two thoughts about that are: 1) When I was a musician, I was inevitably drenched in sweat by the end of the first song, and that was fine with me. It wouldn’t have felt right otherwise. 2) My first point applies to other activities, too. 🙂
Your comments on sweat made me giggle, Anthony! You’re right – I was thinking exercise, but it applies equally to all sorts of exertions.
And you make excellent points about the city = clean concept being flawed. In the face of natural disaster or interruption of services, a city is the last place you’d want to be: once the “clean” (cleaned by chemicals, thank you) water stops flowing through city-serviced pipes, you’re in the dirtiest place imaginable, with the poorest chances of getting any cleaner. Glad to know you get it!
And yay, walking! Are you still in NY? That’s certainly a walking city. Houston isn’t; but I actually get a fair amount of walking on the very large campus of the institution where I work (a lot of that indoors, but you take what you can get).