Wild: An Elemental Journey

Wild: An Elemental Journey (2006, and already out of print) is of the author's travels to hidden, dark and forbidding corners of the world in search of "wildness", that untamed existence known in remote and unforgiving terrain where the elements - eath, air, water, fire, air and she adds mind - are in control and rule. Jay Griffiths exhausts seven year in her journey to discover the wild roots of the earth and challenge God and Culture, which she equates as being the same, to speak out against missionaries who are God-followers and therefore Culture lovers. This premise threading throughout her book states that God is a god of rules and control and order and therefore God is the anti-thesis of Nature, a place of wildness without law or order or control, a place therefore of freedom.

While in the Amazon, she explores the meaning of "wildness" and she glories, or perhaps exalts, in discovery the wildness of the untilled, the untamed, the self-willed.

"Terra viridis incognita" - the green unknown land - was the way Europeans first saw this forest wilderness. American wilderness author Roderick Frazier Nash writes of the etymology of the word wilderness from the prefix wild and the Old English deor (animal) - thus wild-deor-ness meant the place of wild beasts. There is an echo in the Amazon as people speak of monte real - primary forest where people go to hunt or, indeed, where people are scared because they fear the wild beasts.

But what of the wild part of the word wilderness? This is to me the most interesting. Nash writes, "In the early Teutonic and Norse languages, from which the English word in large part developed, the root seems to have been 'will' with a descriptive meaning of self-willed, willful, or uncontollable. From 'willed' came the adjective 'wild' usedto convey the idea of being lost, unruly, disordered, or confused." And so you could say, a wilderness is a self-willed land - easily my favorite definition. What is wild is not tilled. Self-willed land does what it likes, untilled, untold, while tilled land is told what to do. (p41)

Her "wild" experiences in Nature included writing her notes by the light of a firefly silk threaded to her pen, anchoring a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept, eating witchetty grubs and visiting sea gypsies. She treks past a woman in the highlands of Papua New Guinea whose breasts were hanging out of holes in her t-sirt, but who was suitably and modestly dressed as her back was properly covered. She learns of Inuit beliefs in regard to the Northern Lights, that the ancestors are playing ball with a walrus skull. The Northern Lights are also thought to be children not yet born, or the souls of the dead wishing to come back to earth as they softly whistle to the living in hopes of being whistled in response to draw nearer. She explores the cultures of the people and the language used to "control" or at least disempower them. One of many examples is the mighty mountain, Chomolungma, which according to Tibetans is "Mother Goddess of the World", to Nepalese as Sagarmatha, or "Goddess of the Sky", to the sherpahs, Tseringa or " Mother of Long Life", but to the western world the female diety has been stripped and the mountain is renamed in commemoration of a male functionary, George Everest, the surveyor-general of India.

Her writing bespeaks of a yearning to be at one with Nature, to be enveloped in its wildness and make that wildness a part of herself. At times I wonder at her link with sanity, and she says at times she explores the perimeter of sanity and at other times, even beyond.

In the Amazon in the town where the air was fetid and "unhealthy as a fly trap" and where tourists took transport to fly on to Cuzco, Jay met some Harakmbut men who were driving up to an altiplano and trekking through the jungle. Fevered and eating coca to stay sane, she urged her body to go with them and experience the "wildness". And once inside the jungle, the wildness and desperation within herself was released and she journals on the jungle - "Here, the two seasons (spring and fall) are not separate times of the year but are verbs that take place concurrently, to spring and to fall. A sapling springs up and a mossy log falls, nudging another inch nearer earth. A glittering jewel of flourescent green is so new, sprung up brilliant overnight, while the forest itself is so old ..."