This week, how it’s good to pause and notice the ways we supersede older things with the new while benefiting from the old all the same.
One thing I seek to understand the most about the Irish language is how different external influences have changed the language. I first learned the word nádúr before learning dúlra. Both words mean the same thing on a broad level: they both refer to the concept of nature. Yet nádúr comes from the Latin nātūra with the early medieval monks. It was an import to Ireland that arrived with Christianity and the Latin alphabet, a Roman concept of nature that perhaps fits better in the classical sense of civilization than the Gaelic model which was highly developed around forts and homesteads rather than cities or towns. I’ve often challenged my students to consider that while civilization at its core refers to cities, the ways in which it has developed around the globe differ in their own methods.
Take, if you will, the different origins of writing. Whereas our own Latin alphabet derives from a Mediterranean sphere of the written word whose roots trace back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, the history of writing in East Asia goes back to the earliest forms of writing in ancient China on the oracle bones. In the countries whose writing systems derive from this Chinese source, they still largely use logographic or syllabic forms of writing while there is a greater diversity of form among the descendants of these old Egyptian hieroglyphs. We, the Greeks, and Cyrillic writers, have devised alphabets in which both consonants and vowels are written out. Other cultures that have adopted this Mediterranean tradition of writing only write the consonants, as in Arabic and Hebrew. Still others have syllabic systems in which individual written characters represent a syllabic sound: a consonant and vowel combination.
Each system is equal in its utility, and each represent the diversity of human experiences with their own worlds. They are each their own response to a common question. So it is with nātūra and dúlra, one is a Latin way while the other a Gaelic one. Nature, in this Latin perception is quite monolithic and abstract in my view; I’m thinking of Lucretius’s book De rērum nātūra, or On the Nature of Things, whose title I’ve surely ripped off a good many times in the last fifteen years. We can talk about nature this and nature that, yet we need further context to properly understand what is meant by nature. It could be a reference to the non-human world, places untouched by civilization. That certainly fits the Renaissance perception of nature which I study. Or it could stand in for instinct and feeling. My Instagram feed was filled earlier this week with videos of people who have pet panthers and tigers for some reason. Sure, they may seem like big, cute kittens but unlike domesticated cats (Felius cattus) these animals don’t have generations of domestication and breeding to be willing to live around humans like their smaller distant cousins do. So, pets they may be, but they are still pets that could, and quite likely will, rip your face off if given the chance.
What I like about dúlra is that it comes from another Irish word, dúil, which is a very abstract concept in English yet specific in that it refers to the most fundamental aspects of one’s nature. Dúil can be used to refer to the elements of one’s existence, or to a creature as something created. In English we have several words that all generally refer to other fauna: there’s animal, the most common one which has the Latin anima meaning “spirit” at its core, creature, which sounds slightly more menacing yet at the same time speaks to the thing’s nature as a created being, and finally beast which comes into English through French from the Latin bēstiawhich implies a strong sense of danger in its name. These three words offer a gradient of distinction from humanity, and even a scale by which we humans have judged each other. Dúil then fits closer to the English word creature in the sense that a creature is created and is constituted of elements which allow it to exist.
Are these elements then immutable, or can they change with their experiences? There is a story in the March/April 2024 issue of Smithsonian Magazine by conservation journalist Ben Goldfarb about the negative impacts that roads are having on the forests of the American West. In many places roads were the forward guard of civilization, along those roads came the hunters and loggers, the miners and sightseers all of whom transformed these forests to better fit that classical view of a civilized and maintained wilderness that isn’t truly wild. Today, Goldfarb writes, in the contiguous United States “it is impossible to travel further than 22 miles (35 km) from the nearest road.” Think about that for a moment: in the Lower 48 states, which occupy an area of 3,119,884.69 mi2 (8,080,464.3 km2), you can’t go very far from running into a road. I’ve often noticed how if you look at a road map of the 48 states you’ll see how tightly packed the roads are in the eastern half of the country, and once you go out further west they are still there but often more in a clear grid pattern. Goldfarb describes how Idaho’s Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests have a road density which exceeds that of New York City even.
These roads then are not natural to the landscape, and those which were built on older Native American footpaths and trade routes are now so widened and imprinted upon the landscape as to make them less thoroughfares through the woods and more barriers for the denizens of the woods going straight through their home turf. Think of Arthur Dent’s exasperation at waking up in his comfortable English house to find a bulldozer outside his front door ready to pull the house down to build a bypass. The same goes for the bears and birds and deer and all the other wild things that live in this continent’s forests.
Roads often stand for a level of sophistication and civility which hearkens back to the Romans, whose roads famously all led to Rome. Like the Roman coloniae which reshaped the great forests of Northern and Western Europe two millennia ago, our own settlements changed this continent in a way which better reflects the aspirations of one society seeking to assert their sense of civility and right upon all others they encounter. Roads are tangible symbols of empire which aid the movement of goods and people from one place to another. They tie this continent together in its most fundamental way, before the railways or airways brought us even closer together. Yet Goldfarb makes a good point: at what cost have we strung these ribbons of highway across the North American continent?
The suggestion which Goldfarb describes is pulling out less used roads, old timber roads no longer operated by the companies who built them, and letting the wilderness restore itself. At first, I was hesitant to support this cause, after all how else would I, a city guy, be able to venture out west into the woods to see nature and admire the wonders of the Rockies? Yet as I read his article which features conservationists in Idaho and Montana, I began to see his point. These roads are destructive, and perhaps the better way to see nature, to experience dúlra in its fullness on this continent is to pull out some of these more remote roads, let the brush take over again, and force any would-be visitors to hike in and out. Let it be a reminder that whenever we are in that world that we are guests in someone else’s house.
In the coming weeks, I hope to write more about this question of mine of what exactly makes us human? What is the dúil at the core of our existence? And how can we understand our own dúil, our own essence, in a way which coexists with all other life rather than living above all others as some sort of self-appointed superior? Perhaps that famous line in the Book of Genesis where God commissions Adam and Eve as stewards of the Earth ought to be understood not as “having dominion over nature” but “tending to the balance of nature.” As humanity becomes more urbanized, as civilization becomes more city-orientated, perhaps we will see the land around our cities return to the wild. The Australian mammalogist, paleontologist, environmentalist, conservationist, explorer, and science communicator Tim Flannery argues this could be the case. To conclude his book Europe: A Natural History, Flannery describes a future around 2100 where most of Europe’s human population live in cities and the open land between them has been turned into wildlife reserves, national parks, and restored to its primeval forests. As long as we can assure that our food supplies, fresh drinking water, and sanitation persist if not improve, and that overcrowding doesn’t become too much of a problem in these cities then I have little issue with this idea.
It is interesting to me that even in the context of the word dúlra there is a clear distinction between that and humanity, that dúlra represents the essence of the non-human world, something far less orderly than what we’ve created. It doesn’t necessarily follow laws in the same manner as nātūra, laws whose order can be discerned with careful examination. There is something pure to the chaotic origins of life in this word dúlra, and that’s something I appreciate.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 