The Morning Reading: What the Land Says

What Verlyn Klinkenborg can do in less than 400 words:

A couple of months ago, I found myself being asked, in a public forum, what language the land uses when it speaks to me. Several glib answers drifted through my brain — mostly the names of arcane languages — but it was a serious question. So I said what I really believe, that I value the land for its silence, its freedom from language.

Not that I always experience this small farm that way. There are days when I feel pestered by nomenclature, when words like Robinia pseudoacacia — the black locust, which is blooming profusely now — chime in my brain like a simple-minded rhyme. Those are the days when I get tired of words and start whistling back at the woodchuck that lives in the middle pasture. I think that if the land starts speaking to me in a human language I will have to move to a boat on the sea.

One of the other panelists remarked that he thought of the land as a text, a place inscribed with profound historical meaning. This seems true, but the word “text” makes me uneasy. It makes me realize that I’m trying to push through the underbrush of language toward some other way of being in nature. I know people whose most precise word for “black locust” is “tree.” And I know people who can tell me the pattern of its blooming, the uses for its wood, who can look down my fence line and say, without hesitation, which of my fence posts are locust, without ever knowing the scientific name.

Being a writer, in my experience, means putting up with an inner voice — a maker of sentences — that is always clamoring to be heard. More and more, I find myself listening for the moments when that voice lapses.

After a dozen years on this farm, I can name most of the plants and nearly all the birds. But what’s the word for the wake the pileated woodpecker leaves as it dips, flying across the pasture? How can I imagine that land speaks in a language when I’m surrounded by animals whose wordless attention is at least as great as mine? All I can do is put a period to this sentence and hope I can live, for a while, in the pause that follows.

From the June 11 New York Times. Click here.