{"id":7223,"date":"2021-02-07T17:53:24","date_gmt":"2021-02-07T16:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/?p=7223"},"modified":"2022-04-21T11:55:32","modified_gmt":"2022-04-21T09:55:32","slug":"barry-lopez-pozvani","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/barry-lopez-pozvani\/","title":{"rendered":"Barry Lopez: Invitation"},"content":{"rendered":"

"Stories hold everything together. The only thing that binds us together: stories and compassion."<\/em><\/p>Barry Lopez<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Barry Lopez (1945\u20132020) was a respected American traveler, naturalist, and writer, the author of countless refined essays, as well as short stories, novels, and nature and travel publications. His work focused primarily on the ontology of place, the influence of natural landscapes on the human imagination, and the relationship between humans and nonhuman beings\u2014see, for example, the influential book About wolves and people<\/em> (1978, in Czech \u00c9lysion 2017) looking at the history of the North American continent through the lens of human coexistence with wolves. For the book Arctic Dreams<\/em> (1986, in Czech Pavel Mervart 2021), a multi-layered treatise on the far north and perhaps his most famous work, won the National Book Award. Lopez's latest book has also received great acclaim Horizon<\/em> (Horizont, 2019), a sweeping look back at his past life and at the same time an amalgam of the author's reflections on the state of the planet and prospects for the future. The following short essay, originally published in the literary magazine GRANTA (No. 133, Autumn 2015), deals with one of the central themes of Lopez's work: belonging to a specific earthly place and also the indigenous view of the world, and therefore indigenous ways of perception and cognition. The author's influence and privileged position in the American cultural ferment is evidenced, for example, by a commemorative survey that appeared in Orion magazine not long after the author's death and to which, among others, such personalities as the composer and Lopez's close friend John Luther Adams, the poet Jane Hirshfield, the writer Margaret Atwood, and the ecologist Carl Safina contributed. Translated by Lud\u011bk \u010cert\u00edk.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I began to travel with the natives as a young man, I imagined that they saw and heard more and were in every way more perceptive than I. They were more perceptive and saw and heard more than I. The silence during our travels together should have been enough to give me a clue as to what might be the cause; but it did not, at least not immediately. The reason is this: if we do not immediately translate what our senses convey to us into the language, vocabulary, and syntactic framework that we all use in our attempts to express our experiences, there is a much greater chance that small details that may at first seem insignificant will remain in the foreground of the vivid impression and later deepen the meaning of the experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I and my companions happened upon a grizzly bear feasting on a caribou carcass, for example, I would tend to focus almost exclusively on the bear. My companions, however, would focus their attention on the part of the world of which the bear was a mere fragment at the time. The bear here can be compared to a campfire, a peculiar kind of blaze that illuminates everything around it. My companions would look to the farthest point where the light reached, and then back to the fire, back and forth. They would repeatedly situate smaller things within a larger framework, back and forth. When they picked up a scent trail in the air or listened to a bird song or the rustling of a tree trunk, they were essentially extending the moment of their encounter with the bear back in time and into the future. Their framework for the phenomenon that I would later reduce to simply \u201cencountering a bear\u201d was much broader than mine; and where for me, under normal circumstances, the event would not last longer than the moment of meeting, in their world it included the time before our arrival as well as the time after our departure. For me, bear was a noun, a participle; for them, it was a verb, the gerund of "bear-knowing."<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During my years of traveling across the country alongside indigenous people, I learned two lessons about how to be more present when encountering a wild animal. First, I needed to understand that I was entering the event in its course<\/em>. It began before I showed up, and it would continue after I left. Second, the event itself\u2014suppose we had not disturbed the grizzly bear at its feast, but had merely taken in what he or she was doing and then stealthily crept away\u2014could not be fully defined by reference to the physical topography around us at the time. For example, I might not have remembered something we had all seen half an hour earlier, say a reindeer hoofprint in the soft soil on the bank of a stream; my companions would have remembered it. And some time after our encounter with the bear, say half a mile away, they would have been struck by something else\u2014a tuft of bear hair caught in the scales of tree bark\u2014and they would have connected it with certain details they had noted during the moments they had been watching the bear. The event that I had labeled in my mind as \u201cencountering a bear in the tundra\u201d was experienced by them as a sudden plunge into the river current. They swam in this current, feeling its pull, perceiving the temperature of the water, the backflow, and where the side tributaries flowed into the river. My approach, on the other hand, was based primarily on distinguishing objects in the scene\u2014the bear, the caribou, the plants typical of the Arctic tundra. A series of dots from which I would try to extract meaning by connecting them with a thin line. My friends found their place in the dynamic event. And also, unlike me, they did not feel an immediate need to make sense of the event. Their approach was to let things flow undisturbed. To be universally alert and allow the possible meaning hidden in them to arise at the appropriate time.            <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lesson for me was not only that I should pay more attention to what was happening around me, if I could hope to make any deeper sense of events, but that I had to abandon all mental activity while observing\u2014to resist the urge to define and summarize. To step back from the infamous need to understand. But it was also important to become familiar with the nature of the way indigenous people observe; whatever they encounter, they pay more attention to patterns than to isolated objects. As soon as they saw a bear, they immediately set about searching for the pattern that unfolded before them as \u201ca bear feasting on a carcass.\u201d They began to collect disparate pieces from which an event could later freely emerge far beyond \u201ca bear feast.\u201d These disjointed pieces that they had collected during their travels\u2014the character of the soundscape permeating this particular physical landscape; The presence or absence of wind and the changing direction from which it blew; a piece of speckled shell under a tree; missing leaves on the branches of a certain shrub; a freshly dug burrow\u2014they might tell us very little by themselves. But if they were allowed to slowly melt into a pattern, they might lead to a revelation of some kind. They might illuminate the landscape in greater detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the first lesson in penetrating the landscape with the gaze deeper was to be constantly alert, to overcome the urge to stand outside<\/em> event, and instead remain in it Wednesday<\/em> and to postpone pondering its meaning until later; the second lesson for me was to see how often I force my body to submit to the dictates of my mind, allowing rational thought to overshadow the body's extraordinary ability to recognize and distinguish textures, smells, and individual tones and colors of the world outside itself.     <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although I thought I was fully present in the physical worlds I passed through, it eventually dawned on me that I was not. More often than not, I was merely thinking about the inhabited places. Although my initial reaction to an event\u2014the barking of a gray fox in the night forest or the surfacing of a whale\u2014was astonishment, too often I would rush to analyze. Sometimes I would be so absorbed in my own thoughts or the cascade of ideas that I would completely lose touch with the details that my body was taking in from the place. still collecting<\/em>. The ear perceived the song of an evening bunting, and then heard it again, knowing that the second time it was the song of a different evening bunting. But the mind, boasting of its successful identification of those notes as the song of an evening bunting, was too busy summarizing to notice what the ear had so far offered. It let the body's ability to distinguish individual sounds lie dormant. And its awareness of place remained on the surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much has been written about how natives generally seem to derive more information from a walk through a landscape than the casual visitor, someone from a culture that no longer values physical belonging to a place and that considers such a kind of sensitivity a "primitive" attribute, something that a visitor from a "developed" culture would at best consider to be something that has been overcome. Such a dismissive attitude, at least as I understand it, ignores the considerable, if elusive, value that achieving physical proximity to a place can offer. Although it may seem impolite, I am inclined to point out to anyone who is condescending to the desire for such intimacy that it is impossible for a human being to overcome loneliness. And it is equally impossible for someone from a culture that takes a condescending attitude toward nature to escape the persistent idea that human life is meaningless.     <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The existential loneliness and the sense of meaninglessness of one's life, which are the hallmarks of modern civilization, stem, I dare say, to some extent from our resignation to the healing dimension of the relationship with place. A constantly reinforced awareness of the inextricable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that remain always legible and never disappear, and that include their observer, positively influences the degree to which the individual feels lonely or insignificant in the world. The quest for place is therefore an expression of the human desire to belong, the desire to belong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know from my own experience that the effort to get to know a particular place is permanently rewarded. And every place in the natural world is, in my eyes, open to knowledge. Knowledge in the course of which we sooner or later begin to feel how we become its object. themselves<\/em>. And then when we move away from that place, we feel that it misses us. And this reciprocity \u2013 knowing and being known \u2013 reinforces the feeling that we are indispensable in the world.                                                <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the highest goal of all human endeavor is to be alert. The second, perhaps, is to be patient. And the third, perhaps, is to be attentive to the knowledge of the body. I would not say that individual natives are significantly more aware than people who grew up in the same modern culture in which I grew up. Native cultures are just as full of indifferent, lazy, and indifferent individuals as \u201cdeveloped\u201d cultures. But their members generally place a greater emphasis on belonging to a place. When you travel with one of them, you feel acutely how fundamentally different their way of life is from ours. They are more observant, more patient, less willing to express their knowledge and to lock up secrets in speech. When I was young and one of my companions made some wonderfully insightful remark about a place we were passing through, I often felt envious; a feeling connected not so much with a desire to possess the same deep knowledge, but with a desire to belong so obviously to a certain place. To be so clearly an integral part of the place where I stand.                 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A grizzly bear picking berries from blackberry bushes in a thicket is more than just a grizzly bear picking berries from blackberry bushes in a thicket. It is an entry point into a world that most of us have turned our backs on in an attempt to get somewhere else, driven by the belief that we would be more comfortable if we only talked about a grizzly bear picking berries from blackberry bushes in a thicket. think<\/em>.            <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such a moment is an invitation, a bear's invitation to participate, offered indiscriminately to all passersby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Book Of Wolves and Men<\/em> (Of Wolves and Men) from 1978<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cStories hold everything together. The only thing that binds us together: stories and compassion.\u201d Barry Lopez Barry Lopez (1945\u20132020) was a respected American traveler, naturalist, and writer, the author of countless refined essays, as well as short stories, novels, and nature and travel publications. In his work, he dealt mainly with the ontology of place, the influence of natural landscapes on the human imagination, and the relationship between humans and non-humans\u2026 Continue reading Barry Lopez: Invitation<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[57,59],"class_list":["post-7223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-texty","tag-barry-lopez","tag-preklady","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7223"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7905,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7223\/revisions\/7905"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}