As a Social Studies teacher, a wide variety of courses get thrown your way - geography, sociology, law, psychology, history, economics - it depends on the school and course offerings, but most of the 'soft sciences' end up being something one might encounter along a career in the profession. In my 6th year of teaching, I took on human geography; the intersection of human culture and development with geography. The course itself is a distillation of social studies in a way - covering everything from linguistic development to demographics to agricultural systems.The cultural landscape is something I had never really considered deeply, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense and ultimately became one of my favorite classes to teach. Something that struck me most when beginning to study the subject in order to teach it was the influence of place on linguistic development. The native peoples of the Arctic Circle civilizations have many words for winter conditions that speak to not only what's coming out of the sky, but the conditions on the ground and whether or not said conditions are conducive to walking about. The perceptive abilities of humans will never be fully translate-able into verbal expression, but necessity can lead to amazing feats of human creation.
Thinking about the interplay of humans and their environments, I hold an affinity toward extreme landscapes and often, those who come from them (or at least, the art they produce while in them). When the land itself is not welcoming to person or a people, it does something to their understanding of the world. So many Americans live in prefabricated neighborhoods and are entirely engulfed by the man-made as to never have to encounter the frightening vastness Earth has to offer. Since high school, I've personally wanted to see the Mojave Desert. The starkness of the desert biome has been likened to an extraterrestrial one many times; perhaps that's a deeply anthropocentric view. We did not create such vacancy; in fact, such traits are anathema to a social primate's instinctual desire for proximity and comfort, but that does not mean such landscapes do not belong here. Standing alone in a desert (hot or cold) surrounded for miles by emptiness would send anyone into an existential crisis after a while. Hell, it'd even make people want to live in Las Vegas just to avoid the uncomfortable nothingness. Humans are not so different from the rhesus monkeys in Harlow's infamous psychology experiments. Primates, and likely many other animals, would give up actual nourishment for psychological comfort and security. Of course this might be a stretch of an analogy, but there is a degree of truth to why so many of us choose to live in less than ideal surroundings in exchange for the access to convenience of modern living, for the comfort of conformity with other members of our species.
For those who know me and have heard me fangirl over the epigraph's author, Karl Ove Knausgaard, you may also be aware that Norway is one of those places that calls to me. The extreme landscape has not only produced one of my all-time favorite writers, but also some of my favorite musicians. There is a conservative, Lutheran culture in Norway that I would venture to guess all of these artists have chafed against to produce their craft, a point that could be dissected in and of itself at length. What links the expressions that come from this environment is their reverence for the physical world that surrounds them. Even within the intense focus on his own mind for Knausgaard's six volume "autobiographical" novel,his writing has an expansiveness to it. Here we are, mining the depths of the mind of a middle aged man, and somehow we're faced with the unity of all of our own consciousnesses. Whether we want to admit it or not, we've all secretly scowled through meetings or cursed our friends or resented the existence of our most cherished. That internal struggle to be outwardly compassionate and inwardly curmudgeonly is not reserved for his experience. And although his work is not some sort of revelation in the sense that it's exactly saying something new, it does break through the confines of what we are supposed to publicly admit and feel about those whom with we share our lives.
I've also been reading David Wojnarowicz's In the Shadow of the American Dream, which is a collection of his diaries from his teens through his fame and ultimate death from AIDS. There's something about the America he describes that reminds me of now; a brokenness or failure of culture that marginalizes those who do not fit in. The definition of who doesn't fit in is always shifting -that's the game. Sometimes marginalized groups are brought into the fold and a new "other" appears. Whomever the other is, however, within that marginalization there is a sort of freedom to create and be who you are. Although, on the other side, being persecuted for the exact same reasons comes along with those spaces. In final diaries, he's dying of AIDS-related complications, feeling as though his body has betrayed him but also that others have as well by continuing to live their mundane lives while he's thrust into the existential crisis of death. Living through a virus-caused pandemic right now, it's chilling to think about all of the parallels to the continued horrors of not knowing what the virus will do to a human host - Kaposi's sarcoma in young men? Blood clots that kill? We've lived this before. But death remains the ultimate "othering" - we shunt the dead and dying off into margins of our minds, even when they're the ones we love. The vastness of death is that existential desert we just can't bear to look at.
Early into this pandemic, there was a moment where Americans really did seem to be at the precipice of an awakening to being more accepting of the unknown. People were spending more time outside, driving less, consuming less. As the pandemic has worn on and become more and more a politicized weapon, whatever desire for change has faded not because people care less but because they are made to suppress their desire for revolution. The pull of modern life plays on our desire for comfort and provides emotional shelter from mortality. Constant talk about returning to life as we knew it forms a sort of nostalgia for the old (even if it only mere months ago). Covid deaths continue to climb; we tend to understand the threat less and less, as the numbers become more and more abstract the higher they go. Similarly, the environmental crisis that looms in our near future has also kept us from dealing directly with the problem. The problem is our way of life. We must change, not the environment. We are part of the environment and must remember all of the times it has humbled us - even if one hasn't ever seen a town laid to waste by a tornado or hurricane, maybe a beautiful sunset gave pause, or a giant clap of thunder rattled one's brain.
Sojourning through a desert for years on end in search of answers isn't a reasonable expectation for most to have. However, opening one's self to accept the existential expanse that is all around us is feasible even within the confines of a suburban hellscape.
Musical Epilogue:
Although they're not Norwegian, American greats Mastodon have encapsulated this vastness perfectly in the song below....
