Attending to and Experiencing Earthly Provision and Care

JEFFERIES’S ACCOUNT of his ecstatic youthful immersion in a world centered on the Iron Age hill fort of Liddington Castle in Wiltshire describes an earth that he felt actively provided for, responded to, and amplified his existence. This passage, which extends for several pages, begins his autobiographical The Story of My Heart and illustrates why, if Jefferies has a reputation today, it is, unsurprisingly, as something of a nature mystic.1 He writes openly of an “intensity of feeling which exalted me,” an “intense communion” (6) held with the “strong earth, dear earth,” (7) where an “inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus” (6–7). He speaks of “breathing full of existence” (14) and even “losing . . . my separateness of being” (10) while being able to sense the earth’s deep time, “to feel the long-drawn life of the earth back into the dimmest past” (14). His sense of a “soul-nature” (13) that lies “far beyond my conception” (15–16) is incited by earth, sun, stars, but also by the natural historically imbued rural world of the nineteenth-century English countryside.

Jefferies does not confine his attention to the nonhuman world and is in no sense misanthropic, but it is here, keeping company with grass, birds, and sky that he experiences an intense sense of his involvement, of being “plunged deep in existence” (15). These profound experiences are initiated and continually reconfirmed through his attending to, touching, and being touched by specific instances of what we might term “ecstatic provision,” for example, sunlight shining on the surface of his hand, humming bees, calling and leaping grasshoppers, or “flecks of clouds dissolving” (15). Jefferies’s much loved world is constituted as he lies prostrate on Liddington’s grassy slopes, delving into the chalky soil with his hands or attending closely to the lichen on the rough bark of the oak tree against which he leans. In these moments, the world appears both provisional and caring, resonating, fusing, with deeper patterning:

I cannot leave it; I must stay under the old oak in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song of the very air. I seem as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the south wind calls to being. The endless grass, the endless leaves, the immense strength of the oak, expanding, the unalloyed joy of finch and blackbird; from all of them I receive a little. Each gives me something of the pure joy they gather for themselves. . . . The flowers with a thousand faces have collected the kisses of the morning. Feeling with them. I receive some, at least, of their fullness of life. (Jefferies 1947, 80)

Jefferies’s experiences are so intense, excessive, and prolonged that they must appear almost impossibly different to any “normal” modern experience of nature. They do, however, resonate closely with Heidegger’s explication of physis and the relations between Earth/World, even to the extent of a residual humanism where Jefferies ([1883] 1913, 13) claims “to have from all green things and from the sunlight the inner meaning which was not known to them.”

The kinds of encounters Jefferies describes also fit so very well with Heidegger’s (2012) explication of Ereignis, the event as a particular profound experience of the reappropriation of worldly existence. To partially translate event into our terms, we might say it is an opening of the epochal enclosure of our current (or any) materio-semiotic imaginary, revealing an inkling of the earth’s transcendence beyond the enframed world of activities and appearances. Macfarlane’s iceberg was, as already indicated, an event in this sense; Jefferies’s experiences, too, have such affinities, though neither kind of experience is readily accessible to many of us today. That said, on occasion, something so very mundane as just standing open to the falling rain might suffice. After all, rain does not have to be understood, as vast arrays of waterproof consumer merchandise might suggest, as an encounter with falling objects we need to avoid at all costs, nor as something to be suffered, as by Samuel Johnson,2 as a penance. Rather, given appropriate circumstances, rain, too, happens as a moment of inceptual worldly exposure.

In an earlier work, Smith (2017) suggests that rainfall can initiate a different mode of appropriation; it is an event (Ereignis) that has the potential to call us, however momentarily, out of technology and capital’s narcissistic economy. Raining happens to allow things to come into view in ways not reducible to objects under the domination of a barren instrumentalism, not under the guise of commodities, or even under any predetermined theoretical concept but rather, as Heidegger says, “inceptively,” where inception is “an enduring origin that opens up a whole realm of events and meanings” (Polt 2007, 382). The inception (Anfang) might be thought of as a cascading enactment of thoughtfulness rather than as the repetitive reproducible reification of concepts applied routinely to emergent contexts (Smith 2017, 232–33).

Exposed in our very being to the rains falling, outside of any productivist framing, we can, on occasion,

gather something (glean an inception) of the elemental conditions of our fleeting existence here together, planted on the earth, watered by the vaulting, sometimes inclement, sky. That is to say, we can be momentarily exposed in our very being (verb) to the world’s presence, its transience, and its transcendence—its becoming and its going on far beyond our sensory capacities [our words grasp] and our finite lives. Such exposure to the rains raining provides for our worldly existence in a proto-philosophical as well as a physical sense, not just as a thirst-quenching gift or even through its later suffusion and circulation, its collection and pooling, its flows and forceful springs, but also because it facilitates or calls forth an inception (a transitional phenomenological moment of openness that potentially informs all future worldly appropriations) concerning how we and things are gathered together, opened to the world’s worlding. This is why being exposed to rain can be an event that reveals (and perhaps even allows us to revel in) the precarious and precious gift of life. (Smith 2017, 235)

The event is a revelation of the immanent concealment of the earth’s excess, its withdrawal in the manifestations of its enframed worldings. Because of this, it also reveals something of the failure of any materio-semiotic imaginary to encompass, define, or enclose earth within the horizons of its modes of address. It can, we suggest, be an inceptive revelation of the earth as provisional ecology, as sheltered gathering, as physis. Such inceptional events are, of course, registered throughout ecological literature and many people’s lives; they can be profoundly life affecting, often deeply emotional, overwhelming, revelatory, but also simple, so very obvious, so thoroughly unexpected. Sometimes in such occasions, and subsequent to them, we are afforded a sense of being provided for, even being cared for, and also, perchance, a recognition of quite different instances of the earth’s provision of care for other beings.

So many experiences can be dismissed as just occurrences rather than events, because they seem to leave no lasting impression on the patterns of our lives. They are not inceptual in Heidegger’s terms and are easily brushed away. Their reception is also profoundly shaped by circumstances; their positive aspects, like a sense of being cared for, can be crushed by continuing histories of violence, by poverty, harsh words, ceaseless work, financial inducements. They can be shattered by suddenly shifting ground in earthquake, by plague or crop-destroying storm.

Importantly, and despite his blissful evocation of the landscape of his childhood, Jefferies also often speaks of experiencing the resistance that unfamiliar worldly encounters elicit, something, as we have seen, that Heidegger thinks important in allowing us to register something of the earth’s hidden depths. In a passage that seems close to Macfarlane’s description of the iceberg, there are times, Jefferies ([1883] 1913, 65) suggests, at least when “use has not habituated” our minds to their existence, when we encounter other life-forms in all their shocking otherness, as if “only at that moment they had come into existence.” There is nothing familiar about them, no way to fit their appearance into the order of things, no understanding of their behaviors and relations; worse still, they appear coldly indifferent to human interests. Although not “inimical of intent” (65), their “anti-human character is at once apparent and stares at us with glassy eye” (65). Indeed, Jefferies states, a “great part, perhaps the whole, of nature and of the universe is distinctly anti-human,” not set against humanity but “outre-human, in the sense of [being] beyond, outside, almost grotesque in its attitude” (64).

In such moments, Jefferies and the everyday human world are experientially decentered in the face of an inhuman excess. More than this, that which had constituted the familiar background is broken, shattered by these unfamiliar manifestations. For example, in describing a toad as “a shapeless shape appearing in an unexpected corner” (66), he notes that it

sends a shock to the mind. The reason is its obviously anti-human character. All the designerless, formless chaos of chance-directed matter, without idea or human plan, squats there embodied in the pathway. (66, our emphasis)

Interestingly, the point of contrast here is quite explicitly technology (in Heidegger’s sense) and teleology. The event, then, reveals the earth in very different ways, not only as a welcome source of provision, joy, or care but as something that explodes the current framework of our materio-semiotic imaginary, that patterning of self and social understanding and material involvements that acts as our second nature. This is not, as Macfarlane also shows, always a comfortable experience.

There is a stark contrast here. So many occurrences described by Jefferies seem to suggest that there is a sense in which the earth is patterned around us, speaks to and cares especially for us, and will always do so. That, after all, was also the promise of the providential imaginary. From this perspective, Jefferies’s works might be read superficially as a kind of subjective wishful thinking, divorced from harsh reality, but this would be a serious mistake. Rather, as his life “progresses,” Jefferies increasingly realizes that earthwise, we are drawn to the realization that we are just one of innumerable patterns provisionally sustained and then passing on and into others, and as he, and we, come to realize that this is all that nature offers, this can occasion anxiety, fear, repulsion. We might experience a horror exacerbated by precarity, old age, or illness that all too readily reveals that we are only ever a provisional locus of care, though if we are truly fortunate, care can be experienced in its ebbs and flows for as long as we live, even leaving traces, like wave patterns on beach sand, for a little while after we are gone.

However, when earthly provision and care appear finally withdrawn, the sense of abandonment can be terrible, as indeed it was for Jefferies. The ecstatic sense of exuberance in life can even, given different circumstances, descend into the kind of visceral disgust that the phenomenological psychology of Aurel Kolnai (2004, 73) argues is itself closely associated with “life-exuberance.”3 Here the

surplus of life in disgusting formations signifies: accentuation, exaggerated representation, swollen overloadedness of vitality or of what is organic, as opposed to norm, direction, and plan of life, framework [Gerüst]. (Kolnai 2004, 72)

Kolnai’s contrast between the organic and an anthropogenic technological form is evident here, although treated by him as timeless and universal rather than characteristic of the progressive imaginary. That said, Jefferies’s references to grotesque inhuman encounters might evidence Kolnai’s suggestion that, in certain circumstances, we are repelled by the excessive fecundity, the disorderly exposure, the fouling up or distortion of life itself and the loss of teleology and order. This can be seen in extremis in those common phobias of natural “objects” that express an all-consuming sense of deep-seated alienation from a natural world envisaged as refractive, invasive, amoral, indifferent, anarchic, chaotic, and intransigent, experientially initiated, both bodily and mentally, in the abyssal fear of the panic attack (named, of course, after the fathomless terror Pan, the therianthropic god of nature, could inspire in mortals) that dissolves any sense of safe self-enclosure. These phobias typically lead to a life patterned by the sufferer’s obsessive desire to maintain order at all costs. They will compulsively clean and tidy their house; constantly police their bodily and material borders, checking for external invasion; seek to block all imagined avenues of contamination; radically alter behavior patterns to avoid any possible (or even quite impossible) encounters, taking only safe, familiar, and well-tested routes. Although given specific foci in spiders, snakes, thunderstorms, blood, and so on, each of which will induce extreme disgust and fathomless fear, these phobias are, perhaps, ultimately concerned with the way nature indifferently, unpredictably, inevitably, confounds all human-imposed order and all supposed progress by ensuring our inescapable mortality. The fear is perhaps indicative of the unavoidable realization that all our designs are to be interrupted as our own experiential world is inevitably eventually to be extinguished in its entirety and forever (Smith and Davidson 2006).

For all his worldly involvement and earthly intimations, Jefferies desperately desired that his experiences should transcend and escape nature, earth, even the cosmos. He had always interpreted the events in his life in terms of their offering to fulfill his desires to be party to the “strength,” “mystery,” and “glory” revealed in and behind the world’s manifestations. These revelations, so beautifully described, became indicative of what he considered a higher meaning beyond materiality rather than anything more closely akin to Heidegger’s earth. Jefferies struggled, especially as his life ebbed, to overcome the realization that his life as a whole might have no ultimate purpose. Certainly he could find no meaning in a purposeless nature, or in a deity that left the world to chance. Still, he imagined and tried to find words for something “more perfect” still, something “Illimitable” (Jefferies 1948, 259) that he sought through his own inadequate sense of his soul (134–35). Despite his earlier evocative descriptions of a “loss of separateness,” he could never, it seems, allow himself to think that there was not an inseparable gulf between humanity and nature. Toward the end of his life, he wrote,

I am separate altogether from these designerless things. The soul cannot be wrested down to them. The laws of nature are of no importance to it. I refuse to be bound to the laws of the tides, nor am I so bound. Though bodily swung round on this rotating globe, my mind always remains at the centre. No tidal law, no rotation, no gravitation, can control my thought. (Jefferies [1883] 1913, 69)

For all his astounding insights, his careful attention to other beings, the revelatory events that opened and patterned his life work, he always, sometimes joyously, sometimes desperately, struggled to think his own existence as something more than just “ecological”; he did not want to believe that he, too, would be carried out by the tide.

In his final days, he wrote,

Mistake—absurd veneration of works of nature as if they were divine—no mind in it at all. How marvellous! Wrong. Porcelain more wonderful—clock—nature has been working for 250,000 [sic] years and without any drawback of pain or nerves. If a man’s mind had been working with irresistible forces at beck and call for 250,000 years he could have done something better than this. No Great Beyond then in this—the Material or Matter. Nature works by mistakes and failures. Nature is very stupid. Innumerable mistakes. Appears to do nothing but make mistakes and so ultimately arrive at something after continual blotting. Our intelligence seems to come to us in some way from outside nature (or matter). (Jefferies 1948, 260, written May 6, 1887)

This reaction has to be understood in a context where nature seemed, at that moment, inaccessible to him (he literally could no longer walk in nature but was confined to his room) and to have prematurely dashed all his future designs (he was only thirty-eight), refusing him any care or consolation. The life-threatening disorder of Jefferies’s own guts as he wrote The Story of My Heart, the hellish and putrescent associations of the “intestinal tuberculosis” (Williamson, as cited in Jefferies 1934, 13) and anal fistula that he knew were leading inexorably to his own “premature” death, meant that body and mind proved increasingly unable to afford any possibility of “prayer” with the earth or allow him to dissociate morbidity from life. He sought salvation in the kind of supernatural musings that he thought nature could never offer. His last diary entries switch back and forth, from thoughts momentarily landing on plants, the flight of birds, shells, to his desperate situation: “Stitchwort. Beauty suggests hope” (May 1, 1887, in Jefferies 1948, 260).

Swift. No hope, no gratitude, to whom! No love to turn to, yet the mind is not satisfied. How am I a [wretched struck out] poor short creature, teeth, mammae, nails, relics of brute time—to see into and define the Great Beyond? Curves of limpet and scallop. The whole earth deceives and throws the mind aside from true contemplation. (Jefferies 1948, 258, written May 2, 1887)

Jefferies so desperately wanted, as we almost all do, to hang on to his self-identity, his experiences, the great gift of his life, to “wander and sail forever. No limit” (289), but is palpably torn by the fact that any such possibility requires, in a cruel parody of Peter’s denial of Christ, the denial before night falls of any gratitude for its earthly sources. He recognizes that he is “out of tune” (Jefferies 1948, 289) with nature because of his illness but cannot resist placing the ultimate blame for this illness, despite all his experiences to the contrary, upon nature’s cold indifference:

Nature is like a beautiful statue. I must love, must gaze. Yet I cannot put the life into it I should like to. Cannot make it love me, or do as I should like to see it. Still cold, however lovely. The sea is the sea and will not love you again. (Jefferies 1948, 289, written June 1887)

I hate nature. I turn my back on it. Works of man greater than nature—Nature works without a mind as the sea sculpturing the cliffs. (Jefferies 1948, 259, written June 1887)

Jefferies died on August 14, 1887, at his house “Sea View” in Worthing, Sussex, his body buried in the same cemetery as that other great nature writer, W. H. Hudson. In a sense, his life exemplifies the experiential possibilities and the difficulties in believing that the earth cares. In so many instances, he obviously experienced a deeply relational world infused with beauty, care, and joy. However, if our measure of care is granting eternal life, limitless knowledge, endless progress, or complete spiritual enlightenment, then this is to apply an entirely artificial framework to an earth that can promise no such thing. Earthly care, life, and knowledge are always provisional and contextually entangled.

Against this his ill-health is nothing to record, except as something triumphed over by the spirit of life. His sadness came of his appetite for joy, which was in excess of the twenty-four hours day and the possible threescore years and ten. By this excess, resembling the excess of the oak scattering its doomed acorns and the sun parching what it has fostered, he is at one with Nature and the forces of life, and at the same time by his creative power he rescues something of what they are whirling down to oblivion and the open sea, and makes of it a rich garden, high-walled against them. (Thomas 1909, 324)

At least for a little while, for all walls crumble, all gardens overgrow.