The aboriginal peoples of Australia would orient themselves using ‘song lines’, mythical stories they would sing while walking along particular tracks and which would lead them along the track and then back to their starting point. Bushes and rocks inspire the narrative, humans lend their voices, together they tell the story. A story map brings together time and space, history and myth, memory and hope, and ultimately, human being and nature. A story map is specific and concrete: you cannot project the same structure on your garden and on a Cambodian forest. Using story maps to move through the world keeps you grounded in the world as it is, in the present, in the specific nature of the place where you are right now. Story maps break the curse of self-consciousness: they force us to burst our bubble once and for all and pay attention to where we are.
Macfarlane’s entire opus so far is, in a sense, about the creation of modern story maps, a quest to bring magic back to the land. It is an inspiration to create story maps of our own. Do not think that your daily journeys are too humdrum to be mapped through stories. They only seem humdrum because you haven’t mapped them yet. Here is a map you could use to get back to the station from my house, after dinner:
As you face the spot where children meet to learn about their future, look at the direction the sun rises, and walk for the time it takes to hum the beginning of U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday. When the chorus arrives, turn towards the broken nutshells discarded by squirrels, and continue past the point with the funny smell. Go closer to the shadowy corner where Martin says there are spirits (I am not sure I believe in spirits the same way he does, but who knows), and keep going until you get to the corner where your friend tripped up three years ago. Now you only have to follow the slope downhill, reciting Walter de La Mare’s The Little Green Orchard at a leisurely pace. When the poem is over, there you go, the station is there.
Grid maps capture the wild with a handy net, while story maps make the wild speak. When you are using a grid map, you locate yourself through a set of numbers. You are a set of numbers on the map.
When you are using a story map, you locate yourself through that specific house which had a barking dog who frightened you when you were little, that streetlight under which your first girlfriend kissed you, the neighbour who reminds you bizarrely of Gandalf; and in that map, you are a character in a vibrant relationship with other characters. Relationships make you strong, while on your own, you are not much. A grid map can take you anywhere, but a story map can take you home.
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Grid maps are a consequence of the wider superstition by which nature would be an advanced mechanism that we can disassemble, examine and then put back together. This superstition, a by-product of the Enlightenment, is shared by many atheists and theists alike. They both agree that the universe is like a watch; however, while theists believe this means there must be a watchmaker, atheists believe we can explain every cog and lever without the need for a creator.
But there is a certain arrogance to the belief that the watch, a thing that we ourselves invented not long ago, is a model for everything that exists. Why exactly should the universe be like a watch? Why not like a salmon, or an oak tree, living beings that are part of the universe regardless of us? Why not like a human being?
A mechanistic interpretation of nature is just another useful fiction, and we must learn to step away from it. It is handy to focus at times on the mechanics of the world (grid maps are great at doing what they do), but when we convince ourselves that those mechanics are the world, we lose our way home. In a universe where everything but you is an object, you are like a cranky billionaire living alone in a fortified palace: wealthy, yes, but lonely.
Buying more knick-knacks will not make you feel better. All too often, we humans look at the natural world and see there not family to be loved but a resource to be exploited. The travel industry connives in this by advertising and selling nature as a commodity. We extract oil from the land, and gas, and now we also want wonder on tap.
The expression ‘recharging one’s batteries’ sums it up. It sounds commendable: you take a walk in the woods to regain strength and energy. Your doctor recommends it highly. You will be restored; you will be more productive when you return to work. But by thinking in this way, you are not engaging with the woods on their own terms. Rather, you are ordering them to serve you, in the next four hours s’il vous plait, you are a busy person and you don’t have all day.
This is what the philosopher Martin Buber called an I-It attitude. He said that we can approach the world and everything within it (people and trees equally) with two different attitudes, which he called ‘I-It’ and ‘I-Thou’. When we consider a person as It, we consider that person as an object. That person matters to us insofar as she can do things for us. This is not necessarily mean-spirited: to give an example, we might be in distress, and we might ask a friend to lend us a hand. But certainly I-It is never a true relationship. You may be reading this book because you hope I may have practical guidance to offer you. I am It to you. Ours cannot be a relationship, because you cannot have a relationship with It.
In an I-Thou relationship, however, you value me, the woods, the universe, for what we are. When you open yourself to whatever you encounter, without asking favours, without trying to get anything at all from that relationship, it is then that you establish a relationship. You don’t come at me with a set of questions: you silence your voice and listen to mine. You don’t go to the woods to ‘recharge the batteries’, you go there because the woods are nice. ‘All real living is meeting,’7 Buber says, and you can only meet Thou, never It. To let that happen, you have to accept that the woods do not exist for your own benefit. They do pretty well on their own.
The reliance on grid maps made us take for granted that nature is It; by using story maps as well, we realize that nature has always been Thou. Self-consciousness crumbles away, nature comes alive and we come alive to nature. When the world is Thou, it is unpredictable and full of surprises; it becomes wild again – and very vast indeed.
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In 2003, the psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt published a seminal paper on awe, which they say is ‘central to the experience of religion, politics, nature, and art’.8 Awe has two recurring features: vastness and accommodation.
The experience of awe begins when we perceive something much, much bigger than ourselves. That something could be a person who radiates charisma (triggering the feelings we experience in the presence of someone we love deeply); or it could be a work of art, a scientific theory, or an element of the natural world seen in all its wild glory. Whatever the cause, you experience a life-changing moment in which you realize – to paraphrase Hamlet’s words to Horatio – that there are more things under the sky than you dreamt of in your philosophy.
This vastness is too much for you. It overflows, and shakes the core of your world. You thought you cared only about your career, but after you met that girl… now, you are not so sure any more. You thought you were an atheist, but how can a lake so pristine be the result of a game of chance? You thought you were a Christian, but how can you hold on to the idea of a God after solving such a perfect equation as the one on your notepad, which explains the birth of a star without any need for supernatural intervention? An experience of vastness is that extreme place that both witches and scientists strive to reach. Once you are there, nothing is certain any more.