Stream of Consciousness
Our first expedition into a Thoreauvian state of mind took me to a small clearing in the forest near Arroyo Park. I was perhaps better equipped to write about my observations than Thoreau would have been thanks to technology – I was able to speak my thoughts directly into a voice recorder. While Thoreau was only able to scrawl some notes on his observations in the field, I was able to capture a stream of consciousness that truly shows the process of my engagement in the environment around me. By maintaining the form that I originally had these thoughts in, this text more closely resembles the actual experience that I had in nature. Being immersed in nature, I was more thoroughly (and Thoreauly) able to write a nature text as well as comment on the significance lent to the text by my surroundings.
I was immediately struck by the beauty of the place upon finding it. It seems to have some sort of special quality, like I’ve just emerged onto an oasis of energy in the middle of the forest. I can just barely see my breath in front of me and it creates an ethereal, foggy effect in my field of vision, casting even more of a magical feel on the place around me.
I can hear rushing water, possibly from a small waterfall nearby. Beyond the hill I scaled down to get here, a road carries people along, unaware of the magical spot I’ve found; there’s still an ever-present reminder from the occasional car passing by that society is not too far. But blended in with the din of the chirps and the rushing water, the whooshing and growling of the cars almost sound like animal noises themselves, like I’m in some sort of great primeval jungle full of roaring beasts.
The water here is placidly still, save in one corner where I can see some ripples. Oh I see, a bird had just been resting in some reeds tucked around a corner just beyond my field of vision, but now I’ve just seen it suddenly fly out, creating dancing circles across the surface of the pond emanating from each point where its feet skimmed the water. Now on the other end of the pond I see what look like hundreds of little fish. What are these – oh! little water bugs, almost invisible against the blackness of the water. I can only more clearly see the refraction of the light around their little dimples in the taught surface. And as they move around it creates a hypnotic effect – gently gliding rings, drifting outward in all directions.
It’s hard to say how deep the water is; it’s so clear but black at the bottom. As I am looking closer at the water now I see that there are water bugs all across the surface of it. My eyes only instinctively picked up on the large gathering of glimmers in the corner where there had been 50 or so bugs congregated, but the few scattered about the rest of the pond had eluded me. While I’ve been seeing the blackness of the pond this whole time, suddenly I see a reflection, crystal clear – a whole other universe at my feet. Great, long tendrils reach down into the grey-blue abyss, with veins reaching out in all directions radially. The trees become like roots in their reflections.
There are so many different shades of green here around me. Thick, lush carpets of jade green moss drip from virtually every branch in the forest. It coats the logs and tree trunks and rocks around the edge of the pond. There’s a small grouping of trees that look like a withered old hand with terribly long fingers reaching out over a path as if to grab an unsuspecting walker. Moss completely coats the hand as well. The dark evergreens and light shrubs and grasses in addition to the moss complete a full spectrum of greenery.
There’s a red mitten hanging off of a branch pretty high up on the biggest tree here, which looks to me like a cedar. The mitten is almost at the top of my reach, which means it was put there by someone probably at least 6 feet tall – a sign that I’m not the first person to visit this magical little spot.
It looks like there’s at least two large trees fallen over, about 20 paces from the edge of the water. One of them extends up the hill away from me about 10 yards, but the other seems to have once stood just a few feet from where I am currently standing. From this angle I can see the intricate root network of gnarled black and brown snakes with capillary-like hairs extending off of them. Now I can see a spot on the upturned tree about halfway along the length of it where it has split open. The splintered wood on the inside is a really vibrant color, full of reds and yellows – it still looks alive. The tree must not have fallen too long ago.
The ground is covered now with orangish-brown leaves curling up at the tips. They rustle beneath my feet – I can tell they feel papery without even touching them. When I walk the leaves on the ground all just look like one great mass of different colors. I don’t notice the intricacies and beauties of the individual leaves until I slow down and narrow my focus. I can see similar shapes as to what I see when I look at the trees and the roots – one long tendril extending out with veins branching off of it, all coming from the center of the leaf. They look like maple leaves. All varying sizes, some orange with yellow splotches; some brown with red splotches; dark spots; light spots; some kind of green growth on a leaf. And I see what looks like a small fir tree with some fallen maple leaves hanging in the soft boughs of green needles. It’s hard to imagine the dead parts of another person hanging around in my hair or arms. .Little yellow leaves right now are catching the backdrop of the light just right and contrasting with the dark greenery behind them, and also with the thick green fuzzy moss growing along the thicker parts of the branches of the tree.
I found the river now that had been whispering in my ear since my arrival. Thousands of multi-colored rocks rest on the bottom and line the edges of the river – perfectly rounded by erosion and glistening in the sunlight. The light refractions produced by the water bugs of the still pond are magnified here one hundred-fold in the rough, chaotic surface of this body of water. The river is a palimpsest over the rocks below, as you can still see the contours of the rocks showing in the currents and ripples in the surface. There’s a small sandbar in the middle of the river that I could get to if I wanted to get my feet wet, but perhaps I’ll save that for another day.
I feel completely immersed in my subject matter right now. It is as if my insides match my surroundings and I am at equilibrium with my environment. I experience the words as I write them in a much more complete way than I ever have before. If I write the word “tree”, for example, in talking about the tree I am now seeing before me, it carries so much more meaning with it than purely the dictionary definition for “tree”. Words pulled from an abstract lexicon rather than from real experience are distilled of meaning, existing in a vacuum of context. The “tree” on my page is not just any tree. It has the steady whisper of the river in the background; it is accompanied by a light crispness in the air – just the right amount of cold. Not the kind of cold that makes you want to curl up with a blanket and hide from the world, but the kind that brushes past you as a light breath of air, rejuvenating on contact with the skin.
The word “tree”, when used by a different writer, would have to be representative of a completely different object and associated experience. Now, hopefully each of us writers would include some descriptive language to try and give the reader a clearer picture of exactly the tree in question. But why do we need that descriptive language there in the first place? It is because, unless the reader is in the place I was while I was writing it, they can’t be aware of the atmospheric and emotional schemata I have attached to that tree, and so they could never truly understand what I was saying. If the reader can’t truly know what is meant by the word “tree”, then how can they know the true intended meaning of the descriptive words either? To help the reader grasp the meaning of one word that can’t be understood without further information, the writer employs other words that by the same logic the reader would not be able to understand either; it is the Catch 22 of writing to convey truth.
If I want my “tree” to be nothing more than a distilled, reductive translation of the actual thing onto a page, then it doesn’t really matter where I write. But if I want to smell, hear, feel, taste, and see the tree – if I want to know it, to grok it – I have to be in nature to write about it. Similarly, if the reader wants to truly understand what is meant by the use of the word “tree”, they need to be in nature as well, in the same spot as I was when I was writing, or at least somewhere in nature where they can more closely attune to the actual essence of a tree. This “tree” is emblematic of all texts in that, when experienced only as words on a page, they lose a great deal of agency to convey truths.
I can hear rushing water, possibly from a small waterfall nearby. Beyond the hill I scaled down to get here, a road carries people along, unaware of the magical spot I’ve found; there’s still an ever-present reminder from the occasional car passing by that society is not too far. But blended in with the din of the chirps and the rushing water, the whooshing and growling of the cars almost sound like animal noises themselves, like I’m in some sort of great primeval jungle full of roaring beasts.
The water here is placidly still, save in one corner where I can see some ripples. Oh I see, a bird had just been resting in some reeds tucked around a corner just beyond my field of vision, but now I’ve just seen it suddenly fly out, creating dancing circles across the surface of the pond emanating from each point where its feet skimmed the water. Now on the other end of the pond I see what look like hundreds of little fish. What are these – oh! little water bugs, almost invisible against the blackness of the water. I can only more clearly see the refraction of the light around their little dimples in the taught surface. And as they move around it creates a hypnotic effect – gently gliding rings, drifting outward in all directions.
It’s hard to say how deep the water is; it’s so clear but black at the bottom. As I am looking closer at the water now I see that there are water bugs all across the surface of it. My eyes only instinctively picked up on the large gathering of glimmers in the corner where there had been 50 or so bugs congregated, but the few scattered about the rest of the pond had eluded me. While I’ve been seeing the blackness of the pond this whole time, suddenly I see a reflection, crystal clear – a whole other universe at my feet. Great, long tendrils reach down into the grey-blue abyss, with veins reaching out in all directions radially. The trees become like roots in their reflections.
There are so many different shades of green here around me. Thick, lush carpets of jade green moss drip from virtually every branch in the forest. It coats the logs and tree trunks and rocks around the edge of the pond. There’s a small grouping of trees that look like a withered old hand with terribly long fingers reaching out over a path as if to grab an unsuspecting walker. Moss completely coats the hand as well. The dark evergreens and light shrubs and grasses in addition to the moss complete a full spectrum of greenery.
There’s a red mitten hanging off of a branch pretty high up on the biggest tree here, which looks to me like a cedar. The mitten is almost at the top of my reach, which means it was put there by someone probably at least 6 feet tall – a sign that I’m not the first person to visit this magical little spot.
It looks like there’s at least two large trees fallen over, about 20 paces from the edge of the water. One of them extends up the hill away from me about 10 yards, but the other seems to have once stood just a few feet from where I am currently standing. From this angle I can see the intricate root network of gnarled black and brown snakes with capillary-like hairs extending off of them. Now I can see a spot on the upturned tree about halfway along the length of it where it has split open. The splintered wood on the inside is a really vibrant color, full of reds and yellows – it still looks alive. The tree must not have fallen too long ago.
The ground is covered now with orangish-brown leaves curling up at the tips. They rustle beneath my feet – I can tell they feel papery without even touching them. When I walk the leaves on the ground all just look like one great mass of different colors. I don’t notice the intricacies and beauties of the individual leaves until I slow down and narrow my focus. I can see similar shapes as to what I see when I look at the trees and the roots – one long tendril extending out with veins branching off of it, all coming from the center of the leaf. They look like maple leaves. All varying sizes, some orange with yellow splotches; some brown with red splotches; dark spots; light spots; some kind of green growth on a leaf. And I see what looks like a small fir tree with some fallen maple leaves hanging in the soft boughs of green needles. It’s hard to imagine the dead parts of another person hanging around in my hair or arms. .Little yellow leaves right now are catching the backdrop of the light just right and contrasting with the dark greenery behind them, and also with the thick green fuzzy moss growing along the thicker parts of the branches of the tree.
I found the river now that had been whispering in my ear since my arrival. Thousands of multi-colored rocks rest on the bottom and line the edges of the river – perfectly rounded by erosion and glistening in the sunlight. The light refractions produced by the water bugs of the still pond are magnified here one hundred-fold in the rough, chaotic surface of this body of water. The river is a palimpsest over the rocks below, as you can still see the contours of the rocks showing in the currents and ripples in the surface. There’s a small sandbar in the middle of the river that I could get to if I wanted to get my feet wet, but perhaps I’ll save that for another day.
I feel completely immersed in my subject matter right now. It is as if my insides match my surroundings and I am at equilibrium with my environment. I experience the words as I write them in a much more complete way than I ever have before. If I write the word “tree”, for example, in talking about the tree I am now seeing before me, it carries so much more meaning with it than purely the dictionary definition for “tree”. Words pulled from an abstract lexicon rather than from real experience are distilled of meaning, existing in a vacuum of context. The “tree” on my page is not just any tree. It has the steady whisper of the river in the background; it is accompanied by a light crispness in the air – just the right amount of cold. Not the kind of cold that makes you want to curl up with a blanket and hide from the world, but the kind that brushes past you as a light breath of air, rejuvenating on contact with the skin.
The word “tree”, when used by a different writer, would have to be representative of a completely different object and associated experience. Now, hopefully each of us writers would include some descriptive language to try and give the reader a clearer picture of exactly the tree in question. But why do we need that descriptive language there in the first place? It is because, unless the reader is in the place I was while I was writing it, they can’t be aware of the atmospheric and emotional schemata I have attached to that tree, and so they could never truly understand what I was saying. If the reader can’t truly know what is meant by the word “tree”, then how can they know the true intended meaning of the descriptive words either? To help the reader grasp the meaning of one word that can’t be understood without further information, the writer employs other words that by the same logic the reader would not be able to understand either; it is the Catch 22 of writing to convey truth.
If I want my “tree” to be nothing more than a distilled, reductive translation of the actual thing onto a page, then it doesn’t really matter where I write. But if I want to smell, hear, feel, taste, and see the tree – if I want to know it, to grok it – I have to be in nature to write about it. Similarly, if the reader wants to truly understand what is meant by the use of the word “tree”, they need to be in nature as well, in the same spot as I was when I was writing, or at least somewhere in nature where they can more closely attune to the actual essence of a tree. This “tree” is emblematic of all texts in that, when experienced only as words on a page, they lose a great deal of agency to convey truths.
This experience led to the production of a text vastly different from any writing I’ve ever done before. I don’t believe I could have described the scene with such detail and in such a natural way if I had tried to write about this place from indoors. While the text may seem somewhat scattered or disorganized, this reflects how my brain was piecing together its own understanding of the environment as I explored. At first the pond seemed completely placid, but I kept noticing new things: the bird, the cluster of bugs, the bugs dispersed across the surface, the reflection of the trees. And as I explored I also began to see patterns of similar shapes emerge among the trees and leaves. This is a testament to the notion that it takes multiple readings, whether of a text, a person, or a landscape, to develop an understanding of the thing in question. Both in form and in meaning, this text is an embodiment of my experience, akin to Thoreau’s meandering, fluviatile discussion in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack. I look forward to continuing this Thoreauvian experiment to see what new things I can discover in myself and in nature.