Barry Lopez. Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays. Penguin Random House, 2022.
PERHAPS IT’S SOME NONCONFORMIST OR POETIC IMPULSE in me, but I love to verb a noun, even or especially if it defies standard usage. If one of the purposes of language is to communicate meaning, one of its pleasures is to stretch and slide words, that in their wobble and weirdness they might bear newness of life and augment our experience of reality. So I was delighted one morning in chapel, when I was a student at the Candler School of Theology, to hear my Old Testament professor preach a sermon on priesting: priest not as noun but as verb, not an occupation but a way of doing life, or, perhaps, a way of being life.
“I often felt something intentionally priestly about Barry’s presence,” Rebecca Solnit writes in her wonderful introduction to Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, a posthumous collection of essays from Barry Lopez. He had, Solnit writes, “an intention to bring us the way a priest might bring a congregation to something transcendent or immanent.” In eighteen books of fiction and nonfiction, Lopez priested us through the most majestic and desolate terrains, traveling through deserts and islands, rainforests and coastal landscapes. If his priesthood is best known for its geographic range and worshipful descriptions of animals, weather, landscapes, and natural processes, he was equally attentive, pastorally, to the sweetness and depravity, the evil and the good, in human relationships.
We all have our own private canons, the works we cite as exemplary and essential for understanding something about life, time, holiness, the sublime. At the core of mine is Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” in which she describes a life of world travel in the painstaking detail for which she was celebrated before coming to a moment of self-address. “Open the book,” she commands herself. And then, for emphasis, “Open the heavy book,” where we see “this old Nativity.” Bishop ends the poem with one of my favorite lines in English literature, a kind of prayer: “and looked and looked our infant sight away.” There is something priestly in the act of looking, a relationship between the vocations of seeking and seeing. A seer is another word for a prophet, somebody who has looked their infant sight away and come into close contact with the holy, the mystery behind the veil. They are reporters embedded in a far country.
“When I was a boy I wanted to see the world,” Lopez writes in the first essay gathered here, “Six Thousand Lessons.” It is one thing to see the world, to observe in passing from the windows of planes and cars, or to gather impressions of places and peoples from the serene distance of hotel balconies, all-inclusive resorts. It is another to make from one’s observations something potent and sacred, a record of the felicities and forces that govern the world and those who live in it. It requires an attention at once enraptured and sober, deliberate and devotional, which readers of Lopez likely first came to appreciate in his National Book Award–winning Arctic Dreams, an exhaustive, ebullient account of travels in the polar regions of the planet that rarely attract tourists. To see the world as Lopez saw it enlists both our stamina and our patience, our ability to travel great distances (see his splendid essay “Flight,” collected in About This Life) and to sit with the stillness of a plein-air painter, struggling to get the contours and shadows of each cloud, the subtle differences of the grasses in a field just so.
“Having seen so much,” Lopez writes, “you could assume, if you are not paying close attention, that you know where you are, succumbing to the heresy of believing one place actually closely resembles another. But this is not true. Each place is itself only, and nowhere repeated. Miss it, and it’s gone.” Lopez likens this kind of attention—the sort of gaze that allows one to see that the very particulars of a beloved’s freckles and wrists, though they might rhyme with those of another, are entirely unique—to “the six thousand spoken ways of knowing God.” The affinity between our prayerful action of witness and our worshipful action of testimony is interwoven. You cannot read Lopez without being convinced that the more carefully we observe a river or a wolf, a single human or a group of people, the further we enter into that dominion of reverence that once led a poet to rhapsodize: “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”
As he writes in his elegy for Wallace Stegner, “It is a good idea to love each other and to love the Earth…. It is the only way we can have a place to abide.” For half a century Lopez’s place to abide was Finn Rock, Oregon. “Here is where I have had the longest conversation with the world outside myself. Here is where I have tested the depths of that world and found myself still an innocent. Here is where the woods are familiar and ever new.” This sort of looking, at once well acquainted and bewildered, requires the kind of engaged estrangement Annie Dillard describes in the astonishing chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek titled “Seeing.” She conveys just what a difficult task it is to see well, for any number of reasons, and that even when we see well, the actual information we have on the vast cosmos is so slight and insignificant that it is like saying we know one ant in a colony. To look and look our infant sight away does not result in some magnificent maturity but, if we are lucky, an extended childlike way of encountering the world in which wonder, rather than knowledge, is our bread and butter. “Darkness appalls and light dazzles,” Dillard writes. “The scrap of visible light that doesn’t hurt my eyes hurts my brain. What I see sets me swaying.” In his essays Lopez made music that moved to and from such swaying, that took from fidelity to one place and curiosity about many places a divine rhythm, a way of getting lost—and therefore found—in the dance of sight.
Perhaps another way to characterize the type of looking Lopez did, in his life and his books, in his priesting, is to invoke that seminal text for the “nature” writer, Emerson’s “Nature.” I use quotes around the category of “nature” writing because, as many contemporary writers with an ecological concentration note, from Lopez to Camille Dungy to Emma Marris, everything is natural, from cities to synthetics, and it is the impulse to classify, say, an oak tree or an egret as somehow separate from a skyscraper or an oilfield that has led us to our catastrophic moment of climate disruption and desolation. It is an inability to see with our entire being, to become what Emerson called “a transparent eyeball,” that makes us think we can preserve a few acres here and there as “wilderness” (never mind who can and cannot access these acres) while blasting, decimating, and devouring the rest of the earth and everything will be all right, so long as stocks stay up and trade remains free. Nope, Lopez the priest regrets to inform us, joining a long lineage of prophets, from Isaiah through Thoreau, who connect human greed and shortsightedness, a lack of awe and humility, to environmental desolation. “The earth will dry up completely,” Isaiah warned.
“An Era of Emergencies is bearing down on us,” Lopez writes, his use of capitalization making clear just how urgent the cataclysms of drought, intensified hurricanes and tornadoes, and wildfires are. There’s a dour irony in this book’s title, given that Lopez lost part of his home and his personal archive of notebooks and correspondence in a 2020 fire. How are we to embrace a world in which destructive forces are so prevalent and powerful, when so many of the people and institutions that make decisions about the commons care more about so-called growth than old-growth forests? In this essay about our Emergencies, occasioned by a 2021 book American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present, Lopez writes:
At the heart of the lifework of many artists I have known is a simple but profound statement: “I object.” I have studied what we have done to the planet and I object. I object to the exploitation of, and the lack of respect for, human laborers. I object to the frantic commercialization of the many realms of daily life, I object to the desecration of what is beautiful, to the celebration of what is venal, and to the ethical obtuseness of the king’s adoring enablers. I object to society’s complacency.
Such objections connect to what I think Emerson was getting at in his disturbing, delicious eyeball image, which was that to be awake and alert to the world is to let every impression run through us, so that our feet and back see as much as our eyes do. Our lives must become porous and permeable if we are to become the sort of witnesses Lopez was and shows us how to be. “Intimacy with the physical earth,” he wrote, “awakens in us, at some wordless level, a primal knowledge of the nature of our emotional as well as our biological attachments to physical landscapes.” This is another way of expressing Thoreau’s questions: “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”
Intelligence with, rather than simply about, the earth emanates from Lopez’s body of work. Whether he was writing about the methods and meanings of tracking wolves employed by people like his friend Bob Stephenson, or nautical voyages to the remotest parts of the planet, Lopez committed himself to getting low, to noticing and naming the most minute details. What Blake said of a grain of sand and its eternal dimensions, Lopez could locate in a pine needle, the shape of a flower on the Galapagos Islands, the ripple of a river. In an essay titled simply “River” he writes: “This is to say that [a river] is a kind of animal itself, containing other animals and abetting the lives of still others, like the osprey and mountain lion sipping at its bank. It is to point out that rivers are older than humans, that they endure dams, pollution, and being channeled, and, one way or another, carry on.”
I have come to recognize hope as being as much a product of memory as a dream about the future. For Lopez, the ancientness of rivers is the predictor of their
endurance. If nostalgia is a sentimental yearning for something that never quite was, then this mixture of hope and memory such as Lopez embodied in his career as a peripatetic cataloger of the curious, the gorgeous, the wild, is something else. We might call it cherishing, this way of paying attention to forces that began long before we arrived on the scene and will survive long after our names are written on the water. In the final essay in Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, “Deterioration,” Lopez grumbles a bit about the loss of physical ability that comes with age, but ends on this note of cherishing: “We’ll enjoy each other’s company and lean against our trucks, drinking from thermoses, and we’ll watch fair-weather cumulus clouds scuddling overhead, above the crowns of the Douglas firs and hemlocks and cedars, and feel the curious revitalization of physical exhaustion, the pleasure of mutual dependability, and the gift of life, still, in the waning body.” He’s speaking of his own body, but also the body of the earth. Exhaustion is the ground of revitalization. The harrowing effects of aging and mortality reveal the pleasure of mutual dependability.
If ineffable pleasure is one of the qualities that makes reading Lopez such a thrill, there are a few essays in this book that are quite unsettling to read. In “A Scary Abundance of Water” and “Sliver of Sky” Lopez examines in exacting and excruciating detail the sexual abuse he suffered as a child in California. The monstrous violence Harry Shier enacted upon Lopez and other young boys around Los Angeles in the 1950s is unfathomable. Yet Lopez fathomed it, and it makes the brightness and kindness of his work all the more remarkable. At the end of “A Scary Abundance of Water,” Lopez writes about his struggles, as a survivor of such trauma, to resist what he calls “the great temptation of our time: to put one’s faith in despair.”
This reminds me of Toi Derricotte’s assertion that joy is an act of resistance. Notwithstanding the agonies he endured and the assaults he witnessed, on his own body and the body of the earth, Lopez refused to give despair the benefit of his faith. He priested us past despair. There was a period in his late adolescence when Lopez seriously contemplated becoming a Catholic priest. In “Madre de Dios,” he recounts a visit during his senior year of high school to a Jesuit retreat house at Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. “I hoped to return to the city convinced that my future lay with the Jesuit order, but that was not what happened. I felt no calling.” Despite this lack of calling, he remained receptive to the beauty, mystery, and power of Catholic faith and ritual, in particular to the presence of the woman after whom his university was named. At Notre Dame, Lopez recalls praying before a statue of Mary. “On some frigid nights when I knelt there, alone in the effervescent swelling of candlelight holding the darkness at bay, I felt a streaming convergence of inert stone, gleaming light, weather, and shadowed trees, all of it presided over by an unperturbed and benevolent Queen of Intercession, a woman hearing my prayers.” He shares in the essay two other moments in his life when he felt Mary to be, as the psalmist said, “a very present help.” How else to explain such moments but, in his words, “incomprehensible holiness…beyond the reach of the rational mind.”
While Lopez never took holy orders from the Catholic Church, he lived into Paul’s impossible invitation: count it all joy. The tenacity of such resistance amid all the mischief and plunder of Bezos, Musk, et al. requires a faith much deeper than what despair can provide. It necessitates joy, not as an evasion or the deluded chirpings of Pollyannas, but as diligence and devotion. Joy in the wake of catastrophe and murder is a weapon, a protection against the rulers of the darkness of this world.
Early in Horizon, his 2019 magnum opus, Lopez takes us back to one of his early journeys, when he traveled in Europe for two months before beginning his undergraduate studies at Notre Dame. “On our last day in Ireland, I rowed a stretch of the River Shannon in a punt, alone, not wanting this luminous journey—from the art galleries of the Prado in Madrid to the bleakness of the Brenner pass; from the fields of crosses and the Stars of David in cemeteries across Artois and Picardy to the austere Cliffs of Moher in County Clare—ever to be finished.” I love the sinuous syntax of a Lopez sentence, its clausal panache, which enacts the everlasting quality he is describing. In some places he writes with the swift succinctness of a writer on deadline, which he often was, while in other essays he adopts the languorous dreaminess Mary Oliver would call the facility “to be idle and blessed.”
In Anglo-Catholic traditions, when we acknowledge the faithful departed, we ask, “May light perpetual shine upon them.” The books of Barry Lopez, his priesting in prose and poems, are an ongoing emanation of light. They shine into our frailties and failures and contain the splendor of our planet’s grandeurs and deeps. They recollect us, and they remind us of the importance of being good hosts and guests, as they entreat us to be steadfast in particular places and relationships even as we discover divinity too, when we venture beyond our comfort zones. In his luminous journey, Lopez traveled into the darkest parts of his personal history and the history of settler colonialism and genocide. His light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Jason Myers is editor in chief of EcoTheo Review, codirector of EcoTheo Collective, and author of Maker of Heaven & (Belle Point) and the forthcoming A Place for the Genuine: Reflections on Nature, Poetry & Vocation (Eerdmans). An Episcopal priest, he lives with his family in Texas.
