{"id":3360,"date":"2021-06-16T17:43:58","date_gmt":"2021-06-16T17:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=3360"},"modified":"2021-08-04T14:24:34","modified_gmt":"2021-08-04T14:24:34","slug":"wild-belief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2021\/06\/16\/wild-belief\/","title":{"rendered":"Wild Belief"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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A Wilderness Myth<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Nick Ripatrazone\u2019s book on wilderness faith makes a crucial connection between the human and the natural worlds, but sometimes hesitates to go far enough.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Sally Hansen
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In Wild Belief<\/em>, Nick Ripatrazone advocates for a \u201cwilderness\u201d faith: an attunement to the sacred that emerges from inspiring, if uncomfortable, encounters with \u201cthe wild.\u201d In its richest moments, the book illuminates the literary traces of profound human aliveness. Gathering prophets and artists in intergenerational strands, Ripatrazone documents their encounters with geographical and spiritual extremity. Each artist approaches an essential reality: a longing at the crux of mortality and transcendence, a self-estrangement that enables wonder, deep interconnectedness, or an alienation that seems built-in. Ripatrazone skillfully locates each in the relational ecosystems that fostered their work. He chronicles Gustav Flaubert swallowing St. Anthony\u2019s desert asceticism, Wendell Berry\u2019s fervent correspondence with Thomas Merton, Gerard Manley Hopkins\u2019s linguistic \u201cinscapes\u201d flickering in generations of poets that follow. These, along with John the Baptist, Jesus, Terry Tempest Williams, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, William Everson, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin feature in balanced biographical sketches. Ripatrazone\u2019s extensive research foregrounds, for these artists, the contradictions of being alive. In his words, Wild Belief<\/em><\/p>

looks at poets and prophets, saints and storytellers, who have shown that the natural wild of forests, wetlands, and the desert can bring spiritual transcendence\u2014and that perhaps the tension between our understanding of the wilderness as both a fearful and sacred space makes it particularly apt for capturing the unknown and surprising elements of religious belief. <\/em><\/p>

Ripatrazone aims to embrace the conflict and contradiction humans experience when encountering \u201cwilderness.\u201d In several important ways, though, the \u201cwild belief\u201d imagined here does not account for the depth of these conflicts. The book underestimates humanity\u2019s destructive imposition on land, water, atmosphere, and the species they contain, and it occasionally romanticizes the lives of the artists, eliding their inspirations\u2019 darker complications. While he commends an embodied faith embedded in the planet\u2019s life, Ripatrazone sometimes reinstates damaging boundaries, gendering an idealized faith and using land as a metaphor for human spiritual drama. Despite Ripatrazone\u2019s sensitivity to the complexity of his topic, the book sometimes recedes to the myth of an untouched, primal \u201cwild,\u201d instead of advancing climate reckoning and real, costly, revitalization. Though it doesn\u2019t always realize its goals, Wild Belief<\/em> foregrounds the sacredness of land and, most crucially, emphasizes the interdependence of imagination and humility. These are gifts I and any reader might take away from Ripatrazone\u2019s work.<\/p>

His project is an ambitious one\u2014he sets out to redeem language of \u201cwilderness\u201d from its oversimplifying and exploitative history. As Ripatrazone describes in his preface, \u201cour modern idea of wilderness rests on difference\u201d: historically, an \u201cother\u201d constructed for an \u201cus,\u201d a land to be traversed, a body to subjugate, a commodity to consume. Interweaving insights from cultural theorists, historians, and theologians, Ripatrazone seeks to recuperate binary \u201cwilderness\u201d language by collaging diverse artistic testimonies. As a mythical concept, though, the \u201cwilderness\u201d intrinsically intoxicates, and the book sometimes slides into its eroticizing, gendered appeal. A \u201csentimental, trite, and domesticated\u201d [read feminine<\/em>] faith must recover its original tough, desert-proven vitality, according to the first chapter. In an implicitly sexual image: \u201c[belief\u2019s] roughness and even… strangeness risk becoming neutered in favor of a revised faith born not of desert gales but of gentle breezes that sneak into open windows.\u201d While Ripatrazone foregrounds how land shapes story and belief, his appeal risks nostalgia for \u201cauthentic\u201d origins, and slides into a gendered drama of recovery.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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These chapters would benefit from closer attention to the artists\u2019 less appealing contradictions, to more accurately inform our confrontations with the internal and external ecosystems we often blindly inhabit.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Meanwhile, when Ripatrazone discusses Jesus\u2019s temptations in the desert, the actual desert serves as background: Jesus \u201crejects the temptations of power\u2014with the mountainous and arid expanse of the wilderness as a dramatic backdrop, both exposing him to temptation and steeling him in faith.\u201d I expected a different focus\u2014what if the desert ecosystem actually constituted Jesus\u2019s faith, that is, taught him the real dependency of being human? Suppose the desert<\/em> exposed the devil\u2019s tempting lies of autonomy? Bread has to come from somewhere, gravity governs us, political glory hollows, et cetera. Though the book seeks to disturb complacent, rote faith, the appealing metaphor of \u201cthe wild\u201d periodically reinstates predictable, damaging binaries between domestic and wilderness, belief and context, human and land.<\/p>

Ripatrazone intends for the artists\u2019 conflicting and conflicted testimonies to unsettle a single definition of \u201cthe wild,\u201d and in turn open space for a dynamic, imaginative faith. These portraits of disconcerting encounter, though, sometimes fail to disconcert. The chapter on Hopkins features a simplifying binary, a burnt-out academic who seeks \u201cimaginative escape and renewal\u201d in nature. Repressed desire for men, though, darkened Hopkins\u2019s poetic ecstasies with self-punishment and prompted him to burn his manuscripts; erotic \u201ctemptation\u201d (unmentioned in Ripatrazone\u2019s account) plagued Hopkins\u2019s relation to natural beauty. Meanwhile, his theories of \u201cinscape\u201d and \u201cinstress\u201d not only capture a rapturous \u201cspiritual communion of all beings,\u201d but also channel the eroticized violence of Christ\u2019s crucifixion. His masterpiece, \u201cThe Wreck of the Deutschland,\u201d effectively claims to transubstantiate Christ as the wounded \u201cWord made flesh\u201d in the \u201cstressed\u201d language of the poem, even as he spins into hyper-nationalism and triumphalist theodicy. Hopkins\u2019s love of natural beauty constantly battled with and sometimes theologized violence.<\/p>

A closer look at William Everson surfaces similar contradictions. Ripatrazone characterizes him as \u201ca man driven and swayed by his passions… a religious seeker who never appeared satisfied unless he was stirred by uncomfortable faith.\u201d The chapter foregrounds this \u201cuncomfortable\u201d faith without drawing out the troubling implications of Everson\u2019s romantic life, which culminated in a third marriage at almost sixty to an undergraduate student. Dogmatic about little but Jungian psychology, Everson\u2019s post-conversion poetry almost literally drips with gender essentialism. His erotic poems, while merging Christianity and sexuality, frequently align the feminine with passivity, original human shame, and quiescence. Meanwhile, Everson\u2019s mid-career epic, River-Root: A Syzygy<\/em>, allegorizes a river flowing to the sea as heterosexual human sex. But why should the nonhuman world signify the human? Even in the moments of deepest intimacy\u00ad with a sexual partner or beloved land, even in lucid, lush poetry, Everson mingles eros and erasure. These chapters would benefit from closer attention to the artists\u2019 less appealing contradictions, to more accurately inform our confrontations with the internal and external ecosystems we often blindly inhabit.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Ripatrazone builds from a crucial insight, that the sacredness of land must ground human self-understanding.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Ripatrazone brings a different, if abbreviated, flavor with Terry Tempest Williams. A writer influenced by Mormonism, Williams foregrounds the indifference of \u201cnature\u201d to human aspiration, maintaining, \u201cWilderness is a place of humility. Humility is a place of wilderness.\u201d While her extended family made its wealth through resource extraction, Williams has spent a lifetime extricating herself from and challenging environmental exploitation. Her anti-corporate activism and work to protect Utah\u2019s sensitive habitats ground her writing and yield a broad-sighted observation: \u201cYou could say this is a real paradox… to destroy the land, yet love it at the same time.\u201d Her chapter of Wild Faith<\/em>, however, characterizes her activism as \u201cenvironmental realism\u201d that makes peace with this paradox. As Ripatrazone interprets it, \u201cif we are to unite the wild and the domestic, the wilderness with the human, then we must accept their inherent conflicts…\u201d This risks suggesting that we \u201caccept\u201d a conflict in which our planet always loses. Williams, on the other hand, challenges readers to divest from institutions that exploit land and to discard mindsets of entitled consumption.<\/p>

Language of \u201cthe wild\u201d contains this book in the binaries it seeks to loosen. Still, Ripatrazone builds from a crucial insight, that the sacredness of land must ground human self-understanding. Faith in anything real, as he insists, must dance within contradictions. But many of us (myself included) all too comfortably inhabit Terry Tempest Williams\u2019s paradox, cultivating a \u201cwild\u201d faith that might once in a while go to a neighborhood clean-up. Ripatrazone directs his readers toward \u201cconservation\u201d and \u201cstewardship,\u201d but often his appealing myth of the \u201cwild\u201d serves human spiritual needs at the planet\u2019s expense. Climate crisis ultimately debunks divisions between human and ecosystem, domestic and \u201cwild,\u201d living rooms and deserts. It demands the difficult work of coalition. Ripatrazone emphasizes the necessary interdependence of imagination and humility\u2014this vital insight must indeed propel the work that awaits us all.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Sally Hansen<\/strong> is pursuing a PhD in English literature at the University of Notre Dame. Her work investigates desire and erasure in the intersections of poetry, theology, and gender.<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Wild Belief: Poets and Prophets in the Wilderness<\/strong> was published by Broadleaf Books on May 18, 2021. <\/em>Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy on their website here<\/a>. <\/em>
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Nick Ripatrazone\u2019s book on wilderness faith makes a crucial connection between the human and the natural worlds, but sometimes hesitates to go far enough. 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