Wild

An extract from the first chapter of Jay Griffiths' Wild: An Elemental Journey, shortlisted for the Book Prize 2008.

Wild Earth

Absolute Truancy

I felt its urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the colour of ice an invitation: come. The forest was a fiddler, wickedly good, eyes intense and shining with a fast dance. Every leaf in every breeze was a toe tapping out the same rhythm and every mountaintop lifting out of cloud intrigued my mind, for the wind at the peaks was the flautist, licking his lips, dangerously mesmerizing me with inaudible melodies that I strained to hear, my ears yearning for the horizon of sound. This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel—take flight. All that is wild is winged—life, mind and language—and knows the feel of air in the soaring “flight, silhouetted in the primal.”

This book was the result of many years’ yearning. A longing for something whose character I perceived only indistinctly at first but that gradually became clearer during my journeys. In looking for wilderness, I was not looking for miles of landscape to be nicely photographed and neatly framed, but for the quality of wildness, which—like art, sex, love and all the other intoxicants—has a rising swing ringing through it. A drinker of wildness, I was tipsy with it before I began and roaring drunk by the end.

I was looking for the will of the wild. I was looking for how that will expressed itself in elemental vitality, in savage grace. Wildness is resolute for life: it cannot be otherwise, for it will die in captivity. It is elemental: pure freedom, pure passion, pure hunger. It is its own manifesto.

So I began this book with no knowing where it would lead, no idea how hard some of it would be, the days of havoc and the nights of loneliness, because the only thing I had to hold on to was the knife-sharp necessity to trust to the lements my elemental self.

I wanted to live at the edge of the imperative, in the tender fury of the reckless moment, for in this brief and pointillist life, bright-dark and electric, I could do nothing else. By laying the line of my way along another, older path, I would lay my passions where they belonged, flush with wildness, letting their lines of long and lovely silk reel out in miles of fire and ice.

I felt that my blood could only truly flow if it coursed into red, red earth. That I would only know my deepest glee if I could dive in an oceanful of trilling fish. I wanted to climb mountains till I cracked with the same ancient telluric vigour that flung the Himalayas up to applaud the sky. I was, in fact, homesick for wildness, and when I found it I knew how intimately—how resonantly—I belonged there. We are charged with this. All of us. For the human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not. Feral in pheromone and intuition, feral in our sweat and fear, feral in tongue and language, feral in cunt and cock. This is the first command: to live in fealty to the feral angel.

I wanted to put my cheeks against a glacier, to drink direct from hot springs, to see vistas untamed. It’s ferocious, this feeling: vigorous and raw. Wanting to touch life with the quick of the spirit, to feel the wind in my hair, the crusts of mud under my fingernails, the sun on my naked body, ice cracking my lips, tides flooding my body inside and out. Immersion is all.

I sketched out my journeys according to four elements of ancient Greece, earth, air, fire and water, but adding ice as if it were an element in its own right, which in a landscape it is. The only chapter I never planned to write was the last. It forced its way into the book, like a court jester with a dirty laugh and a deadly serious look in his eyes, leaping onto the stage just as Act Five was closing, and offering an answer to the deepest question: the quintessential coupling of wildness with life.

I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their Highlands. I got to the point of collapse. I got the giggles. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them. I went to places that are about the worst in the world to get your period. I wrote notes by the light of a firefly, anchored a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept, ate witchetty grubs and visited sea gypsies. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind. In the end—a strangely sweet result—I came back to a wild home.

I wanted nothing to do with the heroics of the “solo expedition.” There was no mountain I wanted to “conquer,” no desert I wanted to be the “first woman to cross.” I simply wanted to know something of the landscapes I visited and wanted to do that by listening to what the knowers of those lands could tell me if I asked. I was exasperated (to put it mildly) by the way that so many writers in the Euro-American tradition would write reams on wilderness without asking the opinion of those who lived there, the native or indigenous people who have a different word for wilderness: home. I was angered by the nineteenth-century Europeans who called a landscape a “hideous blank” and who, knowing nothing of the land, ascribed their ignorance to it. And I was enraged by the modern species of “adventurer” who risks killing “uncontacted” indigenous people by forcing themselves onto them.

From shamans in the Amazon I learned something of how the wastelands of the mind, its dark depressions, could be navigated and from them I learned to see the world through feral eyes, through the eyes of a jaguar. From Inuit people in the Arctic I learned something of the intricate ice and how all landscape is knowledgescape. From whales and dolphins I learned how much we do not know, the octaves of possibilities, the maybes of the mind. From Aboriginal people in Australia I learned the belowness of things, how land is heavy with significance and how it sings. From West Papuan people I learned how freedom is the absolute demand of the human spirit. From a Buddhist monk I learned that you can cycle on ice and fall off laughing. From indigenous people all over the world I learned that going out into the wilds is a necessary initiation and that for young people, lost in the wastelands of the psyche, the only medicine is the land. Everywhere, too, I learned of songlines, how people who know and love a land can hold it in mind as music.

As I went, I found myself increasingly needing to distinguish wildness from wasteland. Wastelands, such as forests razed to the ground, are the inscriptions of tragedy while wildness erupts with the raw carnival of comedy, laughing its socks off, grace notes galore, honouring the erotic. For wildness is flagrantly sexual—the longest passion of all species, the longing of the daffodil for the spring sun, the thirsting of all roots for water, the sensual relationship between humanity and nature, humming with it, earthy to the core.

To me, humanity is not a stain on wilderness as some seem to think. Rather the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life-generous as water, as inspired as air. Kerneled up within us all, an intimate wildness, sweet as a nut. To the rebel soul in everyone, then, the right to wear feathers, drink stars and ask for the moon. For us all, the growl of the primal salute. For us all, for caramouche and Feste, for the scamp, tramp and artist, for the furious adolescent, the travelling player and the pissed-off Gypsy, for the bleeding woman, and for the man in a suit, his eyes kind and tired, gazing with sad envy at the hippie chick with the rucksack. For us all, every dawn, the lucky skies and the pipes. Anyone can hear them if they listen: our ears are sharp enough to it. Our strings are tuned to the same pitch as the earth, our rhythms are as graceful and ineluctable as the four quartets of the moon. We are—every one of us—a force of nature, though sometimes it is necessary to relearn consciously what we have never forgotten; the truant art, the nomad heart. Choose your instrument, asking only: can you play it while walking?

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote Robert Frost in “Mending Wall.” Something there is in me, in so many of us, that detests a wall. Or a fence, reservation or golf course. That detests the tepid world of net curtains and the dulled televisual torpor of mediated living, screened experience in two senses, both life lived via screens and life itself screened out.

I know this chloroform world where human nature is well schooled, tamed from childhood on, where the radiators are permanently on mild and the windows are permanently closed. School seemed to me little more than a trooping process to educate the young to the cautious life of temperate contentment. Everything was made into corridors: corridors of convention, corridors from term time to term time, corridors from school to university, corridors from sensibly studying maths to marrying an appropriate accountant. Intellectually, the corridors were supermarket aisles, tinned thought. Politically, the corridors offered one-brand, off-the-shelf, right-wing views. Outdoors the corridors were pavements of nonevents, pavements for those who take no risks. Pavements that trod past semi-detached houses, semi-the-same, semi-skimmed milk semi-tasted and always lukewarm. Emotions came only disinfected. The furies of grief or joy were somehow considered unhygienic, passion a nasty germ.

I was educated—as we all are—to stay inside, within the bounds of my tribe (physical bounds and intellectual bounds) and to stay within the protected zone, to let the traffic of routine smother desire for the real outside. I was taught—as we all are—to be scared of the prowling unknown, of the wild deserts of Beyond.

And we were taught to play golf. Golf epitomizes the tame world. On a golf course nature is neutered. The grass is clean, a lawn laundry that wipes away the mud, the insect, the bramble, nettle and thistle, an Eezy-wipe lawn where nothing of life, dirty and glorious, remains. Golf turns outdoors into indoors, a prefab mat of stultified grass, processed, pesticided, herbicided, the pseudo-green of formica sterility. Here, the grass is not singing. The wind cannot blow through it. Dumb of expression, greenery made stupid, it hums a bland monotone in the key of the mono-minded. No word is emptier than a golf tee. No roots, it has no known etymology, it is verbal nail polish. Worldwide, golf is an arch act of enclosure, a commons fenced and subdued for the wealthy, trampling serf and seedling. The enemy of wildness, it is a demonstration of the absolute dominion of man over wild nature.

So I wouldn’t play golf, preferring to play Mozart as if he were the first of the great Romantics—it would have made a proper musician pale. I played Beethoven’s furies and passions (badly) till I thought the piano would burst and detested the cool arithmetic Bach. I felt an unavoidable and total rejection of the nice, easy, convenient, narrow terms of life as offered, because those terms were stifling, life-reluctant, torpid.

I felt hungry. I’ve always been hungry. Whatever it is, I want more. When I was a child, it was a ferocious discontent: a feeling that this small and narrow place was not all, not nearly all and not nearly enough. There was a wide and wild world without, visible only through books, and though I could only see little fizzes of light from it like matches struck a mile away, I felt charged with desire for it.

There was a library in the house where I grew up. One wall was entirely covered with books, floor to ceiling. The children’s books were on reachable shelves. I read them and stared upward for there, always out of reach, were the farther shores. I remember more than any other book the yellow spine that said Seven Years in Tibet. I climbed onto the filing cabinet, then up the shelves, fingertips on one shelf, toes on another, until about ten years old and ten feet in the air, I reached Tibet. But. If I let go with one hand to grab the book I would fall. I gazed at that spine for years. Tibet talked to me. Timbuktu too. Lapland lapped at the shores of my desire. Lhasa, Sahara and the Himalayas. Siberia and the road to Mandalay. When a maths teacher said to me in class that I’d understood her about as well as if she were from Outer Mongolia, I was thrilled to bits. I’d never heard of any such place and yet it existed now—plink—suddenly in my mind. I was swept away. Outer Mongolia must be at the edge of the world. She had given me an Ultima Thule and I wanted to go there. Percentages could wait.

I ran away (for a few hours) when I was nine to sleep in the wildest garden in the street—a three-acre jungle where a tramp lived in secret. I ran when I was seventeen, hitching around the country, pitching a tent at night. (I’m a runner; I’ve run for hours until my feet were bleeding.) When I was eighteen I tried to go to Tibet but only reached India. When I was twenty-four I went to Thailand, living for six months with the Karen hill tribe in the northern forests on the Burmese border.

That time was profoundly important to me. It was the first time I had properly lived without construction, without shops, money, towns, artifice. You live on the earth, in the seasons, right within nature because there is nothing that is not nature. You eat what is hunted—a wild cat once, bamboo rats, wild boar, including testicles. Rice with everything and sometimes only rice. For once, I felt what it was like to live essentially. Water was from a river, not a tap, fruit was from a tree, not a shop, and I felt life stripped, pared to the core. And while there were footpaths, there were no enclosures.

I wanted to live for the fire though it burns you in the process. And it has. After I walked the Annapurna circuit in Nepal with dysentery, I ended up in hospital when I almost stopped being able to breathe. I lost all my toenails climbing down from the peak of Kilimanjaro. I had frostbite once and when I’ve had altitude sickness up mountains I’ve continued climbing to the point of utter recklessness. I’ve known what it is like to whimper with sheer loneliness on a Christmas Day in a jungle on the other side of the world. I’ve felt the fear of being ill alone when in Ladakh I contracted a sudden and shocking fever and, just before I became delirious, I scribbled a note containing my passport number, everything I could remember about getting ill and my medical insurance details, then pinned the letter to my shirt, left the door open and passed out for two days. The kindly hotel owner found me and came up every two hours with a huge pot of ginger tea.

My feeling for wilderness or wildness was both a revolt from something and an impulse towards. Towards unfetteredness, towards the sheer and vivid world. Towards the essential freedoms, freedom of water, of fire, of ice, of earth, of air. This is political, for both the site and the idea of freedom depend on free nature and for us to be truly free, nature must be unenclosed, untamed by road building, logging and mining. And in conversations with indigenous people around the world I have felt a savage fury as they are thrown off their lands. My feelings now, personal and political, run to a savage love, and a savage rage.

It is a rage against the cruelties committed for the sake of this bland consumer culture. A rage against the effects of factory farming, so a bird, flying exhausted, without seeds or hedge margins, drops out of the sky, falling dead to a desiccated earth. A rage against out-of-town shopping centres, placed on the last  little chinks of commons, the wild places on the edge of towns where children play, teenagers fuck, the homeless sleep and the artist idles into life. The commons up for sale—another enclosure. And the common flowers of the commons, sweet heathens, are rare now, and the sparrow, little brown jug of a bird, is scarce. A rage against the hollow men, the stuffed shirts who are the agents of the wasteland, making the Amazon arid and the Arctic an overheated suburbia.

When I was a small girl, awake on a long car journey one full-moon night while my brothers were fast asleep, I stared at the moon for hours, fascinated, compelled. I thought I was the moon’s daughter. That common moon, that wild moon, belonged to me that night—and just as much it belonged to you. But the moon is being made a wasteland, a dustbin for detritus, the bibles and bunting of nationalist superiority. Outer space, the ultimate commons, the absolute wilderness, is being weaponized till there are rifles trained on every human being on earth and the stars look like searchlights.

There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild. Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose.

Drinking Hemlock and Stars

The first part of this journey began by being lost. I had lost my way in a wasteland of the mind, in a long and dark depression, pathless, bleak and bewildered, not knowing which way to turn. Weeks leaked into months, lank and unlovely as greasy hair. I couldn’t walk, couldn’t write, and it felt as if I couldn’t survive the violence of my unhappiness. I had a repeated image in my mind of a little night-light guttering in the wind and I had to wrap my hand around it to protect the tiny pale flame on the brink of being extinguished. I was protecting something very ancient and unmetropolitan: something shy, naked and elemental—the soul. 

The sick body knows it lacks certain vitamins and minerals and seeks food containing them. As the body, so the soul. A handful of times in my life I have felt an absolute demand to go to a specific place or to know a specific person, recognizing immediately something my spirit needed. My journey to the forests began like this, in an imperative odyssey.

One May morning during this long depression I was sitting in my little rented flat in Hackney, in tears. The phone rang. It was an anthropologist I had never met but whose work with Amazonian shamans intrigued me and who had also admired my writing. He asked how I was, in the kind of voice that encourages an open response. I’m drowning, I choked.

He invited me to meet him in Peru the following September, to visit shamans he knew there, and to drink ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a shamanic drug, the Amazon’s most powerful medicine, which is used to treat—among many other things—depression.

Yes, I said.

Why don’t you take a few days to think about it? he asked. It would be an expensive flight, a big trip.

No, I said. I knew a lifeline when I was thrown one.

So I learned Spanish, withdrew all the money I had in the world, bought an open return, dubbined my boots and left.

The journey from Lima to the shamans’ centre was long—a small plane, a car and a boat, a peque peque, one of the little motorized dugouts that zip up and down the rivers of the Amazon. The boatman dropped us off at a particular point of the riverbank where one of the shamans met us, and then we walked to their retreat, an area of natural hot springs. This retreat was called Mayantuyacu, meaning, in the Ashaninca language, “the water and the air”—a name that was so appropriate for my journey in the elements.

The walk to their centre was my first meeting with the Amazon; Amazon stinging, itching and stroking you with velvet; Amazon biting, scratching and softly feathering you; the whole forest winks at you, rubs your warm thighs and grins. A tree bark smelled of nutmeg; certain plants smelled of rotting flesh; there were flowers sweet as honey and a fungus smelling of old and thoughtful mould. I could smell a fine mist of rain and a sour smell from a plant here, a fetid smell from a pool there, the consoling smell of moss, the zinging smell of sap. I could almost smell the sunlight, heavy and lovely as hops.

Palm fronds rattled like a snare drum in the hot moistness. The tower of an oil exploration mast jagged the horizon. A dove fluted in the trees. Logs that had fallen over the path were worn down by the passage of feet. Dalila, sister of one of the shamans, screamed as she saw a poisonous snake. The shaman knelt by the path to pick up a dead toucan, which he had shot on his way down to the river.

When we arrived, the anthropologist, Jeremy Narby, who had visited here before and worked on land rights for Amazonian people, was warmly welcomed back and Juan, the chief shaman, gave him an amulet whose base was the fossil of a prehistoric animal. It was adorned with agate, quartz and turquoise with guacamayo feathers, crocodile teeth and seeds at the cardinal points.

Juan was lying injured on a pallet in his house. A few weeks previously he had stepped off a path and straight into a trap set by a hunter. His leg had been splintered, he had lost a lot of blood and had nearly died. He interpreted his accident metaphorically: he had strayed a little way off his path in life.

Shamans say that ayahuasca shows you your path. Not “the” path, but your own. It is a songline of sorts, not as a map of the land but a map of your life. The songline can untie the choking riddles of your life and show you the winding way, deep in the green heart’s forest, simple as sunlight and resonant with the motivation of a soul’s journey.

Ayahuasca (pronounced “eye-er-wass-ka”) is a powerful hallucinogenic drug widely used by shamans throughout South America. It is made from the vine Banisteriopsis caapi, boiled for twelve or more hours with certain other ingredients added and the bitter, foul-tasting liquid is drunk. It has many names, many properties; vine of visions, vine of souls. Aya means, in the Quechua language, spirit or ancestor or dead person, while huasca means vine or rope. It is thus sometimes known as the vine of the dead, because shamans say it puts you in touch with the ancestors, and through it they can communicate with the spirit world. (The name is perhaps influenced by the fact that drinking it can make you feel as if you’re dying.) It is also known as la purga, the purge, for it dramatically courses through the body, often making the drinker vomit furiously. Perhaps the most common term for it, though, is la medicina, for it is used as a medical diagnostic tool, and as a curative for physical and psychological problems. Noe Rodriguez Jujuborre, a healer of the Muinane people of Colombia, told me once that under its influence, he sees the diagnosis of an illness, and the image of the plant that will cure it is “imprinted on my mind.”

So that night I would drink ayahuasca. It was dusk and the insects of twilight were hissing and thrumming and all the forest’s night players were coming to life, the fizzy, zestful chicharras, cicadas, were fermenting their song and frogs honked, bellowing for a mate. I took my notebook with me as ever, though writing anything in the near-coma that ayahuasca induces was hard.

In Juan’s hut there were rugs, blankets and mattresses around the walls, with buckets if anyone needed to vomit. As well as Juan, there was another shaman, Victor, and an apprentice who poured out measures of ayahuasca into a carved wooden cup, like an egg cup. Just before I drank, I felt a vertiginous fear; this is a “pure alkaloid poison,” I remembered reading, and the hallucinations may be terrifying. But then, I thought, my journey of depression was already frightening and I already felt poisoned. I drank. It was like drinking hemlock and stars; as foul as the one, as brilliant as the other.

Juan began to sing an icaro—a gentle song, thin as the wind in the reeds, ethereal, sweet and far away. As he sang, he repeated the word ayahuasca like an invocation; its sound onomatopoeic, soft and shimmering, a word of whispers and mystery.

Suddenly I wanted to be outside and I left the hut and went to watch the mists rise from the hot springs. After a while, Victor followed me out, asking if I was mareada (seasick). At first I didn’t understand what he meant, but a few seconds later I felt a wave of strangeness and dizziness; then the visions began. I knew a little about the typical ayahuasca visions, of snakes, plants, eyes and rivers, but I was entirely unprepared for the visions I had. Garish and cartoonish, they were a kaleidoscope of tourist-shop junk, silly plastic toys, giddily repeating, row on row of fake London street-name plaques, tawdry key rings, cartoon traffic wardens with seaside-postcard bottoms. I felt mocked by the ugliness and stupidity of the city I had left. I’ve never taken acid, but I know of acid visions, and this seemed to belong in that category; a Xeroxed crazy paving, a zigzagging shopping arcade, jangling with febrile urban banality, the jag of enervation, the blaring buzzing of nothing, in a chivvying, gridlocked triviality.

I was grateful that Victor had followed me out and during the next hours I felt that he had not only found me physically but also psychologically. He put his hands on either side of my head and pressed his lips to my head and sucked. Then, still holding my head, he turned his face to the sky and spat out his breath far away. Each time he did that, my head felt cool at that spot. It felt as if he was sucking out of my head poisoned needles, some five inches long, hard and thin, dangerously sharp splinters.

We talk of being “stabbed in the back” by someone, being “needled” or “knifed” by someone’s words. We refer to “barbed” remarks. Language is wise to the mind’s experience and I had felt, as many people have, that such sharp, thin spikes had been shot straight into my head, where they lodged, creating the infection of depression and nothing I could do would dislodge them. My mind had been knifed. “An ugly word can be like the scratch of a needle on the lung,” wrote Ibsen in An Enemy of the People. It felt now as if Victor were sucking out Ibsen’s needles, saying, as he did so, “They’re gone. Just gone. Away.”

As I later learned, Amazonian shamans “use” such splinters or darts, either throwing them to injure someone or, as in Victor’s case, extracting them from someone who has been wounded. I had “seen” these in the mind’s eye, and experienced them as a powerful metaphor, before I’d had any idea that this was a common perception to them.

Then I nearly fainted, and Victor yanked me up from the earth and pulled me back into Juan’s hut, where I collapsed on a mattress.

Depression is a wasteland all of its own. No animation, no vivacity. The psyche, hurt badly enough, will withdraw and won’t come back easily—or, for some, at all. Like a plant without sap, the body is without dynamism, flair or potency and the psyche wanders far away, lost and lonely. Before I went to the Amazon, I wouldn’t have used the term soul loss, because I’d never heard of the concept. Nor did I know anything about the “soul retrieval” practised by shamans, who understand that if a person’s soul is lost, it takes a sure-footed and skilful traveller in the landscape of the mind to find it. In the Amazon, shamans undertake these journeys into the deep forests of the psyche; they say they see their way to search for a soul as you would see a path in a dream, finding their way in the wildernesses of the human mind.

Previously, if I had believed in a soul, it would have seemed implacably bound to one’s body till death. Now, though, soul loss is a term I would consider because that night I felt that my soul was found. I felt as if I were in a deep river, drowning, and that in these seasick visions Victor had sent his soul out of himself to come and find mine. I was too weak, too far gone in ayahuasca even to hear the icaros that Juan was singing. “Try to concentrate on the songs, use them like a rope to climb out of a bad place,” said Victor, but I couldn’t. He poured a little water on my head and it was like a benediction. “Más tranquillo,” he said, gently. Be calmer. The words were half command, half comfort. They were like water when he spoke them, the quiet drops of water in the syllables of his words like the water on my head.

He held my face in his hands and I could feel his strength passing into me. For a shining moment, I felt as if I saw his soul in the river where I was drowning and he rose to his waist out of the water—so he came to me and in doing so he healed the devastation of my isolation. In finding me, he brought me back, unlonely. Then—vamoosh—on the instant the job was done, he was gone.

Day came up in a surge of song. When the creatures of the morning come to life, they soar for the dawn as if there’s never been a sunrise before and today is the only day there’ll ever be; they clamber out of the cocoon of night to shout up the day, swelling with warmth and light, and the hummingbird, for whom sunlight is the first and most necessary nectar of the day, bathes in the sun which warms it enough to give it first flight. (The hummingbird stores no fat so if it cannot find flowers it will die. It “hibernates” every night, waiting for the first sunlight to warm its wing muscles enough to fly to a flower.)

I heard the bird that sounds like a xylophone underwater and all the jungle birds were singing, in rattles and squeaks and octave-sliding hoots and whistles like a joke shop full of ten-year-olds.

The depression that had so darkened me for months had gone, and though during my months in Peru I had a persistent worry that it would return, it did not and I was free of it for years. I said my good-byes to Jeremy and stayed on in the Amazon, my spirit as green, happy and elastic as a grasshopper in summer, tromboning in the grass.

Telluric Thought

The world is wild-minded. Thought dialects thrive unknown to us: ants with their dictionary of pheromones; the dogged bee, trundling from flower to flower, for whose mind all that is not scent and colour and waggle dance is mere refuse. “Wildness is the state of complete awareness. That’s why we need it,” writes Gary Snyder. Indigenous people have long extended their intellectual horizons by learning from the minds of other creatures. Claude Lévi-Strauss commented that many plants and animals were totemic because they were “good to think with.” The Amazon forest itself, according to a Desana elder, “is a wide expanse, similar to a perceptive human head.”

But the Western way of knowing has denied validity to every mind save its own. Socrates, pithily summing up an entire way of thinking, said, “I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in town do.” Descartes said grimly that the aim of knowledge was to be “masters and possessors of nature.” For the rationalists of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century, there was a hatred of “enthusiasm,” for its emotional, wild surges of knowing were too natural, too bodily, too animal. Rationalism demanded superiority to, and separation from, nature and nature’s ways of knowing. The primacy given to literacy and the superior quality ascribed to written text over spoken words has deafened us to other voices and persuaded us that our meanings are the only ones that matter. So rooted is the idea that nature is stupid that one word for an idiot is a natural. Words for wisdom in the thesaurus include virtually no natural referents, whereas fool is full of them: “ass, donkey, goat, goose, owl, cuckoo . . . greenhorn, calf, colt, buzzard, clod-poll, clod, clod-hopper, bull-calf, bull-head, moon-calf.”

In the Amazon it is not so. Here there is telluric thought, sunk deep in the earth, a wild way of knowing so utterly different from that of the West that while we use the term vegetable for a comatose mind and vegging out as a slang term for mindless laziness, in the Amazon the wisest men and women are called vegetalistas—plant experts steeped in plant knowledge. But there’s more: people don’t just learn about plants, they learn from certain plants called “plant teachers” or doctores, which teach people medicine. This is a contradiction in terms to the Western mind—it balks at there being intelligence in anything other than humankind. But to shamans who use it (ayahuasqueros) the vine is a wild intelligence of a vegetable kind. (Once in another part of the Amazon, drinking ayahuasca with a shaman, I “saw” a crown of speaking leaves on my head, vibrant in eloquence. The shaman interpreted it as an image of knowledge: the plants would speak and I should learn.)

Chief Luther Standing Bear, of the Native American Lakota people, wrote that for “the old Indian . . . to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply” and the earth was “a library, and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and animals.” In Russian, the term Zapovednick is a fourteenth-century concept denoting a protected land, and the root of the word means “knowing,” as environmental historian Malcolm Draper points out.

Trees have long been associated with knowledge; the Buddha meditated under a tree and sought wisdom from it. In India, Saddhus have always retreated to the forests for wisdom; the pipal tree signifies universal wisdom and in traditional Indian thought, trees, in their previous lives, were great philosophers. The English language recognizes an association between wisdom and trees: an idea “takes root”; a book has “leaves”; a small book is a “leaflet”; an avid reader is a “bookworm”; you “branch out” into a new area of study—and even corporate language doffs its cap in the form of Amazon.com.

University thinking is “drily” academic and the term is important. Western ways of knowing use dryness not only for practical reasons (the dry books in dry libraries) but also because dryness itself is a characteristic of the unwild environment, no rain, no rivers, no lips. In the Amazon, by contrast, knowledge is wild and wet. Amazonian shamans feel they are drinking knowledge when they take ayahuasca and they say they are inebriated or “drunk” in trance. Their knowledge is passed on orally, wet and fluent from lip to lip, and in practical terms, knowledge travels along the liquid, flowing rivers, the communication system of the forests.

To the missionaries, this wild and wet knowledge was devilish: knowledge should come from dry Bible paper, made from dead trees, or be given soberly on dry stone tablets, not drunk, drunkenly, from the moist world of living plants. Christianity, like every other ancient system of thought, equated trees with knowledge, but—peculiarly—it chose to associate the Tree of Knowledge with sin.

A “wise man” of the Aguaruna people pointedly sums up his people’s history of thought: they gained knowledge from plants, particularly ayahuasca and tobacco, but the end was abrupt: “This took place until 1953, when the school system of education began and the ILV prohibited the drinking of those plants.” ILV is the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a right-wing American missionary outfit, responsible for cultural genocide. They consider indigenous knowledge evil in itself, because it deals with the relationship between the visible world and the spiritual world. For the Ashaninca, the story was the same: you cannot find ayahuasqueros or tabaqueros “unless you go looking in the deepest forests, where there are no schools.” But if you do find such people, they will tell you of different ways of knowing. The Western way, they say, is merely theoretical; their own way is better, for it is both spiritual and practical, involving a constant moral dimension that includes respect for nature. Knowledge of successful hunting is knowledge of ethical hunting—because a hunter must learn never to be greedy, for instance. But with the arrival of missionaries and government agents and Western school systems, “we were taught to feel shame for our old beliefs.”

There is a certain bitter irony in the fact that now prospectors come from pharmaceutical companies in order to exploit wild and public indigenous knowledge of plant medicine. “They rob us and make large amounts of money from our knowledge,” I was told. Not for nothing is wild knowledge called “common knowledge.” Common knowledge is free, open, unenclosed—and “free” financially: it must not be bought or sold for profit. But now in the Amazon an act of enclosure is taking place—people’s common knowledge is exploited for commercial gain, often privatized with the patent laws, which are the private: keep out signs in the open fields of knowledge.

Literacy is an epistemology of the built world, physically, in libraries in towns, but metaphorically too, the constructed artifice of our written culture, book-bound, which encourages our philosophies and values to move ever farther away from nature—to say nothing of the constructs of deconstructionism and postdeconstructionism.

I was tired of the tamed thinking and desiccated worlds of dry books, and I was following that wild call, familiar to us all: the young, the old, the sad, the curious, the footloose and all who yearn just to bugger off for a while. It is an ancient need, made heroic in the past: the anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr, in Dreamtime, writes, “Yvain, Lancelot, Tristan left culture behind to become mad in the wilderness. Only after having become wild could they rise to the rank of knight. Following this same path, the Tungus shaman runs out into the wilderness . . . until he finds . . . the ‘animal mother’ . . . and has experienced his ‘wild,’ his ‘animal aspect.’ ”

Go to the wilds. The Amazon drew me and, once there, held me fascinated.

On the Río Marañón

After some time, I went north, with an Aguaruna woman, to the river where she was born on a tributary of the Río Marañón. She was taking twelve chickens and several baskets of chicks to communities in her area and the journey took days; by plane and then by bus, crowded with people, parrots and puppies and a man selling antiparasite pills. After the bus, a long car journey took us to the banks of the Marañón and she introduced me to the river as if to a close friend. We took a peque peque upriver.

Small, shiny children were playing like otters on the riverbanks and a dugout canoe softly paddled along the shoreline with a man at the back and an alert little dog at the front. There were biscuit wrappers in the water and trees dripping with moss and vines. A log, fallen in the river, looked like an alligator. If you come here without permission, you may well see your last arrow here; the Aguaruna shoot people who come uninvited. A little boy in a red T-shirt was fishing with a line from a canoe and a mother, surrounded by children, washed clothes. Smoke rose into low clouds from isolated shacks and “Bar. Rest” was marked incongruously on one hut. One of the chickens tried to eat my boots and a buzzard hovered over the bank. Bright green plastic Portakabin toilets, government-provided, stood in a comical row. They were locked. It didn’t matter; no one in their right mind would want to use one of them, because if used they smelled awful and attracted mosquitoes. Outdoors, all excrement is gone in hours.

We began having trouble negotiating a shallow part of the river, until a couple of men appeared on the banks and shouted directions to us. After many hours, we reached the first of the communities Chinita wanted to visit, and we pulled up at the bank. A fishing net hung from a tree to dry, and close to it, a man was fishing. The river, canoe, man, paddle and line together created the elegance of sheer simplicity. There was a concrete schoolhouse, with iron bars on the windows. It was nearly evening and fires were lit, Aguaruna style, three logs pushed, tips together, so that one end of each log smouldered in the fire. Someone fanned the fire with a fan made from bird feathers sewn together. There was an accidental frog in the soup and a rat in the bedroom and on the steps crouched two huge rainbow-coloured insects with fluorescent eyes.

Apart from the rivers, people can communicate here through jungle drums, made from dugout trees. The Aguaruna traditionally have three messages. The first is a lively dancing rhythm, an invitation to a fiesta. The second is for emergencies, a rapid series of sharp knocks. The third is a steady, calling song, which means that ayahuasca is ready. One man showed me how to play a tortoiseshell like a violin. With beeswax on the tortoise’s arse, and using the edge of your palm like a violin bow, you draw your hand over it, scraping it till it sounds like a haunting violin string.

People talked fearfully of a religious sect that lives close to Aguaruna land and they were worried these people would start to build roads through the forests, which the Aguaruna are emphatically against. I mentioned Britain’s anti-road protesters, and they were tickled pink at the idea of people living in treehouses to stop a road. But when I told them that some people had made tunnels and lived underground to prevent building work, they lay back and hooted with laughter.

At night, the palm trees were like fish bones, lively verdant skeletons, and Chinita and I swam in the river under a bright moon, while the stars vied with the fireflies on the riverbanks. There are parrots that sing at night, and their song is pure laughter.

We journeyed on, going to the confluence of two rivers for a rendezvous with a friend of Chinita’s. At the riversmeet, there was a sinister office building on the riverbank. It had been built by the Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path guerrilla movement) and used for bulk coca transactions for cocaine. Most people happily chew coca; unprocessed and in small quantities, it’s mild as tea, and is part of Amazonian culture. When coca is processed in large quantities for cocaine, though, the trade is dangerous and frightening for local people. Inside the building was a desk, a chair, a fridge and a pink plastic piggy bank. Chinita’s friend was late and we spent hours and hours plagued by mosquitoes, listening to the wails of a funeral coming from a village in the distance; an old man had died of cancer the previous day and the forest was full of weeping. People here don’t fear death, said Chinita: it’s a “crossing to the other side” like crossing a river.

Chinita’s friend arrived and we left together to go to another village to stay a night, but going upriver our peque peque ran out of petrol so we stopped by a tiny path on the muddy bank and went to the nearest hut to buy some. We were invited in to eat and drink; someone passed me water in a large hollow gourd and I played face-pulling games with a five-year-old girl. A big moth fluttered by and she caught it and pulled it apart matter-of-factly. There was a woman there, in her mid-thirties, with feet worn like leather from a shoeless life. Her heel was cracked as leather cracks; an unhealable split, deep into her sole. She scraped tiny mites out of my legs, which had bitten me and left dozens of swollen, itchy spots.

Outside, the moon was bright over the misty river. Zapetas (crickets) chuckled, and the lechusa bird called wow from deep in the forest. A storm crashed through the night.

People talked about the illegal gold miners in Aguaruna land and told me in angry indignation how functionaries from a mining company would fly helicopters over Aguaruna land, prospecting. One helicopter had landed, and the Aguaruna kidnapped everyone on board, except the pilot, whom they ordered to go back wherever he came from and fetch 13,000 soles, or £3,000, and return with this ransom; only then would the hostages be released. They were understandably proud of this, one of the few times when forest people have been able to robustly defend themselves.

In some areas, Aguaruna women are committing suicide because their culture is becoming “rotten” or “broken”—devastated by European contact, when their lands are threatened. Here, deep in the heart of Aguaruna territory, it seems impossible to believe, but the edges of their lands are where people feel most vulnerable.

The days stretched into weeks, in the elastic time of wild lands, and we travelled farther and farther north until we got close to the Ecuadorean border. Here, there was a problem. The border guards were used to Aguaruna people paddling up and down the river but no Europeans ever come here, they told me. They were very suspicious. They called their chief. He studied my passport and didn’t like the look of it at all. We talked. Nothing doing. So I took the only option and gently, firmly and unstoppably flirted with him. We went on our way, with his blessing.

Lianas the height of a three-storey house dropped from tree branches into the waters and much farther upriver a man rafted past us, his craft made of bamboo with a small four-poster “wigwam” on the back. Our boat nuzzled its way into the mud of the riverbank and we went to visit a village, where people kept pigs, on reins, in the houses. I forgot to take off my sunglasses and a small child cried at the sight of me. “You look like a huge insect,” I was told. We stopped for the night and stayed with a herbalist, whose knowledge of local plants was famous up and down the river.

Another night we stayed with relatives of Chinita’s, whose house was full of chickens, children, cats, dogs and pigs. In the evening we ate hot banana soup, and oil lanterns lit the night as the fishing nets were hung out to dry. A small girl, with a laugh like a stream, sang catches of songs while her elder brother played a bamboo flute and I went to sleep in my hammock to the sound of laughter; laughter in the house, and in the forests the frogs seemed to be laughing with the birds. The women woke at about three in the morning for a long natter in bed and Chinita got the giggles. A coconut fell with a crash in the forest.

The next morning we went as far upriver as we could in the peque peque, before the rapids of the river became too dangerous. Chinita showed me a secret cave where Aguaruna people used to put the bones of their dead in baskets. There were boas in the deepest pits of the cave and birds nesting at the back. The boatman and a small boy with us went yodelling into the cave, to shoo out the birds before we went in. Every spring, Chinita told me, the river rises, washing away almost everything in the cave, but the ledge, where people put the bones and skulls, was above the high-water mark. She showed me the skulls, including one of a different shape which was, she thought, very old. A bright butterfly fluttered in on turquoise wings and alighted on the bones. The small boy stuck his finger into the eye sockets of a skull and dug out batshit. It was a strange place, grey, silent and ancient and I felt humbled to be shown it, the cave of the ancestors.

Downriver again, back in the green noisy world of now, sunlight was flashing on wet paddles and a child, showing off, did a backflip into the river off the end of a canoe. A group of boys played with their blowpipes on the banks—the blowpipes are about two feet long, made of green reeds, and good for hunting small birds. I spent a long time canoeing with the children in the dugouts. These tippy canoes sit high in the water and are very sensitive. Every wobble your body makes seems doubled by the canoe whose trembling in turn makes you wobble the more. The children were in charge, for sure; here, children can canoe almost before they can walk. I found it hard to paddle because just when I was ready to correct my direction they would pitch in with a deft flick of a paddle, not trusting me to know what to do. In the morning they were grindingly determined to push upstream and, easy in the afternoon, would glide back down to be home by dusk. Childhood, river and canoe all seemed spun of the same silk. Tranquillity is here; a canoe in a cool inlet, silent at twilight, reflected in the water under a cool and silent moon.

Wild Language

Language expresses itself in the rivers. News travels along the rivers in the Amazon; communication and travel is primarily by boat, but beyond the practical reasons there is a deep affinity between rivers and language. Rivers flow like language—we say that someone is “fluent” in a language, their speech flows like a river. Languages, like rivers, run roughly the same course, but always change their details: you never step into the same language twice, because a meaning has newly shifted here, a connotation has just been formed there. Rivers and language are both gloriously wild. Careless of their courses, rivers won’t run straight. Both languages and rivers are extravagant—who cares how a river wastes its meanderings? Who asks why language wastes its windings in splendid, luxurious, uneconomic curls of meanings? And then there are rivers that double back, meet themselves returning from an aside in the conversation they were having with the land. Picture a river that gradually makes a loop, like a U in a line. Then imagine how, in a season of fast-flowing water, the river would push for a more direct route, going straight from one tine to the other without flowing down and up the U. Then, after a while, the old loop would be cut off from the main line that the river is now following. Similarly language, finding a more rapid route to communicate, will leave unused obsolete words behind, still in the dictionary and perhaps in memory but no longer in the currency of language where language is flowing fastest.

Land seems to cross-fertilize language and language the land in an intricate chiasmus of mind and wildness, each a simile for the other. Land likens to language as the viridian green lichens onto trunks; creamy olive mould molds the fungus on the bark; the young green shoot shoots first and later asks questions of the sun, and the radical green root roots itself, complicated, into the simple earth. And the roots of words reach deep down into the earthy past. New leaves, cocky as new words, shine and gleam with sheer delight at being green, and chlorophyll spins sunlight to greenness in lively wordplay, a pun spun of the sun to make “life” from “light.”

Metaphor is where language is most wild, spirited and free, leaping boundaries, and it may be no surprise that Amazonian languages can be as matted and dense with metaphor as the forest is tangly with vegetation. The Amazon seems a place of boundless allusion, this unfenced wild, where meaning is twined within meaning; words couple and double, knotted together. The wind twists a leaf’s meaning and rain reflects the sheer fertility of language romping from sky to forest and back again. As metaphoric meaning is tucked behind revealed meaning, so the vivid green and wild language of allusion sings on the far side of the obvious, as mind is behind face.

The anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote breathtaking studies of the layered and allusive languages and thoughtways of the Amazonian people of Colombia, describing how they merge meanings into richly suggestive textures of thought, as association, that wild bindweed of language, makes one thing cling to another. “To be shining” or “to be resplendent” in the Tukano language is, for example, a metaphor for sexual arousal and erection. It takes five pages for him even to begin to describe the elegant and profound associations, through allusion and symbolism, of just one tree, to show how the “bow wood tree,” or jacaranda, represents maleness, dominance, aggression and procreative energy. It also suggests a “package” and “thunder,” “pollination” and the “semen spurt.” So many concepts are held in one tree, says Reichel-Dolmatoff, that it suggests “dimensions of mind hardly suspected.” Language reveals depth on depth of enfolded intimacy—softly erotic—between people and nature. He writes of the uacú seed, which can refer to sex, because that seed is reminiscent of a deer hoof; the deer hoof leaves a scent trail, the deer smells like the uacú seed and like a woman’s cunt, while the V-shaped imprint of the deer hoof is like the shape of a woman’s legs or the imprint of her buttocks in sand.

Reichel-Dolmatoff meticulously details one word root, ahp, which is the basis of words associated with hallucinogenic drugs, sex and creativity in the Desana language. Ahpi is coca, and gahpi is Banisteriopsis caapi, the narcotic vine used for ayahuasca. Ahp is the root of several words referring to sexual anatomy, including ahpiri, breast, womb; ahpiru, nipple; ahpirito, testicles; yahpi, vulva and gahki, penis. Ahpiri, meanwhile, means to create, and ahpari means to be essential. To me all these suggest wildness; the wild-mindedness of hallucinogens, the wildness of sex, the unboundedness necessary to creativity, and the essentialness of them all.

In the Congolese forests there are similarly dense textures and clusters of meanings in the Kikongo language and in Malaysia, traditionally, people going to get camphor from the forests had to propitiate the spirits of the forest by using a special allusive language called bassa kapor, camphor language; obsolete dialects mixed with Malayan words twisted from their original meaning. Language in forests flourishes in complexity and diversity and allusive meaning.

Green is around you, green above you, green below you in the Amazon; and in at least one Amazonian language, green is not a colour term—as if green, being everywhere, is the one colour not described; rather it is the norm from which others diverge. Reichel-Dolmatoff writes of the Desana language that “Yahsári . . . applied to a pale green . . . is not a colour term; the stem is gah, goh, ‘to germinate, to sprout,’ related to gohséri, ‘to shine.’ The term is used in shamanic language when referring to the colour of young coca leaves.” 

Intriguingly, if you look up green in the Oxford English Dictionary, you find something wonderfully similar. Green is from an Old Teutonic root grô, the same root for grow and grass. The rainforest is profligate with its greenness: the colour of wildness, which grins and gurns, green the fire in the eyes, green the vivid shoot, green the light pouring through leaves, green the verb here; to grow is to green.

In the English language, colours are separate from one another; the words white, yellow, red, green, blue and brown are distinct terms which do not merge into one another. In the Desana language, Reichel-Dolmatoff shows, colour terms melt into one another in a spectrum where one word gently hints at both the previous term and the subsequent term, just as colours themselves softly shift from one to another, yellow turning into orange into red. In this, the Desana language faithfully and subtly follows the truth of nature.

Thus: bo’ré gohseró means yellow-bright, for example sun rays;
bo’ré yahsáro means yellow-greenish;
yahsári-da means greenish-blue—for example, an aspect of moonlight; and
bo’ré yahsá diabiríro means yellow-greenish-strengthened-with-red.

For indigenous peoples of the Vaupés River, nature is bursting with significance: shamans, concerned with the symbolic value of the forest’s creatures, could be irritated if others only saw the physical or economic aspects of animals rather than their value as carriers of image and meaning. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphor, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” The wild vision sees that nature, by relation and by association, is a metaphor for our truths, the slanted, hidden, enfolded truths of the spirit, and—as I was to discover dramatically—an emblem for our transformings.

One thing has struck me in virtually every indigenous community I’ve ever visited: when people are having a conversation in their own language and intermittently dip into the dominant language (Spanish in the Amazon, English in Australia or the Canadian Arctic, Thai among the indigenous hill tribes of Thailand) for terms that they lack in their own, the words they need are words of measurement: measurement of money, of land and time. Words for metres and miles and hectares, virtually any number above about three, words for year or hour or days of the week. Their own languages express the wildness of nature, unfenced in extent; they lack terms for fencing wild time and for measuring wild lands. (A glorious exception to this rule is the relish with which the Papuan Kapauku people set up their own decimal system and can be obsessive counters.)

There are many terms (particularly for things in the natural world) that cannot be translated out of their local indigenous language—for example, because they refer to a rare plant, or because they refer to a specific use of a root, or particular local knowledge. And when an indigenous language dies, so does a whole way of knowing.

Languages that are at ease in the wild world can express a speaker’s meaning with precision by reference to nature. If I have a headache, for example, I would struggle to describe what kind of headache I have. Not so for the Ainu people on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, who could choose between having a bear headache, a musk deer headache, a dog, woodpecker, octopus, crab or lamprey headache.

In one sense all languages lean towards the wild world, through onomatopoeia. An owl sounds like an owl, ’owling in the dark. A river “splashes” waterily on the tongue as much as on the riverbank. All languages have long aspired to echo the wild world that gave them growth and many indigenous peoples say that their words for creatures are imitations of their calls. According to phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, language “is the very voice of the trees, the waves, and the forests.”

Places of the highest biodiversity (such as New Guinea and South America) are also the places with the greatest linguistic diversity. But there’s more: just as biodiversity is threatened by a few agricultural species—wheat, barley, cattle and rice—so it is with languages; linguistic diversity is threatened by the dominant spreading varieties of Spanish or English. In the deep forests of the Amazon the land speaks in proliferating diversity of languages, each apt to, and expressive of, its locale, but where the forest has been felled for cattle the land no longer speaks its own languages but rather a kind of dumb Spanish, a wilderness roaring with eloquence turned into a wasteland.

In the Amazon, people refer to the forest as a speaking world, relating, talking and communicating. People can be interintelligent with their lands, the languages being formed from the land and then people in turn singing up their land. The roots of intelligent are inter and legere, which means both “read” and “gather”—people could gather plants and words from their lands. To gather, of course, itself means both “to collect” (for example, fruits) and “to understand.” So we gather.

The Peruvian Amazon was called a Tower of Babel by early Spanish missionaries. Intended as an insult, it was actually a compliment, testimony to the luminous and tumultuous diversity of jungle languages, not just one tree of knowledge but millions, a forest of knowing. But the Church, the state and the education system together have deforested the human mind, forcing people to speak Spanish and aiding logging companies and others in a corporate land theft. If you take people out of their land, you take them out of their meaning, out of their language’s roots. When wild lands are lost, so is metaphor, allusion and the poetry that arises in the interplay of mind and nature. To lose your land is to lose your language, and to lose your language is to lose your mind, as John Clare, England’s peasant poet (born in 1793), knew. He was one of the very few poets in the canon who insisted on using dialect words, the language most specific to the land he described. This last English indigenous poet was torn up from his roots and shut up in a madhouse miles from his homeland.

Today the Amazon is full of mute inglorious Clares whose silenced words would sing the songlines of a stolen world if they could. For them, their lands had been lit with meaning, glowing with signs and messages, imbued with symbolic thought and without land, they say, they are not. Over three hundred people from the Guarani-Kaiowá people in Brazil committed suicide between 1986 and 1999. “Without land, the Indian becomes sad and begins to lose his language. He starts to speak with the borrowed language of the white man. He loses the memory of his people. Without lands . . . he starts to die,” said Severino, president of Aty-Guasú, the traditional assembly of the Guarani.

The world’s forests have not only been stolen, they have been badly misrepresented, portrayed as thickets dense with unmeaning, a glum dumbness mute as doom. Joseph Conrad did all jungles a terrible disfavour by his insistence on their inarticulacy, because he lacked the skills and experience to hear them and wanted them for a hollow echo to his story. He describes forests—“the wilderness without a sound”—with the shadow words, the negative prefixes in-, im-, un-, op-: “oppressive,” “the extremity of an impotent despair,” “the silent wilderness . . . invincible,” “an empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.”

The desire to tame what was wild—so strong in the days of empire—included a desire to tame the wildness of all languages, even the languages of empire. Philologist Otto Jespersen, in 1905, used land images to contrast French and English. French, he said, was like the formal, regulated gardens of Louis XIV, in contrast to the wild and open commons of the English langscape, “laid out seemingly without any definite plan, and in which you are allowed to walk everywhere according to your own fancy without having to fear a stern keeper inforcing rigorous regulations.”

One reason for the massive project of the Oxford English Dictionary was a hatred of the wilderness of the English language. Wailed a pamphleteer, “We have neither Grammar nor Dictionary, neither Chart nor Compass, to guide us through the wide sea of Words.” It was an attempt to fix the language, to fence it, to delineate it and establish its limits. The result was the opposite. The decades of work, the proliferation of page upon page, book upon book, edition upon edition, was glorious proof that language was unfixable and nomadic, wildly profuse and forever free.

Meanwhile, back in the Amazon, my perception could not have been more different from Conrad’s: to me the forests seemed a riot of language in irrepressible gusto, life growling, flowering, leafing, hooting, wriggling and budding, flickering in a forest fiesta of verdant and noisy verbs. Far from Conrad’s silence, it is a musical place, the tickety chopping sound of leaves in a breeze, the Messiaenic birdsong in the canopies. Even in dead leaves or the carcass of a bird killed by a jaguar, life speaks out its stories, liana tangled, turquoise and elastic, the parrots that mimic a waterfall or a raindrop in a pool and would mimic the sunrise itself if they could; the tumescent and stretchy growths on trees; nests of tiny glistening worms, or thick snakes on a cold slink. Suddenly, bolt upright with curiosity, a monkey glances down at you, its eyes wide and its paws tapping a tattoo on the branches; the forest is chattering with language, a whole universe laughing with life.