wilderness issues lecture series

David James Duncan and the Language of Eternity

By Matthew Frank, 3-07-07

Author David James Duncan says if in the Bible, the words “heaven and earth” were replaced with “environment,” the book would be out of print.

It’s the word’s “soullessness,” he says. It’s not big enough and lovely enough. It lacks “the language of eternity” to affect the whole of a human.

And the inadequacy of the word is reflected in the inadequacy of the environmental movement, whose outward work has not been balanced by, and not informed by, the divinity in each of us, that interior kingdom, the wild within, Duncan says.

The Wild Outside, The Wild Within was the title of Duncan’s talk Tuesday night at the University of Montana as part of the Wilderness Issues Lecture Series. The Montana novelist and essayist spoke of the earth’s holiness and of those who speak of it and write of it so well—the work of “exposing matter to spirit,” as he put it.

Duncan shared passages with the audience from the likes of Tolstoy, Leopold, Hawken, Blake and Darwin. He called them “the deepest, highest, most loving descriptions” of our world—language with that necessary eternity. Among the words Duncan read aloud were those of Mother Teresa, who said, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

A passage that struck this listener was a poem written by William Stafford called “Why I am happy.”

“There is a lake somewhere / so blue and far nobody owns it…That lake stays blue and free; it goes / on and on. / And I know where it is.”

Nobody owns this lake, Duncan added, “least of all reason.”

Duncan’s speech was solemn, enough to make him pause to collect himself once or twice, but at the same time, like his writing, hilarious and irreverent. In between talk of the wild within Duncan addressed the spiritual deficiencies of the Bush administration, which he likens to “cave trolls.” There’s no more a chance of global climate change being solved by the administration’s big oil men, he said, as the crystal meth problem being solved by addicts and tweakers.

But “I am my brother’s keeper,” Duncan said, “and George W. Bush is my brother.”

To hate the sin but not the sinner has been a struggle for Duncan. Help, he said, has come from Tolstoy, who wrote in War and Peace that a king is the “slave of history.” Duncan read, “The more connections he has with others and the more power he has over them, the more conspicuous is the predestination and inevitability of every act he commits.”

Toward the end, the audience still completely honed in, Duncan shared anecdotes about his own inward spirit effecting outward change—small things done with great love. He talked of a loon he sped past on a Montana highway that had mistaken the slick pavement for calm water and lay there, inches from barreling semis, lame with a chipped beak. Duncan threw his car into reverse and carefully scooped up the loon as it warbled into his chest. He raced to the house of a bird-loving friend who placed the loon in a tub of water, and dropped in gold fish that swam below. The loon floated in circles, content, gobbling up gold fish, minutes after inevitable death.

“Life itself,” Duncan said, “sometimes hangs by a thread made of nothing but the spirit which we see.”

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