Natural Justice
MY FRIEND Barry Lopez died on Christmas Day.
Lopez wrote Arctic Dreams and Horizon and a dozen beautiful works that sought to remind us to find ourselves and our lost way again through a renewed contemplation of the natural order. He was my friend, an elder to me, and I miss him, as we all must. One feels hopeful remembering his life, though. In the face of the evidence of so much sustained injustice practised against each other and against the earth, notwithstanding the evidence that earth, its climate heating, its diversity diminishing, is growing less able to sustain the future we had in mind for our children, Barry insisted on love and hope. Hope, though, is a heavy burden to carry, and Barry carried it all his writing life. One feels, though it was a cancer that claimed him, a cancer he had borne for ten years, he could not carry it, that burden of hope, any longer. And who could blame him for putting it down at last?
I’ve written an elegy for Barry Lopez, a long poem (a nine-by-nine-by-nine); I recited it (“Outside: A Cantus for Barry Lopez”) at a reading I made on 27 January, with Judith Nangala Crispin, for Daragh Byrne’s Sydney Poetry Lounge. Check that out online here:
https://www.facebook.com/thesydneypoetrylounge/videos/2733496100235264
Of Arvo Part’s “Cantus for Benjamin Britten,” Barry once told me: that’s how I wish my writing sounded. It’s with that in mind that my poem a is a cantus in BL’s memory—and I called it “Outside” after the title of one Barry’s books I found myself reading and rereading after his death. Here’s how my poem closes:
…For wisdom is both light and grave.
And every pretty place has cost ten
Lives at least, and all that seems a gift
Was stolen once and must be given
Back. You practised on us all the care
You could have used when you were young. Each
Word forgave what nothing can forgive.
Let me walk your work outside and fledge
From feathers a canticle of birds.
I was glad Barrry Lopez did not live to see the idiot mob, incited by the idiot demagogue, their president, invade the Capitol; I was glad he died with a sense, now being realised, that the grownups were back in charge: that fact would again inform policy, that thought would take the place of cant, that human dignity would again figure in political objectives and characterise the way they might be pursued.
Twenty years ago Barry said to me that it was justice—justice for all things, including land—that was his calling on the page. Maybe it is literature’s work. As so I was sorry Barry did not live to see the new administration dedicate itself on 28 January—after many other moves in its first days to achieve social justice—to environmental justice. In the New Yorker, Bill McKibben, a man Barry knew well, and whom Barry influenced, declares 28 January a watershed moment—the day that America, not a moment too late, cast off the thrall of oil and gas and committed itself to justice for the environment, and for all of us, also, who depend on it for our futures.
Natural justice—doing justice to all of nature, not just the human parts of it, though also those, and especially the disenfranchised and silenced—is all our work, I think. Certainly it is mine. And if it is, I owe my understanding of my work and literature’s work very largely to my too-soon departed friend. Justice: letting each thing on earth, each being, have the life to which it is born; the justice wisdom does, freeing all of us from ignorance and cant and stereotype; remembering the earth in every phrase so that we might remember it in our lives and activism, so that a world might continue in which birds still fly and weather still sustains us all.
Here is Bill McKibben’s piece. In memoriam BL:
