Articles & Essays Book Reviews Creative Writing
Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Volume 18 Number 2, August 2017
___________________________________________________________________
John Danvers, Interwoven Nature: relatedness and identity in a changeful world. Whitewick Press, 2016. ISBN: 0995678901
reviewed by
The title of John Danvers’ latest book brackets the breadth and complexity of its content. It is a fascinating read that takes you through an array of topics that include, among many other topics: kinship, language, community, culture, identity, creativity, natural-world interdependence, death, and a mindfulness approach that incorporates aspects of Buddhist, Daoist and indigenous religious teachings.
Two voices narrate this text. The author describes the first as: an old man who reflects on his life, offering small insights he has gained into the ways of the world. (Actually, Old Man didn’t quite capture the persona for me. So for this review, I’ve labelled this voice: Fanciful Danvers instead.) The voice is at times enigmatic and naive, often misquoting from old texts and stumbling into some fascinating poetry.
As described by the author, the second voice is younger . . . More academic, sober and analytical. (I’ll refer to this persona as Analytical Danvers, since I didn’t quite sense him as necessarily “younger,” as the author identifies him.) The voices trade chapters and balance each other. Both voices are keen to explore their relationship with the world and how best they function as creatures in and of the world.
Why two voices for one author? Why not? The device instantly opens a second channel, an added persona, useful for approaching the complicated topic at hand: an exploration of the porousness and interconnectedness of humans as they function in and react to the natural world. Any writer is capable of doing this, dividing a narration into separate voices or personnae, even when the same person composes each narrative channel. You’ve only got to be somewhat innovative and somewhat playful, to be able to carry it off. Also creatively bold. John Danvers is all of these things.
In the end, Danvers points out it could be argued that we all have an old and young person within us, and that these are two voices intertwine in the stories we tell, the beliefs we hold and the opinions we have about ourselves and the world.
Oh yes, and add to this a third counterpointing “voice,” if you will: the occasional interposition of drawings and photographs by the author. I’ve labelled this the third “voice” primarily because I wasn’t sure which persona should be credited with the numerous photo and art images [all black and white] that are interspersed throughout the text.
Interweaving, as foreshadowed from the title, connotes, in part, a nonlinear, collaged structure for the text as it attempts to weave scientific enquirer and analysis with poetic evocation and synthesis. This isn’t something just anyone can accomplish. It requires a combination of the talents of artist, writer, poet and academic, in all of which the author happens to be credentialed.
In one early chapter, Analytical Danvers describes the coming narrative as a series of short bursts of activity, one idea leading to another, . . . An organic unfolding of observations, associations, images and references. His goal is to depict life for his readers the way he experiences it.
There are only one or two very brief moments when the text approaches the potential of a dialogic, in which the separate narrating voices might engage one another, as at the opening of Chapter II. At that point, Analytical Danvers comments: Although I agree with a lot of what the old man has to say, he does seem to exaggerate here and there, and I’m not sure he’s always a reliable witness or observer of what happens.
And then Chapter IV, again, Analytical Danvers: In the light of the old man’s comments about connection and disconnection, let us consider . . .
But Fanciful Danvers never seems to reciprocate by recognizing the existence of Analytical Danvers, and for the most part the two just seem to exist separately under the common roof of the book. This is probably in keeping with the way life works, but as a fiction writer I kept hoping for possible engagement, interaction, conflict at times perhaps but also exploration of common grounds that can lead to palpable synthesis. To be sure, on closer reading, some level of subtle synthesis between the personae can be found, but it doesn't jump out at you. By not engaging it in the text, the author might have deprived himself of the opportunity to make deeper exploration of the dynamic within himself. Perhaps this was intended, as an added means of mirroring the realities of human life.
About his intentions for the Analytic narrative persona, he says: I hope there will be room for you to make up your own mind and to make connections of your own. I want to suggest rather than to cajole, and to avoid dogmatic assertions. So I’ve organized my notes as my thoughts are structured: as a series of short bursts of activity, one idea leading to another. I’m not constructing a reasoned step-by-step argument, but rather an organic unfolding of observations, associations, images and references. This seems to me to be more consistent with how I think and how I experience life as a succession of events, surprises, unpredictable twists and turns. Somehow the whole seems to have a coherence which is not apparent in its many parts. In other words I’m hoping that there is space within what I write for the fragmentary discontinuities that are a vital component of how we live, speak and share our experiences.
* * *
I am not the tree that sings or the sea of despair, says Fanciful Danvers in a later chapter, and we realize how much we’ve been appreciating the poetic contrast his side of the narration provides. And perhaps, had he been actively aware of Analytical Danvers’ presence in the text, he might have been somewhat thwarted in his freewheeling output.
Earlier, Fanciful Danvers comments: But that was long ago in a land grown radiant with remembered dreams and endless reverie.
Then, as he crosses back over to his persona at one point, Analytical Danvers transitions with: The practice of mindfulness, zazen and other modes of contemplation, manifest a very different mode of being to the acquisitive and boundary-making ways in which we relate to the world and to other beings.
Here’s what the innovation of two voices provides for readers. It gives the opportunity to toggle between two distinct styles, styles that often pivot loosely around the same associated topic. This means we can read the Fanciful Danvers voice as he muses into his later meditative mindfulness: Maybe it has always been so, this compelling carousel that holds us in its thrall, leaving us breathless, dizzy, yet anxious for another go. For it is a fairground. We are children with candyfloss and toffee apples in our hands. We run from ride to ride, full of energy and expectancy. Even as we feel nauseous we climb on to another whirligig machine that spins us ever on . . . Yet now, in my elder days, I no longer feel the need to climb on the carousel, maybe my knees are too painful, or I’ve grown tired of the spinning ways. Now I sit and watch, noticing what I’d not seen before, realising how futile it is to get on a spinning machine in the hope that it will take me anywhere other than back to where I started.
Toggling to the following chapter and the Analytical Danvers voice: In this chapter I want to briefly explore one further characteristic of existence, ‘impermanence,’ and then go on to suggest particular ways in which we can rediscover or realise our interwoven nature and reorient our lives around this realisation.
* * *
Buddhists consider impermanence to be one of the three marks of existence — the other two being: absence of self-existence; and dissatisfaction or suffering. It is useful to examine the Buddhist viewpoint that impermanence permeates existence, and to understand the implications of this view.
The obvious surface advantage to the dual voices approach is of course that we’re not confined to one persona or the other. In effect, we’re free to pick and choose the order in which we experience the separate narrative chapters. But there are additional messages and effects that justify the duality at even deeper levels. First, by the example the author provides, this reminds us that the deeper persona is in fact complex enough to carry two or even several voices and still remain a whole and somehow integrated person. This is certainly true of the author. He demonstrates this by the text. And by comparison, it reminds us that it is likely true of all of us who read the book. The narrative voices stand as permissive license, if you will, for our own personal second channels to be recognized and be able to hold forth. Perhaps we even read the text with two perceiving voices: our fanciful, more untethered poetic voices, and our more serious, studious analytical sensibilities.
Fanciful Danvers is inclined at any time to engage in what I’ll refer to as eidetic reduction, especially as he narrates what he observes or experiences within a natural setting. He often records what he sees, into words, simply in the order in which he sees them. It is the process by which children incorporate reality, a step at a time, cataloguing from observed image to image, and rounding corners without any expectation of what is coming, or any sense of obligation to place them in sensible order. All the while being ready to accept whatever it is and make it instantly a part of the experience of reality. A slightly more left-hemisphere variation of this is his occasional inclination for compiling lists of items, in the order of their encounter.
By contrast, Analytical Danvers seems always more inclined to develop inceptional rationales, even as random thoughts and notes emerge, making assessments and analyses as he places things in order.
Fanciful Danvers informs us: I watch clouds of feeling and memory passing through my mind. They seem to have no substance. No weight. They’re no longer attached to me, as clouds aren’t tethered to the sky. squalls of anxiety blow through, whipping up waves as they go. But the waves are small and short-lived. There’s a steadiness and balance to my days, that no squall or thunder can disturb.
Analytical Danvers is protective of the innocence that enables Fanciful Danvers to thrive. Analytical Danvers imports poems. Fanciful Danvers is more likely to create them:
walking in the quiet shoals of
trees dropping gold, finding
what was never lost, slowly
turning each leaf to dream
as if it had never been,
Analytical Danvers at one point seems to take issue with a Rexroth metaphor: “the cold and cruel apathy of mountains,” by taking pains to explain that this must be an anthropocentric reference, since, as this voice admonishes: we can hardly accuse mountains of ‘apathy,’ let alone ‘cruelty.’
How can it be (?) that the same author who parsed this metaphor so stringently could be seen, as he mused, in the persona of Fanciful Danvers:
Gazing out at the garden I remember the rain: the hush of it, the steady fall of millions of drops, each containing a version of the world in its lens-like globe, and the sweet fragrance of earth released into the atmosphere by some alchemy of water meeting soil.
This is the essential paradox of the two voices. The reader is left not only with the wide choice between disparate styles, but also the challenge of possibly connecting the associative dots between them to try to make a greater sense of things. What might be the connections, the complexities that justify the two voices dwelling beneath the same roof?
Ah, but irrespective of the challenge to make the connections, isn’t it part of the miracle of the human condition that these differences in approach can exist? And isn’t it further a part of the miracle that a single author can triangulate his focus onto the same vast topics?
Finally, the dual narrative voices give us all an opportunity to study the complexities of life simply by observing the two channels in action as they approach common topics from different directions. This is in fact one author, but he is coming from two directions, and like diverging radio beams we can follow each channel to where we imagine them intersecting in a deeper discovery as to what this complex author is really about, what causes him to function, how his human system bears in from at least two directions on what he finds interesting or compelling.
Of course in this regard, it is also interesting to note that, while the Analytical Danvers voice seems to be aware that the free-wheeling Fanciful Danvers voice exists, apparently Fanciful Danvers seems to be oblivious of the scholar who dwells within the same human complex. And perhaps it might indeed be this obliviousness that provides a significant key to the permissive freedom for waxing fanciful and poetic. Food for thought.
In the end, the pleasurable experience of reading Interwoven Nature comes from our indulging the two contrasting narrative personnae in pursuit of the ultimate challenge John Danvers imposes on himself. He seeks nothing less than the integration of humanity into a common Being and the absorption of that Being into the context of natural life in which it exists. The profound reader benefit is that the process simultaneously serves to reintegrate Danvers’ two narrating voices into the single being that conceived the project. The experience is highly recommended.