Notes from a Gretel Ehrlich Bender

The bardo state occurs not only at the moment of death or the moment before death, but all during our lives; the bardo is the uncertainty and groundlessness we often feel.

Match to the Heart

There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration.

The Solace of Open Spaces

Yet in all this indeterminacy, life keeps opting for life.

Islands, the Universe, Home

I had an odd moment of recall a few weeks back over a green Honda Civic. It was one of those early 90s models with the hatchback. I forget where I was exactly, but I want to say it was in Roslyn, Washington en route to the Gorge. In any event, I was on the road with a friend I was visiting for a few days when I noticed the Civic. And I only noticed it because it looked off, and it didn’t take me long to realize why.

Growing up, I had a neighbor named Randy who had the same Civic. I guess it’s an elusive model and color combo, because he’s the only person I’ve ever known who has owned that particular car for a sustained period. As far back as I can remember, Randy had the special Montana plates with a bear in the foreground, and his custom plate ID was URSUS H, short for ursus horribilis–the Latin name for the North American grizzly bear. I was always told that Randy was in the very exclusive minority of Yellowstoners, seasoned or otherwise, who, in his time there, had survived a grizzly bear mauling. His custom plates were a nod to it.

I explained this association with the green Civic unceremoniously to the friend I was with. I think I punctuated it with some half-hearted dig on the comparative minutiae of the sort of things people get fazed about on the East Coast. For anybody out in the wild reading who doesn’t already know, I’m from a Yellowstone gateway town, but have unwittingly found myself stuck in the blackhole that is the Mid-Atlantic for almost eight years now–and Washington, DC specifically for the past four-and-a-half of those (a sad fact to report). In that time, I’ve become mindful of the very concrete details that distinguish the Montana of my youth from the lived experience of coworkers, neighbors, and peers I’ve met in my adult life. That I grew up knowing multiple survivors of grizzly maulings is one of those divine details, albeit one that I never gave much thought to until recently. But I’ve been thinking a lot about it in days since, and the valence I ascribe to it now is not all that different from the weight I give to a form of adversity that, at least superficially, looks quite different. But before I get into that, it bears to say that my recent visit to the Northwest (and thereby the spotting of the green Civic) coincided with my reading of Gretel Ehrlich’s Match to the Heart. It was the first of three Ehrlich books that I set out to read consecutively. The streak was inspired by well-timed internet ESP several weeks prior. There were probably many weak signals persuading me that a return to Ehrlich would be prudent, but Amanda Fortini tweeted an Ehrlich quote that put me over the edge. Upon seeing it, I decided I was due for a proper Ehrlich bender.

“The detour, of course, became the actual path; the digressions in my writing, the narrative.”
—Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

— Amanda Fortini (@amandafortini) March 13, 2019

Of the three Ehrlich texts I tapped for this two-week immersion, I had only read one previously, The Solace of Open Spaces. I think I was too obsessed with indulgent, crotchety voices like Ed Abbey’s at the time I first read Solace to appreciate the comparatively still and even-toned luster of Ehrlich’s prose. I still stan Ed Abbey for the record, but I have new and, dare I say it, more mature affection for the quiet, mild-mannered sophistication of Solace. Solace may very well be Ehrlich’s signature text, but I decided to sandwich it with two new-to-me works by her: Match to the Heart and Islands, the Universe, Home. There wasn’t a great deal of logic in the ordering. In fact, Match, which I started with, is chronologically the most recent of the works. But I’d like to believe that the effect of what I was made to feel and think while and after reading the three texts in this sequence was particular to this sequence. Had I read in a different order, the dialectic between texts might have changed. And if that had changed, my perspective might not have. And to get toward what I mean by that, and what it has to do with bear maulings and forms of adversity that manifest differently, I have to begin with this quote from Match:

The fundamental durability of the human body surprises us because the pain can be so intense–yet pain is often transient and hides the tremendous efforts the body is engaged in to heal itself.

For context, Match to the Heart is Gretel Ehrlich’s memoir about surviving two lightning strikes near her ranch home in Wyoming. The pages are comprised of an extended reflection of, yes, the long process of recovering as the improbable victim of such an intense electric shock (for which the prognosis is usually not great for victims). But I think Match can also be thought of as Ehrlich’s extended reflection on what the most basic criteria is to qualify as a living being, and perhaps most importantly, the unanswerable questions the inquiry begets. I immediately responded to this notion of the sneaky and stubborn durability of our bodies because in it, Ehrlich was capturing just the kind of thing we can never feel or appreciate unless we’re really suffering.

A few months ago, I went over to a friend’s house after they had a severe panic attack. Before getting my bike out to head over, I looked at the most recent message from them, which said, “I’m such a failure of a human.” I feel like I’ve heard, seen, and said some variation of these words so many times in my adult life. Of the people that I usually hear this assertion from, they’re almost never male and they almost always have a mood or personality disorder–something that makes them feel chronically ‘unfit’ for society. I and the friend I was helping fit both criteria. I’m a female and have been socialized as thus and I also have a personality disorder. The combo has made me feel terribly misplaced for so much of  my life. And yet somehow, in this instant with my friend, I finally worked it out in my mind that people who are ostensibly kicking ass at being a human are maybe the real failures.

Being a human, in my view, is the single hardest beat if you’re taking it seriously. Most of life is very sad and very heavy and very lonely. And all the people that I respect are the ones who work hardest to reconcile that heft with some of the milder aspects of being alive. I tend to only admire the people who are most passionate and empathetic, and thereby also have a sky-high proclivity for depression. And I must say, in my experience, having very little will to live is a hell of a way to appreciate how hard every cell in our body fights when we don’t want to. Luckily, I didn’t have to get struck by lightning like Ehrlich to arrive at that (and thank god because I couldn’t afford all that rehab in any lifetime!). I have only the faulty circuitry of my brain to blame when my will to live is impoverished. And yet I’ve learned that our bodies have a way of asserting their will to survive even when they’re in conflict with our mind. Ehrlich keys in on this phenomena in Match:

Intelligence exists everywhere in the body not jut in the brain. An electrochemical pulse beats in every one of our hundred billion nerve cells. It is the “life force” referred to in other cultures.

Some of the prevailing wisdom for when a grizzly actively attacks you is to just play dead. One bear mauling survivor (different guy than neighbor Randy) that I’ve met said he couldn’t do it. His reptile brain wouldn’t allow him to take it lying down. He fought for all that he was worth, overwhelmed with the instinct to use all his strength to protect his face and neck. It wasn’t a matter of contemplation. The electrochemical pulse, the “life force” Ehrlich was talking about, possessed him to fight.

I can’t help but respect how hard our bodies fight when we’re decisively unmotivated to do so much as stay alive. Living with that information is kind of brutal–knowing that our will to just roll over and die is entirely at odds with the only thing our systems and organs and processes know to do. I don’t get the sense from Match that Ehrlich found her recovery so tiresome that she actively wished to just die. I do get the sense that she was constantly astonished that she was still alive through every complication.

While the question of how to live alongside the constant potentiality of death and decay–in a way, to be a good, reverent neighbor to death–is front and center in Match, Ehrlich’s entire body of work speaks to this question. Once you’re sensitive to this information, I don’t think it’s easy to live with it. But I think what Ehrlich does is make us mindful that this plight–the simultaneous violence and renewal that we experience domestically–is also the plight of the universe we live in. And it’s not so much that we ever get over it as we just have to find a lifestyle and spaces that accommodate the paradox. In a way, Solace looks to space for this purpose–not to erase the contradiction but to make peace with it by understanding it as the most natural thing. In Solace, Ehrlich says:

Space represents sanity, not a life purified, dull, or “spaced out” but one that might accommodate intelligently any idea or situation.

Where we go awry, and I think Ehrlich would back me here, is when we clutter. The more we move into spaces that are artificial, the more easy it is to trick ourselves into thinking that being alive is supposed to be easy. I think it makes us less and less able to discern the proximity and simultaneity of the things that threaten us with death. Or, in Ehrlich terms:

We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

Victor Hugo is credited with saying, “adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.” And I think it’s true that when we’re made to feel somehow apart from or immune to the threat of pain or mortality, our capacity for empathy suffers and we spoil. It’s kind of a way of rejecting that we’re part of the natural world. Returning to the idea of why I tend to distrust anybody who isn’t chronically depressed, I think depression is maybe the most common psychological manifestation of us feeling this most natural pain. And while I think a clinical depressive disorder is important to monitor and treat, I think it’s a shame that we pathologize sadness so severely. Instead of honoring it as part of our plight as organisms from this Earth, we treat it like an input to shut off, control, or tamp down. Humans, I realize, were never intended to be so without feeling or so without imminent fear of death. And in retreating from the things that used to threaten us–things like large predators, and our minds–we’ve created a host of artificial threats that are now going to do us in by, what are they saying now? 2050?

Ehrlich doesn’t give us a workaround (there aren’t any). What she gives us though is a document of an examined life. In the work I finished my Ehrlich bender with, Islands, the Universe, Home, Ehrlich says of a trip to Tokyo:

I have come here to sniff out shizen–the Japanese word for a spontaneous, self-renewing, inherently sacred natural world of which humans are an inextricable part.

Thinking with Ehrlich, better yet, sniffing with Ehrlich, is thinking about our relationship to the planet that allows us to access, yes the ubiquitous threat of decay and destruction, but also the powerful force of self-renewal. And I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all template for fully accessing and harnessing the effects of self-renewal. But I think I’ve figured it out for myself, and I think it means taking active, rapid steps to get back to “space” as Ehrlich understands it. Getting back to sanity for me, to a place that can accommodate the contradictions and the emotional extremes, means getting out of the Eastern United States for good. It’s overdue and I know the reason that I’ve put it off this long is because my natural reflex is to actively hate, punish, and disempower myself. And what I’ve come around to realizing at long last is that even though I have a disorder that makes that neuro-reflex extremely difficult to suspend, the violence I do to myself by not disrupting it is, by extension, more violence done to the world if I’m to believe I’m a part of it.

Though it’s one of the least intuitive things for me, I’ve tried to think with Ehrlich by recognizing that self-renewal is as much a part of being alive as suffering. And now I feel something of a responsibility to put myself in a position to let self-renewal happen instead of constantly heading it off. Though the specifics of putting myself in a position to be affected by it are somewhat mysterious to me, I think Ehrlich unconsciously positions dreams as something of a litmus test for being truly, reverently alive in Match:

The Arctic people of Labrador say that a person is born empty: dreams fill him, and a person who doesn’t dream is no better than a black fly. That’s what I was, because I’d stopped dreaming almost completely since being hit by lightning. It’s not known that REM sleep is associated with a surge of sympathetic nervous system activity–of which I had very little, and so for six months my nights had been empty.

If you read my notes from a small press bender back in May, this will be familiar, but to repeat, the general state I had been working with for some months at the time was:

Mostly numb.
I don’t think I have any good news in my future.
I wish I’d die of natural causes already.

If I’m to believe that I’m part of a natural order that exercises the will to live, even under duress, then I feel like I have to take a leaf out of a grizzly mauling survivor’s book and fight back. I’ve taken the despondence lying down for a long time, and haven’t given myself permission to think that, on some face of this same many-sided die of life are things like dreams and renewal. And to the extent that we have a choice, I do think we have some responsibility to put ourselves in a place that accommodates all sides of that die with equal reverence.