There is an important difference between confronting the idea of wilderness as bound to a certain place, and then confronting the idea upon its being disentangled from that place.
You can go into into the wilderness as a place and have some really wild and incredible experiences. Things can get weirder and more interesting the less amenities you bring into it, or if you are experiencing some privation in your self, or perceptual alteration.
The mountains and foothills, the deserts and badlands, the forests and scrublands...these places all entail different dynamics and experiences, and require different preparations to go into them. But all in all, going into a wilderness area comes with a certain established set of practices that you can become acquainted with and understand. There is a whole industry of outdoor sporting goods that stands at the ready to outfit you and make that outdoor experience as enjoyable and successful as possible. Further, the more you go into it, the more you become acquainted with how it works, and the more comfortable you become regularly going in.
A conceptual wilderness is a little different, whether that wilderness is found in a wild area, a built environment, or within one's own self. We are talking less here about going to a certain place, accompanied by certain things, and more about an unstable and unintelligible relation of elements to one's everyday understanding of daily reality. This means entering a certain state of consciousness, and even a certain ontological state, which entails certain experiences and practices.
What we are talking about is fundamental uncertainty. Not just whether we're unsure whether to go with the chicken or beef for dinner, or even willpower fatigue or decision paralysis - which can be serious problems in themselves - but a fundamental uncertainty about how to understand and relate to a given state of affairs, and at the extreme end, whether a certain course of action will ensure the immediate or future continuity of one's own self. At a long enough sustain, this state can encourage doubts about the very nature of one's reality.
How to enter into - or even cope with - such a state of affairs? How to manage and practice in a state of uncertainty or unpredictability? It seems as though to manage something or practice something, you have to have something to anticipate, or be able to predict something, however obscure that something is, so as to have some kind of handle to manage, or direction to practice towards.
I think one thing we can say, is that so long as you are living and breathing, that by definition, there is always some sort of predictable, practicable foothold to move towards, however chaotic and uncertain a given environment is. If something is too chaotic and uncertain, in which everything solid is evaporating and flying asunder, say in the heart of some explosion, then that is the end anyway.
The footholds can appear as anything from food, water, raw resources, and shelter in the wild, money and credit, traded goods, utilities, and shelter, and social relations in the built environment, clarity of mind, spirit and heart, confidence, and reasoning efficacy in the self, and so on.
So, the idea is to predict unpredictability, while angling towards some sort of practical predictability in the process. This might still seem obscure, so perhaps we move closer to the concrete now? Of the various practices, there are a few different elements we can put together here.
One principle is this: localized control. Anything you can do yourself, or which can be done by immediate family, friends, colleagues, etc., anyone with whom you have a strong enough bond to be trusted under strain, is more dependable through external failures or foreclosures of action or resource. Having at least one dependable point of strength somewhere which can be leveraged - such as security and shelter - can serve as a foothold to consolidate other sources of strength.
Lower, denser centers of gravity, in a metaphorical sense, can help. Not necessarily literal lower ground, as higher ground and its various advantages can be of benefit, but simplicity of action and robustness of resource and tool. Something you can source or make yourself, or get from somewhere local and dependable.
Complex Rube Goldberg machines such as industrial supply chains spanning continents can make for the rapid provision of powerful and useful resources, and should be taken advantage of, but they can't be counted on into perpetuity either.
Here is another principle: it is good to have redundancy. In an uncertain and unpredictable environment, things fail, and that can mean the failure of any one of your footholds. Back up options and plans are great, or alternative pathways that can potentially be pursued. Having some very basic and universally useful provisions always on hand for example, which are not used up but which are saved for emergencies, can fill in some important gaps when unexpected things happen. Obvious resources like water, dried and/or non-perishable foods, lights and tools, and etc.
And yet here is another principle: a diverse toolkit of dependable practices and protocols that can be turned to in a pinch, which can be maintained with regular repetition. It may feel completely natural to flick on the gas or electric stove to boil some water, but what if one doesn't have access to gas or electricity? Making a fire is not always easy, and requires preparations of its own, which are useful to practice. Using older and simpler technologies is not always simple, and requires a holistic movement into their art and technique.
By that same token, community trust is built up and earned through skills of communication, emoting, and mutual aid, a trust that can yield great power and benefit, and the same is the case with maintaining one's personal spirituality, which has implications not only for how one as an individual moves in the world, but with how one moves with others. There are multiple layers of discipline, resource, and repetition to hold into account.
Diversity is key, as each given tool fits into the other and reinforces the whole. One cannot properly and skillfully pursue alternatives or safely pursue physical emergencies if one's mind is in disarray for example. Physical practice, mental practice, spiritual practice: all of these things work together.
So, with our practice. are we to accomplish the re-establishment of the home under duress, and then move on to systematically drive back every last trace of the wilderness then, so that it never troubles us again? Oh ho ho, I'd really be leading us astray if I were to suggest such a thing.
I think one of the more serious weaknesses of modern industrial society is its relentless pursuit of convenience and comfort, both of which are such obviously good and desirable things that it becomes difficult to see when one can have too much of them. Such a society is terminally self-absorbed and enamored with itself, sealing itself into its own warm and safe environs, which doubles as a symbolic and experiential hall of mirrors in which the original signal successively decays and winks out.
You need a wilderness, and sources of uncertainty, to perpetually improve things and oneself, to stay abreast of a world that is itself undergoing constant change. There are many other benefits to wilderness that I've hinted at before, and which I'll gloss over now, such as source of resources in the form of natural processes or social processes that need to be trusted and left alone to regenerate, spiritual benefits such as wonder and awe and gratitude, and so on.
But by that same coin, is complete immersion in wilderness a panacea then? Does one make oneself perpetually stronger by living in as difficult and austere and alienating conditions as possible? No, emphatically not that either.
Constant uncertainty and chaos only exhaust people over the long run, leading to strife and increasing desperation, until spectacular acts of cruelty lead to severe counterreactions in which you have warlord-types building out fortresses of confidence, shutting out the outside world and freezing the dynamism of reality so that nothing like that ever happens again.
One needs a home, a stable place of comfort, and a community to love and care for, and the constellation of pleasures and contentments that come with those things, which makes life enjoyable and worth living, to do the really difficult stuff to secure those things in turn.
Ah but now it appears that the post grows long. It seems as though we've just started to get into the juicy stuff as this post and series are coming to an end. This is a process that can last a lifetime and then some, and as usual, we'll explore these themes in other ways in the future.
