Imagination & Wilderness
Gina Litherland
Wilderness overflows with animals, plants, stones, and trees that are dreaming of vast utopias unknown to any of us. The current of these verdant contemplations can be felt during long walks through the forest, or while sitting beneath the trees, or while quietly drifting through vapors of thought.
Soaring through the trees with owls and crows, the wind sings, dances, paints, and whispers the rare language of wilderness. The imagination is a wilderness--liberating, ecstatic, waiting to grow and fly and howl. From a brush dipped in verdigris or terre verte, wilderness waits to creep vinelike over canvases and panels, curling and flowing, collecting on the edges of forms like frost, and sleeping in deep pools of viridian and ultramarine. It grows from poetic associations, unfolding its leaves to reveal shadows and phrases momentarily obscured from view.
In the proliferation of wilderness and imagination I see hope for all that has been laid to waste in the world. Civilization and technology have done much to annihilate wilderness, for what wilderness inspires is dangerous to those who seek to control and dominate. To suppress the natural world, civilization created the supreme patriarch, and by his law women were charged with the crimes of intuition, emotion, and secret knowledge; third world (really first world) peoples were charged with ignorance and heathenism; and animals were caged, vivisected, slaughtered, and sacrificed to the god of scientific rationality. For centuries wolves, owls, bats and hundreds of other species have been made the scapegoats of society's fears, and exterminated for the economic convenience of the wealthy and powerful.
What remarkable species of the imagination have been wiped out with our wild and beautiful sisters and brothers? At one time humans knew animals as their teachers; they listened to the complex symphonies of the birds and the howling of the wolves, and watched the bowerbird build his delicate archway, leading his lover to a glittering bed of shells and bones. In dressing like animals and painting their images, humans hoped to gain some of the animals' cleverness, agility and power.
Many of us still feel a sense of wonder at the pure creative spirit of wildness that animals reflect. In painting animals not as we see them retinally but as we see them psychically, we make talismans of wilderness, of howling, of flying, of leaping, of dancing, of silence. We remember that we have not always been in a world that values things only for their "usefulness," but that we once were, and still are, a part of a world that rejoices in its own being, in the rising of the moon, in the reverberating sound of its own ecstatic voice.
In painting, dancing, singing, howling, chirping, and squawking we reforest the Earth with arboreal dreams of liberation for all species of all worlds--of those we can see and hear, and of those we can wildly imagine.
Gina Litherland, 1989
Reprinted from Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, edited by Penelope Rosemont (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), p. 443.