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The Power of Restoration
Leap
by Terry Tempest Williams.
Pantheon, 2000.
Reviewed by Brian Doyle
"Let these pages be my interrogation of faith," says Terry Tempest Williams on the opening page of Leap, and off sails one of America's most interesting and uncategorizable writers into a riveting and labyrinthine narrative that is ultimately about many things at once: the nature and ambition of art, the history and character of her Mormon religion, the history and meaning and power of Hieronymus Bosch's famous painting "The Garden of Earthly Delights," the suicidal evil of environmental degradation, and the thorny personality of Saint Teresa of Avila -- among many other subjects.
Williams, best known as a writer of natural history, an environmental activist, and author of the remarkable Refuge, an "unnatural history of family and place" in her native Utah, begins her tale simply. In her grandmother's home in Salt Lake City, over the bed where the grandchildren slept when they stayed over, hung the Paradise and Hell panels of Bosch's famous work, which also contains a central panel -- the Garden of Earthly Delights. But Williams did not see the central panel, which depicts all the exuberant sensual life of human beings, until she stood before the actual painting in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Stunned by the work in toto, she began a six-year period of semi-obsessive contemplation of the painting -- not only of its history and intricate symbolism, but also of the painting as metaphor for human life and faith. Even the painting's literal restoration, by two fascinating Spanish sisters working for the Prado, gives Williams a means of discussing ways to restore the environment and the human heart.
In some ways this is a difficult book; in some ways it is a work of fitful genius. Williams' style, staccato and halting and oblique, can rise to startling poetry and passages that sing; it can also hamper the telling of the tale for readers used to a smooth and easy narrative report. Readers itchy for factual base from which to grow speculation will yearn for more detail about the mysterious Bosch, for example, and readers unused to a taleteller who leaps from image to idea to dream in the space of a couple of lines will be rattled.
But what ideas! "Can wilderness be a prayer?" asks Williams. And
why not designate wilderness as an installation of art? Conceptual art? A true sensation that moves and breathes and changes over time with a myriad of creatures that formulate dialogues, relations, niches, ecotones never before seen as art as dance as a painting in motion, only imagined through the calculations of biologists, their facts now seen as designs, spontaneously choreographed moment to moment among the living, can we not watch the habits of animals, the adaptations of plants, and call it performance art within the conceptual framework of wilderness?
Or this:
In trying to wrap my arms around my own religious beliefs, I am aware I pick and choose what feels right to me, adapting as I go -- not on service of the Self, but in service of the Sacred within a shared community honoring the dignity of all its members. I hear the voices of my Elders: "You can't have it both ways." Must it really be all or nothing? Right wing or left wing? Paradise or Hell? Instead, couldn't this religious adaptation be another form of natural selection along the path to a spiritual evolution?
And later:
We have forgotten the art of a living theology. We have forgotten that God's declarations are always heard, seen, and delivered through our own creative interpretations. Without language, we could not speak of God. Religions begin as a salve to mystery, not a manifesto of truth. We too can interpret the truth and make it our own. It is our nature to question. It is our nature to create meaning and make myths out of our lives. Each religion creates an anthology of stories, some oral, some written, as an attempt to make the sacred concrete. The Bible. The Torah. The Koran. The Hopi Prophecy. The Book of Mormon. Spiritual beliefs are not something alien from the Earth, but rise out of its very soil.
Williams' sharp ideas and words are aimed in part at her own faith -- at "Mormon, Inc.," as she says. "As a people, my people, we have abandoned the vision of Joseph [Smith, founder of the religion], his vision culled of the earth, our sacred texts opened and pulled from a hillside -- the pragmatism of Brigham Young is our religion now." But she has far bigger fish to fry than one religion, close as the Latter-Day Saints are to her heart, and by implication she challenges all religions to shout what a few have only begun to whisper: that hammering and raping the very world we live in is a sin against our own nature and against everything we mean when we use the word God.
The great accomplishment of Leap is Williams' willingness and ability to phrase riveting ideas, and in that sense it is the finest of her eight books, which also include, notably, Pieces of White Shell, a study of the Navajo, and An Unspoken Hunger, a collection of eloquent essays. As accessible narrative, however, Leap is not as gracefully made an entity as Refuge, and readers new to this extraordinary writer's work should go there before taking the leap into Williams' remarkable -- and remarkably brave and ambitious -- new book.
"I choose to believe in the power of restoration, the restoration of our faith," concludes Williams. "Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there may be no such thing -- faith is the belief in our capacity to create meaningful lives."
This book will help readers along that road.
Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author of two essay collections: Credo, and with his father Jim Doyle, Two Voices. His essays are included in The Best American Essays anthologies of 1998 and 1999. He has recently written about Van Morrison in The American Scholar and Robert Louis Stevenson in The Atlantic Monthly.
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