Seeing Through the Center

The series of essays that Scott Russell Sanders has included in Writing from the Center explore the writer’s relationship to the landscape and culture of the Midwest, but the essays do more than that. They present a rhetorical aesthetic based on sight, a way of knowing through the careful visual penetration of the center of what the eye sees.

In “News of the Wild,” Sanders remembers his father as he prepares for a canoe trip with his daughter. He adds tobacco to his list of supplies remembering that the father followed the Ojibwa custom of sprinkling “tobacco on the water before setting out in a canoe, as an offering to the spirits for a safe journey” (117). For the Ojibwa, the ceremony endowed the experience of journey and return with dignity and sacred obligation to tell what one saw. Sanders remarks that his father always asked his son, “What did you find?” (118), whenever he returned from even the simplest of trips. The practice taught the son to be a careful observer of all that he saw, and it taught the son the sense of circularity that pervades the visual observations that inform his essays. Sanders sums up his father’s legacy to him by saying that in the “sharing of what [he] had found was the journey completed, the circle closed” (119).

This sense of the father’s legacy is fleshed out in the opening essay of the book, “Buckeye,” with the image of the walnut box containing two buckeyes from the writer’s desk. The father had carried the buckeyes in his pocket to ward off arthritis, and he had made the box from a plank bought at an auction. The top of the box was carefully inlaid to make the most of the grain in the wood. Sanders notes that if he stares long enough at the converging lines from the four diagonal joints, “they float free of the box and point to a center deeper than wood” (2).

It is this image and the image from his father’s explanation of the name of the buckeye that coalesce in the discovery that the essay offers. The father had handed the boy a freshly peeled seed and “closed [his] fist around it so the seed peeped out from the circle formed by [his] index finger and thumb” (3). The boy equated the eye that peeped out to the gaze of the deer that the father and son had often seen in northeastern Ohio.

Years later, the author returns to the site from which his boyhood home has been bulldozed and the woods flooded for a reservoir. Touching the bark of a weeping willow that he had helped his father plant, he becomes acutely aware of his father’s presence and looking up he sees a red-tailed hawk “circling in the air above” (7). He is certain that the hawk and father are one. Watching the hawk vanish over the ridge, the man finds a centered completion to unresolved grief. By looking with care and intensity, insists the essay, the eye can see “a center deeper than wood,” a center that transcends the surface view.

Sanders begins his title essay for the volume with another circular image of seeing beyond the obvious. A Kenyan follows a bird, a honey guide, that continually circles back to him as he leads him into the woods to the honey tree. No one in the tribe knows when the pattern of cooperation began providing both man and bird with the honey they both desire. According to Sanders, the honey guide that every writer must seek is authenticity. In his mind, authenticity can be found only at the center of experience. The writer must “move in loops, out and back again, exploring our home ground, as owls or foxes or indigenous people explore the territory they use for hunting, gathering, mating, and play” (159). This desired authenticity has a spiritual, psychological, and geographical dimension and must grow out of “one’s entire life” (164). Sanders equates the effort to find this center to the Quaker notion of “centering down” and cultivating “an inward listening” (166-167).

In “The Common Life,” Sanders tells of joining his daughter and her friends in making bread. The circular, repetitive motion of kneading the dough gave him “a sense of being exactly where [he] should be and doing exactly what [he] should do” (66). The connectivity of the experience wound like a rope back through time. His daughter Eve had learned the process from her mother Ruth who had learned it from a Canadian friend who had learned from her grandmother. The authenticity of the experience came from the shared process and the ingredients that combined with the yeast and the flour--“the sound of birds and the smell of April dirt and the brush of wind through the open door” (69). The process that extended to the distribution of the bread to his neighbors was an exercise in centered life, a part of what he will call in “Voyageurs” biophilia.

On a canoe trip to the Boundary Waters with his daughter he saw a granite cliff on which an ancient tribe had drawn pictures of their life. “What I saw,” Sanders writes, “in the faint red figures was a group portrait, a way of declaring: Here are the people of this place that fly and those that go on four legs and those that go on two” (129). To explore life, to affiliate with life, was the tenor of the trip that observed otters frolicking in the stream, the eagle watching the gliding canoes, and crying loons and gave voice to the writer’s wish to receive their blessing, “to dwell alongside them with understanding and grace” (123).

He speaks of visiting Cedar Bluffs in “Sanctuary,” of walking the loop that the trail makes and concludes that there can be “no sanctuaries unless we regain a deep sense of the sacred, no refuges unless we feel a reverence for the land, for soil and stone, water and air, and for all that lives” (64). The vision of Sanders is post-Edenic in its emphasis on reimagining man’s “place in creation.”

In “Beneath the Smooth Skin of America,” he calls for children to be educated in their home ground, “to handle stones and leaves and dirt, watch squirrels and bats and bugs, pore over photographs and fossils and maps, feel the land in their bones” (20). In “Faith and Work,” he celebrates physical labor, the post-Edenic call to husbandry over the land and the unity of generations to come. Speaking of the builders of the house he remodels with his own hands, he insists, “They measured well, plumbed and squared the walls, drove the nails home, as though they were building a shelter not for strangers but for sisters and brothers whom they would never meet” (97). In “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water,” he tells of his youthful fascination with the periodic table and muses that man is “always speaking about the unsayable in terms of what we can touch and taste and see” (147). He acknowledges that no system of codification can ever express the totality of life but that “the harmony of the whole, the music of earth, air, fire, and water is still compelling.”

“All good writing, everywhere and always, is an act of attention,” (51) Sanders declares in “Imagining the Midwest,” and in “The Writer in the University,” he admits that if he had the freedom he would take his classes into the land, urge them to learn trades, and “listen to the rhythms of [their] place and the voices of [their] neighbors” (115).