Orient: Two Walks at the Edge of the Human

Poet and translator Hinton (Wild Mind, Wild Earth) combines natural history with classical Chinese poetry in this enchanting journal of his meditative walks in the desert of the American Southwest. Beginning with a reflection on the big bang—“the birthplace of stars is now always everywhere”—Hinton notes that “what modern science describes as space-time” is “uncannily” similar to one of “ancient China’s foundational cosmological concepts.” He points to how the classical Chinese ideogram that corresponds to “space” and “breath” also signifies “dwelling place,” and the one for “time” is also “a seed burgeoning forth,” implying a worldview of the “Cosmos as a generative self-emergent tissue,” or “our seed-time home.” As he walks, he finds parallels for this thinking in descriptions of the Southwest’s natural landscape handed down by the Hopi, for whom the “transformation of reality” is a “perpetual process” that develops “from a seed of emptiness” in the breath of all living things. Hinton ruminates on this “primal cosmology” in everything from Indo-European root words to Sung dynasty poetry. As the account builds toward an ecstatic vision of boundlessness between “self” and “landscape” that suggests a limitless capacity for creativity, a bittersweet note also emerges: “scatter is the nature of things,” Hinton reminds readers, and it’s only “forgetfulness that lasts, flowing through its ageless clarity.” This mesmerizes. (Apr.)