Trammeling #28
Description
Lately I have been interested in the idea of "wilderness" and its many formulations and uses from Romanticism to colonialism to 20th century conservation movements. In the most important document related to the latter, the "Wilderness Act" of 1964, the definition is unusually erudite:
"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man[sic] and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." (my emphasis)
Notwithstanding the archaically gender-specific language, the word "untrammeled" draws my eye for a number of reasons. "Trammel" literally means something like "hobbled" or "hampered," but as a way of setting apart certain natural areas to be designated for special federal protections, I also hear "traveled" and "trampled."
Moreover, I am reminded of Roderick Nash's observation (and I am paraphrasing here) that wilderness is the other of civilization -- it is not a natural state of things but an invention borne out by one place setting itself apart as "not wilderness."
I have been working on a long-simmering project to explore this idea computationally, so this NaNoGenMo effort is to do something related as a way to jog my motivation on that other project. Here's what I've got so far...
Using Gutenberg, dammit, I have completed a full text search through every work in that database and located each book that:
- Is in the public domain in the U.S.
- Contains the string "wilderness" at least once
This produced 8,463 individual works.
I am now thinking about ways in which language performs its own kind of "trammeling" through patterns, grammars, and so on. I might try to feed all these books into a Markov chain generator and see what text is produced when using "wilderness" as a seed. I might also try Jackson Mac Low's diastic method with either "wilderness" or "trammel" as the starting value.