WILD: An Elemental Journey

WILD is published in the USA under the title
SAVAGE GRACE


Winner of the inaugural Orion Book Prize and a World Book Day award

A journey to wildernesses of earth and ice, water, fire and air. This book is the result of a seven-year odyssey among Indigenous people, listening to their philosophies; meeting cannibals; anchoring a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept; joining Inuit hunters on a whale hunt; drinking shamanic medicine with Amazonian healers; visiting sea gypsies and journeying to the freedom fighters of West Papua.

It is an evocation of the songlines of the earth, the paths in the Papuan highlands remembered in song, and the ethereal music of shamans, as well as the songlines of Indigenous Australia. The book explores the words and meanings which shape ideas of wildness and it illustrates the anarchic nature of wildness, arguing that what is most wild is most kind, and that wild land is intrinsic to the health of the human mind.

Funny, harrowing, passionate and tender by turns, the book is crafted from love and anger: a love of wildness and an anger at those who would demean it or destroy it. While looking at the murderous effect of missionary and corporate invasions of indigenous land, and examining the ignorance and brutality of European explorers in so-called “wastelands”, the book also demonstrates the political resonances of wilderness in terms of gender.

Answering the call of the wild, this is a book about freedom, about the persistent allure of nomadism even in societies which ignore their own nomadic shadow. Above all it is a manifesto for the essential wildness of the human spirit.

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Reviews and Endorsements:

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“Incandescent, kaleidoscopic, brave, exhilarating, Wild is sensuous, cocky, magnificent, liberating … Joycean word-play, meticulous scholarship, ironic wit, crafted cadences. Wild is a profoundly important contribution, a raging oratorio.”

– Richard Mabey, The Times

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“It’s as though, arm in arm, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas went out to find the deep meaning of wilderness.”

– Sydney Morning Herald

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“Like Henry David Thoreau, Jay Griffiths wants to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life….an immersionist… [her] research is impressive… [her] writing dexterous and lush… a passionate plea for the preservation of wilderness.”

– New York Times

“Wild is a song of delight, and a cry of warning, poetic, erudite and insistent… a restless, unstintingly generous performance… it carries the mark of true intellectual and spiritual passion”

– Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent on Sunday

“Jay Griffiths's Wild is part travelogue, part call to arms and wholly original…Griffiths's aim is not to explore the world, nor its people, though she inevitably and fabulously does so. Her project is wildness itself, in all the philosophical glory that the 'sublime' held for the Romantics… Griffiths is fascinated by, and fascinating on, wild language, and her writing builds in extraordinary poetic sequences. Indeed, of the many literary elements that make up the book - travelogue, memoir, journal, reportage, extended essay on feminism, sociology, anthropology, religion, ecology and geopolitics - it is probably poetry that comes closest to defining this undefinable and untameable work. Perhaps its most remarkable achievement is its own quality of wildness. Wild is alive with its subject. Language is thrown around in the most earthy, vital way… A vital, unique and uncategorisable celebration of the spirit of life wherever it is found, Wild is a profound and extraordinary piece of work.”

– Ian Beetlestone, The Observer

“I used to think the wild did not have words, that it lay beyond the edge of logic and expression. With her journey and her struggle, Jay Griffiths proves me wrong.  She wanders, she wonders, she suffers, she survives.  Her words are intense, episodic, gripping, and sensual, somewhere between Edward Abbey and Jeanette Winterson-who knew there was such a place?  Wild is the first great nature writing of the 21st century.”

- David Rothenberg, author of Why Birds Sing and Wild Ideas.

“If a tiger could write poetry or a polar bear prose, they might write a book as exciting as Wild.”

– Adrian Mitchell, Shadow Poet Laureate.

“Remarkable. Griffiths tears out a stupendous style, volcanic yet soft like the sound of a river, cadenced as birdsong, in a book almost onomatopoeic in the use of language to match its view of the world. Her use of etymology to reach into the core of a cultural vision is unsurpassed. A book constructed, through intuitive, poetic associations. Griffiths takes on the Western conceptual lexicon, exposing the misapprehensions on which it is based…. The true wildness at the heart of the book is the author’s own. There is a reslessness and a pain beneath every sentence which can fill one with a deep melancholy. But there is also a righteous fury, at the destruction of a world whose every fibre is – for this deeply sensitive writer – precious almost beyond understanding. The result is a paean, a threnody, a work of great sadness and great joy.

– Toby Green, The Independent

“A hungry, brave, all-consuming book”

– Adam Nicolson, The Spectator

“A major book by a woman who is, no question, a major writer…powerful and uncompromising… she writes like four kinds of gorgeous, so deep in love with the world that when the right word isn’t there she simply births it… a majestic anthropology. Wild is precisely the right name for this book – it goes deeper into the experience of actually living on our home planet than almost any book I've ever read. It's full of wonderful, funny, scary insight about what this body and mind of ours was built by, and for.” 

– Bill McKibben

“Remarkable, impassioned meditation and world-roving travelogue, exhilarating, high-risk stuff, thrumming with unbridled erotic charge, learned and poetically pagan, a geographical and emotional journey of extraordinary range. Nobody can fail to be enriched by this book’s wealth of observation and description, a memorable appeal to live for the now, and in the fullness of the senses.”

– Jeremy Seal, Sunday Telegraph

“Like Rebecca Solnit and John Berger – dwellers in the fecund borders between the social and the personal, the political and the epiphanic – Griffiths is primarily a storyteller. Speaking to the planetary tribe at a moment of extraordinary collective crisis, she operates shamanically, making a series of remarkable journeys through cultures, conflicts and language, and she returns with the wisdom of profoundly lived experience. A bardic hymn to the necessity of the unfettered in envisioning possibility and change, Wild is radical in the original, etymological sense. It goes to the root of the problem and it sings its way there.”

– Gareth Evans, Time Out 

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“One of the greatest and most radical travel books of the past 20 years.”

– The Age

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“Passionate, rigorous and utterly honest, Griffiths’ remarkable book is written in a style as wild and exciting as its subject.”

– Robert Macfarlane

“A book of staggering power, honesty and wit”

– BBC Wildlife Magazine

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EXCERPT from the beginning of 'Wild'
 

“I felt its urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the colour of ice an invitation: come. Every mountain top intrigued my mind, for the wind at the peaks was the flautist, licking his lips, dangerously mesmerizing me with almost inaudible melodies. This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel – take flight.

I was looking for the will of the wild. I was looking for how that will expressed itself in elemental vitality, in savage grace. Wildness is resolute for life: it cannot be otherwise for it will die in captivity. It is elemental: pure freedom, pure passion, pure hunger. It is its own manifesto.

I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I got to the point of collapse. I got the giggles. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them. I went to places which are about the worst in the world to get your period. I wrote notes by the light of a firefly; anchored a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept; ate witchetty grubs and visited sea gypsies. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind.

To me, the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life-generous as water, as inspired as air. Kernelled up within us all, an intimate wildness, sweet as a nut. For us all, every dawn, the lucky skies and the pipes. Anyone can hear them if they listen. We are – every one of us – a force of nature, though sometimes it is necessary to relearn consciously what we have never quite forgotten; the truant art, the nomad heart.

For the human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not. Feral in pheromone and intuition, feral in our sweat and fear, feral in tongue and language. This is the first command: to live in fealty to the feral angel.”​​