Some books are merely written. Other books, rare as red squirrels now, are made out of such need that they seem to have been generated by pure will, by an urgency at once personal and on behalf of the greater assembly. This, seven years in the crafting, is such a work.
Griffiths’s previous book, ‘Pip, Pip: A Sideways Look at Time’ exploded the straitjacket of the clock, following a global seam of the richest hue in its exploration of non-industrial ways of considering the ageing of the body and the turn of the seasons. Here, she turns all her senses to space, on a multi-dimensional quest to understand the nature and importance of ‘wildness’. Travelling with the elements – earth, ice, water, fire and air – she roves from the Amazon to the Arctic and Australia. Across the oceans she encounters polar bears and West Papua liberation fighters. Always, and rightly, she meets herself in changing light as part of the phenomenal world.
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. And the tales she weaves are those in which the speaker is deeply, unashamedly implicated. 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 – that of herself and others – from which she has fashioned a manifesto that speaks to all about being fully human in the world as it is and as it might be.
That she closes with a journey through the sixth element, mind, reveals the core of her project. 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.
