As There is Wind There
By Matt Kliewer
I’m Matt Kliewer, once from Cimarron, Kansas, now from Austin, Texas, coming to you from San Diego, California.
In Nick Hunt’s introduction to Lyall Watson’s Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, Hunt argues that in this book “[a]ll the winds of the world are inside. If you open it, you will be blown to places you never expected.” For the vast majority of my experience reading this book, Hunt’s warning was oddly prophetic, as I found myself pushed toward considerations of the impalpable and ephemeral forces that work and mold us. Outside of the purely geological, biological, circulatory necessity of the wind on shaping this planet and making it habitable, Lyall explores the culture of wind, a concept which had me doing much more reading outside of the pages of this relatively dense book than I’d like to admit.
The best academic or cultural heuristic is one that clicks everything into place, one which makes sense of the chaotic and inspires that a sort of calm in the finally knowing of a thing and a sense of the almost sublime in the immutability of the thing. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered that simultaneous feeling more profoundly than in Watson’s Heaven’s Breath, where the winds of my childhood in Southwest Kansas, or perhaps more aptly, the deep and thoughtful consideration of the winds of Southwest Kansas, carried me to places I had not expected. Lyall’s prose is dense, it’s rigorous, it’s admirable and enviable. But even moreso, Lyall’s ability to name the thing, to find that transcendental signifier of “wind,” to unpack the definitionally physical realm and dabble in the metaphysical makes Heaven’s Breath a haunting achievement that might change how I interact with the world from this point forth.
At one moment in Watson’s “Geography of the Wind” section, Watson quotes Gertrude Stein, who in her way argues “anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear, and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn, and everything.”
Like many of you, I come from a place that takes the wind personally, and all listeners within range of this broadcast understand even without the help of Stein or Lyall that they are people who are deeply “as there is wind there”. To know the feeling of the relentless needling of an unexpected dust storm on your bare arms and exposed collarbone is to understand the slight hang in the head and shuffle of the step that belies a drought culture. To see a change in the wind pick up the feedlot on the edge of town exposes an outsider. “Smells like money” someone will say with a derisive huff.
While in wind we find a tension between universal truths and individual sensory experience, we all have our wind stories, are all of the wind–conditioned and chaotic. Heaven’s Breath forced me to explore those pieces of myself, and I think listeners of High Plains Public Radio will find themselves somewhere inside these pages, or, more likely, outside and exposed to the elements.
Matthew Kliewer is Professor of Humanities and Dual Enrollment Program Liaison at Austin Community College. A scholar of Native American and global Indigenous literature, film, and media, Matthew has devoted much of his academic work to exploring how communities preserve their histories through stories, language, and memory. While earning his doctorate at the University of Georgia, he contributed to the nationally broadcast PBS documentary Searching for Sequoyah, helping tell the story of the legendary Cherokee scholar whose legacy continues to inspire new generations.
