Amal Alhomsi is a Syrian writer, artist, and environmental educator. His short stories and art are featured in magazines and galleries across North America. He also holds the position of editor-in-chief at Oesa Magazine and resides in Banff, Alberta.

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Senescence is so many things—memoir, science writing, environmental reporting, but at heart a deeply personal and philosophical engagement with life in all forms. Why did you want to write the book?

Originally, the word individual meant inseparable from. To be an individual is to be indivisible from the world. “I am the I am,” as Jesus declared, is not a mystical phrase, but a deeply scientific one.

To say I am without meaning the entirety of History and Time is a misunderstanding of our context. Senescence opened with the Borges quote: “To try to express oneself and to want to express the whole of life are one and the same thing.” The book is an amalgamation of things not because I wanted it to be, but because it was impossible to write about myself without first talking in some length about mayflies and leafminers and car manuals. However, that is maybe the answer I give to sell the book. Truthfully, the reason why I wrote the book is much simpler. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said somewhere that poets write not to change the world, but only to change themselves. I wrote the book so it would change me.

One of the things that struck me while reading is how often you consider the majesty of scale, both in form and space—the tiniest living creatures, to whole epochs of natural time. There’s a sense of deep grappling with both the micro and macro wonder of our natural world. Can you speak about this more?
    
Voltaire, speaking on behalf of Nature, writes, “Since I am the whole that exists, how is it possible for a being like you, so small a portion of myself, to comprehend me? Be content, atoms my children, with seeing a few atoms that surround you, with drinking a few drops of my milk, with vegetating a few moments on my breast, and at last dying without having known your mother and your nurse.” I, as an atom filled with atoms, want so much not to die without knowing my mother.

“What is man that you are mindful of him?” The writer of Psalms asks this, and the answer is very difficult, but one time the moon was low and there was a sheet of frost on Riyadh’s desert, and it was my first time holding in my hand both sand and snow, and I think in the moment I had the answer to the Psalm, but then the wind came and I had to go find a jacket.

By merely being a certain size is to exist in a clear hierarchy where, obviously, some things are larger and others are smaller. But to have a mind, or an ego, or, dare I write, a soul, complicates everything. Is the mantis’ ego larger than mine? What does it mean to say that a mountain is mindless? Who is who in the chaotic hierarchy of metaphysics.

You often quote other writers, and thinkers, and scientists. Sometimes religious scripture or biography. Yet the most poignant engagements are those you describe as lived through your own body and personal experience. In what ways has living in the Rockies shaped how you approach writing?

Being in the presence of mountains is like having a pot of Turkish coffee on the stove. You want to leave the stove and put your feet up, you want to play with the dog or call your mother, but the fire is burning, and the coffee is brewing, and you must keep stirring and stirring or it will overflow and burn you. I want to write about other things, but I feel like if I take my eyes off the mountains, I risk burning my fingers. Writing about the mountains when living in the mountains is not a choice. I cannot imagine a sailor returning from a long sea voyage to produce a treatise on the flavours of chocolate or the geopolitics of Sudan, and if they did, I would be very suspicious of them. 

The book is neatly structured around the seasonal cycle, and you grapple with the body’s natural rhythms within these cycles. What season or part of the cycle did you find most challenging to explore?

In the book I write that “Fall here is outlived by a fruit fly.” Fall in the Rockies comes like a magic trick. At one moment, the magician’s hand is full with colours and flying cards, and in the next there is nothing there at all. It was difficult to write about fall because I had to keep my eyes open to catch the trick.

What advice do you have for folks who have never been to the Rockies, but who long to touch and feel the grandeur and mystery you so magically describe?

In his book, How To Read a Poem, Terry Eagleton writes that “what is in peril on our planet is not only the environment, the victims of disease and political oppression... but experience itself. And this is a relatively new threat of extinction.” In our world of consumable events, rarely any experience comes to us unmediated by advertisement or Yelp reviews.

The word Taste is now being dictated by influencers and ads. Tourists come to the Rockies expecting the mountains to unfold in front of them the way a ready-made pizza would. Mountains are now rated on Alltrails the way toasters are, and walks are divided into must-dos and must-avoid. People are getting "lost in nature" by following tour guides. I do not mean to sound bitter, but I do want to swear to you that beauty will only show itself to you as a shock.

In short, I would encourage visitors to arrive here with little expectation and a lot of ignorance; an ignorance that unfurls into uninformed possibilities, into experiences that are felt precisely like art.

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Excerpt from Senescence

In the winter, there is nothing to do but walk around and look at how the world changed. I walk up Muskrat Street and I think, there used to be a bench where that snow is. Then I make my way to the canoe docks and observe, there used to be docks where that snow is. And so on, until I know all that has been swallowed. That’s all I do. Everyday, I go out of my room to look at things, but, day by day, there is barely anything left to see. The same Engelmann spruces, slanting. The same piles of snow, growing. The same blotches of sky, dissipating. I notice some new tracks over a hill; I yawn. When I first moved here, the sight of my breath playing with the October air thrilled me. Now, forests are dying; I sit in bed eating scrambled eggs. I am uncertain whether to diagnose myself with age or habit. I find that once you reach a certain age, an absence of experience becomes the only welcomed experience. Perhaps that’s how we prepare ourselves for death. Tolstoy writes, “if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” It is much more comforting to slip into the unconscious, to stay in the cave, to not question or be questioned by noise, but I hate to be a waste of cosmic ashes. I don’t want a star to sigh, is this what we burst for? So I leave my bed and, for the star’s sake, I go out to seek. I look at elk and I try to see them. I look at evergreens and I try to see them. I look at rocks and I try to see them, but I rarely succeed. Seeing is impossibly difficult. The moment I see a rock I am distracted from it by it. Viktor Shklovsky writes, “if we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.” This automation of perception is to prevent our brain wires from overheating. The automation allows us to look and move on. Otherwise, a single gaze would take days. When I look out my window, I do not see the trees, I recognize them. My brain brushes the moff. You know it’s a tree, it tells me, but look, what is that yellow thing? Habit is the other sleep; without it, life would become tiring, but with it, it becomes transient. One must choose, and I, abetted by astronomical ablation, choose to see. To do so, I must see like an artist, at least that’s what Shklovsky prescribes, “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life.” He recommends this be done through two methods: by prolonging the activity of perception and by the defamiliarization of the object. He promises that this remedy will make “the stone stony.”

I make a cup of oolong and sit by my window attempting the first method of seeing; I look at a tree for hours. But the tree has multiple branches, and each branch has twigs, and each twig has needles, etcetera. Who knew? It’s maddening. I try to settle on one branch, but a squirrel comes and steals my seeing. Thank the squirrel. The oolong is now turning bitter, so I push it aside, next to my holed sock, into a corner of all the things I don’t want to see.  
      
Reprinted with permission of Rocky Mountain Books, from Senescence by Amal Alhomsi. Copyright 2024.