Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Practical Mysticism
Now that I’ve read Walden, I realize my theory that Thoreau progresses from practical considerations to a more abstract, meditative prose in the later chapters of the book was rather foolish. In the chapter entitled “The Pond in Winter,” one of the last, he provides us with some pretty precise geological measurements of Walden, which he goes to great lengths to obtain. Wouldn’t the measurements serve to demystify Walden for the reader? I see a paradox in Thoreau between his transcendental ambitions and simultaneous obsessive attention to the physical aspects of his environment. In the Christian tradition, mystics strived to turn their back on the world and mortify the flesh to attain spiritual illumination. Apart from meditation and contemplation, which Thoreau clearly adopts and engages with in earnest, Christian mystics commonly underwent fasting as a form of self-denial, and practiced service to others. Thoreau’s endeavor strikes me as a selfish one in comparison. As someone already mentioned, he is not interested in helping or bettering the community in any way whatsoever. He is mostly interested in himself (and what he has to say). His vision of spirituality, clearly, does not encompass service to others. It seems to me to be entirely egocentric.
However, Thoreau’s rejection of the comforts of civilized life and his insistence on complete self-sufficiency (at least in theory) bring to mind the purgative aspects of Christian mysticism. Before attaining spiritual enlightenment, mystics must purify their bodies and souls to be ready to receive it. Likewise, Thoreau seems to be preoccupied with a pure, simple life – albeit defined on his own terms according to the mood of the day - and searching for his own divinity. Unlike the Christian mystics, however, he seeks to be firmly grounded in the physical world as a way to access the spiritual dimension. It’s as if attending to practical matters (such as measuring the depth and breadth of Walden) becomes for Thoreau a form of spiritual meditation. He asks, “why has man rooted himself so firmly in the earth, but that he can rise in the same proportions into the heavens above?” (page 9 in my Dover edition). I find this insistence on physical and material groundedness the most paradoxical and therefore interesting aspect of his life in the woods. The physical world becomes not a hindrance but a required pathway to a transcendent spiritual state. Of course, Thoreau’s goals are not exclusively spiritual and it’s important to keep that in mind.
To add another, somewhat related, observation: I do see a deep contradiction in Thoreau’s attempt to live a simple, animal but at the same “pure” life (this attempt is exemplified in the passage we discussed during last class – p. 64, where he rejects the intellect as “a cleaver” and wants to “burrow” into the physical, material world like an animal would) and his rejection of “animal instincts” and even physical well-being in “Higher Laws.” I’m thinking of one particular sentence where he discusses following one’s genius (and, by implication, vegetarianism): “Though the result be bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles” (140). Generally speaking, Walden seems to be full of such paradoxes and contradictions.
However, Thoreau’s rejection of the comforts of civilized life and his insistence on complete self-sufficiency (at least in theory) bring to mind the purgative aspects of Christian mysticism. Before attaining spiritual enlightenment, mystics must purify their bodies and souls to be ready to receive it. Likewise, Thoreau seems to be preoccupied with a pure, simple life – albeit defined on his own terms according to the mood of the day - and searching for his own divinity. Unlike the Christian mystics, however, he seeks to be firmly grounded in the physical world as a way to access the spiritual dimension. It’s as if attending to practical matters (such as measuring the depth and breadth of Walden) becomes for Thoreau a form of spiritual meditation. He asks, “why has man rooted himself so firmly in the earth, but that he can rise in the same proportions into the heavens above?” (page 9 in my Dover edition). I find this insistence on physical and material groundedness the most paradoxical and therefore interesting aspect of his life in the woods. The physical world becomes not a hindrance but a required pathway to a transcendent spiritual state. Of course, Thoreau’s goals are not exclusively spiritual and it’s important to keep that in mind.
To add another, somewhat related, observation: I do see a deep contradiction in Thoreau’s attempt to live a simple, animal but at the same “pure” life (this attempt is exemplified in the passage we discussed during last class – p. 64, where he rejects the intellect as “a cleaver” and wants to “burrow” into the physical, material world like an animal would) and his rejection of “animal instincts” and even physical well-being in “Higher Laws.” I’m thinking of one particular sentence where he discusses following one’s genius (and, by implication, vegetarianism): “Though the result be bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles” (140). Generally speaking, Walden seems to be full of such paradoxes and contradictions.
Thoreau Beside Himself
In class we discussed a tension in Walden between Thoreau’s desire for knowing the local and for defamiliarizing himself, and others, from it. One thread of this tension is to be found in Thoreau’s vexed attitudes towards other people (both specifically and in the abstract). His famous call for authorial “sincerety” to be an expression “from a distant land,” is part of one trend in Thoreau’s thought tending towards reverence for individual alterity (a reverence in direct opposition to his swift condemnation of so many of his peers). The figurative distance between two individuals, the “sort of space” that prevents any “exertion of the legs” from “bring[ing] two minds together” (93) seems to support Thoreau’s antipathy towards the technological innovations that claim to, in what Leo Marx describes as the greatest “stock phrase in the entire lexicon of progress : “annihilate space and time” (Marx 194). Perhaps the ambiguity Marx sees in Thoreau’s alternating enthusiasm for, and hatred of, technology can be explained by the fact that Thoreau’s thinking is bound to what he believes to be a more ancient form of the annihilation of space and time—a meditative, creative, literary access to the Real, the eternal foundation below the time he “goes fishing in.” This abstract removal from the events of perception is inhibited by the wedding of the clock and consciousness, and thus the train (the invention—besides the clock--most responsible for the standardization of time) poses a threat to the possibility that individuals can have their “own” locality. Thus, it seems to me, that the intense defense of localism in Walden is really a defense of a space that can promote a plurality of individually perceived spaces (“distant lands”). Maybe another way of expressing this is to say that Thoreau’s “ecological” tendencies—of exploring the interrelatedness of things tending towards unity—can also be seen as strategically splintering them.
The supposed national and international unity provided by technology is subsequently perceived as a false unity. Compare, for example Thoreau’s comments on the telegraph, summarized by a localism opposed to the “need for speed” (e.g., “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate”) with William Cullen Bryant’s celebration of the Atlantic Cable:
"to those vast depths where repose the mystic wire on beds of coral among forests of tangle, or on the bottom of the dim blue gulfs strewn with the bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned men, and ribs and masts of foundered barks, laden with wedges of gold never to be coined, and pipes of the choicest vintages of earth never to be tasted. Through these watery solitudes, amon the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkeness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought borne by the electric pulse which obeys the bidding of man. That slender wire thrills with the hopes and fears of nations; it vibrates to every emotion that can be awakened by any event affecting the welfare of the human race"
I quote Bryant at such length (mostly because it’s a cool passage I came across yesterday) but also because it seems to provide an interesting parallel to Thoreau’s own attempts to plumb the depths of Walden. I think the sober empiricism that Buell describes in Thoreau’s plumbing of its actual depths strengthens the mysticism he applies to its metaphoric depths (at once dispelling mysticism to confront, as Marx describes it, Concord’s dwelling solely in the realm of "the Understanding"), while Bryant’s mystification of the wire (the “rhetoric of the Technological Sublime") results in a far less critical evaluation of the interpersonal and environmental impacts of science and technology.
Perhaps more interesting than all of this is Thoreau’s relationship to the more “primitive” technology of writing. For in the “Reading” chapter Thoreau has no problem mystifying this technology: “A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art…It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;--not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech” (73). I sense there may be some interesting parallels between Thoreau’s attitudes towards this “choicest” of technologies and his reflections on the “doubleness” that makes him strange to his neighbors:
“Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, but the workman whose work we are….With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense [my emphasis]. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences…[I] am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes” (94).
A lot could be done with this cryptic passage, but I am interested in the way in which the reflection on “awakening”, which entails a collapse in time and place, is juxtaposed with this disembodied “aloofness” which is part the Nature “next” to us and (like Whitman’s “other that I am”) part the Nature that we are, “beside ourselves”. I find this interesting in large part because of a coincidence: I have been reading a book by Brian Rotman about the relationship between communications technology and embodiment: “Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being.” Part of Rotman’s argument is that the alphabet is a technology that originally enabled the type of disembodied subjectivity that Thoreau worships in “Reading.” Only in Rotman’s case this collapse enabled belief in disembodied agencies—God, Nature, the virtual I—beings beside our physical, gesturing, breathing selves. While with certain privileged texts Thoreau sees the moment of writing and reading as collapsed, atemporal, breathily present—he seems to be aware of the placelessness of the virtual, technological “I” of Walden; that is, of the “Walden” he is creating beside Walden. As his aim was to distribute this virtual Walden years in advance of its writing, it seems no surprise that he is critical of the doubleness that makes him a poor neighbor—he is, I think, in some sense demonstrating an awareness that the distance between him and Walden, and between us and Walden is not collapsible. His own skepticism towards the technologies reducing the “distance” between places, perhaps, makes him skeptical of the technology that enables him to construct his own "distant land".
The supposed national and international unity provided by technology is subsequently perceived as a false unity. Compare, for example Thoreau’s comments on the telegraph, summarized by a localism opposed to the “need for speed” (e.g., “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate”) with William Cullen Bryant’s celebration of the Atlantic Cable:
"to those vast depths where repose the mystic wire on beds of coral among forests of tangle, or on the bottom of the dim blue gulfs strewn with the bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned men, and ribs and masts of foundered barks, laden with wedges of gold never to be coined, and pipes of the choicest vintages of earth never to be tasted. Through these watery solitudes, amon the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkeness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought borne by the electric pulse which obeys the bidding of man. That slender wire thrills with the hopes and fears of nations; it vibrates to every emotion that can be awakened by any event affecting the welfare of the human race"
I quote Bryant at such length (mostly because it’s a cool passage I came across yesterday) but also because it seems to provide an interesting parallel to Thoreau’s own attempts to plumb the depths of Walden. I think the sober empiricism that Buell describes in Thoreau’s plumbing of its actual depths strengthens the mysticism he applies to its metaphoric depths (at once dispelling mysticism to confront, as Marx describes it, Concord’s dwelling solely in the realm of "the Understanding"), while Bryant’s mystification of the wire (the “rhetoric of the Technological Sublime") results in a far less critical evaluation of the interpersonal and environmental impacts of science and technology.
Perhaps more interesting than all of this is Thoreau’s relationship to the more “primitive” technology of writing. For in the “Reading” chapter Thoreau has no problem mystifying this technology: “A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art…It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;--not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech” (73). I sense there may be some interesting parallels between Thoreau’s attitudes towards this “choicest” of technologies and his reflections on the “doubleness” that makes him strange to his neighbors:
“Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, but the workman whose work we are….With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense [my emphasis]. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences…[I] am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it; and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes” (94).
A lot could be done with this cryptic passage, but I am interested in the way in which the reflection on “awakening”, which entails a collapse in time and place, is juxtaposed with this disembodied “aloofness” which is part the Nature “next” to us and (like Whitman’s “other that I am”) part the Nature that we are, “beside ourselves”. I find this interesting in large part because of a coincidence: I have been reading a book by Brian Rotman about the relationship between communications technology and embodiment: “Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being.” Part of Rotman’s argument is that the alphabet is a technology that originally enabled the type of disembodied subjectivity that Thoreau worships in “Reading.” Only in Rotman’s case this collapse enabled belief in disembodied agencies—God, Nature, the virtual I—beings beside our physical, gesturing, breathing selves. While with certain privileged texts Thoreau sees the moment of writing and reading as collapsed, atemporal, breathily present—he seems to be aware of the placelessness of the virtual, technological “I” of Walden; that is, of the “Walden” he is creating beside Walden. As his aim was to distribute this virtual Walden years in advance of its writing, it seems no surprise that he is critical of the doubleness that makes him a poor neighbor—he is, I think, in some sense demonstrating an awareness that the distance between him and Walden, and between us and Walden is not collapsible. His own skepticism towards the technologies reducing the “distance” between places, perhaps, makes him skeptical of the technology that enables him to construct his own "distant land".
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Striking at the Root
Throughout Walden, Thoreau goes back and forth between portraying himself as a "real farmer," vitally connected to the land and the physical world that surrounds him, and as nothing like an ordinary farmer, abstracted from the physical to the spiritual world that lay somewhere in the pond and hills. What seems most important to Thoreau is his own spiritual existence, and his ability to transcend the particular by becoming intimately connected with the immediate world around him.
Clearly, there is something special to Thoreau about rural life, which seems more attuned to the natural world. Thus, he gives us depictions of farmers and Irish ice-cutters and mysterious visitors from the hills. In this, Thoreau strikes a very Wordsworthian note. Thoreau delights, for example, in the idiosyncratic speech of his Canadian wood-chopper friend, who reveals to him (like Wordsworth had suggested in the Lyrical Ballads) "that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate" (101). And just as Wordsworth often does, in poems such as "Simon Lee," Thoreau portrays himself as superior to the farmer and other rural dwellers. Thoreau even echoes Wordsworth when he talks about reformism: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root," he says (and of course, it is Thoreau who is constantly striking at roots and pulling up dead stumps in Walden), just as Wordsworth had taken the axe from Simon Lee and "struck, and with a single blow/ The tangled root I severed,/ At which the poor old man so long/ And vainly had endeavoured" ("Simon Lee" ll. 93-96).
A clear difference between Thoreau and Wordsworth, however, is that Thoreau seems very intent on portraying himself as an actual farmer, able not only to write about rural life, but to live it (and to live it better than the actual farmers themselves). Wordsworth seems perfectly content to live his own, privileged life, and maybe swing an axe once or twice, as occasion has it. Thoreau, on the other hand, gives us records of his accounts, twice, to prove he could turn a profit and live satisfied on his six-week method of subsistence farming. Nevermind that he often ate out, and that he only farmed for one season, and that he didn't have a family to support, and so on. No, Thoreau was a real farmer, and he lived out the romantic ideal in the real world.
Were these ideals under such fire in the 1840s and '50s to require such extra, empirical support? It seems they were, at least, for Thoreau, in a much more pressing way than for Wordsworth. Wordsworth made quite a lot of the natural world, and of life in the country, more closely connected with nature. Thoreau, too, makes much of nature and being away from the city, but he also is also fain (and feigns?) to test it. His experiment, however, doesn't seem to have done much for the actual world around Walden Pond, and Thoreau certainly doesn't seem to care much about helping, in any substantial way, the actual farmers and Irish immigrants living around him.
This reminds me of the anxiety some ecocritics seem to have about the need to prove themselves ecologically-saavy, in touch with nature because they can range-find with a compass and topographical map through campus, or they can cite all kinds of troubling statistics about the environment in their essays on literary works. This isn't intended as an indictment against scholars who want to incorporate ecological concerns in their work, but maybe Walden should serve as a cautionary tale against privileging idealized notions of nature and "the rural" over other, more urban(e) environments, as well as a certain tendency to overdetermine, perhaps, the "ecological" component in literary criticism, as if citing statistics must make one's work more authentic and effective. It may be well worth asking whether this is "striking at the root" of the problems we have in recognizing our connection with our various environments, or if it is merely "hacking" away.
Clearly, there is something special to Thoreau about rural life, which seems more attuned to the natural world. Thus, he gives us depictions of farmers and Irish ice-cutters and mysterious visitors from the hills. In this, Thoreau strikes a very Wordsworthian note. Thoreau delights, for example, in the idiosyncratic speech of his Canadian wood-chopper friend, who reveals to him (like Wordsworth had suggested in the Lyrical Ballads) "that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate" (101). And just as Wordsworth often does, in poems such as "Simon Lee," Thoreau portrays himself as superior to the farmer and other rural dwellers. Thoreau even echoes Wordsworth when he talks about reformism: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root," he says (and of course, it is Thoreau who is constantly striking at roots and pulling up dead stumps in Walden), just as Wordsworth had taken the axe from Simon Lee and "struck, and with a single blow/ The tangled root I severed,/ At which the poor old man so long/ And vainly had endeavoured" ("Simon Lee" ll. 93-96).
A clear difference between Thoreau and Wordsworth, however, is that Thoreau seems very intent on portraying himself as an actual farmer, able not only to write about rural life, but to live it (and to live it better than the actual farmers themselves). Wordsworth seems perfectly content to live his own, privileged life, and maybe swing an axe once or twice, as occasion has it. Thoreau, on the other hand, gives us records of his accounts, twice, to prove he could turn a profit and live satisfied on his six-week method of subsistence farming. Nevermind that he often ate out, and that he only farmed for one season, and that he didn't have a family to support, and so on. No, Thoreau was a real farmer, and he lived out the romantic ideal in the real world.
Were these ideals under such fire in the 1840s and '50s to require such extra, empirical support? It seems they were, at least, for Thoreau, in a much more pressing way than for Wordsworth. Wordsworth made quite a lot of the natural world, and of life in the country, more closely connected with nature. Thoreau, too, makes much of nature and being away from the city, but he also is also fain (and feigns?) to test it. His experiment, however, doesn't seem to have done much for the actual world around Walden Pond, and Thoreau certainly doesn't seem to care much about helping, in any substantial way, the actual farmers and Irish immigrants living around him.
This reminds me of the anxiety some ecocritics seem to have about the need to prove themselves ecologically-saavy, in touch with nature because they can range-find with a compass and topographical map through campus, or they can cite all kinds of troubling statistics about the environment in their essays on literary works. This isn't intended as an indictment against scholars who want to incorporate ecological concerns in their work, but maybe Walden should serve as a cautionary tale against privileging idealized notions of nature and "the rural" over other, more urban(e) environments, as well as a certain tendency to overdetermine, perhaps, the "ecological" component in literary criticism, as if citing statistics must make one's work more authentic and effective. It may be well worth asking whether this is "striking at the root" of the problems we have in recognizing our connection with our various environments, or if it is merely "hacking" away.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Cookery, Noveldom, and Man Weathercocks
Thoreau posits and reposits the question of what, at the very least, we can add to ourselves in order to live most fully. For it is in adding to ourselves external things, that we diminish our inner resources, and our capacity to see clearly. His is a stripping away of the addition process itself--the "common" human means and attitudes towards work endeavors, where motives and objectives are mismatched to the processes by which by which we pursue what we seek. There is always an opportunity cost at stake--each thing external, by covering, distracting, clouding the essential things, smothers us--mediates our connection to the world and makes us dependant on the mediator, rather than on our own internal resources--our intellectual lives and the consciousness of our most personal and direct contact with the world.
Thoreau reverses the way we conceive of addition, because the addition of the "external heat, greater than our own," diminishes our capacity to access "our own internal" resources (12). By adding on or clothing or creating something new around us, whether it be heat, clothing, shelter, or art, we forego, to some degree, the cultivation of already-existant matter we have inside us. This is a strange economy, strangely ego-centric, and yet conservationist to the extreme, reversing the way we thing about human/nature transactions, in that neither is dependant on or independent of the other.
Thoreau demonstrates the lengths to which we go to procure and ascertain "external" things, even at the expense of our own bodies, and how we readily lay ourselves to waste pursuing things outside ourselves. This is the case with the man who walks to town with a broken leg in order to buy new pants. It is, similarly, the case with fashion in clothes and art, which arises like fuel, from a desire to improve or increase onself by acquiring something else--ultimately social approval and status which work against the very objectives from which they stem. Thoreau illuminates the faulty logic in the way we work--our "cookery" (12)--and the giant breach between what we desire and how we approach it, and he goes to great lengths to compress the perceived breach between what we need and what we truly desire--that they are closer than our economy would have us to believe.
Our cookery seems to stem, to some degree, from a fear of taking oneself seriously, and the kind of escapism that ensues from this fear. He speaks of a fear of looking inward and inward change, and a resistance to questioning, which we tend to cope with by changing and covering and amassing what is external. Inheritance of property and sacred texts, alike, suggest an unquestioning and blind acceptance that perpetuates itself, further mediating and therefore distancing the individual from his/her world--it is not his/her world without the conscious choice to inhabit one's own place in it.
Furthermore, cookery seems to be the opposite of conservation--that through complacency, or active "cookery"-- by devoting our time and efforts to creating new things outside ourselves, we lay waste to what exists already and bring into existance more waste. Surely an aesthetic position follows from this. As such, it seems that Thoreau would have to be opposed to Buell's "world-making," that is, if it stops at the world of the text. If acts of our creation serve the essentials, and bring to the surface what is most necessary for life, it seems to follow that creative work should serve to, much like Bachelard's Poetics, stimulate one's own attention to personal (intellectual and physical) experience, and to thereby forge a greater connection to the physical world. I'm not sure if I fully believe the link between Bachelard and Thoreau yet...
Certainly, though, Thoreau places a great responsibly place on "The Professor" to not "profess" what is not also lived, as the writer must not facilitate the breach between man and himself, must not produce only leisure or escape, another layer of clothing or shelter or fuel. Thoreau cites travel reading, romance and noveldom which are allow us to go somewhere else at the expense of self-reflection--and how without reference to the self, and reality, we "suffer the nobler faculties to sleep the while" (74). There is always a reason for doing things--and it is our responsibility as conscientious humans, writers, and readers, to know why we are doing what we do, and to examine ruthlessly the methods by which we pursue the things outside ourselves, and what we forego--even waste--in so doing.
Thoreau reverses the way we conceive of addition, because the addition of the "external heat, greater than our own," diminishes our capacity to access "our own internal" resources (12). By adding on or clothing or creating something new around us, whether it be heat, clothing, shelter, or art, we forego, to some degree, the cultivation of already-existant matter we have inside us. This is a strange economy, strangely ego-centric, and yet conservationist to the extreme, reversing the way we thing about human/nature transactions, in that neither is dependant on or independent of the other.
Thoreau demonstrates the lengths to which we go to procure and ascertain "external" things, even at the expense of our own bodies, and how we readily lay ourselves to waste pursuing things outside ourselves. This is the case with the man who walks to town with a broken leg in order to buy new pants. It is, similarly, the case with fashion in clothes and art, which arises like fuel, from a desire to improve or increase onself by acquiring something else--ultimately social approval and status which work against the very objectives from which they stem. Thoreau illuminates the faulty logic in the way we work--our "cookery" (12)--and the giant breach between what we desire and how we approach it, and he goes to great lengths to compress the perceived breach between what we need and what we truly desire--that they are closer than our economy would have us to believe.
Our cookery seems to stem, to some degree, from a fear of taking oneself seriously, and the kind of escapism that ensues from this fear. He speaks of a fear of looking inward and inward change, and a resistance to questioning, which we tend to cope with by changing and covering and amassing what is external. Inheritance of property and sacred texts, alike, suggest an unquestioning and blind acceptance that perpetuates itself, further mediating and therefore distancing the individual from his/her world--it is not his/her world without the conscious choice to inhabit one's own place in it.
Furthermore, cookery seems to be the opposite of conservation--that through complacency, or active "cookery"-- by devoting our time and efforts to creating new things outside ourselves, we lay waste to what exists already and bring into existance more waste. Surely an aesthetic position follows from this. As such, it seems that Thoreau would have to be opposed to Buell's "world-making," that is, if it stops at the world of the text. If acts of our creation serve the essentials, and bring to the surface what is most necessary for life, it seems to follow that creative work should serve to, much like Bachelard's Poetics, stimulate one's own attention to personal (intellectual and physical) experience, and to thereby forge a greater connection to the physical world. I'm not sure if I fully believe the link between Bachelard and Thoreau yet...
Certainly, though, Thoreau places a great responsibly place on "The Professor" to not "profess" what is not also lived, as the writer must not facilitate the breach between man and himself, must not produce only leisure or escape, another layer of clothing or shelter or fuel. Thoreau cites travel reading, romance and noveldom which are allow us to go somewhere else at the expense of self-reflection--and how without reference to the self, and reality, we "suffer the nobler faculties to sleep the while" (74). There is always a reason for doing things--and it is our responsibility as conscientious humans, writers, and readers, to know why we are doing what we do, and to examine ruthlessly the methods by which we pursue the things outside ourselves, and what we forego--even waste--in so doing.
Monday, February 16, 2009
live in the local, dream in the global
I confess, this is the first time I’ve ever read Walden, and having always understood it to be the original anthem to navel-gazing and the immediate appreciation of nature, I’ve been surprised at how much of the world outside the woods he actually lets in. Sure, he revels in the sensory details of his the details of his immediate space, the sounds of cows and whippoorwills and bullfrogs and screech owls, but the world outside of his little house and clearing and woods is, imaginatively, never that far away. While he listens to the freight train going by, for instance, in “Sounds,” he feels “more like a citizen of the world” for being able to imagine its possibilities, where it’s going, or been, what it’s carrying, what parts of the world it’s connecting; products from Long Wharf, Manilla, or Spain may be on those cars. In “Reading” he adores the ancient and distant cultures which produced his favorite Greek and Roman classics, texts which have nothing to do with his local environment, but he finds it as much an insult to human experience that most people don’t regularly read The Iliad in the original Greek, as it is that most people are caught up in “affairs” and have never found the “hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality” (70). In both cases, people are too caught up with light, shallow, trivial things – “Little Reading” on the one hand, institutions and delusions on the other – to understand what really matters, what is really important and meaningful.
While it isn’t exactly issues of global ecology that occupy Thoreau in his house in the woods, it is the way that the world is perceived imaginatively. He finds that in moving to the woods, “both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me” (63); he has, imaginatively, moved into one of his heroic epics. Things here, without the distractions of those pesky “affairs,” are more significant, even grandiose; a mosquito sings the wrath of Achilles, bathing in the pond every day is a religious ritual, and waking up in the morning is waking up (63-4) one’s soul, to the “real” experience of human life. The evident smallness of local things take on a consequence to put them on the same imaginative plane as heroic epic, as eternal, transcendent things. Imagination is tied up in perception, too; by casting off all but the essentials, Thoreau imagines he can find that rock-bottom of reality that he seeks.
At any rate, I’m not sure those two paragraphs are actually talking about the same thing, but I'm sure I'll figure out a connection eventually.
While it isn’t exactly issues of global ecology that occupy Thoreau in his house in the woods, it is the way that the world is perceived imaginatively. He finds that in moving to the woods, “both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me” (63); he has, imaginatively, moved into one of his heroic epics. Things here, without the distractions of those pesky “affairs,” are more significant, even grandiose; a mosquito sings the wrath of Achilles, bathing in the pond every day is a religious ritual, and waking up in the morning is waking up (63-4) one’s soul, to the “real” experience of human life. The evident smallness of local things take on a consequence to put them on the same imaginative plane as heroic epic, as eternal, transcendent things. Imagination is tied up in perception, too; by casting off all but the essentials, Thoreau imagines he can find that rock-bottom of reality that he seeks.
At any rate, I’m not sure those two paragraphs are actually talking about the same thing, but I'm sure I'll figure out a connection eventually.
Thoreau's Anti-ordering
I'm finding that reading Thoreau after Cooper is a very interesting task in observing how differently the two writers seem to approach the idea of 'ordering.' Christoph suggests in his paper (on Cooper) that Cooper "advocates a type of reading that is in fact non-sequential and crosses all artificial dividing lines" and while this may be true, particularly as Cooper attempts to resist the anthropocentric ordering of seasons, I think, what we see in Thoreau is a much more complete "writing against the grain." Even a quick reading of Rural Hours demonstrates that while Cooper purports to resist the type of ordering that seems to be the underlying premise of her observations, it becomes quickly obvious that she, in fact, adheres to a different kind of ordering rather fully, that is, her own. What Cooper seems to signify as important (in the natural world and its circadian rhythms) is what she, in turn, focuses on and asks us to question our behaviors towards. When it doesn't fit her fancy, Cooper seems to discount it, as we saw so clearly in so many of the examples we talked about during class.
Thoreau, on the other hand, seems to be much more genuine in his resistance to ordering. Thoreau's dedication to the casting off of the unnecessary 'outer skins' as a way to harmonize more closely with the natural world and its untainted possibilities is much more forthright than Cooper's and seems to illuminate many of her ideas as privileged musings. It's interesting to me how in this way, Thoreau and his many resistances to various structures, orders and human-induced fallacious modes of being seem not only to undermine some of Cooper's sentiments (interesting to think that they were contemporaries of one another) and her ways of expressing them, but how this directly underlies the way that Thoreau, himself, expresses his concerns i.e. his 'voice' and how that directly supports his idea that true freedom, particularly of expression, is of supreme importance.
This freedom, of course, comes from the casting off that Thoreau outlines in these early sections of the book (and can be read very easily through the lens of social ecocriticism). Thoreau's voice and how it seems to parallel his philosophic mode brings to mind Bachelard, who said that an image or even the poetic imagery as created by someone else still provides for imaginistic opportunities, which he took great liberties in his book to demonstrate. Thoreau seems to do the same thing in Walden--he will begin with a particular, something very specific (returning to the most basic elements for inspiration here, as he suggests his fellow man do as well) and from that point, from that inspiration, he will somehow be allowed to transcend it to something larger, some place of his imagination is fueled by the elementals within experience. In this way, his language and expression mirror the actions and choices in his life. This is curious and brings to mind Tallmadge and Lindholdt's ideas on the necessity of activism of real experience or what Buell calls 'world-making'.
There's so much to say on this, but I'll leave it up to others to continue with my very fragmented and undeveloped ideas here.
Thoreau, on the other hand, seems to be much more genuine in his resistance to ordering. Thoreau's dedication to the casting off of the unnecessary 'outer skins' as a way to harmonize more closely with the natural world and its untainted possibilities is much more forthright than Cooper's and seems to illuminate many of her ideas as privileged musings. It's interesting to me how in this way, Thoreau and his many resistances to various structures, orders and human-induced fallacious modes of being seem not only to undermine some of Cooper's sentiments (interesting to think that they were contemporaries of one another) and her ways of expressing them, but how this directly underlies the way that Thoreau, himself, expresses his concerns i.e. his 'voice' and how that directly supports his idea that true freedom, particularly of expression, is of supreme importance.
This freedom, of course, comes from the casting off that Thoreau outlines in these early sections of the book (and can be read very easily through the lens of social ecocriticism). Thoreau's voice and how it seems to parallel his philosophic mode brings to mind Bachelard, who said that an image or even the poetic imagery as created by someone else still provides for imaginistic opportunities, which he took great liberties in his book to demonstrate. Thoreau seems to do the same thing in Walden--he will begin with a particular, something very specific (returning to the most basic elements for inspiration here, as he suggests his fellow man do as well) and from that point, from that inspiration, he will somehow be allowed to transcend it to something larger, some place of his imagination is fueled by the elementals within experience. In this way, his language and expression mirror the actions and choices in his life. This is curious and brings to mind Tallmadge and Lindholdt's ideas on the necessity of activism of real experience or what Buell calls 'world-making'.
There's so much to say on this, but I'll leave it up to others to continue with my very fragmented and undeveloped ideas here.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
An interesting genre: eco-mystery ("Where the Wild Things are Victims")
I'm not sure if any of you have run into this "genre" before, but as for myself, it's a first. Here is a review from the NYT Sunday Review of an eco-mystery, entitled "Where the Wild Things are Victims." (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/books/review/Pogue-t.html?ref=books). Is the writer capitalizing on the current trendiness of environmentalism or is there more to it?
Where the Wild Things Are Victims
By DAVID POGUE
Published: February 13, 2009
Not many authors are equally successful at writing books for adults and children, but Carl Hiaasen seems to have made an effortless transition. His first and second books for young readers, “Hoot” (2002) and “Flush” (2005),won awards and legions of fans. His latest, “Scat,” won’t disappoint Hiaasenphiles of any age.
What’s truly amazing is how much mileage Hiaasen gets here from mining the same narrow niche. Every novel is an eco-mystery set in Florida. Every plot features a greedy businessman (with a dumb-as-bricks henchman) bent on getting rich at the expense of Florida wildlife. Each plot is energized by improbable and hilarious action sequences.
In “Hoot,” “Flush” and “Scat,” the hero is a middle-school boy with a feisty female sidekick. Secondary characters include a delinquent bully and a mysterious, benevolent stranger. (In “Scat,” the stranger has wandered in from another Hiaasen novel: he was the protagonist in “Sick Puppy.”)
Yet despite the similarities, the novels don’t feel repetitive — especially not “Scat,” which stirs some new, more ambitious elements into the formula.
This time, the mystery involves Mrs. Starch, an unpopular biology teacher who disappears during a disastrous field trip to an Everglades swamp. At first, it’s hard for Nick, our hero, and his friend Marta to care. After all, Mrs. Starch is a nearly six-foot-tall tyrant who wears “her dyed blond hair piled to one side of her head, like a beach dune.”
But before long, Nick is up to his neck in secondary mysteries. What was the tan-colored, fast-moving blur on the video he took in the swamp? Who or what caused the swamp wildfire that day? Why has Smoke, the class arsonist/slacker, suddenly cleaned up his act? Why is Mrs. Starch’s home filled with stuffed animals (of the taxidermy sort)? And if Mrs. Starch is missing, then who’s driving around town in her blue Prius?
“Scat” is by far the plottiest of Hiaasen’s young-people books. The story lines — involving Nick, Marta, Smoke, their parents, Mrs. Starch, local fire and police investigators, the mysterious stranger and the two hilarious bumblers who run the Red Diamond Energy Corporation’s illegal drilling operation — are intertwined in ways that must have required a spreadsheet to track. Not surprisingly, all of these strands are neatly and satisfyingly resolved at the end of the story.
This is also the most contemporary Hiaasen book, dropping names like Facebook, “Harry Potter,” the TV show “COPS,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper — and the war in Iraq.
And here’s the most startling deviation from the Hiaasen formula. Just when the fun is hitting its stride, we learn that Nick’s father has been wounded in Iraq; his right arm is blown off by a roadside explosive. The story returns periodically to monitor the stages of his recovery: his bandages, his infections, his attempts to work with his remaining hand, and so on.
This is all handled unsentimentally and with a positive spirit; Nick conceals his grief, calls his dad Lefty and tapes down his own right arm in solidarity. But this subplot introduces some new, grimmer notes to the series, and not every young fan will know what to make of it.
Still, the ingenious plotting makes “Scat” more engrossing than either of its predecessors. The characters are richer — two of them turn out to be not at all the caricatures they seemed at first. And even the title is a clever pun, referring both to the good guys’ message to the bad guys, and to the panther droppings that hold a key to the mystery. In short, Hiaasen’s novels for younger readers seem to be maturing right along with them.
David Pogue writes about technology for The Times. His first children’s novel will be published next year.
Where the Wild Things Are Victims
By DAVID POGUE
Published: February 13, 2009
Not many authors are equally successful at writing books for adults and children, but Carl Hiaasen seems to have made an effortless transition. His first and second books for young readers, “Hoot” (2002) and “Flush” (2005),won awards and legions of fans. His latest, “Scat,” won’t disappoint Hiaasenphiles of any age.
What’s truly amazing is how much mileage Hiaasen gets here from mining the same narrow niche. Every novel is an eco-mystery set in Florida. Every plot features a greedy businessman (with a dumb-as-bricks henchman) bent on getting rich at the expense of Florida wildlife. Each plot is energized by improbable and hilarious action sequences.
In “Hoot,” “Flush” and “Scat,” the hero is a middle-school boy with a feisty female sidekick. Secondary characters include a delinquent bully and a mysterious, benevolent stranger. (In “Scat,” the stranger has wandered in from another Hiaasen novel: he was the protagonist in “Sick Puppy.”)
Yet despite the similarities, the novels don’t feel repetitive — especially not “Scat,” which stirs some new, more ambitious elements into the formula.
This time, the mystery involves Mrs. Starch, an unpopular biology teacher who disappears during a disastrous field trip to an Everglades swamp. At first, it’s hard for Nick, our hero, and his friend Marta to care. After all, Mrs. Starch is a nearly six-foot-tall tyrant who wears “her dyed blond hair piled to one side of her head, like a beach dune.”
But before long, Nick is up to his neck in secondary mysteries. What was the tan-colored, fast-moving blur on the video he took in the swamp? Who or what caused the swamp wildfire that day? Why has Smoke, the class arsonist/slacker, suddenly cleaned up his act? Why is Mrs. Starch’s home filled with stuffed animals (of the taxidermy sort)? And if Mrs. Starch is missing, then who’s driving around town in her blue Prius?
“Scat” is by far the plottiest of Hiaasen’s young-people books. The story lines — involving Nick, Marta, Smoke, their parents, Mrs. Starch, local fire and police investigators, the mysterious stranger and the two hilarious bumblers who run the Red Diamond Energy Corporation’s illegal drilling operation — are intertwined in ways that must have required a spreadsheet to track. Not surprisingly, all of these strands are neatly and satisfyingly resolved at the end of the story.
This is also the most contemporary Hiaasen book, dropping names like Facebook, “Harry Potter,” the TV show “COPS,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper — and the war in Iraq.
And here’s the most startling deviation from the Hiaasen formula. Just when the fun is hitting its stride, we learn that Nick’s father has been wounded in Iraq; his right arm is blown off by a roadside explosive. The story returns periodically to monitor the stages of his recovery: his bandages, his infections, his attempts to work with his remaining hand, and so on.
This is all handled unsentimentally and with a positive spirit; Nick conceals his grief, calls his dad Lefty and tapes down his own right arm in solidarity. But this subplot introduces some new, grimmer notes to the series, and not every young fan will know what to make of it.
Still, the ingenious plotting makes “Scat” more engrossing than either of its predecessors. The characters are richer — two of them turn out to be not at all the caricatures they seemed at first. And even the title is a clever pun, referring both to the good guys’ message to the bad guys, and to the panther droppings that hold a key to the mystery. In short, Hiaasen’s novels for younger readers seem to be maturing right along with them.
David Pogue writes about technology for The Times. His first children’s novel will be published next year.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Vergil's Eclogues I and IX; Georgics IV
Due to either the sudden heatwave or my own vast technological ignorance, the photocopier jammed up on Tuesday and I was unable to bring in copies of the Vergil poems. And so, to save paper for those not interested while simultaneously hoarding my precious, precious photocopy quota, I thought I'd post some links instead.
Both the eclogue (a short, pastoral poem) and the georgic (a "how-to" farming guide translated into verse) are classical genres that Vergil is adapting to his own time. I picked out Eclogue I and IX for their political content, more specifically how the rural landscape is threatened by the repossession and civil war from the city. Georgic IV, which concerns bee-keeping, is interesting in that political allegory is read onto the landscape (the two warring kings). These translations are by J.W. MacKail. To see the poems in the original language, click the "Latin" tab at the top of the page.
Eclogue I:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/ecl/ecl01.htm
Eclogue IX:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/ecl/ecl09.htm
Georgic IV (pp. 339-40):
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/geo/geo04.htm
Both the eclogue (a short, pastoral poem) and the georgic (a "how-to" farming guide translated into verse) are classical genres that Vergil is adapting to his own time. I picked out Eclogue I and IX for their political content, more specifically how the rural landscape is threatened by the repossession and civil war from the city. Georgic IV, which concerns bee-keeping, is interesting in that political allegory is read onto the landscape (the two warring kings). These translations are by J.W. MacKail. To see the poems in the original language, click the "Latin" tab at the top of the page.
Eclogue I:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/ecl/ecl01.htm
Eclogue IX:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/ecl/ecl09.htm
Georgic IV (pp. 339-40):
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/geo/geo04.htm
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Pyxidanthera, Rudbeckia, Sclerolepis, Escholtzia
I found Cooper’s tirade on the naming of flowers (82-87) wonderful, partially because I can’t help wanting to agree with her, in feeling if not in linguistic reason; partially because she works up some interesting ideas about the relationship between language, the world, and the experience of the world; partially just because it’s pretty hilarious when, in a moment of unusually fiery indignation, she starts re-writing Shakespeare and Chaucer with clunky scientific Latin to make her point.
This is a case where an excess of culture (or a certain kind of culture) has clearly had a negative impact, but not on nature qua nature so much as the natural world as humans are able to experience or describe it. It disturbs Cooper first that children who pick wildflowers can’t identify them, then that adults often can’t identify the plants around them either, and then that the plants are getting named all wrong anyway. She celebrates the “pretty, natural names” given to flowers in the nostalgic time when there was “some simplicity left in the world (84) and bemoans that “it is really a crying shame to misname them” (87) This “wrongness” suggests that there is some preferable “rightness” in the attaching of names to things; that things have “right names” which inherently belong to them. It’s a concern that dates from Adam (who, according to the Vulgate, named things nominibus suis, by their own names – but were those names their own even before Adam named them?), to Plato (In the Cratylus, the eponymous character remains convinced that the names for things are “natural” – they inhere in the nature of the thing itself – and not “conventional”), to present day prescriptivism in language(usually deeply occupied with the “problem” of language changing and words changing meaning).
Cooper certainly advocates a portion of this linguistic inherency, but not to the rigid degree of Cratylus; her concerns seem to be largely about transparency, aesthetics, and culture. The Latin names are “long [and] clumsy” where the common names are “homely and rustic” and show “quaint humor” or are “imaginative or fanciful” (84); names such as Schoberia and Brugmannsia are simply too ugly for flowers, better suited for “crocodiles, and rattlesnakes, and scorpions” (85); meanwhile, the daisy (or French marguerite) gets top honors as the flower (and flower-word) of romance, especially medieval. The “natural” names of flowers are parsable; they mean something to people who aren’t enrolled in botany classes and don’t know Latin. Cooper’s catalogue of flower-names with occasional explanations or [folk] etymologies reminds us that lady’s-smock is named for its color and bindweed for its habit of “winding about shrubs and bushes” (84). These names are relatively transparent, their meaning and relationship to the flower they denote evident to anyone who knows to connect word and object. Cooper’s concern is, at the last, that people simply won’t understand flowers if they’re named wrong. They’ll miss out on the “natural, unaffected pleasure” that the flowers, by their “right” names, offer (87).
(On the other hand, her note on gilliflowers, “a corruption of July-flowers, from the month in which they blossomed” (ibid) shows us two things: one, that even good “natural” English words change and become less-transparent; two, that since here Cooper’s etymological note is wrong (“July-flower” is actually a folk etymology of “gilliflower,” the “gilli” of which comes, via Latin, from a Greek compound meaning “nut-leaf,” according to the OED), meaning is only as transparent as we construct it to be.)
There is a struggle going on between registers at least, and languages at most, here. For Cooper, the Latin scientific terms are an “evil spreading over all the woods and meadows” which “perverts our common speech” (83); Latin will intimidate the timid and disgust the poets. And I think there’s also a struggle between disciplines, the humanities and the sciences. Cooper doesn’t exactly come at this issue as a wide-eyed ingénue; she’s full of cultural background, erudite quotations, and etymological speculation. However, all of Cooper’s encyclopaedic information seems to enhance her experience of the flowers, anyway – I think she genuinely likes the daisy better for knowing that Chaucer called it the “eye of the day” (which is, I can’t resist pointing out, in this case, its actual etymology), that the German word means “goose-blossom,” that French word is “marguerite,” and that French peasant girls are in the habit of pulling the petals off to figure out their love lives. The scientific name, on the other hand, compromises one’s ability to enjoy the phenomenon, and any amount of scientific knowledge about daisies would presumably only exaggerate that effect.
This is a case where an excess of culture (or a certain kind of culture) has clearly had a negative impact, but not on nature qua nature so much as the natural world as humans are able to experience or describe it. It disturbs Cooper first that children who pick wildflowers can’t identify them, then that adults often can’t identify the plants around them either, and then that the plants are getting named all wrong anyway. She celebrates the “pretty, natural names” given to flowers in the nostalgic time when there was “some simplicity left in the world (84) and bemoans that “it is really a crying shame to misname them” (87) This “wrongness” suggests that there is some preferable “rightness” in the attaching of names to things; that things have “right names” which inherently belong to them. It’s a concern that dates from Adam (who, according to the Vulgate, named things nominibus suis, by their own names – but were those names their own even before Adam named them?), to Plato (In the Cratylus, the eponymous character remains convinced that the names for things are “natural” – they inhere in the nature of the thing itself – and not “conventional”), to present day prescriptivism in language(usually deeply occupied with the “problem” of language changing and words changing meaning).
Cooper certainly advocates a portion of this linguistic inherency, but not to the rigid degree of Cratylus; her concerns seem to be largely about transparency, aesthetics, and culture. The Latin names are “long [and] clumsy” where the common names are “homely and rustic” and show “quaint humor” or are “imaginative or fanciful” (84); names such as Schoberia and Brugmannsia are simply too ugly for flowers, better suited for “crocodiles, and rattlesnakes, and scorpions” (85); meanwhile, the daisy (or French marguerite) gets top honors as the flower (and flower-word) of romance, especially medieval. The “natural” names of flowers are parsable; they mean something to people who aren’t enrolled in botany classes and don’t know Latin. Cooper’s catalogue of flower-names with occasional explanations or [folk] etymologies reminds us that lady’s-smock is named for its color and bindweed for its habit of “winding about shrubs and bushes” (84). These names are relatively transparent, their meaning and relationship to the flower they denote evident to anyone who knows to connect word and object. Cooper’s concern is, at the last, that people simply won’t understand flowers if they’re named wrong. They’ll miss out on the “natural, unaffected pleasure” that the flowers, by their “right” names, offer (87).
(On the other hand, her note on gilliflowers, “a corruption of July-flowers, from the month in which they blossomed” (ibid) shows us two things: one, that even good “natural” English words change and become less-transparent; two, that since here Cooper’s etymological note is wrong (“July-flower” is actually a folk etymology of “gilliflower,” the “gilli” of which comes, via Latin, from a Greek compound meaning “nut-leaf,” according to the OED), meaning is only as transparent as we construct it to be.)
There is a struggle going on between registers at least, and languages at most, here. For Cooper, the Latin scientific terms are an “evil spreading over all the woods and meadows” which “perverts our common speech” (83); Latin will intimidate the timid and disgust the poets. And I think there’s also a struggle between disciplines, the humanities and the sciences. Cooper doesn’t exactly come at this issue as a wide-eyed ingénue; she’s full of cultural background, erudite quotations, and etymological speculation. However, all of Cooper’s encyclopaedic information seems to enhance her experience of the flowers, anyway – I think she genuinely likes the daisy better for knowing that Chaucer called it the “eye of the day” (which is, I can’t resist pointing out, in this case, its actual etymology), that the German word means “goose-blossom,” that French word is “marguerite,” and that French peasant girls are in the habit of pulling the petals off to figure out their love lives. The scientific name, on the other hand, compromises one’s ability to enjoy the phenomenon, and any amount of scientific knowledge about daisies would presumably only exaggerate that effect.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Cooper's joys and pleasures
What comes across for me in Cooper first and foremost is the intense joy and pleasure that her outdoor escapades seem to give her. She seems to be willing to expose herself to the elements and immerse herself in the experience of “nature” even when it might cause her a lot of physical discomfort (i.e. “the teeth of a sharp wind” etc. on March 4th). For all the discomfort, what is gained is a “virtuous glow which is not to be picked up by cowering over the fireside” (ibid). Being in nature is an incredibly joyous pastime for her, and a sensuous one at that. In her descriptions of her experiences she engages all of our senses – it’s not only the obvious impressions like the colors of the flowers or even the songs of the birds or frogs that are worth noting for her, it’s also the temperature of the air, the fragrance of tiny buds, the taste of maple sugar etc…The joys and pleasures are sensuous. The word “pleasant” is her word of choice for describing desirable sensations, and it seems that often she evaluates “nature” depending on whether or not it’s a source of desirable sensations. On May 19th, for example, in her discussion of the European species’ encroachment on American native plants, the only explicit reason she gives for why the situation is not desirable is the fact that the native plants are “prettier” (ergo more pleasant) than the native ones. (This is only one passage though, and I’m not sure whether this is a general trend or not).
But there’s more to Cooper’s experience of nature than just sensation. She seems to be preoccupied with the question of language and the naming – proper naming that is - of “nature.” Sensations need proper labels. It seems that to Cooper a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. She is concerned with decorum – simple yet beautiful flowers demand simple yet beautiful names. In other words, flowers need “pretty” and “natural” names, not scientific, dead terms (June 23). While recognizing the need for naming and classifying, typically scientific pursuits, Cooper warns us about our tendency to “overflo[w] with science” (June 23). I get the sense that she is sensitive not only to the beauty of “nature” but to the beauty of language as well - just as immersion in nature should give us pleasure, so should the (poetic) names of flowers. She wants them both (names and flowers) sweet and pretty. “Botany” corrupts our ability to enjoy “nature:” it destroys our “natural, unaffected pleasure in flowers” (June 23). What is interesting about Cooper’s critique of science as a corrupting and alienating force is her notion that the corruption and alienation occurs through (scientific and dead) language. Language is the medium through which we experience nature, and if we lack proper language, the experience will be ruined.
But there’s more to Cooper’s experience of nature than just sensation. She seems to be preoccupied with the question of language and the naming – proper naming that is - of “nature.” Sensations need proper labels. It seems that to Cooper a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. She is concerned with decorum – simple yet beautiful flowers demand simple yet beautiful names. In other words, flowers need “pretty” and “natural” names, not scientific, dead terms (June 23). While recognizing the need for naming and classifying, typically scientific pursuits, Cooper warns us about our tendency to “overflo[w] with science” (June 23). I get the sense that she is sensitive not only to the beauty of “nature” but to the beauty of language as well - just as immersion in nature should give us pleasure, so should the (poetic) names of flowers. She wants them both (names and flowers) sweet and pretty. “Botany” corrupts our ability to enjoy “nature:” it destroys our “natural, unaffected pleasure in flowers” (June 23). What is interesting about Cooper’s critique of science as a corrupting and alienating force is her notion that the corruption and alienation occurs through (scientific and dead) language. Language is the medium through which we experience nature, and if we lack proper language, the experience will be ruined.
Audubon's Personalities / Turkey and Gender
After reading about the hunters in the Passenger Pigeon, one cannot help but see how the vulture resembles its human counterpart. Vultures are least desirable birds and are compared in many ways to humans, given their excessive—even gluttonous—eating habits, and the way in which they prey unrelentingly on things. Also, Audubon finds that they are not, in fact, distinguished by a keen sense of smell. Instead, they are visual creatures like humans, and he says they also rely on memory. The turkey nests so as to hide eggs from the sight of the vulture, and the main determinants of where to nest for turkey hens are hunters and vultures/crows (200).
Audubon has a very diplomatic way of presenting his observations, developing the birds’ traits in a succession, using patterns of repetition, in order to move toward the classifications he makes, while still seeming to rest on scientific evidence. Yet, the birds are made into characters, with character flaws and predictably repetitive patterns of behavior, which all serve to bolster their personality types. The turkey is the least graceful of the birds we’ve read about. At first sight, it is also the least intuitive and thoughtful, and is, instead, very reactive, bewildered even by its own reactions, awkward, cacophonous, erratic. However, Audubon distinguishes gender differences within species with such detail, and this serves to complicate his caricatures.
Looking at the Passenger Pigeon image at the Lilly, we discussed briefly the curious relationship portrayed between male and female. The female is placed above the male, so it seems she is feeding—moreover, providing for him. It is also interesting how the female Turkey is characterized separately from the male. “The young cocks…gobble and strut, while the young hens pur and leap” (202). The males are given to “ceremony” and their behaviors reflect their baser desires and impulsiveness, whereas the females are portrayed as more intuitive and conscious of her surroundings—particularly with regard to her young. The female, guarding her nest, knows the difference between a human who is careless and unaware of her, and one who intends to approach and/or harm her, the same way she knows when to pursue or abandon the male turkey. Once Audubon “returns to the females” (200), which occurs after a much shorter time spent describing the males, the portrait of the turkey becomes more complex. There is a great deal of “instinct” and intuition among the female turkey and her young. While the female is clearly the smarter, more complex of the two, and switching back and forth between the sexes presents two very different species of Turkey, the female description seems to color all succeeding description of the turkey, giving a greater sense of purpose to the male behavior.
I don’t know why yet, but I am especially struck by this dichotomous way of understanding species of birds—that by understanding how each is broken down into gender roles, and how the male and female correspond to and supplement each other, a more holistic view is gained of the bird as it exists and acts in its natural environment….
Audubon has a very diplomatic way of presenting his observations, developing the birds’ traits in a succession, using patterns of repetition, in order to move toward the classifications he makes, while still seeming to rest on scientific evidence. Yet, the birds are made into characters, with character flaws and predictably repetitive patterns of behavior, which all serve to bolster their personality types. The turkey is the least graceful of the birds we’ve read about. At first sight, it is also the least intuitive and thoughtful, and is, instead, very reactive, bewildered even by its own reactions, awkward, cacophonous, erratic. However, Audubon distinguishes gender differences within species with such detail, and this serves to complicate his caricatures.
Looking at the Passenger Pigeon image at the Lilly, we discussed briefly the curious relationship portrayed between male and female. The female is placed above the male, so it seems she is feeding—moreover, providing for him. It is also interesting how the female Turkey is characterized separately from the male. “The young cocks…gobble and strut, while the young hens pur and leap” (202). The males are given to “ceremony” and their behaviors reflect their baser desires and impulsiveness, whereas the females are portrayed as more intuitive and conscious of her surroundings—particularly with regard to her young. The female, guarding her nest, knows the difference between a human who is careless and unaware of her, and one who intends to approach and/or harm her, the same way she knows when to pursue or abandon the male turkey. Once Audubon “returns to the females” (200), which occurs after a much shorter time spent describing the males, the portrait of the turkey becomes more complex. There is a great deal of “instinct” and intuition among the female turkey and her young. While the female is clearly the smarter, more complex of the two, and switching back and forth between the sexes presents two very different species of Turkey, the female description seems to color all succeeding description of the turkey, giving a greater sense of purpose to the male behavior.
I don’t know why yet, but I am especially struck by this dichotomous way of understanding species of birds—that by understanding how each is broken down into gender roles, and how the male and female correspond to and supplement each other, a more holistic view is gained of the bird as it exists and acts in its natural environment….
A bit more on Cooper's "ruins"
It seems as though Cooper's attitudes towards history and natural history may be indirectly related to colonial attitudes towards Indians....
While, as Andrew has pointed out, Cooper doesn't get too bent out of shape about the lack of picturesque "mouldering" artifacts, when she does find them, they are not meant to give pause or evoke sublime wonder on the past (as they might in Romantic poetry, say) but to illustrate the birth of history in the New World. After discussing the only tradition the Indians have left in the "neighborhood" leaving no other "mark her, on hill or dale, lake or stream," she moves to
"something more positive; from the dark ages we come to the dawn of history. On the bank of the river are found the ruins of a bridge, the first made at this point by the white man. Among the mountain streams of the Old World are many high, narrow, arches of stone, built more than a thousand years since, still standing to-day in different stages of picturesque decay. Our ruins are more rude than those" (114).
Even if a bit self-conscious about America's lack of picturesque ruins comparable to the Old World's, Cooper doesn't hesitate to suggest that Indians are without history--the bridge, though rude, is remarkable in the sense that it is the first sign of "real" history.
In the section in which Cooper reflects on the "ruins" of the forest [125-35] it seems as though she is not endowing them with history, as she conceives of it above (though her reflections on the "slow" deep-time sort of growth of trees is probably indebted both to the discourses of natural history and Romanticism). Rather her emphases on "unnumbered seasons" and "unrecorded time" (127) produce a sublime that works dialectically with her own prosaic method of recording her neighborhoods history down to the daily temp, and, more importantly, with her collapsing of the distance between the natural and the cultural "other". Here's an example:
"These hills, and the valleys at their feet, lay for untold centuries one vast forest; unumbered seasons, ages of unrecorded time passed away while they made part of the boundless wilderness of woods....The whole land lay slumbering in the twilight of the forest. Wild dreams made up its half-conscious existence. The hungry cry of the beast of prey, or the fierce deed of savage man, whoop and dance, triumph and torture, broke in fitful bursts upon the deep silence, and then died away, leaving the breath of life to rise and fall with the passing winds" (127).
Cooper's forest, frequently (seemingly) anthropomorphized as a "tribe" is not the sort that, in itself, has the consciousness necessary for history proper. And while the forest in its "strangely slow" growth and decay is imagined as existing in a slumber, it surpasses the growth of the "savage man" whose actions become a "dream" reduced to a "deep silence," in a passage that seems to mystify the disappearance of Native American tribes as part of a speechless, sublime, natural process. While the reverence Cooper has towards the unconscious but boundless forest informs her attitudes towards a more responsible land stewardship, the same reverence seems bound up in an unconscious cultural violence.
While, as Andrew has pointed out, Cooper doesn't get too bent out of shape about the lack of picturesque "mouldering" artifacts, when she does find them, they are not meant to give pause or evoke sublime wonder on the past (as they might in Romantic poetry, say) but to illustrate the birth of history in the New World. After discussing the only tradition the Indians have left in the "neighborhood" leaving no other "mark her, on hill or dale, lake or stream," she moves to
"something more positive; from the dark ages we come to the dawn of history. On the bank of the river are found the ruins of a bridge, the first made at this point by the white man. Among the mountain streams of the Old World are many high, narrow, arches of stone, built more than a thousand years since, still standing to-day in different stages of picturesque decay. Our ruins are more rude than those" (114).
Even if a bit self-conscious about America's lack of picturesque ruins comparable to the Old World's, Cooper doesn't hesitate to suggest that Indians are without history--the bridge, though rude, is remarkable in the sense that it is the first sign of "real" history.
In the section in which Cooper reflects on the "ruins" of the forest [125-35] it seems as though she is not endowing them with history, as she conceives of it above (though her reflections on the "slow" deep-time sort of growth of trees is probably indebted both to the discourses of natural history and Romanticism). Rather her emphases on "unnumbered seasons" and "unrecorded time" (127) produce a sublime that works dialectically with her own prosaic method of recording her neighborhoods history down to the daily temp, and, more importantly, with her collapsing of the distance between the natural and the cultural "other". Here's an example:
"These hills, and the valleys at their feet, lay for untold centuries one vast forest; unumbered seasons, ages of unrecorded time passed away while they made part of the boundless wilderness of woods....The whole land lay slumbering in the twilight of the forest. Wild dreams made up its half-conscious existence. The hungry cry of the beast of prey, or the fierce deed of savage man, whoop and dance, triumph and torture, broke in fitful bursts upon the deep silence, and then died away, leaving the breath of life to rise and fall with the passing winds" (127).
Cooper's forest, frequently (seemingly) anthropomorphized as a "tribe" is not the sort that, in itself, has the consciousness necessary for history proper. And while the forest in its "strangely slow" growth and decay is imagined as existing in a slumber, it surpasses the growth of the "savage man" whose actions become a "dream" reduced to a "deep silence," in a passage that seems to mystify the disappearance of Native American tribes as part of a speechless, sublime, natural process. While the reverence Cooper has towards the unconscious but boundless forest informs her attitudes towards a more responsible land stewardship, the same reverence seems bound up in an unconscious cultural violence.
Scattered Thoughts and Reflections on Cooper
Like Arwen, I was surprised at how Audobon portrayed the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird as a poetic image of domesticity and then "joltingly" described in detail how one might be able to kill it. All content aside, the seeming lack of a grammatical transition between these sections and the abrupt change in tone were enough to disorient this modern reader.
With that in mind, I'm interested in how Cooper also seems to jump between the vices and virtues of nature (all from a human perspective of course) without any real transition. This particular passage caught my eye: "An instance is on record, quoted by Dr. De Kay, in which three men, who went upon Tongue Mountain, on Lake George, for the purpose of hunting rattlesnakes, destroyed in two days eleven hundred and four of these venomous creatures! They are taken for their fat, which is sold at a good price" (54). The next paragraph changes focus and tone almost immediately: "We found this afternoon a very pretty butterfly, pink and yellow; it seemed to be quite young, and scarcely in full possession of its powers yet; we thought it a pity to interfere with its happy career, but just begun, and left it unharmed as we found it" (54). Cooper then concludes her daily entry with a truncated sonnet about the butterfly. Can we attribute this strange transition as a feature of the genre? Or is there some kind of guilt Cooper feels at vast destruction of wildlife and its subsequent monetary gain that she must end this entry with an image of beauty and rebirth? In any event, there appears to be a tension in Cooper between the "use" and cultivation of the land and the fear of its diminishing.
It's also interesting to note the morality that Cooper superimposes upon nature: flowers are praised for shunning "vanity" and spiders are scolded for being "plotting" and "creeping" (61). But Cooper seems to be anthropomorphizing the landscape knowingly: "for it is a natural impulse of the human heart to prefer that which is open and confiding to that which is wily and suspicious, even in the brute creation" (62). And thus the unity that Cooper emphasizes in nature prevents us from viewing the world through a good vs. evil lens (snake vs. butterfly, spider vs. fly): "No doubt these insects must have their merits and their uses, since none of God's creatures are made in vain" (61). Cooper seems to be saying here that what we read as evil in nature is just as essential as what we read as virtuous; we just need to learn to read the Book of the World to extract the proper lessons. I wonder if this religious faith in unity and providence accounts for these "jolts" between beauty and violence and virtue and vice in Cooper's work. I also wonder how different religions may affect writing about the natural world. For instance, has the idea of dominion in Genesis complicated the West's relationship with the natural world?
With that in mind, I'm interested in how Cooper also seems to jump between the vices and virtues of nature (all from a human perspective of course) without any real transition. This particular passage caught my eye: "An instance is on record, quoted by Dr. De Kay, in which three men, who went upon Tongue Mountain, on Lake George, for the purpose of hunting rattlesnakes, destroyed in two days eleven hundred and four of these venomous creatures! They are taken for their fat, which is sold at a good price" (54). The next paragraph changes focus and tone almost immediately: "We found this afternoon a very pretty butterfly, pink and yellow; it seemed to be quite young, and scarcely in full possession of its powers yet; we thought it a pity to interfere with its happy career, but just begun, and left it unharmed as we found it" (54). Cooper then concludes her daily entry with a truncated sonnet about the butterfly. Can we attribute this strange transition as a feature of the genre? Or is there some kind of guilt Cooper feels at vast destruction of wildlife and its subsequent monetary gain that she must end this entry with an image of beauty and rebirth? In any event, there appears to be a tension in Cooper between the "use" and cultivation of the land and the fear of its diminishing.
It's also interesting to note the morality that Cooper superimposes upon nature: flowers are praised for shunning "vanity" and spiders are scolded for being "plotting" and "creeping" (61). But Cooper seems to be anthropomorphizing the landscape knowingly: "for it is a natural impulse of the human heart to prefer that which is open and confiding to that which is wily and suspicious, even in the brute creation" (62). And thus the unity that Cooper emphasizes in nature prevents us from viewing the world through a good vs. evil lens (snake vs. butterfly, spider vs. fly): "No doubt these insects must have their merits and their uses, since none of God's creatures are made in vain" (61). Cooper seems to be saying here that what we read as evil in nature is just as essential as what we read as virtuous; we just need to learn to read the Book of the World to extract the proper lessons. I wonder if this religious faith in unity and providence accounts for these "jolts" between beauty and violence and virtue and vice in Cooper's work. I also wonder how different religions may affect writing about the natural world. For instance, has the idea of dominion in Genesis complicated the West's relationship with the natural world?
On Cooper & Social Ecocriticism
On Susan Fenimore Cooper
Prone to the 1st-wave of ecocriticism as I am, I must say I was a bit wary of Bennett’s article – the “Metropolitan” in the title initiating my reservation, but I’ve since gotten over it. Of course, Deep Ecology has its limitations (and unrealistic Romantic musings as Bennett suggests) in being applied critically and I see Bennett’s points here, particularly as is supported by some of the keen insight coming from Ross’s Chicago Gangster Theory; but while I’m not apt to pitch Deep Ecology out the window, I am excited at how Deep Ecology fused together with social ecocriticism provide us a broader lens through which to view literary works environmentally.
Think what you will of the poststructuralists (and I’m as suspicious of them as the Deep Ecologists are), but it goes without saying that “unmediated nature” doesn’t exist, or to clarify, it doesn’t exist for us because we as humans must mediate everything in order to make sense of it. So it becomes, I think, much more interesting to read Cooper’s Rural Hours not from the perspective of it as quintessential ‘nature writing’ or pastoral, but from the perspective of social ecocriticism. Barry Lopez is right, I think, in saying that “natural history writing takes as its proper subjects […] the complex biological, social, economic, and ethical relationships among [the natural world].” Viewed in this way, and here I really agree with Bennett, the scope of ecocriticism is suddenly much more expansive.
While on the surface, Cooper’s book might seem like a journal of fine musings about wildflowers and birds, it’s curious to me what significant things are being said when considered within their socio-cultural context: the passage about exterminated/eliminated Native peoples (pg 48) seems particularly in tune with Lopez’s assertion that nature writing tends towards “justice.” In this passage, Cooper seems to draw our attention not only to the natural world and how she perceives it (mediates it), but how people have interacted with that world, including the socio-cultural forces at work that grant the right of land to some and not others—the precise kind of environmental racism/injustice that Bennett says is equal to the contemporary experience of so many blacks in inner cities and how they, indeed, can be seen as the ultimate ‘endangered species.’ (This, I think, takes the argument too far, however, returning again to an overt anthropocentrization of ecocriticism to the opposite extreme).
Lots of other examples from the reading make Cooper exciting when considered from this evolved ecocritical perspective … for instance, her discussion of naming and the way in which a relationship with a place/region etc., is affected by the use of language—abhorring as she does the Latinate names, stating “What has a dead language to do on every-day occasions with the living blossoms of the hour?” (pg 68). Cooper’s discussion of cultivation, of gardens, etc. while tinged with awe of the natural world is simultaneously appreciative of human construction—not only does she appreciate the cultivated fields and considers them lovely to look at, but she appreciates how the town/village creates an interesting (and enticing) juxtaposition to the natural scenery around it. Here Cooper seems to mediate her world (and the human presence in the natural world) in a way that clearly illustrates Bennett’s central points—that the human quotient, the human impression of nature (which subsequently guides the human relationship with nature) has to be considered in order for ecocriticism to extend to its farthest reaches. How do we qualify nature and our understanding of it and how, in turn, does that understanding influence behavior?
In the same passage referenced above about the stump-fields, Cooper brings to light the differences within the studded fields – how some are cultivated and some are left in ruin – motioning towards a difference that could be more closely examined from a necessary socio-cultural perspective. How is it that one unpeopled, wild field appears beautiful (prompting the human desire to preserve it as such), while the next field is ‘lovely’ with a homestead at it’s center and winter wheat growing at its edge? How, Cooper’s text forces us to consider, do we mediate the natural environment to initiate such differences in the way we interact with the environment? Cooper seems to recognize that while one field is acceptable and the other not (the same type of sentiment she expresses around deforestation), the ultimate questions underscored by the text become: how are these choices being made, and what are the ramifications of these choices? The residents of Cooperstown lovingly tend their gardens, Cooper notes in her journal, but simultaneously destroy their forests—how then do humans determine what is beautiful, what is grotesque, what to clear-cut and what to save – all questions related to the socio-environment exchange that needs to be considered in order to (as Bennett says) effect the kind of change that the Deep Ecologists desire, but in a way that might produce that (positive) change on a grand scale.
Prone to the 1st-wave of ecocriticism as I am, I must say I was a bit wary of Bennett’s article – the “Metropolitan” in the title initiating my reservation, but I’ve since gotten over it. Of course, Deep Ecology has its limitations (and unrealistic Romantic musings as Bennett suggests) in being applied critically and I see Bennett’s points here, particularly as is supported by some of the keen insight coming from Ross’s Chicago Gangster Theory; but while I’m not apt to pitch Deep Ecology out the window, I am excited at how Deep Ecology fused together with social ecocriticism provide us a broader lens through which to view literary works environmentally.
Think what you will of the poststructuralists (and I’m as suspicious of them as the Deep Ecologists are), but it goes without saying that “unmediated nature” doesn’t exist, or to clarify, it doesn’t exist for us because we as humans must mediate everything in order to make sense of it. So it becomes, I think, much more interesting to read Cooper’s Rural Hours not from the perspective of it as quintessential ‘nature writing’ or pastoral, but from the perspective of social ecocriticism. Barry Lopez is right, I think, in saying that “natural history writing takes as its proper subjects […] the complex biological, social, economic, and ethical relationships among [the natural world].” Viewed in this way, and here I really agree with Bennett, the scope of ecocriticism is suddenly much more expansive.
While on the surface, Cooper’s book might seem like a journal of fine musings about wildflowers and birds, it’s curious to me what significant things are being said when considered within their socio-cultural context: the passage about exterminated/eliminated Native peoples (pg 48) seems particularly in tune with Lopez’s assertion that nature writing tends towards “justice.” In this passage, Cooper seems to draw our attention not only to the natural world and how she perceives it (mediates it), but how people have interacted with that world, including the socio-cultural forces at work that grant the right of land to some and not others—the precise kind of environmental racism/injustice that Bennett says is equal to the contemporary experience of so many blacks in inner cities and how they, indeed, can be seen as the ultimate ‘endangered species.’ (This, I think, takes the argument too far, however, returning again to an overt anthropocentrization of ecocriticism to the opposite extreme).
Lots of other examples from the reading make Cooper exciting when considered from this evolved ecocritical perspective … for instance, her discussion of naming and the way in which a relationship with a place/region etc., is affected by the use of language—abhorring as she does the Latinate names, stating “What has a dead language to do on every-day occasions with the living blossoms of the hour?” (pg 68). Cooper’s discussion of cultivation, of gardens, etc. while tinged with awe of the natural world is simultaneously appreciative of human construction—not only does she appreciate the cultivated fields and considers them lovely to look at, but she appreciates how the town/village creates an interesting (and enticing) juxtaposition to the natural scenery around it. Here Cooper seems to mediate her world (and the human presence in the natural world) in a way that clearly illustrates Bennett’s central points—that the human quotient, the human impression of nature (which subsequently guides the human relationship with nature) has to be considered in order for ecocriticism to extend to its farthest reaches. How do we qualify nature and our understanding of it and how, in turn, does that understanding influence behavior?
In the same passage referenced above about the stump-fields, Cooper brings to light the differences within the studded fields – how some are cultivated and some are left in ruin – motioning towards a difference that could be more closely examined from a necessary socio-cultural perspective. How is it that one unpeopled, wild field appears beautiful (prompting the human desire to preserve it as such), while the next field is ‘lovely’ with a homestead at it’s center and winter wheat growing at its edge? How, Cooper’s text forces us to consider, do we mediate the natural environment to initiate such differences in the way we interact with the environment? Cooper seems to recognize that while one field is acceptable and the other not (the same type of sentiment she expresses around deforestation), the ultimate questions underscored by the text become: how are these choices being made, and what are the ramifications of these choices? The residents of Cooperstown lovingly tend their gardens, Cooper notes in her journal, but simultaneously destroy their forests—how then do humans determine what is beautiful, what is grotesque, what to clear-cut and what to save – all questions related to the socio-environment exchange that needs to be considered in order to (as Bennett says) effect the kind of change that the Deep Ecologists desire, but in a way that might produce that (positive) change on a grand scale.
Susan Fenimore Cooper's American Ruins
It was a commonplace, among many early American writers, extending as far into the 19th Century as Henry James, to lament the lack of ancient history in America, something that was considered a necessary subject or atmosphere for the creation of literary art. Hawthorne's preface to The Marble Faun (1859) is representative: "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wallflowers, need ruin to make them grow."
Susan Fenimore Cooper, though, is filled with none of this anxiety. "The forest lands of America," she writes, "[...] abound in ruins of their own" (128). True, Cooper does not find in these "forest lands" any "annals" of human civilization, and she doesn't appear to be as interested as Hawthorne in the specific formal requirements of "romance and poetry." Nevertheless, she has no problem finding material to write about. There may not be evidence of human history in the "ruins" she sees in the forest, but the trees have a history of their own. Cooper writes of "broken limbs and dead bodies of great trees" that are found throughout the forest, some "still clad in [their] armor." The forest is the site for a kind of natural drama, where young trees are ever growing amongst the old, and where chance storms and unpredictable winds always threaten to upset the current order. Cooper explores the natural landscape around her and finds just the right kind of environment to spark the imagination.
At the end of her reflection on the forest ruins, she notes that, "amid this wild confusion," there are traces of human life: "the track of wheels, a rude road [...], or the mark of the axe" (129). Within the ancient history of the forest, Cooper also finds the more recent history of human life, which has a story of its own. She unites the two histories (i.e., natural and human) by observing that the trees "freely and richly [...] contribut[e] to the wants of our race." In this case, it seems Nature is subordinate and subservient to human endeavor. But it is worth pointing out that the human story is dependant on the natural. The two are not in opposition, as they so often are in American writing and imagination. Moreover, while Cooper anthropomorphizes nature to some extent (trees as bodies, bark as armor, etc.), the long history of the forest is, for her, an interesting story worth telling -- more interesting in her reflections, at least, than the story of the "rude road" or the "mark of the axe." If the American imagination is stifled by an environment that has a relative lack of history, Cooper has no trouble finding a rich past in the forest to meditate on. If good writing requires ruins, she seems to be saying, these natural ruins can be easily found.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Stillness, and the life and death of birds
"My Style of Drawing Birds” does not, in its first four pages, tell us much about Audubon’s style of drawing birds; it tells instead of his determination of a means to make birds drawable. It is not enough to simply kill a bird and draw it dead; such ornithological portraits are “neither more or less than . . . Stiff unmeaning profiles”, and even hung upside down “to shew their every portion” only produces “some pretty fair sign Boards for Poulterers!”, emphasizing their deadness (759). Audubon determines eventually that he must “attempt to Copy [nature] in her own Way, alive and Moving!” and apparently makes a brief attempt to draw living birds, but he finds that he cannot finish his sketches (760), and goes back to collecting dead specimens, which he eventually learns to string up with wire into natural-looking – that is to say, alive-looking – positions (761).
There seems a certain circular waste of labor in going to the trouble to kill a bird so that one can “represent them in . . . a Natural position” (763), making them look as if they were living again. What the bird-hunter/stuffer/painter gains in this is perhaps not so much control over the bird, since it is the bird’s “Nature (as far as habits Went) that he wants to represent – he is not attempting to make the bird do anything it would not do by itself – as it is the birds’ stillness, which is impossible to achieve while it is living. When the bird is still it is drawable; it is also approachable, and studyable. Audubon can “Stud[y] it whilt thus placed as a ‘lay figure’ before me, according to its Specificity”, learn the forms of its “bill, nostrils, head, eye, leg or claws, as well as the Structure of its Wings and Tail” (763), the better to represent it. Yet Audubon concedes also the importance of observing his birds alive, in their “form and Habits,” to discover that Pewees sit pensive and upright, while “Gallinaceous Birds . . . were possessed of equally peculiar positions and movements” and “herons walked with elegance and stateliness” (762). Audubon can’t represent a still, drawable nature without experiencing it in its unstillness, to find out what it does, so that he can artificially do it (to his birds) himself.
Consider the case of the “Ruby-throated Humming Bird”: Audubon gushes effusively on the beauties and familial habits of “this lovely little creature,” this “glittering fragment of the rainbow”; he describes it in terms of magic and fairy wings (248) and revels in its delicate feeding habits .He is enamoured of the bird’s movement, “from one flower to another like a gleam of light, upwards, downwards” (249) and even more so by its mating habits and family life, anthropomorphizing like crazy here in particular. After all of this enthusiastic description of the living hummingbird, it’s jolting when he turns briefly to the subject of killing them, and then to his strategy for representing them – “in various positions, flitting, feeding, caressing each other, or sitting . . . and pluming themselves. The diversity of action and attitude thus exhibited may, I trust, prove sufficient to present a faithful idea of their appearance and manners” (245). He is untroubled by the violence he’s done on these bird whose parental feelings he has just finished admiring, and once he’s arranged them into their lifelike poses, describes them using the verbs of their previous action, despite that they are now still. It’s as if he doesn’t quite see them as dead.
There seems a certain circular waste of labor in going to the trouble to kill a bird so that one can “represent them in . . . a Natural position” (763), making them look as if they were living again. What the bird-hunter/stuffer/painter gains in this is perhaps not so much control over the bird, since it is the bird’s “Nature (as far as habits Went) that he wants to represent – he is not attempting to make the bird do anything it would not do by itself – as it is the birds’ stillness, which is impossible to achieve while it is living. When the bird is still it is drawable; it is also approachable, and studyable. Audubon can “Stud[y] it whilt thus placed as a ‘lay figure’ before me, according to its Specificity”, learn the forms of its “bill, nostrils, head, eye, leg or claws, as well as the Structure of its Wings and Tail” (763), the better to represent it. Yet Audubon concedes also the importance of observing his birds alive, in their “form and Habits,” to discover that Pewees sit pensive and upright, while “Gallinaceous Birds . . . were possessed of equally peculiar positions and movements” and “herons walked with elegance and stateliness” (762). Audubon can’t represent a still, drawable nature without experiencing it in its unstillness, to find out what it does, so that he can artificially do it (to his birds) himself.
Consider the case of the “Ruby-throated Humming Bird”: Audubon gushes effusively on the beauties and familial habits of “this lovely little creature,” this “glittering fragment of the rainbow”; he describes it in terms of magic and fairy wings (248) and revels in its delicate feeding habits .He is enamoured of the bird’s movement, “from one flower to another like a gleam of light, upwards, downwards” (249) and even more so by its mating habits and family life, anthropomorphizing like crazy here in particular. After all of this enthusiastic description of the living hummingbird, it’s jolting when he turns briefly to the subject of killing them, and then to his strategy for representing them – “in various positions, flitting, feeding, caressing each other, or sitting . . . and pluming themselves. The diversity of action and attitude thus exhibited may, I trust, prove sufficient to present a faithful idea of their appearance and manners” (245). He is untroubled by the violence he’s done on these bird whose parental feelings he has just finished admiring, and once he’s arranged them into their lifelike poses, describes them using the verbs of their previous action, despite that they are now still. It’s as if he doesn’t quite see them as dead.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Vultures and Pigeon-hunters
One of the striking aspects of Audubon's description of the black vulture is the statement, which is really more of a question, on page 300 about the rational capability of vultures. Audubon admits that the anecdote he is about to tell is "attributed to mere instinct," but states that he himself cannot help but consider to "borde[r] on reason" in the vulture. "Border" here seems to be the key word, for the "fact" he goes on to tell is so "dastardly" (301) that it would be dismaying to consider these birds as operating under any form of reason familiar to humans: vultures, it seems, actively seek out and "devou[r] young living animals," and with great frequency.
The border with reason that vultures approach in this case is offset by much of the rest of Audubon's description, where vultures are considered to be so driven by "habit" (298, 302) and appetite that they sometimes act contrary to their own good. Sometimes vultures try to eat too much, or in the wrong places, or become so "lazy" (301) that they are incapable of moving without difficulty. The dangerous appellation of reason on an animal (and a "dastardly" animal, at that) is thus briefly suggested, but immediately and emphatically retracted. The vulture is not an animal that possesses reason or the free will that comes along with it in 19th century theory, and thus its malicious lifestyle is not a problem of reason or morality, but rather an example of a creature controlled entirely by physical appetite and unreflective habit.
Does Audubon launch an implicit critique, then, on the "tyrant[s] of creation" (268) who disturb the passenger pigeon and destroy them by the hundreds and thousands at a time? Like the vulture, these hunters, too, seem to act in the interest of desire rather than reason - they kill so many pigeons that hogs are "let loose to feed on the remainder" after one scene of "devastation" that Audubon witnesses (267), the chief motivation for which seems to be the pigeons' marketability in trade centers like New York (sold for four cents a piece [269]). Luckily, Audubon assures us that "such dreadful havock" will not result in the extinction of this species (267).
It is difficult not to recall the scenes Audubon describes of the gathering of vultures to devour some helpless prey when he tells how the hunters gather, as if by habit or strange custom, in the forest to kill a mass of pigeons. They kill more than they can carry away, just as the vultures try to eat more than their stomachs can contain. And so it is difficult not to wonder, are the humans, in this instance, also merely "bordering" on rational existence? If the vultures fall just short of reason, on what side of the border do these pigeon-hunters lie?
On page 288, Tallmadge compares the “discipline of erudition” to “ordinary science” as Thomas Kuhn conceived of it. Ostensibly, Tallmadge cites Kuhn to bolster his argument that though necessary, book learning is pushed into the “background” when the literary critic-cum-natural historian is radiated by the real, “referential world,” with its powers to induce discovery (If I remember Kuhn’s argument correctly, ordinary scientists make up the brunt of the field, they are the middling technicians whose data is necessary to the revolutionary paradigm shifts in a science). The analogy to Kuhn is curious, though, because his efforts to historicize science seem contrary to Tallmadge’s faith in a mostly unmediated access to the “more-than-human-world…[with] intense, incontrovertible certainty” (287). So while Tallmadge presents scientific discourse as the “discipline” necessary to receive nature’s message, his argument (besides falling prey at times to what Bennett refers to as “nature fetishism”) seems ahistorical w/r/t science. I think his argument would be troubled if he recognized the historically bound nature of the “background erudition” that supposedly sufficiently cleans the doors of perception onto the “referent.” To be fair to Tallmadge, he presents King’s Mountaineering as exhibiting a complex interaction between competing literary and scientific discourses. Moreover, while it is naïve to conceive of science as a privileged discourse capable of furnishing us with a complete “coherent picture of the living world” (285), there is no doubt that in the natural sciences, such observation is hugely important (whether or not it is accompanied by sublime feelings). Tallmadge’s field work, however, seems more like a fact-checking mission, of limited interest and practicality.
All of this isn’t to suggest we go completely in the opposite direction and say that the experience of “wide open spaces” is typically a fetishistic scam made for and consumed by credulous new-agers. But even if replicating the “experience” is a useful component in promoting environmental justice, theoretical challenges to the “referent” cannot, and should not, be dismissed offhandedly. Bennett’s argument, I think, lays out a number of reasons why, for instance, taking science uncritically (as a key to unlocking the experience of nature or narrativizing it as a whole) has historically led to social injustice. Likewise, the privileging of “non-human” environments as somehow more natural seems specious. But unlike Buell’s flip-flop towards a cosmopolitan, cultural ecocriticism, Bennett’s “hope” that deep ecology and social ecocriticism can find some common ground seems an attractive direction for the field.
All of this isn’t to suggest we go completely in the opposite direction and say that the experience of “wide open spaces” is typically a fetishistic scam made for and consumed by credulous new-agers. But even if replicating the “experience” is a useful component in promoting environmental justice, theoretical challenges to the “referent” cannot, and should not, be dismissed offhandedly. Bennett’s argument, I think, lays out a number of reasons why, for instance, taking science uncritically (as a key to unlocking the experience of nature or narrativizing it as a whole) has historically led to social injustice. Likewise, the privileging of “non-human” environments as somehow more natural seems specious. But unlike Buell’s flip-flop towards a cosmopolitan, cultural ecocriticism, Bennett’s “hope” that deep ecology and social ecocriticism can find some common ground seems an attractive direction for the field.
Reconsidering the Reconceptualization of the Pastoral
In class we’ve considered pushing the boundary of ecocriticism to a pre-Walden space, and the Sayre essay in particular succeeded in tracing Thoreauian impulses back to America’s infancy. Since the beginning of the semester, however, I’ve been wondering if ecocriticism can inform even earlier works, specifically the pastoral literature of antiquity. So I was interested in Bennett’s statement “the pastoral looms large in deep ecocriticism” (303). “Pastoral” can be a pretty general term, and I think Bennett could have spent some more time defining it or at least providing us with some textual examples. As I have not read either the Love essay that he cites or the body of deep ecocritical work that deals with the pastoral, I am uncertain that his representation of the ecocritical view of the pastoral is accurate. But, assuming that it is, I would like to complicate some of the claims about the pastoral by looking briefly at Vergil’s Eclogue I (Loeb edition translated by H. Rushton Fairclough).
First of all, according to Bennett, Love claims that “pastoralism will only become more significant as its chief concern, the interconnections between human beings and nature, comes to dominate a time ‘when the comfortably mythopoeic green world of pastoral is beset by profound threats of pollution, despoliation, and diminishment’ (“Et” 196)” (303). While Vergil’s Eclogue I does depict a “comfortably mythopoeic green world” of sorts, it is a world ravaged by war and under threat from Octavian’s land seizures. Meliboeus says “we are leaving our country’s bounds and sweet fields. We are outcasts from our country” (2-3). This “classic pastoral” world is not, as Bennett claims, a place where “the city dwellers took a refreshing trip to the country in order to return to their home rejuvenated” (303). Rather, it is a world profoundly affected—even infected—by the city; so much so that Tityrus must go to Rome in order to plead his case and maintain control of his lands. The “city dwellers” who enter the pastoral world do not do so for refreshment; they are, according to Meliboeus, “godless soldier[s]” and “barbarians” (70-71). This ostensibly idyllic country is a place where “bare stones cover all,” and “the marsh chokes … pastures with slimy rushes” (47-48). The countryside is populated by miscarrying goats --“the hope of the flock” (14-15)--, which Meliboeus later describes as “once happy” (74). When the poem concludes, the pastoral world itself seems to mourn the strife inflicted upon it: “Even now the house-tops yonder are smoking and longer shadows fall from the mountain-heights” (82-83).
Thus, I fear that without proper definition the traditional pastoral might become a “straw terra,” so to speak, a genre that might be “reconceptualize[d] … [to be] relevant for a contemporary world” on insufficient grounds (303). I suggest that ecocriticism take another look at the classical pastoral to see how a melancholy rural landscape threatened and repossessed by an alien city might overlap or interconnect with our concerns in more contemporary literature.
First of all, according to Bennett, Love claims that “pastoralism will only become more significant as its chief concern, the interconnections between human beings and nature, comes to dominate a time ‘when the comfortably mythopoeic green world of pastoral is beset by profound threats of pollution, despoliation, and diminishment’ (“Et” 196)” (303). While Vergil’s Eclogue I does depict a “comfortably mythopoeic green world” of sorts, it is a world ravaged by war and under threat from Octavian’s land seizures. Meliboeus says “we are leaving our country’s bounds and sweet fields. We are outcasts from our country” (2-3). This “classic pastoral” world is not, as Bennett claims, a place where “the city dwellers took a refreshing trip to the country in order to return to their home rejuvenated” (303). Rather, it is a world profoundly affected—even infected—by the city; so much so that Tityrus must go to Rome in order to plead his case and maintain control of his lands. The “city dwellers” who enter the pastoral world do not do so for refreshment; they are, according to Meliboeus, “godless soldier[s]” and “barbarians” (70-71). This ostensibly idyllic country is a place where “bare stones cover all,” and “the marsh chokes … pastures with slimy rushes” (47-48). The countryside is populated by miscarrying goats --“the hope of the flock” (14-15)--, which Meliboeus later describes as “once happy” (74). When the poem concludes, the pastoral world itself seems to mourn the strife inflicted upon it: “Even now the house-tops yonder are smoking and longer shadows fall from the mountain-heights” (82-83).
Thus, I fear that without proper definition the traditional pastoral might become a “straw terra,” so to speak, a genre that might be “reconceptualize[d] … [to be] relevant for a contemporary world” on insufficient grounds (303). I suggest that ecocriticism take another look at the classical pastoral to see how a melancholy rural landscape threatened and repossessed by an alien city might overlap or interconnect with our concerns in more contemporary literature.
Some thoughts on Tallmadge
In a gesture which seems to completely divorce ecocriticism from literary studies, Tallmadge defines a curious new “ecological method of criticism” (282). Close reading is just not going to cut it for him because it belongs to conventional literary studies and apparently does not go far enough. As I was reading his essay, the main question on my mind was the question of audience. Who is he writing for? It seems he has in mind a new breed of literary eco-scholars, scholars – if they can even be called that - who go “far enough.”
Tallmadge’s starting point is David Abram’s argument that we have grown deaf to nature and become desensitized to it. It brings to mind Rousseau’s theory of “the natural man,” corrupted by the evils of civilization. Our natural capacity for compassion and pity has been destroyed. Enter nature writing. Enter the eco-scholar, a tutor of the land, engaging with nature through “whole-body encounter[s]” (287).
Tallmadge wants a method “to match our mountains,” a method that will force us to consider nature “in more than a casual way,” the implication being that intellectual labour itself will not carry us far enough (283). We need “fresh air,” we need “field work” (284). We need “field-based reading” (284). And our model should be natural history, a scientific practice and a literary genre all rolled into one!
Interestingly, Tallmadge’s field research project does little more than corroborate King’s account. Hardly a piece of literary scholarship, it might make an interesting contribution to autobiographical studies which are concerned with the question of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. But how is it ecocritical? Tallmadge himself admits that his escapade added “balance to interpretation,” but that’s pretty much it (291). It is not “an actual demonstration of the method” (291). Wow. I guess we are left on our own to try to envision what an actual demonstration would look like.
Despite the many problems Tallmadge’s new method might pose for literary criticism (for example, what if we are dealing with a fictional mountain? How can you have a “whole-body encounter” with a fictional mountain?), what seems to be most problematic is his questioning of intellectual inquiry. His premise is that intellectual inquiry by itself is not adequate because of its alienating effect. It alienates us from real nature, from the real world. This premise is wholly drawn from Abram’s “alphabetic literacy” argument, which assumes that there once was a golden age when we were all noble savages living in perfect harmony with nature. Even if this were true, Abram’s universalist thesis seems to conflate all human culture without taking into consideration that different peoples and different civilizations construct the nature/culture divide differently. Besides, one could easily argue that intellectual inquiry does not necessarily need to alienate us from nature or anything else for that matter (i.e. Plato’s argument that philosophy is the only road to truth).
Tallmadge’s starting point is David Abram’s argument that we have grown deaf to nature and become desensitized to it. It brings to mind Rousseau’s theory of “the natural man,” corrupted by the evils of civilization. Our natural capacity for compassion and pity has been destroyed. Enter nature writing. Enter the eco-scholar, a tutor of the land, engaging with nature through “whole-body encounter[s]” (287).
Tallmadge wants a method “to match our mountains,” a method that will force us to consider nature “in more than a casual way,” the implication being that intellectual labour itself will not carry us far enough (283). We need “fresh air,” we need “field work” (284). We need “field-based reading” (284). And our model should be natural history, a scientific practice and a literary genre all rolled into one!
Interestingly, Tallmadge’s field research project does little more than corroborate King’s account. Hardly a piece of literary scholarship, it might make an interesting contribution to autobiographical studies which are concerned with the question of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. But how is it ecocritical? Tallmadge himself admits that his escapade added “balance to interpretation,” but that’s pretty much it (291). It is not “an actual demonstration of the method” (291). Wow. I guess we are left on our own to try to envision what an actual demonstration would look like.
Despite the many problems Tallmadge’s new method might pose for literary criticism (for example, what if we are dealing with a fictional mountain? How can you have a “whole-body encounter” with a fictional mountain?), what seems to be most problematic is his questioning of intellectual inquiry. His premise is that intellectual inquiry by itself is not adequate because of its alienating effect. It alienates us from real nature, from the real world. This premise is wholly drawn from Abram’s “alphabetic literacy” argument, which assumes that there once was a golden age when we were all noble savages living in perfect harmony with nature. Even if this were true, Abram’s universalist thesis seems to conflate all human culture without taking into consideration that different peoples and different civilizations construct the nature/culture divide differently. Besides, one could easily argue that intellectual inquiry does not necessarily need to alienate us from nature or anything else for that matter (i.e. Plato’s argument that philosophy is the only road to truth).
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