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.
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