Post on 20-Jan-2023
October 14, yMooney
CHAPTER NINE
THOREAU'S “CONCORD RIVER”:
LIVING TRANSCENDENTALLY ON CURRENTS OF TIME
As a recent convert to the singularity and soaring
universality of Thoreau's poetic prose, you might think that
I'd plunge straight into Walden; instead I take up Thoreau's
first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. I take up
only the prelude at that, all of eight pages, titled “Concord
River,” and move at a gently rowing pace.1
Thoreau's writing rises from desolation—in the case of A
Week on the Concord, from his brother's death—and aspires to
vibrant serenity. John died writhing from lockjaw in Henry's
arms. Insofar as philosophy, literature, and religion can
express an ache for salvation, release from affliction and
despair, Thoreau's writing belongs to each. He finds release
1 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Ed. Carl F. Hove, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
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through religious communion with rivers, their fish, oaks,
and meadows. And high above rivers, he savors a view from Mt.
Greylock, and then from Mt. Washington, the northernmost
point of his journey. Thoreau's attention to particulars in
his surroundings is a poet's and also an ecologist's. He
seeks a naturalist's view, and also a Biblical, poetic touch
with things, a sort of contact or touch unknown to present
day academic dispassion and specialization.
Thoreau brings our attention from ideas in platonic
heavens down to the ebb and flow of mobile things–mists,
fish, and rivers—finding the poetry, philosophy, and
salvation in particulars just there, in singular occasions.2
This is less “transcendentalism” than what one scholar wryly
calls “descendentalism” (Porte xiii, xiv, 10, 140). To
2 For a story linking “Transcendentalism” to Kant, see below, note 22. Tracing an upward ascent, either toward Plato's Ideal Forms, or toward Kantian regulative (and transcendental) Ideas, or toward Kant's transcenden- tal preconditions of knowing, risks lifting us to clouds of abstraction— whereas Thoreau would have our feet on the ground, or feel askiff slide through the currents of a sustaining river. Consider the linefrom Walden that has God “culminating in the present moment” (95). Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Princeton: Princeton UP. Thoreau had a healthy disrespect for clubs and for programs or trends of thought that congealed anywhere near doctrine. For him, there is nothing useful in disquisitions on so abstract a topic as “transcendentalism.”
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descend to the detail is to escape the prosaic boredom that
masks quiet desperation. A Week and, its prelude, “Concord
River,” provide shifting words, places, prospects, and
radiant bits of creation: a scampering fox, a cranberry
bobbing in a marsh. These singular occasions shine sideways
or transversally, backward and forward in time, up toward
stars and down toward the dark of a river bottom.3 Attention
to flowing, shimmering things in their surround, translates
us out of the routine or mechanical to the touch of a river's
shad and weeds, its waves and winds, its oaks and cranberries
—even its cruel histories.
A Transcendental River
“Compared with the other tributaries of the Merrimack, it
appears to have been properly named Musketaquid, or Meadow
River, by the Indians. For the most part, it creeps through
broad meadows, adorned with scattered oaks, where the
3 Ephesians 3:18 calls us to regard the “breadth, and length, and height, and depth” of the divine. (Thanks here to Marcia Robinson.) We have an attunement to the world-as-divine that reverberates with The Psalms and with the Whirlwind in The Book of Job, as well.
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cranberry is found in abundance, covering the ground like a
mossbed.” (Thoreau A Week 9)
Within the first leaves of the book we learn that the
river is not unto itself alone, but belongs to a larger
waterway, one tributary among others. We can see it, of
course, in a pedestrian way as belonging just to the environs
of Concord, but Thoreau wants to expand our attention. He
leads us elsewhere, down to the Merrimack, an attenuated
stream that stretches north to disappear in the snowy heights
of Agiocochook, Mt. Washington, and then descends many miles
south to be swallowed in the vast Atlantic. Thoreau leads us
also to an attenuated elsewhere in time, even back to the
Nile (as he suggests in “Concord's” first sentence)—not to
mention back in time to those earlier associates of the oak
adorned Meadow River, those dwellers who called it
Musketaquid.
It flows as a network, a reticulation. Part meadow, part
river, its broad marshland forms an amphibious, anomalous
zone, especially in spring floods. There we find birds of the
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air belong also to water, brothers who belong to both land
and water, a dory painted blue above water line and green
below, to mark belonging to sky, water, and marsh. All flow
with and against currents of water and wind.
Anomalous, amphibious zones embrace flow and movement.
They are neither here nor there, both this and that, zones
for outlaws and wanderers. In Thoreau's posthumous Cape Cod,
they are the zones of scampering crabs, half of the sea, half
of the sands, anxiously and side- ways inhabiting that
changeling zone where walking one belongs to the curling,
rippling advancing flood, and also to the wet–dry terra firma
—only momentarily awash, while the beach gently hisses as
waters advance and retreat.4
After a number of poetic invocations, the days of A Week
begin with a short prelude called “Concord River.” Here is
that beginning:
The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the
Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history until
4 For jellyfish and clams as anomalous creatures, see Cape Cod, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1961: Ch. IV, 81.
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the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of
England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of
CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have
been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-
ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be
Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. (5)
Thoreau reports that, on the arrival of English
settlers, the river gains a new name transferred from the
name of the village. The town appears, as he says, to have
been “commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony.” But how
peaceable were the English newcomers? Did the town earn its
name? The gentle hint is “No,” for Thoreau immediately adds,
“To an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted
and fished . . . .” The first inhabitants may be extinct, but
Thoreau has them appear as he honors their history and words.
In the first line of his prelude, he gives us not the
Commonwealth's name for this meadowy river, but their name.
The English took over the river and naming rights,
baptizing Musketaquid, “Concord River.” This unconsecrated
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place is settled by English eager to farm, to fish, and to
pray—a people who will push out the long-standing tenants.
The village is baptized “Concord,” and in the same breath,
“The 12th Church of Christ.” Thoreau tells us that he relies
on the records of “old Johnson,” the region's first historian
or bard. This is Christian concord or harmony, not an Indian
peace or serenity. The advance of the Massachusetts
plantation, we're told, is “Wonder Working Providence.”
Thoreau repeats “old Johnson's” deadpan (he doesn't believe
it for an instant).
Concord River is well stocked with shad and alewives.
Johnson observes that salmon would be present too, but for
the downstream falls that are too high to leap. Soon the
brothers will encounter the settlers' hand-built falls upon
the Merrimack, made to drive mills. These dams, as Henry
observes, will halt the upward flow of fish in their
transcendence from below—until they too become extinct. Fish
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and non-fish, Europeans and First Peoples, inhabit anomalous
zones between water and rock, death and life.5
The River: Paradise Lost and Regained
In and about Concord, river and town, we might hope for an
eponymous harmony-in-the-making. Some years after writing
“Concord River,” as the Civil War approaches, Thoreau
glimpses a scaled down heaven in a lily rising
inconspicuously from a malodorous swamp. He suffers the
stench of a fugitive slave bill that welcomes slave catchers
to roam his woods, draining them of heaven—but for this
miraculous lily.6 On earlier days, he finds harmony-in-the-
making. In pure fun, he scampers across ice in flow with a
5 I discuss Thoreau's finding John Brown in an anomalous zone, where life and death strangely mix. See “Thoreau's Translations: John Brown, Apples, Lilies,” The Concord Saunterer July 2008, 194–221, reprinted in Mooney, Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophyfrom Thoreau to Cavell, Continuum Books, 2009, Ch. 12.6 See “Thoreau's Translations” (Mooney 194–221).
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fox.7 He has a knack for finding numberless heaven-filled
ecstasies. Thoreau nods toward paradise in A Week, but
acknowledges deep pain, as well.
Writing out of the gentle flow of the river can reveal
the gradual unsettling of the first residents and mask the
unspeakable death of John Thoreau (a story we know from other
sources). That ghost is inscribed in the book's dedication,
where he pleads, or prays, “Be Thou my muse, my Brother.”
Then, there is a horror that is by no means masked or washed
over. We hear in the “Thursday” chapter of A Week of
apocalyptic events not far from the place the Concord flows
into the Merrimack.
Thoreau tells of murders in Haverhill and some miles
north. He knows that the events of 1697 swirling around
Hannah Dustan are as bloodcurdling as Goya's black painting
of Chronos devouring his children. Perhaps, the Concord and
7 “I saw a fox. . .making across to the hills on my left. As the snow lay five inches deep, he made but slow progress, but it was no impedimentto me. So yielding to the instinct of the chase, I . . . bounded away, snuffing the air like a . . . hound.” Henry D. Thoreau, “January 30, 1841.” Journals, Vols. I– VIII. Ed. John C. Broderick, Robert Sattlemeyer, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton UP, 1981–2008.
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Merrimack form an anomalous region where paradise is lost,
and any shred of paradise regained is dark— and our precise
place on the water, somewhere between loss and gain, is to be
questioned at any bend.
By now, brothers John and Henry have reached the
headwaters of the Merrimack, climbed Washington, and are
making their down- stream run. They row and sail swiftly,
wind and current to their advantage, sweeping back toward the
inflow of the Concord. Haverhill is just past the turn west
up to Concord. In 1697, a lifetime after the founding of
Concord and one hundred and thirty years before the brothers'
trip, the town becomes stained in blood. Thoreau evenhandedly
inserts these terrible events, interrupting his account of
homecoming. Hannah Dustan, a settler, is dragged from her
home by a small band of Indians. They lead her out toward the
river, and dash the brains of her nursing infant against an
apple tree—thus, the end of Eden. (Had settlers dashed
Indians to bits?) We inhabit an anxious oscillation between
burdens of guilt and hopes for redemption.
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Dustan is brought several miles up the Merrimack, under
watch— at last, by only a remnant of the group. As they sleep
she kills and scalps them, children included—again, the end
of Eden. She takes their canoe, paddling frantically by
night, to escape down the very Merrimack the brothers are now
plying, the very Merrimack that will welcome the inflow of
the river that will bring them home by way of that marvelous
tributary that spreads out into gentle marsh land, welcoming
“gulls wheeling overhead” and “ducks by the hundreds,”
halfway to heaven (Thoreau, Week 7).
The Meadow River, or Musketaquid, became “Concord” as
the plantation extended its prerogatives. The legacy might
have been honored and in place. Then, scholars and visitors
would gather Thoreau's spirit in the good village of Meadow
or Grass-ground. Instead, we have Concord Village on the
Concord River, well past paradise, the river having more or
less survived, apparently indifferent to names. The reality
of waters transcends the name, though it takes transcendental
poets to whisper that secret. It is they who word the world,
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in ways that show that words are not all, and are never
finished.
A Thoreau-style transcendence or a paradise regained has
ordinary, diurnal things that appear in ways that lets
immanence stride with transcendence and lets transcendence
anchor in everydayness. Walkers on pilgrimage will be knee
deep in the marsh, as well as swamp lilies that do and do not
transcend it. Poets in skiffs facilitate transcendence of
land-bound restraints. Here, the brothers can assume the
rhythms of water (quite other than the beat of plodding of
feet). For Thoreau-style transcendentalism, there must be
poets with oars, and also with wings, affording rhythms and
looks neither land-bound nor water-bound but of the sky.
Thoreau gives us bounteous things here and now that reach
beyond here and now.
The brothers, erstwhile village schoolteachers, take a
river trip to escape the humdrum shackles of weekly business
and the worst of prose, to row and climb free, to abide in
clouds that give prospects of infinite scope. This graceful
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communion among meadows and fish has its cruel underlay:
John's death, extinct peoples, Hannah Dustan and her scalps.
Transcendence is translation into paradise before our eyes
and inescapable descents into hell. We are bi-focal
creatures. The world is anomalous, heaven, and hell.
Translated by Words
In “Concord River,” we find Thoreau's characteristic eye for
singu- lar evidence bringing us instantaneously elsewhere
(though never out of this world):
Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the
spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the
hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and
now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers straight for
Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling
round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to
reconnoiter you before they leave these parts; gulls wheeling overhead,
muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm
them by that you know of, their labored homes rising here and there
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like haystacks; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along
the sunny, windy shore; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up
on the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders;—
such healthy natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand.
(Week 7)
Such words—such things—beckon continually elsewhere or
beyond, plunging us into the evident wonder, risk, and allure
of what their simplicity holds within: the cranberry is a
skiff fitted out for sailing.
We listen to the affective, mobile, and knowing surface
of Thoreau's words. We take up with the world as immanent-
transcendent: poetically, religiously, and philosophically.
The wind is not just disturbing the waters, it is “keeping
nature fresh”; we are allowed to participate in the world's
renewal, “spray blowing in your face.” The muskrats don't
just paddle, but “swim for dear life.” We hear a life that is
dear, bounteous, and dangerous simultaneously, a shape-
shifting flow, for better and worse.
There are ducks, not just sitting or stuffed or bobbing,
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but “ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw
wind, just ready to rise.” They're ready in their uneasiness
to see something elsewhere, and rise toward it. We also, in
beholding, are “uneasy in the surf” and ready to rise. Words
translate us aloft. The ducks are “now going off with a
clatter and a whistling like riggers straight for Labrador,
flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings.” Any gap
between sailors in rigging and ducks wheeling aloft has been
closed. Any gap between my viewing and ducks is closed, too.
There is a single arcing ascent, a kind of union and loss of
self—an ecstasy. The ascending ducks are “like riggers
straight for Labrador,” and we are high up in the yards of a
sailing ship. This is the place, Melville warns, where
Transcendentalism or Platonism becomes tempting.88 It can be
both bracingly ecstatic and mortally imprudent to go aloft,
to scan, and to dream.
The flock of hundreds might “circle round first, with
all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to
8 Moby Dick, many editions, Ch. 35, “The Mast Head.”
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reconnoiter you before they leave these parts.” Or, having
reconsidered, they settle down again on the waters of the
marsh. Gulls don't just fly, but are “wheeling,” even as the
river and its words wheel on and on, the moving waters
holding the image of moving birds.
Thoreau gives us “countless mice and moles and winged
titmice,” letting a repeated “m” hum us forward in
translatability, and with “mice” next to winged “titmice,” it
is we who acquire wings, as both sounds and species fly by in
passing perception. Our muskrats are “wet and cold, with no
fire to warm them by.” Thoreau adds sotto voce “so far as we
know.” Perhaps, this is an offhand, but serious question:
What do we in fact know of the other, of each other? What
cold or fire lies in their homes? Muskrats swim “for dear
life,” haunted by dangers, real or imagined, hurrying to a
familiar haven, “their labored homes rising here and there
like haystacks.” There is a time for safe harbor.
Cranberries are cranberries, of course, but not only
that as the poet's eye, the translator's eye, finds them
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“tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their
little red skiffs beating about among the alders.” They may
sail through the chop as if in heaven—or be tossed up on the
beach as wrecks. Perhaps, other skiffs are “beating about” on
the way to Labrador, or beating their way up the Merrimack
toward Agiocochook, “Home of the Great Spirit.” These skiffs
journey- ing outward are also skiffs seeking safe harbor by
an alder, and also just cranberries rising and falling,
bobbing, on wavelets on the edge of a watery meadow.
Thoreau finds across the wind-swept marshes, in
travelers here and there, “such healthy natural tumult [as]
proves the last day is not yet at hand.” And why not add,
“Let us therefore cast off the hour of dark- ness and put on
the garments of light.”9
Here, we have religion. These images and words tie us
back into an overflowing, unfinished reality, a Creation,
against the ache of loss. Religio is a re-sewing of torn
ligaments, a repair that reanimates what so easily becomes
9 Romans 13:12, KJV: “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let ustherefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.”
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bare routine and quiet desperation. It aims to suture that
and to staunch inescapable pain. Religion does not tie up a
torn creed or belief. It repairs to let life course through
broken bodies and spirits. Thoreau's writing gives us the
transforming and transformed radiance of things in ongoing
creation. We are transformed as things transform before the
religious poet's attentive eye.
The writing enacts a philosophical, religious, literary-
poetic way of life, walking, seeing, and hearing in
imagination-drenched tactile immersion. We sense a way of
taking up with the world and of being happy to be of it. Yet
seeking life and serenity can miserably fail. Does the
emphasis fall on loss or return, on despair, or exultation?
Reality is difficult and gives us reasons for both.10
Thoreau is startled into life and invites us along. With
Isaiah, he will “go out in joy” where “mountains and hills
will burst into song . . . and all the trees of the field
10 See Cora Diamond on “Difficult Reality,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe,New York: Columbia UP, 2008.
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will clap their hands.”1111 This is miles from Galileo and
Newton, who manage to bury nature in a whirl of colorless
atoms and soundless mechanical parts.
Wheeling gulls and red cranberry skiffs assure Thoreau
(and us) that the end of the world is not quite at hand. “The
end of the world is not yet” appears in Thoreau's Journals
(April 2, 1852), in the context of reflections on poetry:
“The sun climbs to the zenith daily high over all literature
and science . . . the sun of poetry and of each new child
born into the planet has never been . . . brought nearer by a
telescope. So it will be to the end of time. The end of the
world is not yet” (qtd. in Walls 5).12
Poetry encompasses all living knowledge and literature;
it delivers worlds as fresh and new as a newborn child.
Worlds are born again in poetry, Thoreau tells us, just as
11 Isaiah 55:12.12 This Journal entry is quoted in Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humbolt and the Shaping of America, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Walls traces an ill-conceived opposition between literature and science that emerges with twentieth- and twenty-first-century professionalization. Also, see Cora Diamond's “Knowing Tornadoes and Other Things,” New Literary History 22, no.4 (1991); she shows science (the meteorologist's tornadoes) and poetry (a writer's evocation of its lived-presence) as affording compatible modes of perception and knowledge.
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the sun rises each day. This truth cannot be made a whit
stronger by appeal to a telescope (or to Newton, or to a
science of the brain). There is ample time, accordingly, for
receiving the world, articulating it for others, enjoying it
(such as we may). Wallace Stevens declares, “The search for
reality is as momentous as the search for God,” and reality
is as wondrous and terrible as the poets foretell (465).13
Transcendentalism as Transformative Practice
“Transcendentalism” is a term of cataloging convenience, and
if Thoreau is tucked in this drawer, it would be in virtue of
his walking and writing practice, each the inside of the
other.14 He evokes lively meanings from an object of
attention (a cranberry), giving them out to birth and
renewal. Then, he brings them back to inhere in the singular
immanence from which we began—a bounteous particular now seen
13 See Joel Porte's discussion of Thoreau's Faith and its affinities with Wallace Steven's poem featuring Professor Eucalyptus, in Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed, New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.14 Walking affords an openness to the world, taking it in; writing (and its cognate, thinking) are ways of making that intake available to otherswho can, in reading, share that walking.
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better, now better seen. Each movement, out and back, is the
inside of the other. Expressive drawing out is expressive
giving back.
Things are the other side of their meanings. Particulars
that are poetically rendered occupy amphibious, anomalous
zones. In their liveliness, they break through regions,
districts, matrixes, and boundaries. A cranberry, a fruit, is
itself and is also a rigged sailing ship—and a little red
skiff. Amphibious, anomalous zones lie where the truncated
meanings of the prosaic lap over the ever extending, ever
transcending meanings each ordinary thing (or congeries of
things) contains.
Birds high above waters and above grasses create a
vertical axis that extends down to reeds and alewives,
riverbed fish, and pebbled bottoms. Singularities radiate
“surface-up and surface-down” (vertically). Concord River
becomes one of many tributaries, as if any given site (a
river) were a nodal point in a skein of unfolding strands.
Singularities radiate “sideways” (transversally). The
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Musketaquid- Concord belongs with the Euphrates and Nile—
timeless rivers attaining a kind of eternity through backward
identities. Singularities move to and fro and radiate back
and forth temporally, back to the Nile and forward to the
openness ahead (“our last hour is yet” [Thoreau, Week
7]).1515 These “things” in temporal and spatial motion form
and inhabit an anomalous reality, as difficult as it is
wondrous.
Thoreau anchors his unique “transcendentalism” in the
diurnal and immanent, even as these radiate otherness, pasts,
futures, heights, or depths. Affinities radiate among things
of land, river, and sky (alders, shad, or gulls) and each
affords the poet's eye more than a bio- logical or Newtonian
presence. They convey bounteousness and lack, fulfillment and15 Laura Walls contrasts “bottom-up,” Thoreauvian empirical holism with “top-down,” non-Thoreauvian rationalist holism: Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and 19th Century Natural Science, Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995: 60–93. The “whole” in such holism is achieved in various glimpses and portraits from here and now. The idea of a single, timeless map of the world is an illusion. The idea of an unending multiplicity of maps, each aiming for a holistic prospect (and sometimes achieving a partial one apt to its aim), is healthy and necessary. We live in a map-littered reality we inherit and become. There is no cause to despair in the knowledge that a single full map, the mother of all maps, is as chimerical as “the view from nowhere.” Living with multiplicity is just maturity.
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despair, skill and terrible flailing. Muskrats swim for dear
life, cranberries beat upwind, and thunder forbiddingly
roars. And Thoreau gives us also the “not yet” of a world. It
is not caged into its present forms. He is free to anticipate
and find the next morning's joys and delights.
Who are the Poets?
The poet's eye—Thoreau's eyes and words—give us John Brown,
the martyr for abolition, who Thoreau calls the only true
transcendentalist. Brown commits to ideals and follows
through. Perhaps, John Brown had a poet's eye for truths not
yet of the world. A traveler constantly encounters things not
yet of his common world. As a writer and traveler, Thoreau
puts himself in the way of things that his poetic eye and ear
can take in. John Brown and Thoreau, despite their
differences, can each harbor poets within. Furthermore,
poetic reception and rendition are not elitist prerogatives.
Thoreau's neighbors are neither near-saints (or wild
insurrectionists), like John Brown, nor by any ordinary
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standard, poets. Nonetheless, they assume the work of poetry
and of living transcendentally.
You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced and wise men, keeping their
castles, or teaming up their summer's wood, or chopping alone in the
woods; men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and
rain, than a chestnut is of meat, who were out not only in ‘75 and 1812,
but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or
Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never
took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they
might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not
written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and
scratching, and har- rowing, and plowing, and sub soiling, in and in,
and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they
had already written for want of parchment. (A Week 8)
Thoreau had a healthy respect, even love, for men of the
field, and I would not exclude women: think of the alluring
lass on the slopes of Mt. Greylock, with whom he imagines
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spending some days.16 And this reputed curmudgeon could write
on “Friday” of A Week,
I pass along the streets of our village of Concord on the day of our
annual Cattle-Show, when it usually happens that the leaves of the
elms and buttonwoods begin first to strew the ground under the
breath of the October wind, the lively spirits in their sap seem to
mount as high as any plow-boy's let loose that day; This [is an]
autumnal festival, when men are gathered in crowds in the streets as
regularly and by as natural a law as the leaves cluster and rustle by
the wayside. . . . I love these sons of earth, every mother's son of them,
with their great hearty hearts rushing tumultuously in herds from
spectacle to spectacle, as if fearful lest there should not be time
between sun and sun to see them all, and the sun does not wait more
than in hayingtime. (358)
Of Time and the River: Life Lived, Life Dying
16 The role of household women in Thoreau's life, the shock of his losing a marriage bid, and his “domesticity” and “gender blurring” are topics recently under fascinating and overdue discussion. See, for example, Laura Dassow Walls, “Walden as Feminist Manifesto.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 1.1 (1993): 137–44. Reprinted in Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings, 3rd edition, ed. William Rossi. New York: Norton, 2008: 521–27.
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To truly sense things of the moment is to sense their
eternity. On “Friday” of A Week, we are given the good news
that “We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses
can furnish . . . ” “May we not see God?” (382).1717 Through
the senses, past, future, and the eternal saturate things of
the moment. In “Concord River,” after giving us muskrats
swimming for dear life, and noting that “the end of the world
is not quite at hand,” Thoreau writes of the divine, “As
yester- day and the historical ages are past, as the work of
to-day is present, so some flitting perspectives and demi-
experiences of the life that is in nature are in time
veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial,
17 Consider, also, the line (already mentioned) from Ch. 2 in Walden, “God culminates in the present moment.” On Thoreau's view that the sensesare portals to heaven see Mooney, “Wonder and Affliction: Thoreau's Dionysian World,” in Thoreau's Significance for Philosophy, ed. Rick Furtak and Jonathon Ellsbury, New York: Fordham UP, 2011, and Mooney's “Thoreau's Translations,” Lost Intimacy, Ch. 12. For an account of the education of the senses and perception in the never-ending achievements of moral sensibility, see Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Also, see Mooney, “Passionate Speech and the Dark Woodsof a Life,” Listening, A Journal of Religion and Culture, Fall (2011). For an account of how close readings can—and should—bypass post-structuralism, see “‘They practice their trades in different worlds’: Concepts in Post-structuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy,” Toril Moi, New Literary History, Volume 40, Number 4, Autumn 2009, 801–24.
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young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die” (Week
8).
His prelude to A Week ends with a meditation on the
river's amble through time, carrying in her easy gait life
lived and life dying:
I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the
current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the
system, with time, and all that is made; the weeds at the bottom gently
bending down the stream, shaken by the watery wind, still planted where
their seeds had sunk, but ere long to die and go down likewise. (Week 12)
These last words—“ere long to die and go down likewise”—close
out his thoughts on moving forward. But the river in flow,
that would-be emblem of progress, slows to a stop well short
of tragedy. Paradoxically, speaking of inescapable death
occurs in tones that resonate as a ringing affirmation of all
life.
There is death. But Thoreau also takes a vantage
“outside to time, perennial, young, divine.” Flow is
anomalously in “the ephemeral here and now” and also in “the
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lastingly out-of-time.” In the last words of “Concord River,”
Thoreau turns to the singular, the particular, as the portal
to meaning in time. He yields himself up to the river, ready
to be carried downstream and elsewhere, in serene being with
time: “the shining pebbles, not yet anxious to better their
condition, the chips and weeds, and occasional logs and stems
of trees that floated past, fulfilling their fate, were
objects of singular interest to me, and at last I resolved to
launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear
me” (Week 713).
Postlude: The Romance of Literature and Philosophy
What have poets to do with philosophers? What do both have to
do with the sort of personal narrative that we find in A
Week? Perhaps, a poet is in the business of challenging a
hardening of words to firm (and too familiar) anchors. Thus,
we find Thoreau loosens our perception of “Concord River ” by
extending the name back toward “Musketaquid,” or in Cape Cod,
loosens the sands back toward their reign as an arm of New
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France. A shift in name can stretch our sense of time and
place, which can be a poetic, philosophical, and
transformative expansion.
Stanley Cavell links philosophy to autobiography, making
its writing an instance of passionate and poetic speech—not
just a series of lawyer-like arguments, or analyses of social
contracts, for instance.18 The models of philosophy he
inherits straddle literature and autobiography: Rousseau's
Reveries; Thoreau's A Week; Kierkegaard's The Point of View;
Montaigne's Essays. To accept this convergence of literature,
philosophy (and, we should add, religiously redemptive
writing) means setting aside a standing cultural anxiety.
Lacking the hoary age of poetry and religion, the younger
philosophy splits off to establish its separate identity. As
part of this forceful splitting, it bears grudges, quarreling
with its sponsors—those “crude,” “irrational” passions
associated with tragedy, myth, music, and poetic
intoxication.
18 See Mooney, “Passionate Speech” and also (on Cavell), Lost Intimacy, Chs. 6 and 7.
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Perhaps, Thoreau's slant toward moments of “meaning in
life,” not to mention his passion and poetry, put him at the
margins of much dry contemporary philosophy. Yet there are
striking moments that are incontestably philosophical, as
when he characterizes our world (in Kantian terms) as
“answering to our conceptions” (Walden 97). Cavell points
this out and hints further that Thoreau can be seen as giving
us a Kant-like “transcendental deduction” of each word he
writes.19 This is to speak of “transcendence” in a Kantian
way, not as a “transcendental experience” and not as a
reference to a realm of Ideas, Categories, or (in Emerson's
terms) Intuitions. To speak of a Kant-like “transcendental
deduction” of a concept or category is to determine what the
conditions for the application of a concept must be. Cavell
hints that Thoreau's poetic improvisations, fantasies, and
innovations give us, in their utterance, their own basis and
validation, their “transcendental deduction,” word by word.
19 Thoreau, Walden, ed. by J. Lyndon Shanley, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971; Cavell, The Senses of Walden, New York: VikingPress, 1972; also “The Division of Talent,” Critical Inquiry, 11.4 (June 1985): 519–38.
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They carry their conditions of applicability in the risk and
success of their utterance, as they conjure the things that
they utter.
If this is Thoreau, he's aiming at considerably more
than Kant, who attempts to give a transcendental grounding
only to categories like “causality.” Thoreau is aiming at
more than Kant does in grounding “a metaphysics of morals,”
and much more than Kant attempts in grounding reason-giving
in a need of reason. If Thoreau wants a grounding of each
word he writes, it would be a grounding of each thing that
words word—each thing in the flow of his writing, a writing
that is adjunct to, or the other side of, a natural unfolding
of things with their words (each being the inside of the
other, each legitimating the other). Can this be believed?
Thoreau “grounds” Concord River (both the mobile site of
life and the words of A Week) by exposing multiple impacts
and surprises, breakthroughs of meaning. The meanings of
Musketaquid and alder are linked to ever-expanding networks—
alders giving refuge to cranberries, the Meadow River flowing
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down to the maw of the sea. Each thing and word is caught up
in living-and-dying, in what Wittgenstein called the “stream
of life” and its “natural history.”
The grounding of words in train with associated
meanings-of- things is linked testimony, the testimony of the
poet linking things and words to their grounds. This brings
philosophy to autobiography. By establishing his concrete
location (or a semblance of this) in the writing of A Week,
Thoreau shows us where he stands (with regard to his words
and the things he words). This gives his testimony the weight
it has, the best justification we can have. If we are
convinced that this grounding is adequate, that should be all
we need. Thoreau gives weight to the translation of a “mere”
muskrat into a muskrat “swimming for dear life,” who aims for
“the warmth of a fire.” Can I give the poet the precise
weight that he means his words to have? Grounding these words
depends on Thoreau's skills as he stands behind them, and
also on my finding them credible, on my standing with them.
The force of words grasps us and alters who we are and
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our perceptions. The “bottom line” is not a stock, standard-
issue literal attachment of timeless name to unwavering
thing. This is a fantasy of a one-to-one correspondence or
perfect fit. The bottom line is whether and how we buy into
the force of our words and accept our immersions in words and
worlds. It is whether and to what extent we acknowledge their
felt-weight and find it altered and settled down in ongoing
conversational negotiations of their weight. We are
conversational creatures with bottom-line capacities for
communicative mutuality. We talk out our credibility with
each other, talk out our contacts with the world, and with
ourselves (and suffer our lost credibility and contacts,
too). Making sense, feeling our weight, and getting
confidence in the weight of our words, is a shared venture, a
community trust.
The experienced force or weight of words can lead us to
words commonly called “literal,” and others called “figural.”
When our culture (or conversation) gets too obsessed with
“the literal,” perhaps, our weight should shift to honor “the
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figural.”
Of course no word, or string of them, is either literal
or figural “in itself.” Yet Rousseau, in On the Origin of
Language, was surely right that in some sense figurative
meaning precedes the literal, and that our first utterances
are inevitably analogical, or signs of what William Day calls
“a sudden aspectual vision” (212).20 To say that the
figurative is first is to break free from the presumption
that it is an ornament clinging to a more basic literality.
It is to say that anything that presents itself presents
itself under an aspect, and no aspect is in itself literal
(or for that matter, figural). We negotiate, case by case,
how to take the proposed contrast, or whether to grant it at
all.
Being struck by a non-wooden, poetic aspect to things,
and articulating this aspect, can be a notable
20 See William Day, “On Wanting to Say Something: Aspect Blindness and Language,” in William Day and Victor Krebs, Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010, 204–24.
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accomplishment. Words like death, love, attachment,
adventure, and friend can become hardened. Discovering their
poetry is discovering their life (and the life in the world
for which the words are happy adjuncts). More complicated
word-strings, like “the freedom of rivers,” or “an ache for
salvation,” may need release from encasement as well. Reading
in the humanities, reading Thoreau, is a communal,
communicative venture that we trust will end, on good days,
in a release of both words and cognate ranges of experience.
We fight to save language and our perceptions and ourselves
from cold storage.
The literal is not “the natural,” but its loss. We start
as children with a naturally anomalous shifting surround, and
as we grow, the poetic edges and centers of experience retain
that anomalous surround. We begin with an unfolding world
that is just too shifting, and our verbal tracking of it just
too improvisatory, to yield anything like a stable and all-
purpose center.
We begin life exercising prodigious translation and
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decoding abilities. Some of us live on to decipher worlds far
beyond the child's. We happen on a poem of Emily Dickinson,
or a page from Finnegan's Wake, or Thoreau's A Week. We live to
decipher the weight and meaning of words and things that bud
and burgeon in ever-more-intricate, enticing, and terrifying
figurations—and all too often, we fall back into fine phrases
and chatter, not worth hearing, cold, like jokes gone stale.
Of course, the literal and prosaic flourish usefully in
stretches of scientific, bureaucratic, and practical
discourse. They are of immeasurable help in getting on in the
prosaic world. But in a full life neither the prosaic nor the
figural are dispensable.
What about criticism—literary or philosophical? My
writing on “Concord River” will succeed if the words I write
and the associated things worded are “grounded.” This happens
in part holistically. One word-set overlaps others, in a
mutual network of reinforcement and support. Words gain
weight through holistic inter-animations and also gain force
as I stand by each strand (or aspect) of interweaving
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meanings. I stand by things inhabiting something like an
anomalous zone (a cranberry becoming a skiff ). Or perhaps I
don't stand by them, dis- missing them as humor or “mere
metaphor” or “a pretty turn of phrase” (Ha! Cranberries
becoming skiffs!). Words stand or fall as my credibility in
wording them stands or falls—as my (or Thoreau's)
intelligibility stands or falls in writing of muskrats
swimming for dear life toward a hut with no warming fire.
Authority does not rest in any book of rules or congress
of priests. It rests in mutual trust, as I offer an image or
thing as possessed of great import, and you take that
offering in good faith (or not), and you weigh the image,
thing, or word collaboratively with me (and with others) in
extended dialogs tending toward embrace, and acknowledgment
(or disdain and dismissal).
Do we enter different terrain when we think of meshing
words, not with “mere things, objects,” but with things of
importance, that matter, like ideals or aspirations? The
quick answer is “No.” Thoreau's hopes, convictions, and
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despairs ebb and flow in force or weight as we do or do not
find his words credible, say those in praise of John Brown.
He offers John Brown as a martyr, marking his death as a
break through to glory. Unlike Washington or Franklin, Brown
died for something; Franklin and Washington merely “went
missing.”21 The effort of grounding his words of praise,
fixing them to glorious ideals, resembles the exertion in
reading Thoreau's remark that only a few have learned “the
art of walking,” that “Concord River” is perhaps only a
temporary replacement of the name “Musketaquid”—“Concord”
will be withdrawn when we recognize that concord, harmony,
has disappeared. Will we find it credible that Cape Cod's
marriage to New England dissolves a previous marriage to
France? Should we acknowledge that it was once New France?
Knowledge swept by tidal currents is not always
despairingly uncertain. It carries its certitude with the
same flair as my knowledge that crabs belong to the sea and
21 See Mooney, “Thoreau's Translations”.
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to the land, or that my back door threshold belongs to the
inside and to the outside of the house. Aspectual knowledge
can shift, but it is no more at risk in a debilitat- ing
sense than my footing is at risk as I stand amidst the
advance and retreat of the tide. Nothing about being caught
in its anomalous ebb and flow necessarily destabilizes my
footing. Balance is maintained. Knowing that crabs inhabit
land-and-sea increases their intelligibility. Recognizing
lawless zones is a net gain. Stability is negotiated in the
flow of conversation, of reading and writing, of walking
meditations that release poetic imagination. This grounding
of the poetic is not chimerical or “just a brand of
relativism.” It is robustly relational, negotiable, and
improvisational—as when I know I am on terra firma (or not)
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as waves rush at my shins.22
A Romantic Take on Kant's “Thing in Itself”
Kant says we cannot have knowledge of “the thing in itself.”
This makes it an excess or superfluity—or, in a different 22 A group of Concord intellectuals called themselves “transcendental- ists” in tribute to what they knew of Kant's “transcendental philosophy.”But the banner meant many things. When Thoreau calls John Brown a “true transcendentalist,” he means a man who lives high ideals, someone who transcends moral mediocrity. On the other hand, “The Transcendental Club”of Boston saw itself following the spirit of German Philosophy—Kant, but also his Romantic and idealistic successors. Frederick Hedge returned from Germany afire with Kant, Herder, Fichte, Schiller, Kant, Coleridge, and others, who offered, it seemed, a lofty moral philosophy. It stressed, in Kant's phrase, the enlightenment of “mankind's coming into its maturity” or an “exit from its self-incurred immaturity.” This liberation would occur through a critical reason set to undermine illiberal, authoritarian, and clerical abuse. (This essential sense of ‘enlightenment’ is lost on many of its recent critics.) Allied with imagination, reason could provide intuitions (notions not derived directly from worldly experience)—for instance, with Kant, “intuitions” about the role of regulative ideals like Morality and Freedom. Many transcendentalists were Ex-Unitarian Ministers who endorsed the new biblical criticism from Germany: the search for the historical Jesus yielded a fully human moral exem- plar who transcended the moral mediocrity. They endorsed an active, world- shaping mind, energized by the productive imagination, closely linked to Kant's idea of artistic genius. Kant had denied cognitive access to the thing-in-itself. Decoupled from accountability to it, imagination and poetry were set free. See Phillip Gura, American Transcendentalism: a History, New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Thoreau writes, “The boundaries of the actual are nomore fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imagination.” (Journals, Vol. 203). The imagination stretches our apprehension of ‘the actual’, permitting transformation—for ‘the actual’ is not fixed through time and place, but changes, ahead and behind our perceptions of it. And the actual is not immune to our articulations of it. Consider Buber: “Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence.” [I and Thou, 73] In Cavell'smoral perfectionism, imagination clears a path to the less imperfect persons we can be. The boundaries of my actuality are elastic. Persons
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register, a guarantor of finitude in knowing. We know we are
finite because we know there is always something further we
cannot know. (I may know today that hurricane Isabel began
forming five thousand miles south of the equator, but I could
not know that two years ago.) But what if we have access to
the thing in itself through some modality other than
knowledge. After all, knowledge regulated by determinate
concepts (the sort Kant had in mind) is not our sole access
to the world. If I am struck by the wonder of sunset, being
impressed by it is not a matter of knowing it.
This encounter can be strictly observational. There is
something I know (the sun descends to the left of that pine).
But what of an encounter that entrances or strikes or
afflicts me? If I wince at the piercing light, or am
continually transcend their latest version of their worlds and the selvesthey can be: imagination reveals that morally we are never beyond reproach; so we need to imagine an improved self (to make actual). See Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008, and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Thoreau took philosophy to be as unfinished and non-systematic as the self, and thought philosophy should be devoted to the care of the unfinished self. His imagination takes him to Concord's jail; his transfiguring experience travels transcendentally to suffuse the imaginations Gandhi and King, thus remaking the actual world.
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entranced by its wonder, an aspect of sunset arrives in a way
other than having it as an object for observational knowing
only. I am struck by its wondrousness, or take it as a fiery
descent to the underworld, or a reminder that departure is
both invigorating and depressing. Can I get you to see that
it is not just the thing to the left of the pine?
If “the thing in itself” is not superfluous or an
illusion, it reminds us that knowledge is limited (there is
always more to know). And it also reminds us that, behind a
happening, say of the sun going down (which may be only of
meteorological interest), there is also available, as an
aspect of its going down, the sun as a locus of the beauty of
sunset (for example). We might say that beauty resides hidden
but waiting to appear from a reservoir of unanticipated
meanings that we clumsily call “the thing in itself.” The sun
holds meteorological interest, available as knowledge, and
holds endless other aspects, a wide and deepening associative
aspectual field—for example, the sunset can strike us as a
wonder. Any number of aspects are available in ways other
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than observational knowing. Hence, we do not know the thing-
in-itself, but we can be struck, overtaken, or enchanted, by
emanations from it.
A moment of awe (or terror) is not a failure to secure
knowledge of a “thing” in itself. That moment makes me regard
something as presenting an aspect above or beyond what can be
measured or observed by just anyone. A “power to convey awe”
is not a Newtonian aspect of the object now hovering on the
horizon; yet it is an aspect of the self- same sun I had
identified as worthy of observation—now available under a
different aspect. The sun that Newton triangulates is the sun
full of enchantments.
Let's say that Thoreau's writing grounds something like
Kant's “thing-in-itself.” This means that we take a “double
aspect” (rather than a “two object”) view of Kant's notion.
There are not two objects, one in appearance, the other
unknowable and “behind” it. There is one object that holds a
number of aspects, available sequentially or simultaneously.
First is the aspect that affords (let's call it)
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observational knowledge: the sun sets just to the left of the
oak. However, a sun known observationally or meteorologically
is partially eclipsed when the same sun gives me something
else, more, or other. It might lose its aspect of
“thinghood,” appearing as an indistinct blur of orange. Or it
may become a force that sweeps me away in wonder or deflates
my hopes for an unchanging serenity. In any case, the
wondrous or deflationary force, or its capacity to blur, are
aspects that belong as much to the sun as its meteorological
aspects do. A storm's fury, a desert's quiet, a wind's roar
are aspects of storms, deserts, or winds—aspects as real as
their meteorological features.
To give a “transcendental deduction” of “the thing in
itself” can mean to explicate a region of possibility
correlative to an object of observation. Whatever focuses my
meteorological interest can also focus my wonder, dread of
passing, or pure delight. To give an elaboration of being
struck by a sunset's wonder is to offer the conditions for
that occasion, as it were. It is to offer for your
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consideration a “deduction of the thing in itself.” Can I
convince an interlocutor that I am struck by an aspectual
reality just as weighty as the aspectual reality amenable to
meteorological knowing?
In wonder, the mind does not stop at information (of
this or that) but goes further. It will travel beyond our
familiar itch to explain (this or that). Wonder (or
devastation, or delight) are not there to be explained, or to
ground practical interests or instrumental appropriations.
Here is Emily Dickinson:
And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down
—And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing—then— (“280” lines 17-20)
When we “hit a world at every plunge” and find we've
“finished knowing then,” the mind and heart leave off prying
for more data, for explanations, or more knowing. They are
patient with rain or a slant of sun, are stopped here and
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now, not in knowing, or knowing why, but in wonder.
Dickinson finds “a plank in reason break”—she falls and
falls. But having finished knowing, gripped in the fearful
immediacy of an utter absence of “grounds of reason,” or
knowing why, she nevertheless finds worlds remain. Worlds
without justifying grounds, we might say. One can “finish
knowing” and still fall in love, plunge into dread, or slip
into grief or delight. Each “fall” or “plunge” or “slip” can
eventuate in the revelation of things in a world. Each
interruption of her fall, each world-encounter, shows up as a
way of being in the world, a way of being that begins despite
groundlessness, despite the death of knowing.23 She “hit a
world at every plunge / and finished knowing— then—” (lines
19-20).
Thoreau remarks in his essay “Walking” that “The highest23 A philosophy like Thoreau's is upbeat, but not unaware of desolation.He doesn't need to seek an unassailable knowledge because he is not writing to demonstrate certainties, but to brace the soul. His thinking is open toward an intimate, tentative knowledge, knowing as a Biblical, poetic, figural touch with things, and so is not finished when a plank ofreason (“strict knowledge”) breaks. And the sort of ‘grounding’ we can effect (when we do) through conversations with others, ‘trying out’ our intuitions and convictions in a Cavell-like enterprise relying on trust and acknowledgments, occurs at a different moment than the experience of giddy or desperate ‘falling’ as Dickinson’s ‘plank of reason breaks.’
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we can attain to is not Knowledge but Sympathy with
Intelligence” (Essays 172). Perhaps, he means that our
highest, most fulfilling attunement to the world comes when
we are alert for news, for local “Intelligence,” as the world
gives its news under the aspects of love, dread, grief, or
delight, and as that news comes from this alder or that rock,
or comes from the surround given in grand vistas. We have
sympathy with, that is, openness toward, intelligence
secreted our way in pouches others will miss. Only an
attentive sympathy and affinity with such news can deliver us
to sustaining worlds, when knowledge-as-data, or knowledge-
as-explanation, run out (as they must), and new life
begins.24
24 Thoreau does not hold the hyper-Romantic view that scientific (twentieth-century style) knowledge kills poetic evocation, or necessarily leads to an objectified self empty of life. Although our universities in the past fifty years have shifted financial resources away from humanities and toward vocational–professional training and scientific enterprise—threatening the survival of poetry and the humanities—Thoreau (and so many others) attest to the mutuality of the worlds, on the one hand, that science unveils, and on the other, the wonders and poetic celebrations of those worlds. Nevertheless, it's disheartening to see not only the academy but a wide swath of high- and middle-brow culture, and the bureaucratic business social order, tilt thoughtlessly toward the primacy of the scientifically factual and dispassionate theoretical, oblivious to the silencing of the poetic. Poetic and figural speech and writing become marginalia, consigned to theside-street of entertainment or cocktail party polish.
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The retrieval of the poetic, as I envisage it, is not a
nostalgic or sentimental wish for a different, enchanted
time. It embodies a realism of the locally poetic that
resists the ever-encroaching claims to Empire by regimens of
value-deaf science and technology, or cold common sense. It
is resistance, in the academic world, to a dominance of just-
the-facts research, critical unmasking, or varieties of
vanguard theory that leave behind the felt-weight of words
and our experiences with them. The emergence of a
disenchanted world is familiar enough. It is chilling but
also heartening (I think of advances in medical technology).
But accepting the neo-Galilean world as a given does not rule
out an adjunct world of enchantments. My alders can be
thirsty and yearn for spring while I unstintingly know their
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cellular biology. There is no problem loving a lily while
loving its fit in an ecological niche. Thoreau knew both
loves, both ways of seeing, and saw no need to choose one
over the other, but relished their convergence. Knowing the
meteorology of tornadoes does not preclude being awed by
their power. Dickinson has us stopped (in wonder, in
surprise) by a world after knowledge is finished, and Thoreau
has us relish naming fish while longing to become them in
their liquid darting.25
25 In the body of “Concord River” I display the transformative mobile ebb and flow of the river in a way a poetic naturalist might, unaware of Laura Walls' book length studies of Thoreau's lively observation-based and poetic natural science: Seeing New Worlds, and of her recent The Passage to Cosmos. She speaks of a congeries of vital facts implicating awhole—a bottom-up empirical holism, as she dubs it (Cosmos 331). By different routes, and by different lexical schemata, we converge on the same Thoreau—indistinguishably poet- naturalist, naturalist-poet, poet-prophet-seer, and scientist-philosopher.
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Print.
———. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. Chicago: U of
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———. “The Division of Talent.” Critical Inquiry 11.4 (June
1985): 519–38. Print.
———. The Senses of Walden. New York: Viking Press, 1972.
Print.
Cavell, Stanley, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking,
and Cary Wolfe. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York:
Columbia UP, 2008. Print.
Day, William, “Aspect Blindness and Language,” Seeing
Wittgenstein Anew: New Essays on Aspect-Seeing. Ed. William
Day and Victor J. Krebs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 204–
24. Print.
Diamond, Cora. “Knowing Tornadoes and Other Things.” New
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