Chains
of Translation:
On
Being a Pacific Thoreauvian
Laura Dassow Walls
Lafayette College
* * * * *
In memory of my brother
Richard von Dassow (1939-1967)
* * * * *
During the years I've been reading, writing,
and thinking "professionally" about Thoreau, I've kept
a cedar frond tacked over my desk specifically, a frond of western
red cedar, Thuja plicata,
from a vigorous young tree that grows on the corner of the lot
where I grew up in the suburbs of Seattle. I first began reading
Thoreau in the shade of that cedar tree. I renew the frond on
my periodic visits home. By such gestures do we make objects serve
our desire; I'm always surprised how long its intricate, palmate
lace stays green.
Henry David Thoreau crafted a voice and a mode of writing
that make it all but impossible for his readers not to compare
themselves with him. His demand to know where it was that he lived
assumes meaning only to the extent that we ask where it is, then,
that we live and it is just here that I find myself most at odds with him.
I'm even envious, not of when he lived, for the nineteenth century
holds little nostalgia for a woman; nor of how he lived, for he
shames me out of that temptation; but of where he lived. Thoreau
was able to spend his life rooted in place, even through adulthood
living in his family's house (which he helped rebuild and survey),
the "Yellow House" on Main Street in Concord, Massachusetts.
This was unusual even then in mobile America, and it was no accident:
when the young Thoreau went off to Staten Island to tutor William
Emerson's son and enter the literary culture of New York City,
he suffered deeply and the experiment was aborted. Young American
men were supposed to seek their fortune by leaving home; Henry
found his by returning home, never to leave again.
I feel this acutely, because of my own deep sense of personal
displacement. Though born in the territory of Alaska (and reared
on stories of the "good old days" in the mythical Far
North), I grew up on the outskirts of Seattle, a northern Pacific
seaport in America's forgotten "far corner," a region
among the last to be settled and bearing the least part in the
great standard topoi of America. I threw myself into my home place: played alone outdoors,
exploring and homesteading the woods and ravines around our rustic
house, and later I turned myself into a precocious "expert"
in local plant ecology and animal behavior. I tied my identity
as intimately as possible with the nature of the coastal Pacific
Northwest. The impulse lasted until my amateur's love ran into
the cabinets and trays of professional university field biology
a collision which transformed me into an English major, reading
who else? Thoreau. I modeled my nature essays after his, and
in my Master's essay I tried to plumb the phenomenology of the
mysterious interface between Man and Nature.
Of canonical American writers, Thoreau is the most deeply
grounded in particulars of place, yet I never noticed. "Nature"
seemed a universal concept, an abstract form into which one poured
whatever local content was at hand. The exact entities to which
his words referred were blanks on the page into which I wrote
myself, as if knowledge were weightless and transferred without
loss from his century to mine, his coast to mine, his gender to
mine.
Twenty years later, I've gone over to the other side. I'm
obsessed with the weight of knowledge, its specific gravity. Recently
I hiked through old growth forest into the high alpine country
of Washington's Olympic National Park, and overwhelmed my companion
on our return by naming, mile after mile, every plant within view
of the trail. I'd forgotten I had such knowledge, yet here it
all was, unfurling itself before me, the embodied display of my
own pre-Thoreauvian identity. I was disgusted: what a waste to
know so much that is, both in my academic world and in my current
way-station on the eastern rim of Pennsylvania, so utterly without
point. How could I ever have believed knowledge was unbounded,
weightless? It is deeply bound and immensely heavy. Look at the
miles of it that wouldn't fit into the moving van that whisked
us from home on the Pacific to a school in the Midwest to a job
an hour from the Atlantic. This is very hard to communicate casually.
I will never forget introducing myself to an East Coast colleague
who hastened to reassure me, "Oh, I'm not from around here
either! I'm from Connecticut." My colleague can get into
her car after class and be home for tea, without breaking any
speed limits. If a Connecticut Yankee feels displaced in Pennsylvania,
then I may as well be from another planet.
Yet if I'd stayed on that planet, I would never have experienced
the way distance can open awareness. I had been blithely unpacking
Washington from the books into which Thoreau had labored to pack
Massachusetts. It was not until I moved east and saw Thoreau's
country for myself that I recognized my mistake and the work I
had to do: Thoreau hadn't been writing about my place, the cool
gray-green watersilk hills half-sunk into the ocean, pooling among
coastal mountains. Walden Pond turned out to be a beautiful vestpocket
lake, almost alpine in its seeming isolation from the surrounding
landscape, and that pleasing discovery reinforced everything I
had read in Walden. But all the plants and birds and landforms
and streets and houses Thoreau had loved were alien to me, and
I felt viscerally displaced. True, I gained a more accurate sense
of the nature "behind" his words, but in one blow I
lost the subtle substitutions I had, without thinking, been making
between his world and mine. The objects in his world no longer
told my story. Knowing his world alienated me from his words,
from the imaginative universe I had built from them; and worse,
knowing his words had alienated me from my place, literally. To
study them and the complexities gathered in them meant exile from
Seattle. That is the loss marked by my perpetual cedar frond.
Literary study became a way of incorporating a wider loss,
using Thoreau, like my cedar frond, to perform a certain kind
of cultural work. Yi-Fu Tuan distinguishes between environment,
a given reality "to which we respond in automatic and unconscious
ways," and landscape, "an achievement of the mature
mind" which construes or orders reality ("Thought and
Landscape" 100, 93). Thus for Tuan, landscape is a "fusion"
of "disparate perspectives":
...when a person faces the environment
he may see alternately an operational farm, a pleasant scene,
and a type of social order. Should these different sets of clues
amalgamate into a vividly coherent whole in his mind's eye, what
he sees is landscape. But there is no instrument, no stereoscope,
that will enable him to achieve the integration.... (97)
But one instrument that can prompt this
integration is, ironically, distance. Tuan observes that being
rooted in a place is different than cultivating a "sense
of place" truly rooted communities are unlikely to have
museums and societies for the preservation of the past. "The
effort to evoke a sense of place and of the past is often deliberate
and conscious. To the extent that the effort is conscious it is
the mind at work; and the mind if allowed its imperial sway will
annul the past by making it all present knowledge" (Space
and Place
198). Museums collect displaced objects and offer them in redesigned
context, which, if the mind's "imperial sway" succeeds,
offer the illusion of authenticity by annulling the memory of
distance.
This is why objects are so interesting: they can argue
with the mind, interrupt its imperial sway. "Objects anchor
time," Tuan observes (187). Their presence can counter the
mind's parochial presentness, in the same way that confronting
the actual Walden Pond forced me to acknowledge the distance in
space and history between Thoreau's landscape and mine. Thus is
opened a new field of investigation: how is such distance traversed?
Thoreau appeals to us because for all his rootedness he projects
a profound sense of place and moreover, of a place endangered.
His world moves too rapidly to receive our nostalgia, for the
railroad is at his back and the lumberman's axe is never far away.
He himself made his living surveying land, the first step to its
transformation by the imperial sway of the American mind: he knew
himself implicated in the coming of what he called the "evil
days." Environment nature as abstract concept became charged
with the responsibilities of landscape because in our modern life
we are perpetually being distanced from it by loss. My childhood
woods are paved now, the trees cut, the ravines commanded by the
mansions built by Boeing and Microsoft and refugees from the cutting
and paving of California. But I am hardly alone to have loved
a place is, for most of us, to grieve.
Against grief, Thoreau took a stand at Walden Pond, bragging
"as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his
roost, if only to wake my neighbors up" (Walden
title page). What they would wake up to was dawn, not the coming dusk: "Only that day
dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun
is but a morning star" (333). These words, the conclusion
of Walden, are a gesture past grief, as if belief
in apocalypse were to ensure its coming. Both the generic fear
of apocalypse and the individualist gesture of defiance escaping
the evil days by building one's own private Paradise are deeply
build into the myth of America, and this is the kind of universal
story that attracted me in the closing years of the Viet Nam War
and the first Earth Day. Thoreau famously went to Walden to build
his own world, even to his "own sun and moon and stars"
(Walden
130) yet this popular icon masks the second half of Thoreau's
claim, that the world he built was to be not a retreat but a platform.
His metaphors enlarge relentlessly on Walden as a "place
for business," for transactions with the "Celestial
Empire" (20-21) which demanded of him not isolation but
all manner of exchanges. With the axe he borrowed he cut trees
on the land he also borrowed, to frame the cabin he finished with
boards recycled from a railroad worker's shanty, a cabin he sold
off, to be dismantled to patch a barn.
Thoreau's double movement both masks and advertises this
transactional basis in things the poetic curve of his prose moves
out toward abstraction, the weightless words that travel so well
around the globe; and also back into the material objects which
anchor him on borrowed land a mile from Concord, cutting pines
in the spring of 1845 with a borrowed axe. Apocalypse, nostalgia,
and American individualism are powerful but weightless. Thoreau's
approach was to anchor them in a world of heft and swing, and
to find in the very process of anchoring faith in the dawn. The
integration of this double perspective enabled him to fuse his
divided world into a single, coherent landscape.
To ground our own faith in Thoreauvian fashion, we cannot
copy him, but must forge our own mature version of this double
movement. When I started reading Thoreau, how did I read passages
like the following?
It was pleasant to see my whole household
effects out on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's
pack, and my three-legged table, from which I did not remove the
books and pen and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories....
A bird sits on the next bough, life-everlasting grows under the
table, and blackberry vines run round its legs; pine cones, chestnut
burs, and strawberry leaves are strewn about. (113)
I like to imagine I had his "household
effects" standing under Douglas fir and hemlock, with Oregon
grape growing under his table, salal run round its legs, and fir
cones, cedar twigs and madrona leaves strewn about. More likely
I flattened his specifics into "green stuff," reading
for the meaning and confident I was close enough, that the specifics
made no real difference. Yet if this made Thoreau commensurate
with my world, why then was I so taken aback by the novelty of
Massachusetts flora? And excited, too here was a whole new Thoreau
to whom the specifics did matter, and who wasn't at all commensurate
with my world at least not without some serious work. Thoreau's
chain of translation still led from local Massachusetts to global
truth, but not back down to the Olympic Mountains. Since I couldn't
just take over his sense of place, I had to reconstitute it for
myself, step by step, from the ground up.
A first step is to go back to that cedar frond. Thoreau
never saw a western red cedar. They grow on the lowland fringe
of northern North America and require a soft, moist, mild climate.
Given those conditions, cedars are a tough and ambitious tribe,
strong and graceful, growing to tremendous girth and height. Cedar
wood splits easily into boards, and the bark into cloth-like strips;
the Northwest Coast Indians planked their houses with it, wove
the bark into clothing, and carved the soft but durable wood into
totem poles. Unlike most conifers, to take out a cedar you must
take it from the roots. When a gale tops a cedar, the uppermost
branches shoot upward to make a new top. Young cedars are skirted
with graceful skeins of delicate green lace; ancient cedars stand
like blasted candelabra, teeth to the wind. What the cedar marks
is a whole aspect of American nature that Thoreau never experienced,
a West so far west that it faces the far east. The abstract polarity
that inscribed America West and East, Nature and Culture, Wild
and Civil by coming full circle collapses, leaving behind the
unresolved complexity of material beings. The cedar frond over
my desk growing dusty and fragile becomes a metaphor for distance
and a reminder of all in nature that does not bespeak Thoreau,
but it also represents an effort at translation, a way to communicate
his world into mine.
"Objects anchor time." Thoreau in Walden repudiated objects his effort to live simply required
him to jettison the burden of possessions that spoke not to immediate
need but to the past, to tradition, to the clutter of a crowded
middle-class Victorian home. Thoreau discarded one past to create
a new, mythic alternative. His gesture extended to objects of
nature: "I had," he tells us,
three pieces of limestone on my desk,
but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily,
when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw
them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished
house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers
on the grass, unless where man has broken ground. (36)
The breaking of ground thrusts the eternal
present of nature into the history of human enterprise, where
the layering of dust marks the intrusion of time, gathering and
weighing on the present moment. As a mystic, Thoreau discarded
objects even as he sold his Walden cabin for scrap, apparently
without a pang, leaving his more materialistic descendants scrambling
to find its final remains: a fragment of board in a crumbling
barn, a hearth unearthed and preserved in Walden State Park. Next
to the cabin site rises a cairn begun by Bronson Alcott in 1867
a pile of stones where Thoreau's followers honor their hero,
this man who threw his three pieces of limestone out the window,
by piling up the stones they have brought with them, in luggage
or handbag or backpack or pocket, from all over the globe. The
man who repudiated objects is honored by the accumulation of the
simplest and least valued objects of all, stones which anchor
him in our own past, anchor our meditative passage through a plot
of land made sacred by his presence, anchor public memory in physical
reality.
The less public image is the Thoreau who stuffed his attic
room in the Yellow House with collections of rocks, arrowheads,
plants, birds' nests, birds' eggs, and whatever curious objects
caught his eye. His serious collecting began after he left Walden
Pond behind, as if the gap opened by leaving his home in nature
could be filled by bringing nature home. It couldn't, of course
his collection marked not his belonging in nature but his distance
from it, even as he could write Walden
only after leaving Walden. Yet even after reassembling nature
under the imaginative grasp of Walden, his collection was still incomplete, he still found work to do. Collecting
and reassembling can become a way of cultivating a sense of place,
a continual reassessment of the material elements that compose
a landscape. Perhaps he found the collection's persistent incompleteness
comforting, in that its gaps assured him there was still, in effect,
more day to dawn, more in nature than even the most totalizing
mind could grasp. Museums are said to create the illusion that
the world's totality can be has been comprehended by the mind,
even as the souvenir brings the far place and the distant past
into the imperial here and now. Paradoxically, museums and souvenirs
can also perform the opposite insight, marking the incompleteness
of the mind's comprehension by displaying the gaps, and deflating
the imperial here and now by evidencing distance.
Objects can resist oblivion they can hold open the gap
between here and there, the gap that myth would close. Thoreau
dreamed of the American West, whereas 130 years later my own path
was East, backwards. Could Thoreau's mythic evocation of the Pilgrim
fathers on Plymouth Rock connect me to my past? When I make the
effort I run up against family stories of pioneer mothers, German
immigrant fathers and the dryland odors and sounds of failed homesteads
in Eastern Washington. Only to the Easterner is the American West
mythic; the Westerner coming East is forced to question the East's
myth of itself.
Myth dissolves contradiction, smooths over gaps and heals
breaks with narratives of wholeness. The most significant part
of my cedar frond is the raw end where I broke it off the branch,
detaching it to make it portable. That broken stem marks the instant
when I created it as an object, for there are no objects in nature.
The twig flows into the branch, branch into trunk, trunk into
roots, roots into soil, soil into more roots, into house foundations
and roadbeds and streambottoms, a forest, a coastal ecosystem,
an urban megalopolis that skips from Vancouver B.C. all the way
to San Diego where will I break the twig? Why this cedar, and
not that hemlock? The series of choices I made, quite unconsciously,
dramatized my identity to myself, including the drama of disconnection,
departing. Yet the act of breaking connects, and the point of
breakage recalls me to that moment, is that memory materialized.
The stasis of the object I made marks time even while the living
tree, 3,000 miles away, sets its cones, drops them, adds a new
layer of growth and discards the old.
People drag all kinds of things home from the woods, the
mountains, the deserts, the beaches. The conventional wisdom about
this is effectively expressed by Thoreau's friend Emerson in the
poem "Each and All":
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild
uproar. (Poems
5)
The beauty of the whole fools us into
thinking the parts beautiful too, but beauty lies in wholeness. No object no natural object, at least can, therefore, be
truly beautiful. The logic is even more interesting when Emerson
humanizes it:
The lover watched his graceful maid,
As 'mid the virgin train she strayed,
Nor knew her beauty's best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the
cage;
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
The nomination of objects is the poet's
pathway to the "perfect whole," but only objects ensconced
in their natural contexts. The shell, or the woman, is either
whole and beautiful in context, or, ripped out of context, noisome
and deflated, "down to earth" in the worst sense. It
doesn't occur to the poem that a shell fetched home has not been
removed from context, but moved from one constructed context (where
the poet strolling on the beach stoops to pick it up, admire and
pocket it) to another constructed context (where the shell resting
on the poet's mantle signifies his past act, perhaps his futile
desire to possess nature, or his ironic desire to pretend to possess
nature, or his successful desire to possess a memory). The poet
assumes that there are contexts, and then there are objects which
can be removed from contexts to float in free space, as if they
no longer cast a shadow. It's when this assumption is gendered
and humanized that it betrays its weakness. Poor Lydian. What
did she think of her husband's poem?
Something rather different happens in a passage from Thoreau's
Cape Cod, an entire book about beaches and things
on beaches, about the specific weight of objects and absences
and the way certain objects delimit absence. Charity houses, for
instance, put up to shelter victims of shipwreck, prove on inspection
to be both nailed shut and utterly bereft of comfort: "Turning
our backs on the outward world, we thus looked through the knot-hole
into the humane house, into the very bowels of mercy; and for
bread we found a stone.... we thought how cold is charity! how
inhumane humanity! This, then, is what charity hides!" (60).
Words betray objects, objects give the lie to words.
One of Thoreau's most disturbing passages meditates at
length on objectivity, deception, and betrayal: "Objects
on the beach, whether men or inanimate things, look not only exceedingly
grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they actually
are." Bold and rugged cliffs, he reports, "proved to
be low heaps of rags," lost cargo from a shipwreck. Shipwreck
casts up another kind of cargo, too. "Once also it was my
business to go in search of the relics of a human body, mangled
by sharks, which had just been cast up, a week after a wreck,
having got the direction from a light-house...." On July
19, 1850, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, her husband, and her infant
son were shipwrecked off Fire Island, New York. Emerson dispatched
Thoreau to find their bodies and Margaret's manuscripts. Thoreau
spent days combing the beach without success, but, as he wrote
to his acquaintance Charles Sumner, he did find an unidentifiable
body that was, perhaps, the remains of Sumner's missing brother.
In the calm retrospective prose of Cape Cod, Thoreau's account continues:
I expected that I must look very narrowly
to find so small an object, but... the relics were as conspicuous
as if they lay in state on that sandy plain, or a generation had
labored to pile up their cairn there. Close at hand they were
simply some bones with a little flesh adhering to them, in fact,
only a slight inequality in the sweep of the shore. There was
nothing at all remarkable about them, and they were singularly
inoffensive both to the senses and the imagination. But as I stood
there they grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the
beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them,
and I was impressed as if there was an understanding between them
and the ocean which necessarily left me out, with my snivelling
sympathies. That dead body had taken possession of the shore,
and reigned over it as no living one could, in the name of a certain
majesty which belonged to it. (84-85)
To discuss the deceptive appearance of
objects, "whether men or inanimate things," Thoreau
chooses a man who is also a thing, leading to the queasy recognition
of the body's ambivalent status. In this context, the mundane
observation becomes quite shocking, perhaps the more so the harder
Thoreau labors to make it sound like "nothing at all remarkable,"
entirely "inoffensive." The beach is the classic figure
for the interface of decent, domestic humanity and the desperate,
annihilating sea, domesticity's ultimate wilderness. This narrow
middle zone is a terrible equalizer of objects. Upon its shelf,
Thoreau reminds us, lie "The carcasses of men and beasts
together... rotting and bleaching in the sun and waves, and each
tide turns them in their beds, and tucks fresh sand under them"
(147). The sea is Mother Nature, our loving neighborhood butcher,
tucking all her children in for the night. Yet what can we trust
in this inhumanly innocent realm, where perception is distorted
and common conception refuted? Is this zone where the waves beat
bodies into objects the epicenter of our world, or the outermost
margin where truths and bodies alike are turned inside out?
Thoreau's steely insistence on rendering this, even this,
environment into landscape shapes it into the only truth that
the human mind can accept: distortion is the truth after all.
This small object really is grotesquely huge, this "simple"
object overwhelms in complexity, this "slight inequality
in the sweep of the shore" is an outrageous inequality, the
unremarkable is remarked upon at length, the inoffensiveness is
profoundly, metaphysically offensive. The human body which, in
a cosmic parody of shell-collecting, Thoreau is sent to gather
and bring home is broken out of all proper context. But to Thoreau
the dawning understanding is that it is, after all, in context,
part of that very perfect whole. In fact, the bones are such a
natural part of that whole that they unite in a secret sympathy,
a mutual understanding which drives Thoreau, the living man "with
my snivelling sympathies," altogether out. His tone is a
little injured: "Whose side are you on?," he seems to
ask. It turns out that he, not the body, is dispossessed, as if
to be alive and conscious is to be dis-placed. Above all, it is
the specific weight of the body, its presence as nothing but a
body, that becomes unbearable. Its presence is a monument to absence.
Or to be more precise, Thoreau uses its presence to erect
a monument to absence in a complex feat of ideological work, even
as the stone cairn piled up by generations of pilgrims marks the
absence of Thoreau from Walden Pond. What was the absence in Thoreau's
life that called him to such prose? Not nature, not this time.
There was, not Charles's brother, but his own brother John, who
had contracted lockjaw and died in Henry's arms eight years before.
Thereafter Henry developed a case of sympathetic lockjaw, a tyranny
of mind over body which terrified his family. His biographers
find this moment crucial. Thoreau's every literary effort offered
tribute to his lost brother, whom everyone had agreed was the
brilliant one, the charming one, the promising one. It was, in
a terrible irony, John's death that had freed Henry.
A cairn of books to honor his brother not to speak of
the cairn of books which pile over Thoreau's name in every scholarly
library, all of which attest to the complex ideological work that
has kept Henry Thoreau culturally alive. The pond itself is taken
to be an anchor in time, weighing down an aspect of the past that
we don't want to lose. A long political battle has been fought
to keep Walden Pond in the nineteenth century or rather, to recreate
it in the image of Thoreau's myth, "forever wild" as
the slogan goes, against the rising tide of twentieth-century
commercial usage in which Walden Pond the middle-class shrine
is also Walden Park, the popular Boston working-class bathing
beach, and (so to speak) Walden Estates, the site of an exclusive
upper-class neighborhood. Which whole is the real whole, which
context the right one? The pond has become like Emerson's seashell,
carried along with him after the beach has long since vanished
under beach houses and fishing piers. With the "natural"
and "authentic" context gone, would Emerson construct
a simulacrum? Or amalgamate the many layers and perspectives into
a coherent whole that somehow acknowledges them all? If every
object shows a visible break, and if the break is the true point
of attachment to the original cognitive act of objectification,
then the difficulty lies not in masking or suppressing the break
but in cherishing the object because it is broken, because of the history
bespoken by the break. Thoreau knew he lived in a damaged world
and he came to value it anyway he surrendered the dream of a
perfect whole to focus on the broken, on the regeneration that
sprang from the disruption, even the destruction, wrought in his
time by railroads, axes, fire and in the case of John Brown violence.
The broken and mangled body abandoned on the wide beach finally
is given grandeur and dignity by a voice that sees the broken
as not a violation of the whole, but the hidden attachment to
wholeness made visible, a glimpse of the underside of the pattern
in the carpet.
Because of Thoreau, Walden now has a tri-valent meaning:
the word can designate the living pond, marker of our distance
from and attachment to the past; it can also designate his classic
book, or the concept the book encapsulates. The book itself is
another object not the canonical volume handled by pedants and
students, armored with footnotes and annotations and generations
of monographs but the original vestpocket volume of 1854, simplicity
itself, shocking in its lack of pretence or expectation. To behold
it is to see the ground fall away from under one's scholarly feet.
Once again, the object marks the gap between 1854 and now, the
gap filled and masked by scholarly editions. Held in the hand,
Walden
becomes just a book again, the summer's latest reading: what has
that promising young friend of Emerson got to say now? I see that
book he's been working on finally came out!
Walden as a first edition is expensive $2,500,
according to our librarian but Walden as a concept is cheap,
portable as glacial lakes and first editions are not. The concept
build your own world, be the only man in nature can be obtained
without the expense of visiting the pond or even of reading the
book, though a proper Thoreauvian will protest that a concept
gained so very cheaply loses most of its meaning; one has expended
no life to earn it. What it loses is gravity, the weight of experience.
To take up the chain of translation only at this farthest link
is to experience nothing: the claim that ideas are universal turns
out to be as hollow and empty as Thoreau's humane houses, their
barrenness sheltering no one. Thoreau, we like to say, "grounded"
his ideas, he was "down to earth." I'd like to say that
he loaded his writing with the real by constructing an unusually
long chain of translation, from world-heavy Walden Woods at one
end to free-floating concept at the other. His readers can pick
up the chain at any point and follow it in either direction in
fact, Thoreau insists that we do so, that in no other way will
we truly understand the concept. He consciously construed his
conceptual world through particulars, but more, his fascination
with perception led him to explore the way different perspectives
made visible different sets of particulars, even in the same environment.
When he "traveled a good deal in Concord," he traveled
variously as antiquarian, classicist, social historian, businessman,
folklorist, civil engineer, school teacher, poet, naturalist,
scientist, philosopher, mystic. The various perspectives were,
in his conscious ordering mind, amalgamated into a "landscape"
in Yi-Fu Tuan's sense; out of that mental landscape, scholars
of various disciplines have precipitated various Thoreaus a historian,
a poet, a social critic, a naturalist.... This unravels various
aspects of a single coherence, following a complex chain of translation
a braiding of chains back into just that set of particulars
of interest to this or that discipline. But how can we respond
fully to the inclusiveness of his vision? It's easier to pick
up the chain midway and follow it out to the common and familiar
realm of universals, those large and mobile concepts like "individualism"
and "nature." But moving backwards into the realm of
particulars, the objects that Thoreau lifted from the whole, handled,
reassembled, manipulated, is difficult because it requires us
to re-engage the very problems discourse was invented to overleap,
problems which theories of discourse barely discern. In theory,
the mind of words faces a world of things, and only phenomena
exist at that interface, which is permeable in neither direction.
Like Ahab, try as we will, we cannot strike through the mask to
seize the reality beyond. We gather next to Thoreau on the beach,
staring into the shifting and unnameable ocean. He who ventures
across that barrier is sure to be cast back onto the beach, a
mangled relic of himself.
To venture beyond we need to trade the narrow beach for
the wide forest, where the chain of reference isn't submerged
or repressed but spread out in the open air, right on the grass
like Thoreau's furniture. In this metaphor, reference doesn't
face an uncrossable gulf, but grows from the middle toward the
ends. To begin, one dips into the unbroken flow and dips up an
object, something to take along in one's journey, both breaking
off and marking the break. "Reference" then is not what
one points to, the external validation of an internal reality,
but "that which remains constant through a series of transformations"
(Latour 170). In this tag-team relay of reference, "a word
replaces a thing while conserving a trait that defines it"
(174), aligning each stage so that from the very last, one may
always retrace one's steps to the first. The first act of taking
up begins the sequence of translation from object to sign. The
cedar frond in my hand is now an object; as I transfer it to the
plastic bag that protects it, the object becomes precious; unpacked
3,000 miles away it becomes a sign of distance; tacked over my
desk, it becomes a metonym for the specific place I desire but
lack, and soon a metaphor for desire itself, herein translated
into graphite scrawls on paper, next into electronic pulses on
a screen, which printed out can be transported across the Atlantic
and distributed, now halfway around the world from the tree which
still thrives, in magnificent indifference to me. As Bruno Latour
says of the objects brought back from the Amazon forest by field
biologists,
We never detect the rupture between things
and signs, and we never find ourselves faced with the imposition
of arbitrary and discrete signs upon shapeless and continuous
matter. We only see an unbroken series of well-nested elements,
each of which plays the role of sign for the previous and of thing
for the succeeding. (169)
Each step conserves some trait, which
through the sequence of alignments is amplified, gaining in legibility,
compatibility, and mobility even as it steadily loses in locality,
materiality, and particularity. The gulf between the wild sea
and the cultivated shore is crossed by connecting the minutest
of links into a delicate chain that binds us to the world, fills
the world with invisible chains.
Yi-Fu Tuan values landscape because it encourages us to
dream while anchoring our attention with components we can see
and touch ("Thought and Landscape" 100). Similarly,
Thoreau's chains of translation from the weight of sensual immediacy
to the weightlessness of ideas keep every step in view, not only
giving his prose its peculiar density and sensitivity to place
but also showing how the mind can glimpse transcendence in the
commonplace, not by abandoning the material world like a castoff
shell but by valuing precisely the stories only materiality can
speak. Objects are used to embody and bespeak complex cultural
stories. The story I have embodied in my cedar frond is one of
discontinuity, difference, homelessness and exile, a story which
emerged in a complex symbiosis with Thoreau's works and with my
own quest to follow the trail of his words back into his world.
My story no doubt betrays my own ideological working habits, including
a wish to use knowledge to puncture (or, more generously, to elucidate)
myth. When Thoreau writes of playing tag with a loon, I can triangulate
on that loon as if it were a star which shone on him and shines
on me, collapsing the distance between us the same way Walt Whitman,
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in 1856, triangulated from
sun, river, and seagulls "oscillating their bodies"
to greet us today "face to face." Because I too know
the deep-diving common loon, its maniacal laugh and its eerie
howl, I can imagine Thoreau and I share a world: I trace his words
back to an object in my own nature, no doubt a reason this passage
stays with me as many others have not. I can, with his help and
the help of a loon on a long-ago Alaskan lake, relive this myth.
But tracing his words back to breaks in our object-worlds helps
me dissolve his myth back into the confusion of history, whereby
even a suburban, female, twentieth-century Pacific Thoreauvian
is linked, through the "transformed, aligned, constructed
world" of Thoreau (Latour 186), to America, literature, nature,
the past.
Thoreau offers the reader a process of self-definition
through matter as memory a matrix of memory that locates the
individual in the context of the whole, not by swallowing others
in the mind's imperial sway or being swallowed into the good of
the whole, but by making visible and even tangible some part of
the myriad and ever-changing associations that ravel up identity,
doing and undoing at once. I broke off a bit of cedar to tell
myself not where I am not, but exactly where and who I am. It's
an answer to the question Thoreau was driven to by immersion in
his own wilderness, the barren heights of Mt. Ktaadn: "the
solid
earth! the actual
world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?" (Maine Woods 646). By catching hold of the middle,
the world of objects which anchor us in place and time, Thoreau
found not just an answer but a way back from dissonance to Concord:
Take up the world where you are. Where you are broken, there is
your point of contact.
***
Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904.
Latour, Bruno. "The 'Pédofil'
of Boa Vista: A Photo-Philosophical Montage." Trans. Bart
Simon and Katia Verresen. Common Knowledge 4.1 (Spring 1995): 144-87.
Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.
----. The Maine Woods. New York: Library of America, 1985.
589-845.
----. Walden. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1973.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective
of Experience.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1977.
----. "Thought and Landscape: The
Eye and the Mind's Eye." The Interpretation of Ordinary
Landscapes. Ed. D. W. Meinig. New York: Oxford UP,
1979. 89-102.
