Carl Remick wrote: ``More attention should be paid to New England-style everything, in my humble, regionally chauvinistic (being a Massachusetts native) opinion ;-) I just watched a C-span discussion on Emerson and Thoreau (part of a new series on American authors) and was struck again by how fresh, vigorous and accessible their thinking was and is...''
``I think it's difficult to say whether Emerson was about anything in particular. As Marc's Nabokov says, in effect, it's not what you say but how you say it. `Trust thyself -- every heart vibrates to that iron string' doesn't mean anything except in a vague poetical sense, but people like to hear it. He might as well have said Trust the Force and gotten in a very successful movie.
Thoreau, on the other hand, was a serious person, an earnest moralizer who went to jail in opposition to imperialism and slavery. That's not isolation, although it may be icy and weird. I don't recall if Emerson ever answered his famous question on that occasion.'' Gordon Fitch
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They all have their place, even Emerson. He was pretty good at taking a thought a part in development and then putting it back together, even if his taste in which thoughts to examined, sucked. So Nabokov wins the structure argument, sort of, on that count. And there is something inspiring about Thoreau, more by example than in the way he actually wrote, which is rather wooden (ha, ha). I liked his On the Merrimack and Maine Woods more than Walden. But these guys certainly failed to match the sheer narrative scale of Melville. Just reading Melville will open your mind with its fantastic sweep, which is a little like what happens when you read Tolstoy.
What makes Thoreau and Melville important to me, is the centrality of nature in their work. But this core which is also what invigorates Transcendentalism is still alive and well in the whole ecology movement, the numerous national and international groups and their litanies of protest against corporate globalization and US hegemony---the erasure of local cultures and communities, the senseless development and exploitation of every resource, the burning of forests for live stock grazing, the industrialization of the ocean's fisheries, and so on and so forth. The long list of reactions to those atrocities has little to do with American individualism, and yet it shares an affinity with what moved Thoreau to go canoeing up the Merrimack, or Melville to write on whaling, or even Emerson to bore us all with his anal moralizing. It is just a matter of reading them with a certain sympathy and critique, held in a sensible balance.
It is especially interesting to read the 19c Americans in relation to the 19c Russians. There are passages from Turgenev in the Sportsman Sketchbook that sound almost as if Mark Twain wrote them. One passage in particular, which I can't locate at the moment takes place when T is out hiking with a hunting bag of several birds, his catch of the day, and he comes over a small rise in the late afternoon and sees some pleasant boys, walking home after working in the fields---it is as Twain had seen a real Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer walking bare foot on a dirt road in the South. The parallel is pretty stunning.
It makes a kind of narrative sense that Hemingway would like Turgenev, that the Russians liked Twain, and that I see, or sense, or think I do, a common thread in the importance or transcendental meaning of a particular landscape to a particular people---and even a kind of urbane reminiscence for that which was lost to Twain and Turgenev.
You can trace the weave of those themes in Hoelderlin's Abendphantasie:
Before his cottage seated the ploughman rests
Contented, while the smoke of his stove ascends.
The wanderer passing through a peaceful
Village by evening chimes is welcomed.
Now also to their harbour the boatman turn.
In distant towns the market's gay blustering
Subsides; the silent garden bower
Glistens with food as the friends assemble.
But what of me? and whither? For mortals live
By work and wages; shared between toil and rest
Their days are joyful; why in my heart
Only, then, cannot the thorn's twist slacken?
....
And further back into the tapestries and paintings of the Italians, say Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Good Government in the Country (1338-40, Siena), all the way back into the depths of the Roman pastoral and Ovid. I mean it gets to be pretty damned close to a universal wish and regret by then. But what's two thousand years, when you can take it another thousand to Tutankhamen hunting antelope with his dogs (1340 bce), or yet another thousand beyond that, to Ti Watching the Hippopotamus Hunt (2400 bce).
And these are just in the West. There are similar traces in the Chinese and Japanese scroll paintings of hermits, poets, wandering priests, tiny isolated figures, set against the vast backdrop of mountains and woods, scenes from rural village life, animal stories of rabbits, frogs, and monkeys dressed up as peasant farmers, scenes of hunting and fishing that all seem to combined this same sense of a witness to a simpler, better life, but as if seen by those who are not part of its inner harmony---exiled from it, by the twists of Hoelderlin's thorn.
Just to put in a plug for my own favorite landscape, I went cycling this afternoon, after the heat had baked the hills. Coming back up the grade through the turns into the oak lined gullies, I could smell the scent of the grasses, aromatic bay trees, and rosemary made pungent by the dampness near the creeks in the shade. It was a fabulously hot, spring day. Looking back across the rolling hills and the reservoirs, the sun had dropped low to stretch out the shadows over the landscape, giving everything a golden glow, like the threads of some old renaissance tapestry.
But then there is this:
``Transcendentalism was immanent nationalism, at a time when national capitalism was still, as Marx would put it, objectively revolutionary -- but no less problematic for that.'' -- Dennis Redmond
This is crudely accurate but needs development (which I realize you supply elsewhere), in the sense that the romantic entrall of the sublime blurs the boundaries between identification with a landscape, a people, and the State. Certainly the State in its propagandistic best wants to subsume whatever it can unto itself, and ensnare those sentiments in a tight embrace whenever they arise. The Americans, the Germans, the French, the Russians, even the Sienese and Florintines, or the Romans, and the Egyptians were all involved in closely related cultural processes of mystifying the State apparatus and making it into a mythological entity, animated by similarly derived and evoked collective passions. And their arts were often devoted to transforming these into material, tangible symbols, all those accouterments of State power: the seal, the coat of arms, the cartouche.
I think what makes Hegel so interesting to me, is that suddenly, the whole cultural process that I am referring, the formative myth of State, was made completely transparent by the events of the French Revolution. Hegel with no other intellectual reference or analytical tradition to guide him, simply invented world spirit as the name for what he saw and felt happening.
Practically all the examples I cited above have some component of something like an immanent nationalism.
And it is for sure that capital is almost entirely devoted to the manufacture and manipulating of these sentiments and their identifications with an equally mythological pantheon of lesser gods, all those daemonic spirits or so-called products who animate logo land---don't let them get wet, and don't feed them after midnight. Obviously the entirety of the consumer media world depends on these same imaginary and symbolic realms for its very life---what Derrida derided as the mythopoetics of being.
Yet we have to live within our mythopoetic world, our cultural envelop, since we have no other and so, there are distinction to be made, and these become key in a forever war. In other words I want to let Thoreau off the hook here, as well Turgenev and Twain, Tolstoy and Melville, Hegel and Hoelderlin and most of the rest of them.
But enough for tonight
Chuck Grimes