The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Discuss

  • Earth-Glass Half Empty or Fuller?: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

    “Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it,” says Buckminster Fuller, explaining the title of his 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in the chapter titled “Spaceship Earth.”

    The whole idea is a metaphor, comparing the planet to a machine. Is Earth a machine? What are the implications of our thinking of the planet as a machine? If it’s a spaceship, who’s in control? Who’s the captain? Where is the crew, and what are their jobs, or roles? Where are we going?

    We may think of an operating manual as not quite the same thing as an instruction manual, yet Fuller continues, “I think it’s very significant that there is no instruction book for successfully operating our ship.” So the manual, whatever we call it, should provide both physical and mental information for the user to successfully work the machine. In Fuller’s terms, this includes physical and metaphysical work, for “In view of the infinite attention to all other details displayed by our ship, it must be taken as deliberate and purposeful that an instruction book was omitted.” Omitted by whom?

    “We are forced,” Fuller says, “because of a lack of an instruction book, to use our intellect, which is our supreme faculty, to devise scientific experimental procedures and to interpret effectively the significance of the experimental findings. Thus, because the instruction manual was missing we are learning how we safely can anticipate the consequences of an increasing number of alternative ways of extending our satisfactory survival and growth – both physical and metaphysical.”

    Seeing Earth as a machine provides metaphorical instruction (seeing Fuller’s title as a metaphor provides rhetorical instruction). If we think of Earth as a machine, we justify certain uses of it, and these justifications explain our behavior. Our current thinking of machines includes the idea that they break down, or wear down (entropy). Property insurance contracts include the terms “depreciation” and “actual cash value.” The actual cash value of an old machine is its value new minus its depreciated value from wear and tear, damage, and obsolescence. Using this formula of valuation, what’s the current value of Earth? What would it cost to replace it (replacement cost)?

    Thinking of Earth as a spaceship reorients our position. We need not think of going into space, outer space; we are already in outer space. We are already out in space. Are we lost in space? And are we running out of fuel? Are we beginning to feel entropic effects? Should we start shopping around for a new planet? A new spaceship?

    But Fuller argues that “the physical constituent of wealth-energy cannot decrease and that the metaphysical constituent-know-how can only increase. This is to say that every time we use our wealth it increases. This is to say that, countering entropy, wealth can only increase. Whereas entropy is increasing disorder evoked by dispersion of energy, wealth locally is increased order – that is to say, the increasingly orderly concentration of physical power in our ever-expanding locally explored and comprehended universe by the metaphysical capability of man, as informed by repeated experiences from which he happens in an unscheduled manner to progressively distill the ever-increasing inventory of omniinterrelated and omni-interaccommodative generalized principles found to be operative in all the special-case experiences. Irreversible wealth is the so far attained effective magnitude of our physically organized ordering of the use of those generalized principles.”

    Fuller is the eternal optimist, literally. His glass is more than half full; it’s continually running over. “Wealth is anti-entropy at a most exquisite degree of concentration,” Fuller says, but one must get his brain/mind dichotomy to be persuaded by the argument: “Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical. Wealth is the product of the progressive mastery of matter by mind, and is specifically accountable in forward man-days of established metabolic regeneration advantages spelt out in hours of life for specific numbers of individuals released from formerly prescribed entropy preoccupying tasks for their respectively individual yet inherently co-operative elective investment in further anti-entropic effectiveness.”

    Systems check: Mind? Functioning near full capacity. Brain? Showing some signs of wear and tear. Coffee? Need a refill.

    Update: This post selected at Berfrois for Earth Day!

    Related:

  • Sentence Fragment Run-on

    Go. A sentence fragment. Having one must avoid. All the handbooks say. Danger. Caution. Draw ire. Pounce on error. Incomplete though. I think I thought I was running on. Stop.

    Go. Thinking of writing post on sentence fragments, how they irk writer reader argument. Murky sirens fill air writing tinnitis. Word wringing. All writing no end to it antecedent. Stop.

    Go frag for short. Correction reading for proof of fragments. A post of sentence fragments, a can of worms, the kind that spring in one’s face when one lifts lid. One who? You, Boing! Laughter. Practical joke fragments not funny not at all good writing. Nothing. Go on about nothing? Stop.

    Go. Fizzles. Beckett. Master of sentence fragment, incomplete thought, dead end. Dead end. Deaden. Dud. Duds. Fizzling fragments. Not to mention run-ons. Do not. Stop.

    Go. Mention them the run-ons go on get in line in front of the fragment and talk spend some time talking run-on go on run-on running on, wait, the comma splice just one kind of run-on remember fragments connecting commas the runaway the runaway the runaway reader the reader who ran out of the text through the margin and fell off the page. Stop.

    Go comma splices stop in tracks fragment tool linearly linear. Early line. Line ear. Listen. To the fragments. Words falling, failing. Green to red. Color of hope to color of despair. Save. Transition. Stop.

    Go. Mark it up here mark it up there: frag there, R-O here. Stop.

    Go. Exceptions. For fragments or run-ons. Poetic license. Incomplete though. “The great head where he toils is all mockery, he is forth again, he’ll be back again” (Beckett, “fizzle 1”). Stop.

  • Economy of Emergent Stuff

    Last week, over on SE Stark Street, a pothole the size of Devil’s Punchbowl emerged in the eastbound lane. Someone had erected a barricade that barely covered the problem. I told Susan a local state of emergency should be declared – call out the Guard. I might even be willing to get back into uniform and man the compressor truck, my old specialty. She scoffed at these ideas, yet several dangerous days passed before a detail was finally dispatched, during Friday rush hour, of course, to fill the gaping pore. I drove slowly through the detour, obeying the bright orange pylons, saw the road crew assembled like a team of dentists, one in the hole up to his neck, picking in the horrible cavity.

    Portland was once the City of Bridges. Now it’s the City of Roses. Soon it will be the City of Signs. We see new signs popping up everywhere, like teenage acne on the urban landscape. One new sign currently multiplying rapidly is affixed below stop signs, and reads: “Traffic to the right does not stop.” What did we do before these signs were deemed necessary? There are signs, seemingly randomly distributed, posting a phone number to call to report rampant potholes. I did not see one, though, near the Stark Street Devil’s Punchbowl crisis of last week. James Joyce once challenged his contemporaries to walk across Dublin without passing a pub (though I think he considered the impossibility a good thing). Our challenge locally is to drive cross-town without encountering a roadblock. Yet the roads don’t improve. One new sign I’ve noticed, at the end of our block, reads, at the entrance to what we used to call an alley, “Caution: Unimproved Roadway.” The roadway is obviously unimproved, and the sign does nothing to improve that. In any case, are there any roadways in Portland that are improved? If we don’t soon become the City of Signs, it will be because the City of Potholes sticks first.

    While the Stark Street pothole crisis still threatened locally, I happened to pick up the March 19 issue of The New Yorker and turned to James Surowiecki’s “The Financial Page.” I’m a regular reader of the feature, for in a single page Surowiecki is usually able to do for the economy what Robert Frost suggested poetry does for the soul: “a momentary stay against confusion.” But this week I came out of Surowiecki’s “Great Expectations?” feeling like I had just hit a pothole. “One good sign,” Surowiecki argues [that the economy is improving], “is that Americans are buying new cars again.” But where will they drive them, as the country’s road and bridge infrastructure continues to deteriorate, potholes proliferate, and the price of gasoline again threatens to spike? The age of the average car on the street today, Surowiecki says, is at “an all-time high,” suggesting a “pent-up demand for new cars.” But surely the fact that Detroit finally started making better new cars at least in part helps explain the improved longevity of the used car.

    But the number of households is not increasing, Surowiecki says, a bad sign, for young people can’t afford to move out on their own, but “when this trend reverses there will be a spike in demand, both for housing, especially rentals, and for all the stuff that you put in a house.” Thus the economic recovery relies on thoroughly anti-Thoreauvian principles, for what we need are fewer, more efficient new cars, improved mass transit of all kinds, smaller, more affordable and more efficient houses, and less stuff, not to mention freedom from oil dependencies. Meantime, the potential of rising rents and the consolidation of available rentals in the hands of a few speculators may conspire to throw both the young and old to and from combined households. And why would a young person want to add to student loan debt the absurd cost of a new car loan? And how will they qualify for home mortgages with increasingly stricter requirements, saddled with their student loans? And then I came across another article, this one pointing economic blame at the same young for their alleged entropic and torpid inactivities.

    Over at the HBR Blog Network, I found Sarah Green “stewing all week about a logically sloppy op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times.” Amazingly, the op-ed Green refers to, titled “The Go No-Where Generation,” blames the continuing poor economy in part on young people’s staying home, even citing a downturn in driver licensure as evidence, when, as the Surowiecki article also suggests, what we need of our young people is early licensure for the commute from the new home to the de-benefitted new job to afford to fill the new car with ever more expensive gas and the new home with new stuff. I quickly saw why Green stewed, for the op-ed invokes Steinbeck’s Joads as the prototype of the flexibly mobile go-where-the-jobs-are independent American worker – as if they had a choice. Besides, I was also reminded of John Grisham’s semi-autobiographical novel, A Painted House. Set in Korea War era Arkansas, the story compares and contrasts the stay-at-home, determined but economically doomed cotton farmers with friends and relatives who move up north and find jobs in the automobile factories, and who return to visit driving outlandishly expensive new cars. The irony, not found in the novel, is that not too long ago, the descendants of those local defectors to the north could now be found returning to the south to find jobs in Texas and environs as their manufacturing jobs in the north disappeared.

    But what if, Sarah Green suggests, young people have decided on something new, an innovative idea toward value: “The choice young people face,” Green says, “isn’t whether to be jobless in Nevada or employed in North Dakota. It’s whether they’re going to drag themselves unwillingly into an unfair game or decide to invent a new one.”

  • Frank Delaney On Blogging…

    Frank Delaney, whose novel The Last Storyteller, just out in February, I reviewed back on Feb. 27, was featured in a Trib Local interview this morning, and what he had to say about blogging, I want to celebrate, “fur and feathers” and all. One of the questions asked of Delaney was, “How strong is the pulse of literary fiction, criticism and serious examination of literature in the 21st century? Who are today’s shining literary lights?”

    Delaney replied: “Great question! People have been saying for generations, ‘Oh, the novel is dead.’ Well, it ain’t – nor is that wonderful American invention, creative nonfiction, nor is biography, nor is political writing. And as well as the books, the commentariat is alive and well. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that it’s healthier than ever, because we now have this wonderful new creature, the Literary Blogger. I’m a massive fan of this gorgeous animal, with all its fur and feathers – for a number of reasons. My main complaint about the general direction of literary criticism over the last century has been – and Joyce is a case in point – that it tended, in its lofty tone and often impenetrable language (not to mention occasional vendetta behavior), to be antidemocratic, to keep certain areas of literature to itself, whereas my own passion is for as many people as possible to be reading as widely as possible. The Literary Bloggers have no axes to grind, they’re not protecting their reputations, they don’t fear being sneered at by other critics, they’re reading what they want to read, writing what they want to write, and they don’t want to keep what they enjoy to themselves. They want to share. They want to expand the constituency of reading. They want to hail and applaud good writing. To my mind this is a very significant development – uneven, I grant, here and there, but, dammit, not as uneven as the generations of formal literary critics, and the blogging intention is so good and so worthy of loud vocal support that you can call it truly a new and, to my mind, incomparably welcome development in the world of reading and writing.”

    Reference: Librarian’s Shelf by Lisa Guidarini – An Interview with Ireland’s Pre-eminent Storyteller Frank Delaney, March 16, 2012, by Virginia Freyre, Algonquin Area Public Library.

  • The Art, Woe, Slop, and Toe of the Book Review

    In an era of sinking readership, closing bookstores, the disappearance of newspapers, and Google making us stupid, who cares about book reviews? The book review is the grownup version of the book report, the nefarious writing assignment where students first learn to plagiarize. Publishing is in a hard market, as they say in the insurance trade (rates up, coverage down), but book reviews have softened, a bummer for the pros, happily for the amateurs. We tried our hand at a book review the other day, having read the book with a review in mind, The Last Storyteller, by Frank Delaney.

    Reading with writing in mind changes the act of reading, for we are no longer Salinger’s coveted general interest reader, who reads and runs sans comment. We loiter in the margins, jotting down questions we’d like to ask the author. We’re going to have to say something about what we read, or say something about how we felt while we were reading, but putting into words how we feel about a book is like putting on a tie, and we drift away from the text, ignoring the general book review rubric, if there is one.

    The book review is as good a place as any to begin to think about purposeful writing. Writing with a purpose implies an audience, and if one is to stand before an audience, particularly a hostile (or perhaps worse, an indifferent) group, with any hope of persuading, some strategic plan might prove useful. To some, writing with a purpose might take all the fun out of the sails.

    Ah, but what’s the purpose of the average book review – to wrestle the writer to the ground? A book reviewer might think like a reporter, an investigative reporter, even a detective of sorts, trying to solve, not a crime, but a puzzle, perhaps. Some readers don’t like puzzles. Puzzles can make one feel stupid, and, as Rene Char said, “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.” But how much worse for the bird when what the reviewer wants to do is shoot her from the tree with a slingshot?

    A brief summary of one aspect of contemporary book reviewing may be found in an SF Gate article by Heidi Benson (untitled, on-line version, July, 2003). I’m familiar with The Believer book reviewing philosophy she describes, having been a Believer subscriber since almost its inception, but I’d not heard of Dale Peck, quoted by Heidi as an example of a snarking, negative reviewer, so I read Peck’s review (referenced by Heidi) of Rick Moody (Moody I’ve read only in The Believer – I’ve not read his novels), which begins, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation,” and continues, later, “I mean to say only that he [Rick Moody] is a bad writer. But bad writing has consequences.”

    But, in part, it’s those consequences that Peck’s review is about, not Moody. Though Peck does a professional job of explicating samples of Moody’s prose, what he really wants to argue is that the modern novel as developed by the later James Joyce and company is responsible for what Peck sees as today’s literary mess (exemplified by Moody). In short, I assumed, Peck values realism, maybe naturalism, and for a good reason: he thinks literature could be more instrumental in solving contemporary problems if it were more purposeful and accessible, if, in short, it were more meaningful, if it were about something other than itself. Peck concludes with a vengeful rant against the modern novel, as follows:

    “All I’m suggesting is that these writers (and their editors) see themselves as the heirs to a bankrupt tradition. A tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is Ulysses; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov; and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid—just plain stupid—tomes of DeLillo.”

    Fine, but I’d never heard of Dale Peck, so I looked up one of his books on Amazon, but I was so appalled, nay, horrified, by the excerpt from the Publishers Weekly review showing on Amazon that I had to shut down my computer and go for a walk. I’m back now, from the walk, but I still can’t believe that the Peck who wrote Body Surfing is the same guy that wrote the New Republic review. And, of course, since I am an actual, real, natural, old-time body surfer, boogie boarder, and surfboarder, I’m more than horrified at Peck’s book, I’m annoyed and disappointed, for he has, literally, defiled the surfing term with his title over that book. (And there’s my review of Peck’s book, which I’ve not read and will not read.)

    Still, though, there’s a lesson there too, for the reader and the book reviewer in me (if he’s still there, after all this), for wouldn’t we agree that Stephen King is a terrible romance comedy writer? Of course not, because King doesn’t try to write romantic comedies. But one’s preference for romance comedy doesn’t make Stephen King a bad writer. Nor does my being appalled by the Amazon review make Peck’s book a bad one. We shouldn’t criticize something for not being what it was not intended to be. But if that’s true, then we shouldn’t fault Peck for criticizing Moody’s intentions. But this is where things get hard, for we don’t have time to read everything, so what should we be reading? Some criticism can be helpful. Criticism should help us understand the author’s intentions. And, once that’s done, help us understand how effectively those intentions were carried out. Good writing then becomes that which achieves its objectives, even if we don’t happen to like those objectives. n+1 wrote something up on Peck in April of 2004 which would seem to have put the matter to rest. Once again, of course, I’m way late to the party, and I’m not sure if I’m catching up or falling farther behind.

  • On Universe: A Conversation Between Thoreau and Bucky

    Thoreau: “What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment!”

    Fuller: “Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and co-ordinator of local universe affairs.”

    Thoreau: “Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it.”

    Fuller: “This is the essence of human evolution upon Spaceship Earth. If the present planting of humanity upon Spaceship Earth cannot comprehend this inexorable process and discipline itself to serve exclusively that function of metaphysical mastering of the physical it will be discontinued, and its potential mission in universe will be carried on by the metaphysically endowed capabilities of other beings on other spaceship planets of universe.”

    Thoreau: “I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.”

    Fuller: “Coping with the totality of Spaceship Earth and universe is ahead for all of us.”

    Thoreau: “The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions.”

    Fuller: “Only as he learned to generalize fundamental principles of physical universe did man learn to use his intellect effectively.”

    Thoreau: “The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe’s Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay.”

    Fuller: “We are faced with an entirely new relationship to the universe.”

    Thoreau: “Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.”

    Fuller: “Can we think of, and state adequately and incisively, what we mean by universe?”

    Thoreau: “Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask.”

    Fuller: “But the finite physical universe did not include the metaphysical weightless experiences of universe.”

    Thoreau: “The universe is wider than our views of it.”

    Fuller: “The universe is the aggregate of all of humanity’s consciously-apprehended and communicated experience with the nonsimultaneous, nonidentical, and only partially overlapping, always complementary, weighable and unweighable, ever omnitransforming, event sequences.”

    Thoreau: “In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

    All quotes, juxtapositions around universe, taken from Thoreau’s Walden and Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

    Fuller, R. Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. First published, 1969. New edition, Baden/Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2008/2011 [Edited with Introduction by Jaime Snyder]. Print.

    Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. Boston: Beacon Press, July 15, 2004 [Introduction and Annotations by Bill McKibben]. Print.

    Related:

  • Transition: From Walled-in with Thoreau to Take-off with Buckminster Fuller

    “We can never get enough of nature,” Thoreau says (297), yet we will soon have turned the entire planet into garbage. But, as Slavoj Žižek has said, we must learn to love garbage, for it reflects our imperfections (Examined Life, at 1:04:40). “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds,” Thoreau says, in the Walden chapter titled “Conclusion” (303). He was aware of the pun. In “The Ponds” chapter, he says, “I detect the paver. If the name was not derived from that of some English locality, – Saffron Walden, for instance – one might suppose that it was called, originally, Walled-in Pond” (173).

    “The universe is wider than our views of it,” Thoreau says (299), yet he’s limited to worldwide travel in wooden boats. But he’s aware of the limitation, and the ambiguity of his predicament: “The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing” (299). Travel, for vacation or business, amounts to the same thing, for we cannot vacate ourselves, but must bring us with us on any trip. Thus Thoreau proposes that we travel to “whole new continents and worlds within [us], opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought,” for “there are continents and seas in the moral world” (300). And why should we make such a trip? “How worn and dusty the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world” (302). He “will pass an invisible boundary” (303). How will he pay for the trip? “Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul” (308).

    “What is the most important thing we can be thinking about?,” Buckminster Fuller asked his grandson on the way to LAX (8). Thoreau comments, as if riding in the backseat of the car, “My neighbors tell me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose, dress it as you will” (308).

    And a planet is a planet, Fuller might have responded, and how will we address it? “What are men celebrating?,” Thoreau asks (308). Thoreau was not a specialist, and he celebrates, in Walden, his non-specialist skills, the ability to cross over the boundaries of disciplines. This is why there are so many ways of looking at Walden, and why Thoreau (like Fuller) was an inventor – his vision was not walled-in by the format of a specialized discipline. Buckminster Fuller was also a non-specialist who avoided the traps of specialization and categories (because, as we will see Fuller explain, specialization leads to extinction). And specialization leads to artificial categorical definitions of all kinds that place claims on individual lives: “This ‘sovereign’ – meaning top-weapons enforced – ‘national’ claim upon humans born in various lands leads to ever more severely specialized servitude and highly personalized identity classification,” Fuller says. “As a consequence of the slavish ‘categoryitis,’ the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions ‘Where do you live?’ ‘What are you?’ ‘What religion?’ ‘What race?’ What nationality?’ are all thought of today as logical questions,” yet, Fuller says, “These questions are absurd” (p. 31). The specialist is the go-to man, yet Fuller says, “All universities have been progressively organized for ever finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable” (25), dangerous assumptions, for, as Fuller says, “society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking” (24).

    Thoreau was a comprehensive thinker, but he only glimpsed, in his criticism of the railroad, the damage that was to occur, or how worldwide poverty would belie his dictum, “Love your life, poor as it is” (307). He would have been appalled at the costs we’ve incurred, the lack of generalist and comprehensive thinking. Thoreau’s Walden was published in 1854, Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in 1969. The juxtaposition of the two works (though published 115 years apart) creates a dialog between Thoreau and Fuller, a conversation that might suggest answers to where we’ve been, where we might have gone, where we appear to be headed, and where we still might have the possibility to go.

    Fuller, R. Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. First published, 1969. New edition, Baden/Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2008/2011 [Edited with Introduction by Jaime Snyder].

    Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. Boston: Beacon Press, July 15, 2004 [Introduction and Annotations by Bill McKibben].

  • A Monstrous Metaphor Fished from Walden Pond

    If Walden, the pond, as Thoreau tells us (“The Ponds” chapter), sports some, but not many, fish, “…pickerel…perch and pouts…breams, and a couple of eels. Nevertheless, this pond is not very fertile in fish” (174), Walden, the book, is well stocked with metaphorical fish; some, when pulled to the surface, monstrous tropes: “A lake…is earth’s eye…The fluviatile [of a river] trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows” (176). Thus we see the earth as a Cyclops, a one-eyed monster, the eye stretched into an imperfect circle, trees for lashes and eyebrows, hills for forehead. And the eye, at a certain time of the day, the sun, another eye, gazing into its waters, contains fluid a kind of “molten glass cooled but not congealed” (177). The picture we see here is not the standard product of the bucolic water-colorist; more like a Salvador Dali painting.

    The face of the earth is dotted with these Cyclopes, but these eyes are protected against blindness, as Thoreau explains in yet another figurative device, the riddle, which he uses to sieve his pond. What is a mirror which no stone can crack? He gives us the answer: “[The lake] is a mirror which no stone can crack” (178).

    Yet we’ve already been introduced to the lake as a mouth, so now we’ve to add a mouth to our Cyclops’s eye: “By this fluctuation the pond asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of the lake on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to time” (172). What a face!

    The metaphorical mouth surrounds the eye-trope, the eye sits in the mouth, and the eye is sometimes blue, but often, in places, “of a yellowish tint,” or again, “vivid green…verdure…Such is the color of its iris.” (167). And at the bottom of this eye, “logs…like huge water snakes in motion” (188).

    Thoreau finishes “The Ponds” chapter with a metaphorical flourish: “Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her” (188). No doubt.

    Related:

    Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. Boston: Beacon Press, July 15, 2004 [Introduction and Annotations by Bill McKibben].

  • A Sixth Way of Looking at Walden: Deliberately Seeking Simplicity

    Walter Harding suggested “Five Ways of Looking at Walden.” Bill McKibben, in his introduction to the Beacon Press edition of Walden, cites two “practical questions…: How much is enough? And How do I know what I want?” (xi). Reading Walden as a way of asking these questions for ourselves, McKibben suggests, is another way of looking at Walden.

    “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately” (85), Thoreau said, in the Walden chapter titled “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.” What does he mean by deliberately, and why wasn’t he able to live deliberately in town? “When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other” (6). Yet how deliberate can the decision be if, as Thoreau continues, “…they honestly think there is no choice left” (6). We might add a third question to McKibben’s reading questions: What are my choices?

    “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature,” Thoreau proposes, “and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails” (91). He seems to be suggesting that to live deliberately means to live free from non-essential distractions, from man-made dissipations. Perhaps this is reason enough for talking about what we are reading, for reading aloud, with others: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written” (96), for while deliberately means intentionally, purposefully, meaningfully, existentially, deliberate also means to think, to consult others, to consider one’s options. One may live as simply as one chooses, Thoreau seems to say, but it takes, apparently, deliberation.

    Related:

  • It is told in sounds in Thoreau’s Walden

    “It is told in sounds,” Joyce says, “in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom…and anythongue athall” (Finnegans Wake, 117).

    “– Is it so exaltated, eximious, extraoldanddairy and excelssiorising?
    – Amengst menlike trees walking or trees like angels weeping nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it!” (Finnegans Wake, 505).

    Here Joyce takes a common, neutral cliché, defrocked by virtue of its clichéd repetition (nobody ever saw anything to equal it), and gives it wings so it can take off again, renewed, refreshed. “Poetry is the foundation of writing,” Beckett says. “When language consisted of gesture, the spoken and the written were identical” (Exagmination, 11).

    Just so, Thoreau, a monk amongst trees, delights in the poetry found in sounds and tries to locate the sounds in human language, and we see him building the foundation for his own writing. An example of this is found in the “Sounds” chapter of Walden.

    Thoreau has heard a hooting owl, to him a “melancholy sound,” and tries to imitate the owl’s sound: “I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I try to imitate it.” And in the passage, he repeats the gl letters so that the reader, if reading for sounds, must hear his meaning: “gurgling melodiousness…,” “gelatinous mildewy stage….” “It reminded me of ghouls…howlings” (118), this last, the gl inverted. And we thus find Thoreau a polyglot at work, in at least two languages, the language of nature and the language of the human, and the combination of the two might be what Joyce meant, repeating Thoreau’s gl, by “polygluttural,” the mouth flooded with the sounds of nature.

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  • Epizeuxis, epizeuxis, epizeuxis! in Thoreau’s Walden

    Writing is repetition. Listen to the keyboard. Each key produces its own, unique sound, repeating, the sounds given emphasis by the relative strength and position of the fingers, but we recognize the collective effort as someone typing. Suddenly, the sounds grow faint, decrescendo. Perhaps the typist has reached the required length. Then, suddenly, suddenly, like a cat in flight, the ideas spring like birds from the grass, then scatter, some alighting on wires, others landing on roofs, others lost within thick trees, trees, trees.

    Typing sounds. But that’s not writing you say, but typewriting, echoing Capote’s criticism of Kerouac’s On the Road, the first draft produced on a single roll of paper fed through his typewriter: no yoke.

    And repetition is instruction, to repeat, to teach or learn, often with little relief, as we are made to recite or duplicate. But in the distance we hear the stammerer, needlessly repeating, though stammer he must, to get it out, battology, swinging away in the batting cage, practice, repetition, swing, swing, swing. If the ball is claim, the bat grounds, flight is assumption. Going, going, gone! And a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, said Gertrude Stein, and we can imagine her writing teacher’s penciled comment on little Gert’s paper: “wordiness.” Yes, but, well, isn’t that what she’s getting paid for?

    “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” rants Thoreau in the “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” chapter of Walden (86), an example of epizeuxis, (ep i zeux’ is), a figure of repetition, a word repeated in succession for emphasis. Yet two sentences down, Thoreau seems to realize a mistake, or maybe he’s just tired himself out, and he says, “Simplify, simplify,” twice only, without the exclamation. But he’s followed his own advice, having simplified his epizeuxis, for now, diminishing the repetition by one. But, at the same time, a contradiction appears, for he’s up to five.

    Thoreau repeats the word simplicity ten times throughout Walden, the word simple, twenty-five times, but the imperative, simplify, the argument of proposal, he repeats only twice, but in the figure of repetition, epizeuxis, which is to say, he says it simply once.

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