OF A GOLDEN AGE

my new favorite journal entry comes from Thoreau (surprise!) volume v. on 22 may 1853 he writes about a kitten he discovered whilst “rowing past Mr. Prichard’s land, where the river is bordered by a row of elms and low willows” (180-181). he and his companion find the kitten mewing on the river’s bank and the kitten promptly runs to Thoreau. it is apparently a “handsome” and healthy specimen, and Thoreau wonders immediately how it got to a place three-fourths of a mile outside of the nearest inhabitance. he takes it home and speculates on its origins, since the kitten is still so young as to be unweaned.

Thoreau’s older cat doesn’t like the kitten and Thoreau writes that any thoughts about drowning the kitten were extinguished “having once looked into its innocent extremely pale blue eyes” (182). I wondered while reading it if convention still holds that unwanted kittens are drowned or otherwise killed by their owners or finders.

in the brilliant, cancelled HBO show Carnivale, the first episode has an event like this — our hero, Ben Hawkins, has the ability to heal and restore life. he brings back a kitten that has died in his depression-poor home, and his mother, suspecting that Ben has some kind of demonic powers, drowns the kitten. she says something like, “god takes what’s his and you can’t take it back.” interesting, though, that in this case drowning Thoreau’s kitten would be a kind of taking-it-back. to reverse this would involve bringing the kitten back to life, arguably an even further disruption of god’s order. complicated!

eventually Thoreau figures out that someone had tossed the kitten into the river in order to drown it, but the kitten clung to life and saved itself. he praises the kitten’s instincts because of the way it sought Thoreau and found a way to survive. “It saved itself and hailed a boat! What an eventful life! What a precocious kitten!” (183). he finds a home for the kitten with an irish family and learns that it was originally discovered behind a board in someone’s home.

Thoreau writes three whole pages in his journal about this kitten. his admiration of the kitten’s survival instincts is tangible on the page and the kitten acts as a symbol of what Thoreau loves about nature, which is pretty wonderful. I also like that he refers to the kitten as handsome and describes its “maturest” mannerisms. it’s funny to imagine Thoreau watching as the kitten climbed his chair and person and sucked on his chin. he seems fascinated by it, calling the kitten “exceedingly interesting.”

what the kitten evokes is the cycle of life. Thoreau comments that the kitten “was smaller than we remembered that kittens ever were” (181), implying the stages of life and growth that often are forgotten once we pass through them ourselves. (who isn’t surprised by the tininess of a baby’s hand or a brand-new leaf on a tree?) the kitten’s creative means to survive also brings to mind a famous line from Jurassic Park: “Life finds a way.”

On Friday, September 29, Roger Waters and his many-piece ensemble rolled into the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre (FMBA) in Tinley Park, Illinois. Up until several years ago, the FMBA was called the New World Music Theater, then it spent a few years as the Tweeter Center (an alarmingly hilarious name for anything), and now apparently another corporation has gobbled it up. The FMBA is enormous, somehow more imposing than even a Major League ballpark because of its structure of metal tubing with little visible support. This isn’t a place you want to be if there’s a natural disaster, so luckily I was crammed in there with twenty thousand other people who were largely intoxicated. Pretty awesome.

I missed the first half hour of the show for a variety of Murphy’s Law-type reasons, but as my friend and I pulled into the FMBA, we realized the show had started and Waters was playing “Have a Cigar” from Wish You Were Here. Parked in the third-to-last row of a gravel parking lot at least four blocks long, we heard the strains of “Fletcher Memorial Home,” a compelling idea yet boring song off of Pink Floyd’s mediocre 1983 album Final Cut. Waters played some of his solo material—remember the opera he was writing last year, about the French revolution, apparently?—which, though fairly unmemorable, was both intensely political and accompanied by beautiful visuals on the huge, Pulse-like screen behind the band.

The FMBA, as an amphitheatre, is all outdoors—there’s a roof over the seating area but no walls, and the back of the venue is an expansive, slanted lawn. We had seats, which I thought would mean actually getting to sit and watch the show instead of being jostled by gross drunk people. That was a silly assumption. First, I’m not sure why anyone needs to stand during a Pink Floyd show—it’s not like you’re dancing, assholes. Sit down. A drunken man behind me and two meatheads in front of me almost came to blows over the meatheads’ insistence on standing. The drunken man’s belly bounced against the back of my head while he swore vividly at the meatheads. I put the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and prayed for a miracle. No dice.

Second, is it really worth missing part of “Comfortably Numb” or “Money” to go and buy nachos? This was less irritating than the people who paraded in and out of the show with beer every fifteen minutes for two hours. If you’re going to abuse something, isn’t the point of a Pink Floyd show to get really, really stoned? A huge portion of the crowd was shitfaced and belligerent, swaying like morons and making bathroom runs every other song. I did catch a lot of wafting marijuana smoke but it paled next to the communal beer breath. Beer was $9 at the FMBA, too. Giving these assfaces the benefit of the doubt in terms of tolerance, they were spending between $50 and $100 on alcohol.

Back to Roger Waters, though. After a 15-minute break halfway through the show, he and his band returned to play Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Everything I said before about the crowd acting like imbeciles intensified during my favorite song of all time, “Money,” but shortly thereafter they finally calmed down and sat in their goddamned seats, even the meatheads. Finally standing up at an appropriate time, the entire crowd took to its feet to sing along with the last track on the album, “Eclipse.” This created a near-spiritual, arena-shaking feeling that lasted through the end of the song; the ovation after Waters and the band left the stage; and their encore of “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II,” “Vera,” and “Comfortably Numb.”

This is the best concert I’ve ever seen. The musicianship of Waters’ band is technically flawless and the arrangements were tight; even the sound, projected from enormous quad speakers, was shockingly clear. Waters created an ideal mix of his own questionable solo work and early and late Floyd. An unexpected highlight of the night was a female backup singer’s spot-on rendition of the sweeping, ecstatic “Great Gig in the Sky.” What broke my heart about this performance, though, was the absence of the rest of Pink Floyd—no matter how good the Dave Gilmour-alike on the guitar (or the second Gilmour-alike on vocals) sounds, he is not part of Pink Floyd. He’s a hired gun. Especially on tracks like “Comfortably Numb” and “Breathe,” defined by Gilmour’s smooth, slightly-raspy voice, any number of imitators could not recreate his presence. I’m sure that at a Gilmour concert I would feel the same way about Roger Waters’ absence. When a band composed of men in their 60s still looks, plays and sounds great, why can’t they just get it together to play some shows?

The Rolling Stones tour incessantly and in much larger venues—80,000 people in Comiskey Park at upwards of a hundred dollars apiece is a pretty outrageous scale, probably to demonstrate to the world that their forty-plus-year career is not over yet. Even the mediocre Gin Blossoms are reuniting, for chrissake. It’s time to make nice again, Waters and Gilmour. At least Paul McCartney isn’t trying to switch your songwriting credits around.

this never occurred to me before, but having been reminded of my childhood summer camp by a new Facebook group, I looked it up — and man, it would be easy to argue that their motto is steeped in pantheism. no, it does not directly state that the world IS god, but the idea of seeing god in everything lives on a slippery slope.

it is pretty fair and charitable, though, to say that christian summer camp is a very Romantic and transcendentalist idea. I went there for a week each summer from age six through thirteen, everything from sports to art to general interest camp. my parents are not religious, nor were my grandparents, but the camp is a few miles outside of the town where my grandparents lived and where my family lives now. the god stuff was always a distant second in my mind, and actually, now that I think about it, there was a pervasive absence of religious content in my camp experiences. maybe that was because we were such young children, and I had an unusual awareness of my religion or lack thereof so I noticed this absence of bible study or anything. in my last year there, my camp was much more biblical and god-oriented, and it really turned me off on ever going back. they finally gave me the pitch and I turned heel and ran!

last night I went to the library with my friends. we sat and studied separately-together, Nick reading psychology, Emily reading religious politics, myself reading Kierkegaard. somehow, we started to talk about religion and religious symbols that people display publicly. it was an interesting conversation, but mostly it made me realize that I feel the same way about public displays of religion that I do about public displays of affection: keep it private, please.

on september 26, 1852, Thoreau wrote this intriguing passage:

“Dreamed of purity last night. The thoughts seemed not to originate with me, but I was invested, my thought was tinged, by another’s thought. It was not I that originated, but that I entertained the thought” (volume 5, page 354).

wow. this begs the question, where are the rest of the details? this volume of his journals is much less cohesive than volume xiv, which I read last time. I also wonder, don’t all dreams have a certain sense of disconnectedness from our possession? Freud would say of course they don’t, but even disregarding his vaguely valid ideas on dreams, these bursts of subconscious are still at least a step removed from our waking thoughts. rather than view them as someone else’s thoughts visiting our minds, though, at least for me, I’ve always considered dreams to be the synthesis of the mental detritus we just don’t consciously consider.

to change gears, I made an error in philosophy class today that I think will probably happen more frequently now that everything in my academic intellectual life is folding in on itself — I directly described a passage in class thinking it was from a Hegel text, but a classmate corrected me: “oh, wait, isn’t that from walden?” hahaha yes, yes it is. MY BAD. I was just telling the professor earlier that my classes are doing this to me, though, combining topically and confusing the hell out of me a lot of the time.

backtracking to Thoreau’s dream, though. it’s especially interesting that he “dreamed of purity” whilst entertaining the thoughts of another. I picked up this volume because it’s from the Walden era, and chose this entry because its date is so close to today’s, but it fits into our discussion in class today of Thoreau’s attempt to get close to the gods of nature. he implies that his dream was inhabited by something whose message was purity, probably pretty naturalistic in his mind.

as a linguistic side note, I marked a place in Walden where Thoreau used the word “extravagance” but as two separate words. it never occurred to me before that vagance would have meaning on its own, even though the word is obviously that kind of formation, so I looked it up in the OED. vagancy: “A wandering or strolling.” the word extravagance, therefore, literally means “outside wandering.”

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Weekend Edition – Sunday (NPR) 05-05-2002

Commentary: Reflections on Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” after reading a four-page summary of it

Host: LYNN NEARY
Time: 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM

LYNN NEARY: Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond to write, observe and reflect. His reflections are still being studied nearly 150 years after they were first published. WEEKEND EDITION commentator Tom Schiff found a handy shortcut that got him thinking about this classic work of literature.

TOM SCHIFF: I wasn’t actually reading “Walden,” I was reading a book called “The Book of Great Books,” something you get at the bargain table at Barnes & Noble. “The Book of Great Books” is itself actually a summary of 100 great books, sort of like Cliff Notes summaries, only shorter. I was reading it mostly out of a genuine curiosity about most of the books, which I haven’t read, and also so that I can seem more educated and erudite than I really am.

Anyhow, when reading the four-page summary of Walden, I was struck that Thoreau, though roughing it, more or less, back there in 19th century rural Massachusetts, was actually living on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 300-acre farm out there at Walden Pond. I mean, this wasn’t like some homesteader tromping off into the wilds of Montana to chop down trees and bring his little slice of modern civilization to the wilderness. It was more, like, `Hey, Ralph, you know me. I’m Henry David Thoreau, the intellectual poet and, you know, you’ve got this 300-acre spread out there in Concord, and it’s your property, so even though civilization is creeping up, you can farm it and hunt on it and fish on it and keep others out, and you don’t mind if I build a place on it and just kind of hang out for a little bit, do you?’ Of course, Ralph, also being an intellectual and a writer, said, `Sure, go ahead. I’ve got 300 acres. Suit yourself.’

So that’s what Thoreau did for a couple of years. And I think having read a four-page condensation of “Walden,” that the moral of the book is live modestly, and you don’t need that many possessions, especially if you’ve got a friend with a 300-acre property that they let you live on for a few years. Which brings me to my other observation about the book, which is about the difference between liberals and radicals. Radicals seem to me to be people who don’t have much and live amongst others who don’t have much and genuinely feel they’ve been screwed by an unfair society or economy. A liberal is somebody who lives on their friends’ 300-acre farm and preaches to others about the virtues of material modesty. Or maybe it’s someone who reads a four-page summary of a book and pretends to be more educated and erudite than he really is.

NEARY: Tom Schiff reads condensed books in Los Angeles.

“There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion.”

this line appears on page 328 of our Thoreau anthology. I am starting to love Thoreau more and more, easier once I started to take his writing more personally and wade into his journals. his earnestness in his journals strikes the starkest contrast with the jaded part of me, but it resonates unequivocally with my wondering side. he has the dynamism and love of the world that, in my mind, demonstrates true brilliance. I meet enough people who are intelligent within one area and have obvious mental horsepower, but this isn’t enough. to be truly brilliant requires intellectual dynamism and insatiable curiosity. Thoreau realizes how important it is to consume everything you can get your hands on, and it shines through in his prowess over so many different ideas — he transitions from natural science to astute social observation to beautiful, lucid descriptions of his surroundings, and at least in Walden, he is sometimes hilarious.

(i looked up “lucid” to make sure I could use it in that context, and loved the OED’s definition: “Bright, shining, luminous, resplendent.”)

to circle back to my initial quote, though: these sentences begin my favorite passage from Walden so far. I’ve been marking it up pretty adamantly because his turns of phrase and thoughts are so compelling. anyway, in this part, Thoreau tears down our classical idea of philanthropy and goodness. simply helping someone out is not enough, he says; “I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much.”

I enjoy Thoreau’s dissatisfaction with people’s rote acceptance of society. parts of Walden start up a soundtrack in my mind, specifically the song “is that all there is?” by Peggy Lee. she starts out feeling underwhelmed by a housefire and the circus but ends up feeling the same way about love and her own inevitable death. it’s a pretty amazing song, though obviously kind of a downer. Peggy Lee seems to be a party existentialist: “if that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing.”

I’ve been reading thoreau’s writings: journal xiv for the last half hour or so. before, I read emerson’s journals, which I enjoyed but did not find as inspiring as thoreau’s — perhaps for the very reason that thoreau did try to live as a transcendentalist “should” and developed an ambivalent relationship with his experiments. he is not an orator so much as the “hopeless romantic” type in our oeuvre of transcendentalists.

I imagine thoreau as the dennis-the-menace to emerson’s mr. wilson, or that episode of the simpsons in which george h.w. bush moves into the mansion across from the simpsons. (bart proceeds to destroy almost everything in bush’s home, of course.)

early in this volume, thoreau describes (with characteristic volume) the oft-unnoticed beauty of his new england world. “When your attention has been drawn to them,” he writes, “nothing is more charming than the common colors of the earth’s surface” (5). part of what appeals to me most is the vaguely scientific affectation thoreau takes on when making his observations — he gives the latin names for many plants and animals and elaborates on their characteristics.

later in the volume, he complains of the incomplete nature (no pun intended!) of contemporary botany and those who write it. “I rarely read a sentence in a botany which reminds me of a flower or living plants,” he writes. “Very few indeed write as if they had seen the thing which they pretend to describe” (92). incidentally, thoreau wrote this passage on september 22, 1860.

he hearkens to early botanists and names gerard in particular, john gerard, who is often considered the father of botany and continues to be cited in everything from histories to the economist: “Gerard, writing before the migration pattern of birds was understood, declared that geese emerged from the encrustations on the bark of barnacle trees” (11/12/05). gerard is revered for his thorough coverage of all aspects of plants, from their physical characteristics to medicinal properties and mystical reputations.

this reminded me of a project that former beloit math professor (and number two in an ever-rotating string of my advisors) glenn appl-by helped bring to campus two years ago: a display of rare medieval and renaissance herbals. they were exquisite and appreciable as much for their precise, loving etchings and illustrations as for their content. I felt at the time a sense of wonder toward these books that I think our friend thoreau feels too — the men who wrote and drew them clearly cared greatly for nature, both as a mechanical wonder and as a manifestation of our perfect, awesome universe.

on page 259 of this volume, thoreau says of his local flora that various plants “are your companions, as if it were an iron age, yet in simplicity, innocence, and strength a golden one.” I have a soft spot in my heart for the phrase “golden age” and an associated word that, to the best of my knowledge, the brilliant michael chabon discovered for his novel the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay: aetataureate, literally “of a golden age.”

the contrast of iron to gold is an interesting one. the iron age of world history is often glorified and identified as the beginning of the distant roots of industrialism. iron itself will win no beauty contests, but gold is both finer and more reflective of the colors of nature. thoreau seems only to need the gold of “all the heat and sunlight that there is, reflected back to you from the earth. The sandy road itself, lit by the November sun, is beautiful” (259).

a couple of pages later, thoreau begins hierarchizing the fruits of nature in terms of local versus imported. part of his reverie whilst walking is in the discovery of new things: “So long as I saw one or two kinds of berries in my walks whose names I did not know,” he writes, “the proportion of the unknown seemed indefinitely if not infinitely great” (261). he goes on to describe foreign fruits and how he does not care for them so much, but that the people to whom the foreign fruits ARE local fruits should love them the way thoreau loves the woodland berries.

this idea of localized natural affection is a little discomfiting to me, as if thoreau is fractalizing the world and only taking small pieces to avoid connecting to another place. I know I’m oversimplifying, but there does seem to be a place for both the local and the distant to intrigue us as intellectual beings.

this passage does bring to mind the moral values lecture last spring on localized nutrition. when I interviewed biology professor marion f-ss afterward, she told me she feels people should hone in on the items that occur naturally in their climates. her rationale, though, was about the decentralization of enormous corporate farms and a push to purchase organic local food. she and thoreau display similar symptoms of different diseases, so to speak.

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anything I’ve said about enjoying Emerson’s language even when I hate his points is true thousandfold of Thoreau. maybe because of Thoreau’s drifty, dreamy, vaguely self-indulgent style, I love reading his work regardless of the way his ideas often clatter around aimlessly. these two sentences from “A Natural History of Massachusetts” summarize Thoreau’s charm in my eyes:

“I stay my boat in mid-current, and look down in the sunny water to see the civil meshes of his nets, and wonder how the blustering people of the town could have done this elvish work. The twin looks like a new river-weed, and is to the river as a beautiful memento of man’s presence in nature, discovered as silently and delicately as a footprint in the sand.”

part of me wants to retch at this sentimental writing, but it is still beautiful and effective. Thoreau’s quest to write a book review ends in a wildly-veering collection of borrowed poetry and snapshots of the natural world. it is endearing to imagine Thoreau sitting down to write and finding himself unable to disengage from this seemingly-bland text. he is passionate, which is what makes his writing as compelling as it is.

topically, I’m listening to the very, very excellent album Blazing Arrow by Blackalicious and the track “4000 miles” has this line:

“the final destination used to be my main question, but then I looked and all that I was searching for was present.”

in this track, they romanticize music as a unifier and spiritual force, with which I largely agree. the process of romanticizing, though, translates easily to Thoreau’s loving fixation on nature. he reminds me somewhat of the subject of the frightening, powerful documentary Grizzly Man, which is an example of transcendental philosophy carried to asocial extremes. the borderline noble-savage view of nature held by many transcendentalists leads grizzly man to live amidst bears. he talks to them like they’re his children or his brothers. it is upsetting and he suffers.

since my previous post I’ve had a couple of interesting experiences relating to god. the first happened saturday evening. a friend of mine told me about part of an interview he’d recently watched, which turned out to be Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth series. Campbell describes a logical connection: if god is love, then doesn’t it hold that love is god? love is blissed-out and terrifying at the same time, a suffering caused and relieved by the same individual. in Richard Linklater’s incredible movie Before Sunrise, Celine (Julie Delpy) tells Jesse (Ethan Hawke, swoon) that she believes god exists in the connection between two people who love each other. I have to say, I find this idea tremendously alluring.

what caught in both my friend’s and my throat about this, though, is that Tom McBride has been inundating us with Wittgenstein’s idea that the word “is” can have two meanings. I think, though, that that is an early Wittgensteinian idea — the later Wittgenstein, himself a compelling figure about whom I’ll write sometime, was much more free-wheeling and intuitive about the shifting nature of language.

the other god-event relates directly to Wittgenstein. whilst browsing at an enormous used bookstore in Madison yesterday afternoon, I combed the philosophy section for a book I’ll need for Tom’s class in case I might find it for a lower price. the several Wittgenstein books in stock included one about contemporary thinkers in Christianity. WHAT?! does that mean Wittgenstein’s amorphous style is a mechanism for the exact illogical religious thought I mentioned before! this is a horrifying thought.

most of the very religious people I know fall into two categories: those with nothing but trials in their lives and those with nothing but blessings. it’s hard for me to fathom the middle ground unless it’s composed of people who have come through trials or had some other transition. especially after taking intro philosophy last spring and studying various “proofs” for god’s existence, I feel more strongly than ever that organized religion is illogical.

the thing is, this feels terrible. is part of me so cold and callous that I can’t turn off logic and think about god in a visceral way?

on the other hand, why should I have to? if any power is so great as to have created the universe, why can’t it stand up to simple logical reasoning? where I end up, therefore, is plain old righteous anger. I refuse to believe that logic will hold me back from any theoretical heaven.