The marvelous world we live on is
so varied and marvelous that it’s part of the human condition (at least for the
normally adventurous of us) that we want to go out and see some of it. Thus the
tourist industry. It wasn’t always that way. Tess d’Urberville might normally
have expected to never leave her valley and her poor little cottage, except her
not-cousin cousin raped her and made her pregnant, and a chain of tragical
romantic adventures got rolling, which took her as far as Stonehenge and a
couple other far-off exotic spots in Southern England. A noose put an end to
all that travel and exploration, but like I say, it’s a terribly unfair tragedy.
The young sailor, Herman Melville, jumped ship in the South Pacific and took up
with the Typee who lived on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, and who quite literally
never, ever left their valley, except to raid the one next door on rare
occasions. Of course it was paradise, with everything they needed, but it was a
paradise with mountain walls around it. They were so adamant that no one was to
leave the valley that they were furious with Melville when he tried, and when
he finally got away, they came within a whisker of killing him for it. He was
fortunate to have made it out. I’m glad he did because a world without Moby Dick in it would have been that
much poorer a place. Henry David Thoreau took a dim view of travel in his books
and journals, claiming that it was a consumerist waste of time and one of the
questionable privileges that wealth purchases. He wrote in his journal,
If a man is rich
and strong anywhere, it must be on his native soil. Here I have been these
forty years learning the language of these fields that I may the better express
myself. If I should travel to the prairies, I should much less understand them,
and my past life would serve me but ill to describe them. Many a weed here
stands for more of life to me than the big trees of California would if I
should go there. We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.
He made one trip down the Concord
and Merrimac Rivers in a rowboat with his brother, and one to Cape Cod, another
to the Maine woods, all of which triggered great airings of the Thoreauvian intellect,
but that was not distant heroic travel even for his day. He made it on one
other trip as far as Minnesota. Still, for all his insistence on staying home
and writing about the advantages and necessity of studying ones place, which is
inexhaustible to the attentive and curious nature noticer, he was fascinated
with travel narratives—Darwin, William Bartram, and more, were influential. I
think Thoreau desired travel a lot more than he admitted, but a stay-at-home
attentiveness needed to be the compensation for the life of poverty he chose.
Travel is expensive. It was all about nature for Thoreau at any rate. Darwin
and Bartram travelled to observe nature. In the end, the reason people read
travel narratives, all the way back to Sir John Mandeville, who travelled
through North Africa, the Middle East and India in the Middle Ages, and Marco
Polo, who made it to China and Mongolia, is because it was such a strange and
exotic thing to even think about. It was exceptional. Travel was romantic, but
it was weird.
Thoreau’s compensation was to
study the rhythms of the flowers and weeds in the woods around, and he wrote a
famous essay about walking, which was
the free, localized travel that substituted in his imagination for steamboat
passage to jungles, snow-capped mountain, cathedrals, and palaces. It was just
a question of how narrow to adjust ones focus and what one chooses to observe: What
one chooses to value out of life’s experience.
The other important thing about Thoreau’s experience is that he wrote it up.
These amazing things that surround us don’t write or try to communicate, they
just are. It was the Transcendentalist’s
project to discern message in the fabric and gesture of the world, but that was
as much a creative act as an interpretive one. The line between creativity and
interpretation is less fixed than we like to admit. But the thing about creativity
is that it doesn’t just poof things into existence out of a vacuum, and then,
the thing created often takes on a reality. Thoreau died before he finished his
great project, and no one is quite sure to this day what exactly he was up to,
but he was closely observing the rhythms of nature, observing and writing them,
partially as a scientist does—to interpret—but just as importantly as an artist
does, so that he was writing into being a new and newly valid iteration of
creation. C.S. Lewis has Aslan the Lion sing
and roar Narnia into being. Exactly
like that, yet not. Aslan creates Narnia out of a void. We create out of
material that life presents. We sew shirts and dresses out of life’s gift of
fabric. Thoreau is credited, as a result, as one of the first ecologists, or the first ecologist, but his real aim I
believe was to push through the science into an understanding of God the Artist
and then translate that work. Translation is an art in itself; it is more than
reporting, more than decoding. The work must be faithful to the original but it
must also be fully and thoroughly reimagined if it is to have life in the new
form the translator sets out to create.
B. laments his travelogue
shortcomings in this poem, though we know from The Dream Songs that he crisscrossed North America, had extended
stays in France and England, and one in India. Respectable, but there’s plenty
more to see. Instead, “Forgoing the Andes, the sea-bottom, Angkor, / he led
with his typewriter. He made it fly / & walk to them sites for him.” The writer’s
compensation! He creates his own iteration of the marvelous world, and it’s
just as real and probably more accessible anyway than the sea bottom. Except—it’s
not enough. You see someone in Greece with real problems, and remind yourself that
it could be a lot worse, but that’s not enough either. The world waited in all
its marvelous wonderment, and he wrote and wrote instead of seeing it. The compensation of that, the
fabric of the created world he did experience, isn’t enough this time. “When
nostalgia for things unknown grips him he growls / he’s saving it for the next
time around.”
Maybe there’s a “next time around”
and maybe there isn’t. There isn’t much comfort in that thought, seems to me, outside
of a pretty adamant fundamentalist faith in reincarnation and an afterlife, but
it’s the best he’s got at the moment. He’s not a fundamentalist: He’s groping
for solace. The poet here is struggling with a bad suspicion: All this nose to
the grindstone business was foolish. He missed so much. But I think I might argue
with that: He roared something into being here. It’s true he didn’t pay enough
attention to the world and its sites, not over the horizon, nor, like Thoreau,
to what was growing under his shoes. But every one of us is, as Emerson claims,
“part and parcel of creation.” He put something out there, roared and sung into
being out of the fabric of his awareness, and that in itself is a wonder and
a marvel.
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