BREANNA CLAIRE

         The Concord Writers          

The day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law…And if truth come to our mind, we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds. 

                                                               —Ralph Waldo Emerson 

 

Standing on the North Bridge in Concord, everyone can be a prophet. In reading history books, one gazes at the past from the present; here, where the nation has seen fit to preserve a haven of history from the invasive species of suburbia, one can commune with the men of 1775 and warn them of the consequences of their heroism: that heroism will one day be prized more than sincerity, that "no taxation without representation" will go from a rallying cry to an intractable ideology, that the right to arm a well-regulated militia will pass to poorly regulated men.

Half a century after the original bridge was dismantled, Ralph Waldo Emerson could look on its site from the window of his step-grandfather's house and begin to conceive the writings that Oliver Wendell Holmes called "our intellectual Declaration of Independence." I am ordinarily one of the last people on Earth to defend essentialism, but could an exception be made for geographic essentialism? Could the Hudson River School have taken root anywhere but the nation's first corridor of development, extending the hand of industry from the coastal cities into the hinterland? Could Impressionism have had its beginnings anywhere but on the Normandy coast, where reticent sunshine can give way to gusty rain, and back again, in a matter of minutes, and in a Paris shifted into overdrive by the railroads and the boulevards? And where else could Transcendentalism, the apotheosis of the individual, have emerged but in a place suffused with the spirit of independence?

But that spirit comes not from the battle. What once required the ungodly blood sacrifices of sons and brothers now comes cheap. Electronic communication emits a veritable machine-gun spray of shots heard round the world. The supply of wisdom greatly outpaces demand, and our Revolution of Enlightenment dissipates in a Thermidor of Glibness. Ideals have a kind of entropy. Two and a half centuries on, the only difference between the old national myth and the new one is that the new one is more insidious for not needing a king for a figurehead. Like an old piece of parchment, our founding principles are torn and burned around the edges, and now "freedom" can be defined however one wants, to exclude whomever one wants.

On the North Bridge, I had my first sighting of a beaver in the wild. A young gentleman called my attention to it, and what followed was one of those epiphanies wherein one paradoxically finds oneself by losing oneself, feeling independence through absorption. At first, I only saw what appeared to be a log in the water, but presently I noticed concentric rings radiating out from it, then I saw a little twig bending in front of it. After the twig had been gnawed off, the beaver swam away, with only its head out of the water. Soon, we could only follow its progress by a watery trail behind it. My impromptu companion said he had seen the beaver farther downstream a few minutes before. I thought it was a long way to swim for just a frail twig. The trail eventually vanished as the beaver rounded an eastward bend in the river, upon which I returned to my own lodge.

I had come to Concord as an aspiring writer to see if the place still offered the same lessons it gave to the writers of the century before last; my first lesson was that, while writing is the product of thought, it is important for the writer to stop thinking once in a while. For those few minutes, the beaver was a beaver, not a symbol of industry; the river was a river, not an index of the passage of time. Nature needs no comparison to the obsessions of humanity for validation; it has a virtue all its own. To a beaver, building a lodge is not work; it is life. Though I had never before witnessed a scene like this, my excitement was quickly replaced by a sense of familiarity. What was novel to me was ordinary to nature, and the longer I stood transfixed by this quotidian spectacle, the less of me there was. I watched the beaver swim not in order to see it – I never saw much of it to begin with – but to live a few minutes of my life along with it.

I forgot all about minutemen and redcoats. The burden of Americanness was lifted off my back. I found it no wonder that Emerson and Thoreau wrote so little about the event that made their hometown famous. The first shot the militiamen fired at the British may have been heard around the world, but it cannot be heard through time without marked distortion. The past is only a lure; the present is always the main attraction. To some, April 19, 1775 marks the birth of freedom, but for me, for whom that kind of freedom is still in gestation, the events of that day are of importance for granting me refuge in the republic of nature. History is not a thing to be looked at, but a platform from which to view something greater and more consequential. If I cannot belong to a nation, I will belong to the cosmos.

Thoreau ends the introductory chapter of his book on the Concord River with an invitation to contemplate and explore:

I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current… the shining pebbles, not yet anxious to better their condition, the chips and weeds, and occasional logs and stems of trees that floated past, fulfilling their fate, were objects of singular interest to me, and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me. 

Such apostrophizing reveals a mind as willing to identify with specimens of inanimate nature as with the society into which one is dropped at birth. It is an introduction to himself as much as to the river, expressing the urge to abandon the familiar and unsatisfactory to seek fulfillment in the unknown. Nature's metaphors will duly flow through our pens, but from time to time, we must return to the spring to make sure it still gives forth the same waters. Is this not the way all artists launch themselves on the world? Is it not the way I was launching myself on the bosom of ladyhood? Some people take to enslavement to society better than others; the rest of us are compelled to be free.

Concord's appeal lies in contrast. In no other place have I seen such a dominant seventh chord of nature and culture, whether it be a beaver on the battlefield, or a beach party near Thoreau's beanfield. Time has made the contrast as delicious as haroset and horseradish. Emerson chose the woods of Concord over the books of Boston, but the railroad soon brought the books to him. Today, the town presents the paradox of suburbia, the self-defeating mass movement to escape the masses, the embrace of nature that broke its back, the individualism of yesterday that by word of mouth becomes the conformity of today. A walk in the woods can be followed by a stroll through the shops; here is a place to turn one's mind off and on in quick succession. Here Alcott's little women found equal adventure in skating on the river and buying a hat. Concord is a better place to find oneself than a hermit’s abode in the wilderness, for in Concord one has a choice, though in the spirit of the Transcendentalists, I should describe it less as a choice than as a gravitation. Gravity makes the small great; from tiny quantum irregularities, it formed suns and planets. The slightest of choices, perhaps so slight as to be unconscious, parts the path of the soul from the path of the world, but where there are not too many trees to obstruct the view, the one remains visible from the other. Thoreau bragged of his ability to thrive in the wilderness, but he needed society, if only as a foil. For the Transcendentalist, society presents a menu of lifestyle choices to be rejected in turn, rather like Adam rejected each animal species as a mate. The only way to know what one is is to see what one is not. But those who lack the patience willingly choose from society's menu for the sake of convenience, as one chooses a fast-food dinner over cooking a wholesome meal.

I was in Concord on Emerson's birthday, but it seemed to go unacknowledged. I had the tour of Emerson's house to myself, while I had nearly a dozen companions on my visit to Louisa May Alcott's house. The neglect is not surprising. Emerson's essays demand constant attention; paragraph breaks are not rhetorical conveniences, but acts of mercy. He subscribed to Schlegel's maxim that "[i]n good prose, every word should be underlined." His writing has been described as an army of all officers. The mind rests nowhere if it does not rest everywhere. Emerson sought to distill the essence of the world, and found that the world's entirety was its essence; his essays are both epic and concise, every aphorism a candidate for the thought that birthed the universe. I read one of his sentences, and swear it is the most brilliant thing I've ever read until I read the next sentence. Inversely, anyone who is lost or put off by a sentence is likely to be more so after the next. But I have plunged too far into Emerson's mental labyrinth to shrug my shoulders and sigh chacun a son goût. I would be a poor disciple of a man who saw the prophetic spark in everyone if I attributed all disregard of him to a lack of understanding, just as I would not be fair to myself to think all bigots irredeemable. If I end a reading of Emerson without renewed hope for humanity, then I have not understood a thing.

The real trouble with Emerson is that he alerts us to problems we never knew we had. To hear that man never fell is an annoyance to those who await the End Times. To achieve material fulfillment, or to be on its cusp, and learn that one is spiritually an infant is unimportant to some, inconvenient to others, but for a few is an opportunity to recover their lost creativity. Emerson is most fragrant to those who have already had whiffs of dissatisfaction. His writings acted on me like a vaccine, injecting me with an innocuous dose of midlife crisis to immunize me against a more dire crisis. That crisis would take place a decade and a half further into life than his. The only question is whether, upon the loss of one's dearest beloved, one goes about finding a new wrapping for the newly exposed void at the heart of the self, or seeks to fill it. The latter is intelligence, the former a fool's errand. Marriages are addictive opiates, and we search in vain for another as potent. Our careers cannot serve. Faith in God cannot serve. Emerson and I can count ourselves lucky for having rejected these other sources of fulfillment beforehand. 

The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life…and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men. 

Had I read these lines by Emerson in the first few months after my wife's death, I would have regarded it much as a rejected lover does a friend's, "You'll find someone": an empty assurance worse than the brutal facts. But having waited two years to revisit his essay "Compensation," which ends thus appropriately – the death of a loved one being the ultimate proof of the human will – I can more easily accept his other optimistic pronouncements: that persecution is an attempt to fight against nature; that eventually, 'the truth is seen and the martyrs are justified,' even as the threat of ignorant rage tinges the air around me, and I have no appetite for martyrdom. A scientific proposition does not become a law until it is proven; Emerson's Law of Compensation is the only law proactively designated – a law-in-waiting. No matter how many times they are proven wrong, a prophet need only be proven right once. The skeptics will say we must work – even fight – to make such a prediction come true, but when simply being what one is is a revolutionary act, then seeing is equivalent to doing, and an argument proves to the same degree as it inspires. I can disagree with Emerson, but I don't want to. As an apostate art historian, I have ceased to regard beauty as a mere aesthetic property. I was not beautiful to myself until I was truthful to myself, and I maintain that nothing can be beautiful that is not right. Emerson confirmed this principle for me, even as the rightness of his words seemed paradoxically a product of their beauty.

Emerson’s essays contain few anecdotes, and his biography is little more than bibliography. He lived in his head, choosing such a life out of love for those of us who have no choice. Thought without experience is warp without the woof that locks it into a pattern, threads stretching on indefinitely. But in society, as in a tapestry, no pattern means no practicality. Materialists distinguish between “book smarts” and “street smarts” so as to denigrate the former, as if there could be anything smart about acting without awareness. The ruthless man of the street externalizes his inner conflict, creating strife through avoidance, achieving material victory through spiritual cowardice. The high school bully has street smarts. Through an act of mental jiu-jitsu, he puts down his withdrawn, bespectacled classmate for his intellectual prowess, and deprives him of his confidence in the classroom, the only place where he has any. The downtrodden prodigy then withdraws further into his shell – taking solace in the longevity of certain shelled creatures – wanting to fight back, but being no match for any opponent but himself; wanting friendship, but finding none whose love is unconditional except books. 

Art is consumed by those who want it, but is understood only by those who need it. Every sentence of a good book is balm to a different ailment, even those not yet identified in the writer's day; every idea a truth that passes in and out of focus at various historical distances, a repeating bass line to the chaconne of life, a god that recreates itself whenever sacred duty lapses and chaos reigns. But its most soothing consolation is the reminder that conflict makes us. Without conflict, there is no book, just as there is no true self without a false self. The Bhagavad Gita, much beloved by Emerson and Thoreau, ends with Arjuna resolving to fight, but the book would not exist did he not require Krishna to persuade him. His contribution to literature is not his resolution, but his doubt. What is true of myth and fiction is even more true of the essay; while the scholarly disquisition for which I was trained requires ironclad proof, and is tied up neatly at the end, Emerson wrote essays in the original sense of the word: as trials. He offers little evidence for his propositions, persuading us not of their truth, but only of their worthiness for investigation; he invites us to find our own proof, to pick up his pen. He leaves his life out, so we can put ours in, provided we have the insight to find space within his dense lines of prose. To quote Emerson is to misuse him, though a transgression for which his simple eloquence gives ample apology. Quotes are frozen ideas, but Emerson’s aphorisms inspire with the thrill of open-endedness in a world of forced finality: "He only can create who is." But being is not stillness. We know we have discovered the truth only when other discoveries follow from it. I don't want to find God because then I would stop looking. There are many means by which I can say what I think: a microphone, a digital video, a congressman's office; but only in writing can I trace the process that made my thoughts worth thinking.

Perhaps so many of the great writers are outside normative society because writing allows them to dissemble, to conceal as much as they express. Job wanted his words to be written in a book, so they could be remembered to the latest generation; I want to write my words in a book to cache them, to be dug up, and their meaning teased out, when society is ready for them. In this endeavor, my mentor is Louisa May Alcott, daughter of a friend of Emerson's who was much maligned for the sin of not keeping the Transcendentalist tenet of self-knowledge shut up in a book, but proclaiming it in the classroom, raising the hackles of those ursine parents who insist on bequeathing their prejudices to their children. At a time when it was thought that women weakened their constitutions by using their brains, Bronson Alcott built his daughter a desk.

I bought a copy of Little Women at the gift shop after touring Alcott's home in Concord, thinking it essential to my education as a lady, a formative influence of my belated female adolescence. But right in the first chapter, when Jo, the character Alcott modeled after herself, declares, "I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy," I could not read the book the same way. If Emerson was my leading indicator, Alcott was my lagging indicator. I picked up her book expecting to reverse engineer my womanhood, but I ended up reverse engineering my conscience.

Louisa May Alcott signed her name "Lou" in correspondence, declared herself "papa" to her nephews when she helped care for them after their father died, and described herself in an interview as "a man's soul put into a woman's body," the shma yisrael of the transgender person. I do not know how much significance to ascribe to these words; perhaps she was only employing her writer’s gift for metaphor. But every metaphor contains the possibility of literality. Making a single connection between two unlike things is an invitation to discover more connections – for the reader, if not the writer. But I will leave the biographical gleaning to others. For me, it does not matter what Alcott was; identity for the Transcendentalist is always a who, never a what – which is rather unfortunate for the cause of genderqueer rights; if I could explain my identity in any but a tautological way, I might elicit more understanding. The virtue of literature is that, while looking at pictures or listening to music may be a solitary or a gregarious act, reading is inherently solitary, so that every reader may feel like the book was written for them alone, and when the truly imaginative reader meets a writer of like astuteness, they may perceive it to be about them too. A good book is not a lesson, but test preparation; not a how-to manual, but a map; its purpose is not to educate, but to encourage. Alcott, like her father, knew that the lesson is already implanted in the child. A less self-aware writer might have made Little Women maddeningly importunate, but we can interpolate ourselves in Alcott's novel just as well as in any Emerson essay.

The first half of Little Women is less a continuous narrative than a string of vignettes, with one or more of the girls learning a lesson in each chapter. Only when the prospect of marriage presents itself does the plot acquire a shape and a flow. Childhood is a series of experiments with fantastical hypotheses and disconnected conclusions; adulthood is formula. Coming of age is science interrupted. When Meg's suitor proposes to her, Alcott, hardly able to contain her sarcasm, writes, "the love of power, which sleeps in the bosoms of the best of little women, woke up all of a sudden and took possession of her." The "little" in the title, it seems, does not refer to physical stature alone.

Alcott wanted Jo to remain unwedded like her, but popular sentiment demanded that girl characters be properly married. The only revenge she could get was to have Jo reject the boy her readers wanted her to marry in favor of an awkward, bookish professor – perhaps a male alter ego. Had I not so much sympathy for the rejected suitor, I would give this resolution the tepid applause it seems to demand. The earlier chapters are seen decidedly through the girls' eyes, but as the conclusion approaches, the social critic casts an ever-lengthening shadow over the proceedings. Amy's haranguing of Laurie after Jo's rejection of him, punctuated by the exhortation to "wake up and be a man," is rife with stereotypes of both gender binaries; Jo's romantic reveries are interrupted by a polemic – soporific by the author's own admission – on the need to be kind to "spinsters"; and I read the syrupy final chapter picturing Lou Alcott writing it with her teeth clenched.

The only lesson the little women don't learn all in one chapter is love. It is also the only lesson of womanhood I haven't had to learn all at once. It's a good thing I got a head start.

If Emerson was Concord's prophet, and Alcott its evangelist, Thoreau was its saint. His relics – his flute, his spyglass, his walking stick – adorn their own gallery at the Concord Museum, across the street from Emerson's house, where Thoreau lived for a time and tended the garden, its owner often not being bothered to do it himself, having decided that "[t]he genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic." Even nature was an abstraction to Emerson, something to be experienced in one setting and talked about in another. Thoreau is more accessible than Emerson, because while Emerson did what we could never do, Thoreau did what we feel we could do with just a little more prompting. Emerson's is a triumph of the intellect; Thoreau's is a triumph of the will. Emerson writes from insight, Thoreau from experience. Emerson is the man of thought, Thoreau the man of action.

But Thoreau is no Sun-tzu or Alberti. The privileged do-gooders who audaciously claim that you, too, can make only one pound of trash a year, or make a backyard wetland with your washing machine, are not his progeny. Neither is Walden a prototype for the myriad books in which a world-weary iconoclast lives in the wilderness for a time, and writes about how they grew, and what they learned, and how rotten society is. Thoreau stayed within walking distance of town, kept in contact with friends, sold his beans at the market, knowing that Christ was greater than John the Baptist – the most useful social critic criticizes from within. More important, for him the learning was already well underway. As Emerson stepped down from the pulpit before picking up his pen, Thoreau quit the schoolhouse before building his cabin. He hoed beans like Pollock painted pictures: not as labor, nor even as expression, but as an act of being. He never locked his cabin at Walden Pond, only his writing desk. His material possessions could be had by any vagrant; his thoughts were what he held most precious.

I am among those guilty of misusing Thoreau; I first read Walden as motivation for a stillborn scheme to grow my own food and live off the power grid, another blind lunge in a stumbling, quixotic pursuit of a reason to live, or perhaps an attempt to make myself as small as possible. It does no good to replace mindless work with activity one has no mind for. The most famous passage in Walden – "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," etc. – is also the most misleading. Action has a cause, but living needs no justification. He had a much briefer answer for people who asked him why he lived as he did: why did they live as they did? The creative mind knows no normality. Even rebellion seems to lapse quickly into formula.

Though nature is now on the back foot, what natural havens remain, like the woodland path that leads from Emerson's house to the site of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, are now all the more beautiful in contrast to the growing monstrosity of what they provide refuge from. "In the hush of these woods," Emerson wrote, "I find no Jackson placards affixed to the trees." Said Thoreau: "In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth's surface where a man does not stand from one year's end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man." Emerson has been criticized, in his time and since, for not speaking out against slavery sooner; and "Civil Disobedience" is for Thoreau the exception that proves the rule – an expression not of political sentiment, but of disdain for politics. Emerson insisted on waiting to speak until one had something to say, while Thoreau wanted a better medium than the ballot for his speech, but the slave can afford no such patience. Thus is haste its own fruit. Two centuries later, as deed races exponentially ahead of thought, the Transcendentalists' handicap becomes my incapacitation. The electronic landscape is rife with self-proclaimed experts, and the person who waits to speak is chided for not opposing those who speak impetuously. Who will break this cycle of glibness? Our media image is a disembodied reflex, the scratching of an itchy leg by an amputee. The liberal and the reactionary survive the translation into pixels; the human does not. Yesterday, the struggle was against taxation without representation; today it seems there is nothing to represent. Expression, literally speaking, is the extraction of inner juices, but our speech is nothing but discarded peelings that yet leave the fruit unrevealed. "There can be no concert in two," writes Emerson, "where there is no concert in one."

And it is thus that the most radical individualists of all, the queer quintessential Transcendentalists, constitute a "community." Nothing unites like truth. And ours is a truth that any child can sense, requiring no empirical justification, no abstract thought; a truth for which the only suitable response to gainsayers is "I know who I am." We feel our identity at a level too deep for rationality; there is a science to queer identity, but it is the subtle science of the soul, in the region at which the physical and the metaphysical asymptotically approach one another, where science and spirituality are interchangeable, just as matter and energy are interchangeable at velocities approaching light speed. We are easy targets for politicians not only because our community is so small, but because we are too contented to quibble with them. As Krishnamurti says, there can never be conflict between truth and falsehood, only between two falsehoods. Electrons cannot scatter light when they are within the orbit of an atom. We love too well for politics, the community of the cynical.

Individualism such as Emerson's is perhaps most possible in America, not constrained by any aristocracy, but his philosophy is antithetical to any sense of Americanness. The individualist must be willing to bite the hand that feeds, rejecting the new myths as soundly as the old ones. And what are our new national myths but secondary growth, sprouting from the decomposed old myths? The living say they are free thanks to those who sacrificed their lives at Concord, Gettysburg, and a thousand other places, and the dead cannot say otherwise. But freedom is a gift of nature, not the wages of war; and it is given anew at every moment, not at a single point in the past, henceforth to be guarded jealously. To achieve at the expense of another is not self-reliance. A country where every height is matched by a low point of equal measure is flat in the mean. Freedom is not to be found on old pieces of parchment, nor strewn across a battlefield like the extruded viscera of once-promising young men, but like an inner cosmic background, coming from everywhere and throughout time, easily overlooked for its constancy. Concord helps us see what is by showing us what is not; it inspires with the promise that is the other side of want.

If I could travel through time, I would tell Emerson to publish the following sentences, instead of confining them to his journal: "Women see better than men. Men see lazily if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act." "A highly endowed man with good intellect and good conscience is a man-woman." "Hermaphrodite is then the symbol of the finished soul." I would gently chide him for the archaic terminology, but I would also remind him of his principle of the unity of souls, which makes an audience distant in time as much his audience as is his next-door neighbor. So I speak little about the latest variations, and more about the themes. Were I to dwell on political squabbles, or the ravings of the too-smart-by-half, or theoretical diatribes about the social construction of gender, readers of the next century would only be nonplussed. "Of course she was a woman!" they would say. "How could anyone have thought otherwise?" Rather, in a future of more fine-tuned identities than the present, I hope my words will be as time-travelled echoes of a shout not quite burst from their lips, and they will see me as one of them, avant la lettre.

Emerson wrote of "finished souls," but rarely of himself. Does this mean that his soul was not finished? Among so many who will not practice what they preach, how refreshing it is to meet one who admits he cannot! I search in vain for a better way for a writer to fulfill the basic function of communicating to the reader than in inviting them to complete their realization. I write to express a congruence with all people and things; only the trappings are unique. This is entirely the reverse of my vocational training. The scholar of books reads the work of an earlier scholar and finds an enemy who has beaten them to the crossroads; a scholar of the world reads the great authors of two centuries prior and finds the same sympathy across time that they found in Plato and Shakespeare before them, and thus is the arrow of time wrapped into a circle of friends. Emerson said of Montaigne, "It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience." Scholars of books write to stake an exclusive claim; scholars of the world write expressly to be repeated. Before encountering the Concord writers, I read to learn; now I read to unlearn. The human soul is the mind minus knowledge, and the soul is the building block of the eternal community.  

 

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