The Art of Losing: Reading Thoreau’s Journal Practices

Kristen Case

From Ball's? Hill the Great Meadow looks more light-perhaps it is the medium between the dark & light above mentioned. Mem. Try this experiment again. i.e. look not toward nor from the sun but athwart this line. Seen from this hill in this direction--there are here and there dark-shadows spreading rapidly over the surface here & there where the wind strikes the water. The water toward the sun seen from this height--shows not the broad silvery light but a myriad fine sparkles. The sky is full of light this morning--with different shades of blue--lighter below, darker above, separated perhaps by a thin strip of white vapor.-- Thicker in the east. (4:430-1)

This passage was likely written in pen in Thoreau’s attic room in the Main Street house on the morning of the 11th from field notes taken the morning of the 10th of April, 1852. At a later date, small additions and a footnote were added in pencil. In Thoreau’s journal practices, every journal entry bears reference to at least three temporal points: the moment of observation, the moment of writing, and the moment of subsequent correction, gathering, and rearranging. But each of these modes must be further complicated: observation was not a single moment but a span of several hours of walking punctuated by the writing of field notes. Writing was in part a process of reading and arranging those notes, typically the following morning, and recasting them in the present tense. The retrospective journal-work—the penciled corrections and deletions, the copying of dates and notes into the charts of seasonal phenomena—was similarly ongoing and intermittent (Neufelt and Simmons 631). Each of these practices not only overlapped with but also helped to constitute and sustain the others.

Reading with Thoreau’s material writing process in mind, I am struck by the continual crossing of temporal experiences manifested in the use of the present tense for the previous day’s observations: “The sky is full of light this morning.” The present tense is and the deictic this are adopted here not as they might be in a finished literary work to affect a reader with a sense of immediacy but rather as a making-present, for the writer, of a lived past: a gathering of past experience into the present materiality of writing. Similarly, the instruction “try this experiment again” projects a past and present self into the future by means of an imagined repetition, an experiment, that most Thoreauvian of modes, in which thought is a practice, “an ‘It works!’ that belongs to the register of creation” (Stengers 42).

The notation – “Mem. try this experiment again” – is a material memorandum: gerundive of memorare, literally “something to be brought to mind” the “to be” here signaling that the mind in question is located in the future: writing --the physical process and the material page--bridges the moment of seeing and the moment of seeing again, becomes a space in which each of these temporal points may be experienced simultaneously.

One might read this entry as reflective of what Jane Bennett has called a “vital materialism”: this is no passive, objective landscape, but a living one, “dark-shadows spreading rapidly over the surface.” Moreover the entry presents not a series of natural “objects” but rather a field of shifting phenomena in which the observer is not only an active but also a constitutive part. Here we might say that Thoreau’s vision corresponds to a new materialist ontology, in which, as Karen Barad writes, the “primary ontological units are not ‘things’ but phenomena—dynamic topological reconfigurings/ entanglements/ relationalities/ (re)articulations” (818). I am drawn to this reading, but I have my reservations about it, too. The claim that Thoreau anticipates new materialism invites me to attend to certain moments of the journal: particularly moments of encounter and of phenomenological description. But I wonder what might be elided in this critical practice, what my investment in this redescription of Thoreau’s writing might obscure. In recognition of the dangers of this investment, I want to take as a critical starting point not the new materialism, which refers to a philosophical position, but the closely related field of science studies, which refers to a practice: specifically, the study of scientific knowledge as it is materially produced.[i] Following philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, I want to read the Journal as an “ecology of practices” (37).

*

The passage that follows is from the Journal entry of the following day, April 11, 1852, likely written up the morning of the 12th from field notes.

The sight of Nut Meadow Brook in Brown’s land--reminds me that the attractiveness of a brook depends much on the character of its bottom…I stop to look at the circular shadows of the dimples over the yellow sand-- & the dark brown clams on their edges in the sand at the bottom. I hear the sound of the piano below as I write this and feel as if the winter in me were at length beginning to thaw--for my spring has been even more backward than nature’s. For a month past life has been a thing incredible to me. None but the kind gods can make me sane-- If only they will let their south winds blow on me. I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be tender to the fire that melts them. To naught else can they be tender. The sweet flags are now starting up under water two inches high-- & minnows dart. A pure brook is a very beautiful object to study minutely--it will bear the closest inspection--even to the fine air bubbles like minute globules of quicksilver that lie on its bottom. (4:433-4)

I have come to this passage wanting to talk about materiality, but the passage wants to talk to me about time. That is: the word materialist seeks to make a claim. The phrase new materialist complicates that claim by adding new claims to it. (Roughly, we might say that materialism makes the claim that the world is composed only of matter, and that new materialism adds to that claim several complicating claims about the nature of matter: principally that is more agential, complex, self-organizing, and transverse than allowed for in earlier materialist philosophies.) But when, oriented by these claims, I return to Thoreau’s material processes, I find that these processes are neither governed nor governable by claims but by rather by other, related processes which push me away from the language of philosophical position or argument and toward the particulars of a life, which is to say, toward the astonishingly replete material record of an ecology of practices. The critical move to isolate these practices from one another and read them principally as evidence for a position seems to me a fundamental distortion. To say this is perhaps to experiment with a different sort of claim: to re-make the bounds,[ii] in this sense, is not to forgo the tools of literary or philosophical analysis in favor of a more biographical or historicist approach, but rather to submit my thinking about Thoreau to the demands of what Stengers calls, borrowing from biological studies of symbiosis, “reciprocal capture.” “In contrast [to parasitism], we can speak of reciprocal capture whenever a dual process of identity construction is produced: regardless of the manner, and usually in ways that are completely different, identities that coinvent one another integrate a reference to the other for their own benefit.” (Stengers 36)

I want to read the passage above in terms of its complex and fluid materiality. I want to talk about the circular shadows of the dimples over the yellow sand and darting minnows and minute globules of quicksilver, but the passage presses upon me its distortions and layerings of time, its relentless maneuverings between various nows, its conspicuous navigation of a field of losses. These temporal shifts operate as a constraint.[iii] My pull toward Barad’s “dynamic topological reconfigurings/ entanglements/ relationalities/ (re)articulations” is not refused but complicated, resisted, by something I had not wanted to see: not relation but isolation, withdrawal, loss.

Most arresting here is Thoreau’s interruption of his present-tense recording of the previous afternoon’s experiences with a real-time rendering of his thoughts while writing, each of these two senses of the present already estranged in the way words always are from the experiences which they extend. And so a double immediacy, a double present, and also a double loss. “For a month past life has been a thing incredible to me” is suggestive of Thoreau’s particular and periodic bouts of practical skepticism: an inability to credit life, to grant it the value of his active investment. As H. Daniel Peck observes in his invaluable study Thoreau’s Morning Work, the expression of this crisis as an estrangement from nature, and especially from seasonal rhythms --“my spring has been even more backward than nature’s”–reflects Thoreau’s life long preoccupation with time as both linear (and so composed of continual loss) and circular (and so restorative).

What might be lost, then, in attending to Thoreau’s positions at the expense of his processes, is loss itself: the mourning occasionally spoken but always inscribed in his evocations of even the liveliest of material entanglements. I want to suggest that the ecology of practices that constituted the Journal work was at least in part a management of that loss—a way of practicing daily both passionate attachment and a willed passivity in letting go. If a reabsorbtion in life is what Thoreau awaits and begins to feel–or rather, what he awaited and began to feel in his study on the morning of April 12th as he wrote the afternoon of April 11th –it is a reabsorbtion itself composed of passivity and loss, a wholly dependent asking and the registering of an already-vanished present. To attend to this loss is not, I would submit, to position it against Thoreau’s evocations of the materiality of nature, but rather to see these as part of Thoreau’s complex mechanism–itself composed of material practices–for registering time and integrating loss.

In closing, a hypothesis: that as readers we might follow Thoreau in a different way than we have supposed–not as a representative of certain literary or philosophical positions, but as an expert practitioner of an ethic that encompasses, along with active engagement, a letting go that might transform critical parasitism into reciprocal capture. To adopt such an ethic requires the kind of attention a materialist orientation can foster, but it also requires a tenderness to the fire: a willingness to be transformed by those aspects of a text most difficult to account for in our critical discourse.

Notes:

[i] Many new materialists, including Karan Barad and Stacy Alaimo, work within the field of science studies. Likewise, the most influential figures within science studies, Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, have been important sources for new materialism; however new materialism represents a more recent and more internally consistent phenomenon than science studies. Another, perhaps more contested, way to describe this relation would be to say that new materialism represents a recent outgrowth within science studies that critiques the “strong constructivist” position of earlier work in the field, seeking to balance a perceived overemphasis on cultural and linguistic forces with a renewed attention to materiality. For the purposes of this paper I am interested mainly in the distinction between the practice and position.

[ii] “That is what I had been doing all my life, making bounds, or rather finding them, remaking what had been unmade, where they were away” (Journal 10: 232).

[iii] “Unlike conditions, which are always relative to a given existent that needs to be explained, established, or legitimized, a constraint provides no explanation, no foundation, no legitimacy. A constraint must be satisfied, but the way it is satisfied remains, by definition, an open question” (Stengers 43).

Works Cited: 

Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter

Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28:3 (2003). Web. 10 December, 2013.

Neufelt, Leonard N. and Nancy Craig Simmons. “Historical Introduction.” The Writings of Henry D.  Thoreau: Journal, Volume 4: 1851-52. Ed. Leonard N. Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992. Print.

Peck, H. Daniel. Thoreau’s Morning Work: Memory and Perception in A Week on The Concord and

Merrimack Rivers, the Journal, and Walden. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990. Print.

Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Journal, Volume 4: 1851-52. Ed. Leonard N. Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992. Print.