Mapping Thoreau: A Crystallography of Ice

James- Poetics of Empiricism

“The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. The day is the epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer” - 291 Thoreau’s first sentence, “The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale” functions primarily as a proposition. The second sentence grounds this proposition with a scientific sensibility, starting with the certainty qualifying phrase, “generally speaking”, before detailing the natural dynamics of the Sun’s interaction with different depths of the pond. Immediately after though, Thoreau says, “The day is the epitome of the year”, simplifying the complicated changes between seasons and shifting his rhetoric from loose empirical claims to definite poetic ones. The original proposition is then restated. It is not backed up by any real scientific grounding, but by the simple observation that there are symmetries between the temperature of the day with the seasons of the year. This is to say, Thoreau as the empiricist appears here only to function as a springboard for his poetic rhetoric on time. The day is not just the year, it is the “epitome” of the year, that is, a perfect abstraction of it. The microcosm is not just similar to the macrocosm, but rather, it contains the macrocosm. Night is the winter, morning and evening are the spring and fall. Bringing this sort of poetic logic its extreme, time radically condenses. Years crumble into the here and now. It seems, to Thoreau, time is not a fixed frame, that, measuring our seasons, paints the portrait of our lives by way of years, but instead, starts and finishes a portrait today, even, moment to moment. ~ “The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its printing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side the inert bank, - for the sun acts on one side first- and on the other this luxuriant foliage the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me, - had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about.” 295 Turning from physical descriptors to the mythic, Thoreau as an empiricist melts into Thoreau as a poet. We are at the outset, carried by his scientific rhetoric, his measurements, the bank which is “twenty to forty feet” and the mass of foliage which extends a “quarter mile” only to be thrown into pagan fantasy. Suddenly, this foliage is not a passive growth but the creation of the “artist who made the world”, and we, like Thoreau, stand before creation that is ever fresh. The poetic thrust of this passage emphasizes natural environmental interactions not as passive reactions of cause and effect that should go ignored, or simply measured, but rather as ordained events, excesses of divine energy given form. Not unlike his reflections on time, there is a movement to poetically consecrate nature and the moment - all of time is here today, and here also, before us, is creation, forever becoming from its source.

~ Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, Umbilicaria, on the side of the head, with its lobe or drop. The lip - labium, from labor (?) - laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by the cheek bones. 297 The borders between the Natural World and Man have completely dissolved. Man is comprised of the vegetative, his palm, that of a leaf, his lips, “Labium” like the center of a rose; man is of fungi, his ears, “Umbilicaria”, lichen, or which grows upon rock; his face is of the mineral world, his nose “stalactite”, formed over hundreds of thousands of years - his chin is even older. Thoreau lives in a waking dream of the natural philosopher. Every scientific classification leads to the scientifically impossible - the very muse of his poetic imagination, natural science, denies the reality of his visions. Yet nothing about Thoreau’s writing suggests insincerity, aesthetic flourishes for the sake of flourishes - nor of delusion. Thoreau writes, “The ear may be regarded fancifully, as lichen”... that is, the ear is thought of imaginatively as lichen. Thoreau knows he colors reality by imagination, but considers this coloring just as real. If man is of the vegetative, mineral and fungi world, each inexpressibly connected through motion, then imagination is too. ~ The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologist and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flower and fruit, - not fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. It's throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful molds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter. 298 Thoreau puts forward his major conceit. The earth is to be studied, measured, examined, yes, but as something alive, as “living poetry”. The world is not dead, nor is it fragmented. Giving the earth “throes”, an intense pain associated with birth or death, Thoreau not only anthropomorphizes the planet, but also relativizes man. It’s labors will “heave our exuviae from their graves”. Man will perish before the earth. Our skins, and our lives are insect shells to both its ancient and future revolutions. Vegetable and animal life, man included, is merely “parasitic”. Even our art is something, almost, less, something contrived, when compared to the “forms which this molten earth flows out into.” Institutions too, held like so much else in human life to be separate from nature are but ‘“clay in the hands of the potter”. Our own structures are then paradoxically beyond us, a product of a greater culture than our own. There is a decentralizing of human narrative in Thoreau’s poetics here. Man is treated as inert and expendable, mouldable, instead (as is commonly the case) of the Earth. Yet at the same time, his poetics divinize us. Deeming all things organic, of naturalistic origin, divine, we are gracefully included in his grand and eternal vision. Our image of ourselves is slightly lowered, offered to the mercy of this ‘great potter’, but our worth is exponentially and fundamentally increased.

CONCLUSION:

Thoreau is an empiricist. Yet, he is even more so, in my opinion, a poet. This is to say, his poetry does not sit idly by his scientific empiricism, as a hobby, or something he does when he is simply free of labors. Instead, it is deeply intertwined with his empiricism - colors it, gives it feeling and force. How often it is that his measurements, the primal material of any scientific endeavor, are distilled, broken down into their basest elements, and then, by poetic amplification, coagulated and crystallized into symmetries that destroy the borders between divinity, nature, and man. Thoreau is an Alchemist. He does the impossible. By way of comparing the temperature of the day to the seasons, he turns days into years, saying, “The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer”. He sanctifies and mythologizes the mundane, putting us before the source of creation at every moment. The foliage which grows at the edge of Walden is not just proof of the functions of the ponds biome, but is also, as Thoreau says, “of the Artist who made the world and me… still at work, sporting on this bank...with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about.” Thoreau might not only be an Alchemist, but he may be one of the last and greatest, himself distilled, purified from serious superstitions and with only a tincture of the hopelessness of the modern age. He, unlike so many other alchemists, does not see his work outside of himself, searching for some naive goal of wealth or immortality, but instead, sees himself as the work. When he studies his environment, his primal material, he studies himself. He sees that man's hand is but a “spreading palm leaf….The ear… a lichen, the nose... stalactite.” He sees that the earth “is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book… but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flower and fruit”. Constantly, Thoreau launches from scientific empiricism into a metaphysics of poetry, and then, back again. Lead turned to gold, he humbly to his first matter. Thoreau recognizes what certain hermetic traditions might call the ‘anima mundi’, or the “the world soul”, both radically relativizing his position as within, part of, and subject to, the earth. Yet, in this challenge towards the human narrative, that the earth is not our subject, he still divinizes every element of his and our existence. The prima materia is both the beginning of the work, and it’s final, perfected form. Thoreau is an excellent empiricist, but, as far as he would humor this distinction - which perhaps he wouldn’t - I see him better as a poet. And, perhaps, as the great late Alchemist of the nineteenth century.