Roger McGuinn

Thoreau’s June

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

We’ve already heard from Claude McKay and Thomas Wentworth Higginson on the month of June, and now it’s time to turn to one of the foremost spirits of the mid-19th century American Transcendentalist movement, Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau is well-known for being in the activist, live-the-ideals, wing of Transcendentalism, though readers here have been introduced to Thoreau’s contemporary Thomas Wentworth Higginson—more than a footnote in the Emily Dickinson story—who also spent considerable time living those ideals.

Henry David Thoreau

Collect the series: Unfortunate Hair Stylings of Important Personages

 

Thoreau and Transcendentalism’s major domo Ralph Waldo Emerson lived in the same town in Massachusetts, and one of the most striking things for me when I first visited that town, Concord, was to think that in a matter of a few blocks there lived Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott—all in this place not that much larger than the small farming community I grew up in. What a town that must have been in those years!

Transcendentalism is a little hard to put a finger on exactly as a movement because it was interested in and had change-convictions about so many things. Higginson in his 1899 collection of memoir pieces Cheerful Yesterdays  calls it “The Period of the Newness” and speaks of “The Sisterhood of Reforms.”

My current working-definition of Transcendentalism is it is the belief that there is a primary knowledge to be obtained from the deep study and meditation on the structures and methods of nature, as opposed to the accumulation of received and conventional truths about it. Thoreau the Transcendental activist helped to pioneer this, often writing about his direct experience of nature. His thought process also caused him to develop political ideals, including Civil Disobedience to unjust and violent government actions, famously inspiring Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Thoreau didn’t just inspire Gandhi and King with his writing. The first story I ever heard of Thoreau recounted the tale of Ralph Waldo Emerson visiting Thoreau who had been jailed for refusing to pay taxes as a protest against the Mexican-American war and its support of slavery.

Henry, what are you doing in there?” Emerson asked across the jail door bars.

“Waldo, the question is, what are you doing out there?” Thoreau replied.

But here’s one lesser known thing about Thoreau, the deep naturalist, writer and political activist: he was also something of an engineer. Between writing and other activities, he was active in his father’s business, a small factory that made pencils. A chief problem at the time was the formulation of the graphite used in the “lead” for these indispensable writing instruments. Thoreau’s father’s pencils, like other American pencils at the time, used a too soft binder that led to a crumbling point and blurry line. Through study of European pencils (and one suspects a little lab time on his part) Henry David Thoreau, Transcendentalist writer, philosopher, and activist figured out a clay formulation to mix with the powdery graphite to produce a much better American pencil. Profits from the sale of these pencils and the underlying technology* were largely what supported Thoreau’s writing career.

Not to make too fine a point of it—and King and Gandhi might have found other inspiration, and Thoreau other funding—but the 20th century Afro-American civil rights movement and the independence of the Indian sub-continent owe something to a thing as prosaic as a better pencil design—monumental things that literally come from a feet of clay.

Today’s piece is a short meditation taken from an entry in Thoreau’s Journals for June 6th 1857. Adding to the above connection, when Thoreau was writing his nature observations in the field, he most likely was doing so using a pencil of his own design. Note too that at one point engineer-Thoreau talks of the revolution of thought connected to the revolution of the natural cycle of seasons as if they are the meshing of a gear train.

Thoreau June 6 1857

Handwriting as bad as mine! The page from Thoreau’s journal containing today’s text.

 

Written as prose, it has a flow that I could find to recite and accompany it with music. The piece’s chordal part I played on an electric 12-string guitar recorded in the manner Roger McGuinn and the engineers on The Byrds recordings devised in the Sixties. Instead of the John Coltrane-inspired lead 12-string melodic line of something like “Eight Miles High”  I played an acoustic guitar with an E-Bow, a magnetic invention that drives a guitar string to vibrate and produce a flute-like sound. As I read a little about Thoreau this week, I came upon the information that he was also an avid flute player, so it seems appropriate.

The player gadget is below. My apologies for being away from this blog and blog activities so far in June—you know, life and things.

 

 

 

 

*Here’s more about Thoreau and his pencils. I first heard the story on the radio series “Engines of our Ingenuity”.

I Felt a Funeral in My Brain

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

Before leaving our Transcendental Trio of Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson, we should feature another set of words from Emily Dickinson, particularly since today is her birthday.

Besides the poems themselves, Emily Dickinson is a series of cracking good stories. One story is similar to guitar poets Robert Johnson, Nick Drake, or Rodriguez, all artists who never made it during their prime, but who get discovered later and find greater distribution and acclaim. In Dickinson’s case, she wrote most of her work in the middle of the 19th Century. After her death in 1886 over 1700 poems were discovered in her papers, and a selection of her work was published in the 1890s. As fortuitous as this discovery was, the process was fraught with complex family dynamics and a decision by the editors to edit the work to make it more conventional for print. All this was not sorted out until the last 60 years or so when readers could finally read the poems Dickinson wrote as she wrote them. So, there’s one good story—one every little-published author can envy.

Then there’s the legend of Dickinson’s life itself, which was in the forefront as I was introduced to Dickinson as young man: Poor Emily, naïve and unlucky in love with a mystery man in her youth, she secludes herself in an attic and spends the rest of her life cloistered like a nun, the patron saint of introverts everywhere. This turns out, like most myths, to be a misleading account.

I’m not a Dickinson scholar, no more than I’m an expert on Blake, Sandburg, Frost, Whitman, or Emerson. I’m a poet who’s worked at that for 50 years, a musician who’s done what he can for 40 years, and for about 20 years I worked in hospitals, mostly in emergency departments. I’ve got my theories, like those that have spent more time on Dickenson. She’s clearly whip smart and no more naïve than Frank O’Hara or Margaret Atwood. When she presents herself as naïve, she’s role-playing. She’s as stubborn about her own theology and philosophy as William Blake, and she’s just as stubborn and original about her musical tactics as Joni Mitchell. She can be as mordantly funny about the human condition as Leonard Cohen.

On one Dickinson question, I wonder about neurological matters. As an introvert myself, I suspect introversion, perhaps even something “on the spectrum” as they say these days. One thing non-introverts don’t understand is that it takes a whole lot of energy for introverts to do what others think of as little things.  Add to that the burden of being an intelligent, free thinking woman with a talent for writing in the 19th Century—well then, choosing to restrict one’s social obligations makes a lot of sense.

A few years back, a Dickinson biography was published that suggested that Dickinson may have been an epileptic. Another theory is that she suffered from migraines. There may be something there, and either could explain her choice in reducing her social interaction. In poems like I Felt a Funeral in My Brain, one can easily see metaphors that could be framed as reports of the pre-event auras that suffers experience, as well as post-ictal, after the event states—but let’s show some respect here. I remember reading as a youth that Monet may have painted his impressionist water lilies because he became near-sighted as he aged, and those ponds just looked blurry to him. Well, I’m nearsighted, and I can’t paint like Monet; and if Monet’s art includes elements of a medical condition, “explaining” it that way is reductionist. Monet would still have to choose to paint those water lilies blending and floating, and if Emily Dickinson had migraine auras and dreadful headache episodes, she’s still have to choose to write so originally and vitally as she does in I Felt a Funeral in My Brain.

Biographical mysteries echo the mystery of the poems, but there are plenty of poets with plain lives and mysterious poems. Dickinson is a master of first lines, as this one has. That first line/title might lead one to expect a Roger Corman directed Edgar Allen Poe pulp movie—and you can enjoy the poem as that. Others see it as a statement of desperation, as a statement of sincere anguish at potential unrealized, “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.”  If one wants to take the migraine approach—or for non-suffers, those who’ve had a really bad hangover—you can read it sardonically, “Hey, stop with that clomping around in your boots. You know what kind of night I had!”  You can read it as a meditation on a death foretold.

To the degree I had to choose as a reader I somewhat favored that last one, but with a bit dark humor underlying it, “Get the damn obligatory service over will you, I’m ready to contemplate oblivion.”  That last stanza may be a change in mood. I was reminded of Roger McGuinn’s fine song 5D as I was reading Dickinson’s poem this time, “And never hit bottom and keep falling through just relaxed and paying attention.”

Musically, I started by aiming for something like John Cale’s arrangements for Nico.  I played all the instruments, and the syth part came out something like that. The piano part was an adventure in that I’m not a piano player, and keeping with the John Cale idea, I tried to channel Cale’s part on Nick Drake’s Northern Sky, though the result is something else. Now if I could just dream of translating a bit of Danny Thompson on bass! Well never mind, no one can listen to intentions, but you can hear the results by clicking the gadget that will appear below.