24: Experience
Should we fear the hobgoblins of consistency? And to what end? Can you be a philosopher if you write essays that don’t have a clearly stated point, and if so, what kind is Ralph Waldo Emerson: American individualist prophet or misunderstood pre-Nietzschean post-Stoic?
The Sometime Seminar discusses “Experience,” from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s First Series of essays (1841).
This is a really good program. I was happy to hear your respect for Emerson and allowing him to know what he’s doing.
Normally one in encouraged to comment when there is at least a hint of disagreement–that is, I might want to contend with your presentation. But I don’t, as you allowed for so much and were so generous that it would be hard to quibble. I think that is the right stance to take with Emerson. He is “unsounded” in that his words seem to have no bottom to interpretation. To stop interpreting Emerson is to be “settled” and what does he say his primary project is? To unsettle all things (and I think by extension we might conclude that this means he is himself “unsettled” by his thinking and writing).
Probably the most prescriptive passage in Emerson that I know is this one from the ever-misread “Self-Reliance”:
“Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why, then, do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is.”
This seems to me, “where we find ourselves” (perhaps “in my way”).
Emerson is the poet of “gaps”–Melville follows him in this way. And I suppose this would my one disagreement–that Melville does not disparage Emerson a la the portrayal in the Confidence Man, but rather parodies the “easy” interpretation of what is, as you say, the American Emerson. A well-known letter from M to Duyckinck perhaps honestly complicates, at least, Melville’s response (and might even draw Waldo into the role of “begetter”):
“Nay, I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing in any other man’s swing. Yet I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture he is an uncommon man. Swear he is a humbug — then is he no common humbug. Lay it down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson would not have mystified — I will answer, that had not Old Zack’s father begot him, old Zack would never have been the hero of Palo Alto. The truth is that we are all sons, grandsons, or nephews or great-nephews of those who go before us. No one is his own sire. — I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish; I had only glanced at a book of his once in Putnam’s store — that was all I knew of him, till I heard him lecture. — To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho’ to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain. — Now, there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctuly perceptible. This I see in Mr Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; — then had I rather be a fool than a wise man.”
But I will leave that alone.
I had two thoughts that were “punny” and two texts I wonder if you have had a chance to look at.
First, “ejaculate” and “pudency”–I find that there are often surprisingly sexual terms in Emerson that we somehow dismiss as sexual–that is, how can Emerson, particularly the “schoolboy” Emerson, be sexual! But the use of ejaculate in the essay is exactly sexual (not salacious, but biological) and refers us back to the way life is power–in the shooting of the gulf! “Life has no memory. That which proceeds in succession might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from being conscious, knows not its own tendency.”
It is from this perspective that I tend to think of all of Emerson’s essays, no, sentences–ejaculations which “essay to be.” They are “be-comings.”
Emerson is impudent (unashamed)–baring his genitals and ejaculating a way of being. The “art of life has a pudency”–that is the “art” and not “life”–life is impudent. And this is the model of Emerson’s expression. A kind of anarchist of prose. It will not take orders!
Sorry for going on–this great show made me want to join in!
The two texts you might know or might be interested in knowing: 1. Morse Peckham’s intro to an edition of the Essays (both series) and 2: Mark Edmundson’s book on grieving in Milton, Wordsworth, Emerson and Freud (please don’t let the Edmundson of late prejudice your approach to this book!), Towards Reading Freud.
Thanks!
Doug Storm
Bloomington, IN
What a fantastic comment, Doug. I’m very glad to hear your thoughts, and glad that the podcast sparked them. That letter of Melville’s was in fact just what I was thinking of (along with the rather less charitable stuff in The Confidence-Man, yes) when I made my offhand remark about his judgment of Emerson; but I’m glad to see, on re-reading it, that it’s less of a condemnation than I remembered!
I must have read the Peckham introduction at some point, but I don’t remember it well — and I’m pretty sure I’ve never read the Edmundson book at all — so thanks very much indeed for the recommendations. To reciprocate: my new favorite work on the topic of loss in Emerson is On Leaving, by Branka Arsić, the best thinker I know of who’s writing about the Transcendentalists these days.
Hi, Roger, thanks so much. I really had never given that “ejaculate” comment much thought but it struck me this time as so perfect as a kind of transumption.
Peckham seems right on to me (in most of his work!) but he also has a great essay on Hawthorne and Melville that would make a good companion to the Emerson.
I actually bought the Arsić book not that long ago (haven’t touched it though) because I have a kind of all things Emerson sickness! With your recommendation I will take it off the shelf.
Another thought:
“Where do we find ourselves?”
I was thinking of the sort of nightmare of being “on a stair” and not know what was above or what might be below (coming after us?)–I was first put in mind of some scenes in Nicholas Christopher’s novel Veronica which are based on the Bardo Thodol, but then realized that there was the description of Piranesi’s work in De Quincey:
Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c.&c. expressive of enormous power put forth and resistance overccome. Creeping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unnfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.–With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams. In the early stage of my malady, the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural: and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds.
And only with a search did I discover Emerson mentions Piranesi in his poem “Ode To Beauty” (1843), which seems a kind of ode to terror displayed in form of “endless growth and reproduction” (but not improvisation). I see from one of my books that Emerson met De Quincey in 1848. Here’s a bit of the poem:
Is it that my opulent soul
Was mingled from the generous whole;
Sea-valleys and the deep of skies
Furnished several supplies;
And the sands whereof I ’m made 50
Draw me to them, self-betrayed?
I turn the proud portfolio
Which holds the grand designs
Of Salvator, of Guercino,
And Piranesi’s lines. 55
I hear the lofty pæans
Of the masters of the shell,
Who heard the starry music
And recount the numbers well;
Olympian bards who sung 60
Divine Ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.
Oft, in streets or humblest places,
I detect far-wandered graces, 65
Which, from Eden wide astray,
In lowly homes have lost their way.
It’s somewhat “irrelevant” other than it’s a powerful image that seems probably about as perfect for Emerson as any other (both diffident and ambitious)…though, I’ll admit that I want it not to be: the stair metaphor, while obviously allowing for movement shackles us with Chapman’s Emerson (1898)–at best this mobility (this up and down) leaves no room for “whim” or improvisation. Stuck upon the stairway (of no surprises!).
From Barbara Packer’s book on Waldo, the chapter on “Experience”:
“From the beginning of the essay the concept of experience is already involved in ironies. The opening image, which compares life to the climbing of an endless staircase, has reminded more than one critic of a Piranesi engraving, and Porte has pointed out that Emerson’s references to “lethe” and “opium” recall a passage in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, where Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione is explicitly mentioned. But De Quincey was describing dreams induced by an actual drug; Emerson is describing he ordinary waking consciousness, life as it presents itself to the senses.”