In Awe of My Body
I can’t stop thinking about a specific passage in Thoreau’s The Maine Woods. It has lodged itself in my mind and seems to be preventing me from thinking about anything else. I have a sense that I must address it—flesh it out, so to speak—before it will loosen its grip on me.
The passage in question is a fairly famous one, at least among Thoreau acolytes and scholars. The first essay in The Maine Woods, “Ktaadn,” recounts the first of three trips Thoreau made to Maine, and specifically his (attempted) ascent of Mount Katahdin. The weather was unfavorable, however, and the views he had hoped for were obscured by clouds and mist. His description of the ascent is, in my opinion, some of his most compelling writing.
It reminded me of the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of Atlas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus. Such was Caucasus and the rock where Prometheus was bound. Æschylus had no doubt visited such scenery as this. It was vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits. Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than [one]*. There is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him than in the plains where men inhabit. His reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtle, like the air. Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, Why came ye here before your time. This ground is not prepared for you. Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain [that I am not your genial mother]*? Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear.
“Ktaadn,” The Maine Woods, *bracketed sections are unpublished, analogous sections from the Journal
He attempted two ascents but ultimately never reached the summit either time. Intriguingly, it wasn’t until after he descended below the clouds for the second time that he felt the full gravity of his experience. This is when the famous passage, the one stuck in my mind, occurs:
I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?
“Ktaadn,” The Maine Woods
Vast, Titanic Human Nature
Recently I took my brother to the emergency room. It was a very serious situation, one that thankfully ended positively after a brief hospital stay. My brother can’t tell us what’s wrong, what he’s feeling, or what he needs, so we have to be extremely attentive and rely on our knowledge of his patterns and behaviors to discern—as best we can—what he’s experiencing. Taking him anywhere, especially the hospital, is unfathomably difficult for him and us, and while we of course want him to be healthy and receive the care he needs we also have to weigh whether his state warrants undergoing another traumatizing experience in a medical setting.
When I say taking him to the hospital is traumatizing, I fear some may misunderstand me or think I’m exaggerating. As I mentioned, my brother cannot communicate verbally, though he does make vocalizations and will yell and scream. In a hospital setting, he has no understanding of where he is, why he is there, who the nurses and doctors are, and, most challenging of all, no understanding of what they need of him. Even something as simple as putting a pulse oximeter on his finger results in violent thrashing, screaming, and self injury. Drawing blood or getting IV medication requires either a small army of people to hold him still or chemical restraints—sometimes both.
I can understand that for many people who don’t care for or know someone like my brother my musings about his “wildness” may seem like overdramatic and overblown romanticizing at best, or potentially ableist comparisons to nonhuman animals at worst. But it is difficult to convey just what he’s like in these situations without resorting to these sorts of descriptions. Only when you’ve experienced that kind of Titanic wildness will what I’m saying make any sense.
Sense, though, is probably the wrong word to use here, because it’s anything but rational or mental. It’s bloody and visceral, pure emotion and pure feeling, sheer will. That same vast and Titanic force that Thoreau encountered on Katahdin lives in my brother.
Annihilating The Body
It seems at times in “Ktaadn” that Thoreau is struggling with how to reconcile his experience of fierce, wild nature on Katahdin—natura naturans, or nature naturing—with his experience of a more genial and nurturing nature below the clouds. Put differently, he struggles with the relationship between those two aspects of nature he experienced: do they correspond to something within us as well as outside of us?
Transcendence is built on the dualism that underwrites alienation from the body and so necessitates that nature will always be “elsewhere.” It splits open a gulf between body and spirit, elevates the spirit then annihilates the body, so the spirit may cry out perpetually for loss of a home, of bodily touch, of warmth—of “Contact!“
Seeing New Worlds, Laura Dassow Walls
On the other hand, it seems that he isn’t just struggling to relate these two aspects of nature, but to unify them. I resonate with this impulse; I also want to understand not only the relationship between or within those two modes of nature but also how to unify them and, maybe, feel whole again.
If the Romantic and Transcendental project is built upon a fissure between spirit and matter, mind and body, one result is the internalization of that fracture within the individual. Which is to say, many of us (myself included) have an internal experience of our selves as severed or separated, and then project that split onto nature, locating wildness, matter, bodies, earth on one side, and culture, mind, spirit, heaven on the other.
Wrestling Titans
My experience in the emergency room reveals to me that I am somewhat accustomed to this dualism and, in many ways, rely upon it and the protection it brings. If I’m honest, unifying these dualities is a terrifying idea: when kept apart the ferocity of matter is much less threatening, but bridging that gap leaves us vulnerable to the many contingencies of physicality. Despite my desire to feel whole and unified the thought of that is harrowing.
An ongoing critique I have of some public intellectuals is the way they talk about materiality, physicality, and bodies. They, rightly so, want to emphasize the ways that our lives—politically, religiously, philosophically—have been stripped of their material aspects. They want to reclaim the body as a site of liberation, resistance, and justice. The embodied practices and theories they advocate for are a radical departure from centuries of discourse that elevated the spiritual, mental, and rational, and I do think that is a good thing.
However, part of my problem with this emphasis on embodiment is that our conceptions of what matter and bodies are are themselves already filtered through this dualism. That is, matter and bodies are already tamed and domesticated before we even approach them. How few of us—myself included—have confronted the frightening and truly awful, vast, raw power of nature? How many of us have trembled before the strangeness of our own bodies, let alone the bodies of others? Have we wrestled with that Titan that possesses us?
It seems to me that, despite our rhetoric, we actively avoid these mountaintop experiences in two ways. First, by literally avoiding encounters with the vast, titanic forces of nature where we would otherwise unavoidably confront our strange and fearful bodies. Second, by insulating ourselves from those forces by talking and thinking about matter and bodies in an abstract way so that the material world is less threatening to us.
Often the discourse on embodiment and materiality is far too tame and timid, sanitzied and civilized. We want to speak of the beauty and abundance of nature while ignoring the horror and destruction that comes along with it. Which isn’t to say that nature isn’t beautiful or abundant, or that it is only destructive or horrible—only that speaking of embodiment takes on a different tone and tenor when one has encountered it’s full power and force, and those encounters seem to be missing from prescriptions for embodiment.
Not Bound To Be Kind
Thoreau trembles at his strange body and the strange bodies of others because he fears them. The same Titan that occupies the summit of Katahdin resides within his body, has taken hold of him. His body has become earth-born, and it is terrible and awful to behold. Caring for, or attempting to care for, my brother in the emergency room and at home has aroused in me very similar feelings of fear and strangeness.
Self-preservation is, generally speaking, considered by smarter people than me to be an instinct inherent to all living creatures. But this idea is much harder to accept sitting next to my brother in the hospital bed, wiping blood from his mouth while trying to prevent him from biting his fingers to the bone or pulling out his IV. Of course I wanted him to heal and recover, but I would be lying if I said I felt he wanted that for himself. It wasn’t the preservation of his body, self, or even his life that he was instinctively acting to protect or maintain, it was something else entirely, something strange to me. Annihilation did not faze him, whether by his hand or another’s.
Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,—to be the dwelling of man, we say,—so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,—not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,—no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,—the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.
“Ktaadn,” The Maine Woods
It is easy to talk about a desire to unify spirit and matter, to bridge the chasm opened up by dualism, to make ourselves whole again. I certainly long for this, deeply. But less appreciated is the fact that part of what we want to unify resists unification.
The dualistic separation of matter from spirit protects us from the forces and powers of nature that are indifferent to our survival and existence. Those forces that are “not bound to be kind” resist attempts to unify body and spirit. It is as if there is a part of us that actively works against us while also being that part of us that is most alive. Our spirits may cry out for “contact!” and bodily warmth, but not all matter is genial nor “bound to be kind to man.”
Man’s Kindred
At this point I think I’ve managed to dislodge the contact passage from my mind. But I am left with a question: how do I approach these forces “not bound to be kind to man?”
Thoreau gives one possible answer in a journal entry from the winter after his trip to Katahdin. Laura Dassow Walls recounts that entry this way:
“All material things are in some sense man’s kindred, and subject to the same laws with him.” The very candle he burned to light his page was “his relative,” who wastes and decays the same as he, only on a shorter scale.
“Some Star’s Surface” in Rediscovering the Maine Woods
In an exchange with Penobscot elder Louis Neptune before his excursion to Katahdin, Thoreau asks whether the spirit of the mountain, Pomola (or Pamola), would allow them to go up.The elder responds that they must give an offering of rum if they wish to summit. In Thoreau’s account of the exchange there is certainly disdain and disgust at the drinking habits of the indigenous people there, and he didn’t seem to take seriously the warnings about the mountain.
Perhaps in a moment of humility on the top of Katahdin, Thoreau says:
The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. [The indigenous] do not climb mountains,—their tops are sacred and mysterious tracts never visited by them. Pomola is always angry with those who climb to the summit of Ktaadn.
“Ktaadn,” The Maine Woods
Thoreau’s insolence was punished, it would seem, if we are to go by his later account of the extreme existential disorientation he felt. And although he didn’t have the sort of sublime mountaintop experience he anticipated, he nonetheless left with some gifts of knowledge and wisdom, even if it took time for them to germinate.
The Penobscot, despite their reticence to climb to the top of Katahdin, have a relationship with the mountain and the spirit that dwells there. Indeed, the difference between the physical mountain and the mountain spirit seems to be less important than the fact that Katahdin/Pomola are subjects in relationship with the Penobscot—they are kin, relatives.
The wild and powerful forces that Thoreau encountered on the mountain were someone’s kin, even if at first it didn’t seem like it. Wilderness and the wild are not “elsewhere,” outside of some system that separates body from spirit, or mind from matter; wilderness and the wild are, for the Penobscot, integrated into a relational system as active subjects capable of participating in the world with agency and purpose. Even though Katahdin and Pomola are approached fearfully they are still a respected member of the community, a part of the relational system. The Penobscot know when the mountain is angry, know its moods, because they are related to it.
Crossing Boundaries
Eventually, after his third and final trip to Maine, Thoreau began to more fully embody this flicker of wisdom he brought back from Katahdin. As Dassow Walls puts it, the problem of the Maine Woods became for Thoreau,
…not crossing the boundary between civil and wild, as it has been twice before, but the nature of the boundary itself.
…Thoreau, in the few productive years remaining to him, redoubled his own work to “be” something like an indigenous intelligence in Concord, to model, albeit in white garb and with white tools, an Indian kind of being—as if embodied knowledge could be mobilized after all, in words and stories, words that could be carried from Maine back out to the world.
“Some Star’s Surface” in Rediscovering the Maine Woods
Like Thoreau, it is the nature of the boundary between me and my brother that this most recent trip to the hospital has made me question.
Before, I approached his wildness as something already separate from me, like Thoreau first approached the Maine woods, both of us hoping that by crossing that boundary into the otherness of the wild we can achieve wholeness. We recognize the separation in our core, the separation between our minds and bodies, but we don’t yet realize that this separation has already tainted our view of what the wild is: we come to nature incomplete and seeking wholeness but the very fact that we conceive of a boundary between us and nature—that nature is something “out there” that we have to come to—has already doomed us to fail.
My desire to feel whole and to bridge the chasm between spirit and matter, mind and body, is perhaps a desire to dissolve the boundary between the two, to make them the same. But they are not the same. Katahdin taught this to Thoreau, and my brother, in that hospital bed, taught this to me.
The mountain resisted Thoreau’s attempts to unify and left him feeling even more alienated from matter, from his own body, at least at first. My brother similarly resists attempts to unify and thus tame matter and tether spirit. How do we respond when confronted with this resistance? By resolving to overcome nature, taming and domesticating the wild? or perhaps more subversively, by promoting the unification of spirit and matter in an attempt to elevate matter into a more spiritual mode of existence?
Neither of these options is satisfying, though regrettably common as is the destruction they engender. But there is another option: the path of relationship and kinship.
This path does not seek to cross the boundary nor to eradicate it, but to respect and relate to it. The boundary becomes something to which I am bound in relation. The challenge then is not to unify and find wholeness within my self, within closed borders, but to open up and nourish the relation between boundaries.
Seen this way, I am already related to that vast, Titanic force that erupted in the emergency room last week. And though he is not bound to be kind his body is that strange matter to which I am bound: bound in relation and kinship. I, too, am possessed by the Titan of my brother’s body and spirit and tremble at its power. Who are we?