attention
The scarlet oak must, in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads,—and then we can hardly see anything else.
Autumnal Tints, Thoreau
Lately I’ve been feeling unmoored and adrift, uprooted and dislodged, altogether out of place and time. Autumn—a time when I am normally attentive and responsive to the subtle fluctuations of the season—came somewhat as a surprise to me this year. I think it’s due, in part, to the ever increasing encroachment of the summer heat, which results in a sort of timelessness and placelessness. But there have also been struggles of a more personal nature, struggles that similarly result in a sort of timelessness and placelessness. My attention is and has been much more diffuse and scattered, especially in my attempts to establish new patterns and rhythms, and to locate myself in my new place.
Perhaps in an attempt to orient myself I turned to Thoreau’s Autumnal Tints, one of his late essays I try to read every October, like a phenological lectionary. As it happened, the same day I picked up my copy of Autumnal Tints I went for a walk around my new place and noticed a blazing scarlet oak that, just a week prior, was entirely green.
By the twenty-sixth of October the large scarlet oaks are in their prime, when other oaks are usually withered. They have been kindling their fires for a week past, and now generally burst into a blaze… But it requires a particular alertness, if not devotion to these phenomena, to appreciate the wide-spread, but late and unexpected glory of the scarlet oaks.
Autumnal Tints
My alertness and devotion to these phenomena has been admittedly lacking lately, though my desire to be so remains as fervent as ever. I find myself feeling like I should be more focused, more perceptive, more observant, more attentive. But attentive to what end? I’m not sure I have ever really asked myself that question before. I have a vague notion that my attention or attentiveness to certain phenomena is in some way correlated with their importance, so that the more attention I pay to some thing the more valuable that thing becomes. Obvious enough perhaps, and surely why attention is so precious and coveted.
Yet when it comes to observing the nonhuman world, like being attentive to the late ripening scarlet oaks, why does Thoreau suggest that we shouldn’t just be attentive, but devoted to these phenomena?
All this you surely will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,—if you look for it. Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is, whether you stand on the hill-top or in the hollow, you will think for threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at this season, sere and brown. Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them…
Autumnal Tints
I believe Thoreau is correct, that we will only see those things that we look for, those things that we are attentive to. But how many times have I ignored the common robin or humble dandelion because I was looking for something more uncommon or proud, some creature I felt was more worthy of my devotion? Where I live the maples are surely the most brilliant of autumn stars and it’s hard not to devote oneself to their display. I was completely oblivious to that scarlet oak because my mind and eyes were concerned only with maples.
Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e. we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.
Journal, 2 July 1857
There is, however, more to the world than finding what we look for, more to it than observing and being attentive, as Thoreau knew well. Sometimes it seems as if the goal of being attentive to my environment and its inhabitants is solely to collect the most sightings of uncommon or novel creatures, as a traveler checks items off an itinerary. It often feels like that’s my reward for sustained focus and attention: a mere vision of some animal or plant pushed to the limit of survival in a place where humans are actively destroying their habitat. That I should be grateful for receiving this reward, that this sighting should sustain me until I can once again go back outdoors to find other unusual things to observe and collect, all the while ignoring everything else. Why not just visit a museum?
Is there some other reason to be attentive and alert? Some other motivation for devoting myself to these phenomena?
Without Remainder
Nearly four years ago I wrote in my journal:
I can’t shake this thought that I should be as attentive to the human animals in my life as Thoreau was of the flora and fauna of Concord. To see these creatures as nature, these humans as wilderness, or, to find the wildness in them; to see myself as part of nature-naturing as well as those around me.
My current state—unfocused and inattentive and yet desirous to be more devoted to the phenomena of my life—is clearly not new. I don’t normally like to reread my journal entries, as sporadic as they are, but there was something about this entry that stuck with me. Although my circumstances are different now my desire to be not just more attentive but to use that attentiveness in service to something else has remained. At its core this passage expresses a desire to know—not just to know about another, but to know as another.
“I remember gazing with interest at the swamps about those days and wondering if I could ever attain to such familiarity with plants that I should know the species of every twig and leaf in them, that I should be acquainted with every plant (excepting grasses and cryptogamous ones), summer and winter, that I saw…
Still, I never studied botany and do not to day systematically, the most natural system is still so artificial. I wanted to know my neighbors, if possible,—to get a little nearer to them. I soon found myself observing when plants first blossomed and leafed, and I followed it up early and late, far and near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the town and into the neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty miles a day. I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened, beside attending to a great many others in different directions and some of them equally distant, at the same time.”
Journal, 4 December 1856
Running twenty or thirty miles across town and visiting some remote plant so that I may know exactly when it leafs and blooms—to be so devoted—is something I desperately wish to do, but my obligations and duties, especially to my brother, constrain me. I am, especially this time of year, both home-bound and bound by my responsibilities.
But there is something else about this passage in Thoreau’s journal that resonates with my own: he didn’t just want to be familiar with the plants, knowing about their botanical traits and collecting data merely—he wanted to know them as neighbors, to be not just familiar but family.
Is there a way for me to know both my human and more-than-human family in the same way that Thoreau desired to know every leaf and twig i the swamps of Concord? Both Thoreau and I want something similar: to know another without remainder. It isn’t enough to know about, to be attentive to and catalog the changes and moods and seasons of my brother and others in my life. Any systematic knowledge is artificial after all, no matter how naturalized it has become. But to know the scarlet oak, to know my brother as he knows himself, that requires something more than attention and even devotion.
Polyphonic Sympathy
In her book The Flowering Wand, Sophie Strand offers an interpretation of the Arthurian wizard Merlin that resonates loudly with my interpretation of Thoreau. He frequently articulated a deep longing not for knowledge per se, but sympathy: he wanted to feel what his other-than-human neighbors felt, to sympathetically vibrate with their being and so achieve a wisdom deeper and more robust than knowledge alone could provide. Merlin, according to Strand, similarly pined for and achieved that sympathy with his other-than-human relatives:
He makes kin with other beings by literally becoming them: “I have been a blue salmon, I have been a dog, a stag, a roebuck in the mountain…”
…legend tells us the goddess Ceridwen turns Merlin/Taliesin into a bard by putting him through “lifetimes” as a series of plants and animals. Merlin’s wisdom isn’t conceptual. It is somatic. Lived. His mythology isn’t calcified by a singular human perspective.
The Flowering Wand, Sophie Strand
Strand contrasts Merlin’s polyphonic ontology with the monophonic epistemology of our world. Merlin wasn’t concerned with knowing but with being; not knowing about, but knowing as. This prioritizing of ontology over epistemology is a reversal of the way I (and I am almost certainly not alone) was raised to experience and inhabit the world: as an isolated and detached observer, never a participant.
Merlin offers a way of being in the world that not only recognizes that there are a multiplicity of perspectives inherent to each other-than-human being, but models how to relate to those perspectives, how to know them. There are as many ways of being and ways of knowing as there are beings and Merlin is situated among them and as them, not an outsider looking in but an insider looking out.
“Ecology is polyphony. A forest of inhuman minds. Merlin knows this is where he must draw his inspiration—not from one source, but from all of them at once.”
The Flowering Wand, Sophie Strand
Thoreau also recognized many knowledges, many ways of being in the world other than the human, and, like Merlin, that it was possible to attain sympathy with those beings and thus know them in a way that knowledge alone couldn’t achieve.
“My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.”
Walking, Thoreau
We do not learn by inference and deduction, and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.
Natural History of Massachusetts, Thoreau
As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things…
Walden, Thoreau
Shall we not have sympathy with the muskrat, which gnaws its third leg off, not as pitying its suffering, but, through our kindred mortality, appreciating its majestic pains and its heroic virtue? Are we not made its brothers by fate?
Journal, 5 February 1854
This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre.
Walden, Thoreau
I am the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook. Methinks I have need even of his sympathy and to be his fellow in a degree.
Natural History of Massachusetts, Thoreau
I’ve written before about the fissure between the physical and the nonphysical, the body and the mind, matter and spirit, and the internalization of that fissure within my very being. Part of why I have always been drawn to Thoreau and his writing is not only the way he describes similar feelings of alienation but his attempts to resolve that tension, exemplified in the journal entry from above, where he articulates his desire to know his plant neighbors. Sympathizing with minnows and muskrats, with the multiplicity of perspectives in the world, requires both a separation from the other and a connection to the other.
It is a contradictory move, but one Thoreau tries to make: to at once know another as another knows themselves, to experience the world as another, to sympathize with the plants and animals, while also maintaining the separation and distinctions which make them different from him—not him. Sympathy is not a mystical union whereby one’s self is emptied or purified, burned up in the intense heat of oneness and unity. Rather, this is a process whereby otherness is maintained, a participatory otherness, where one participates in and experiences as the other without erasing, collapsing, or demolishing that otherness.
Hence Thoreau’s desire is not to become one who “knows” what it is he is looking at, and who comes by this certainty through a detachment of observation that allows him to master, subordinate, and categorize the field. Rather, Thoreau places himself as a link in the connecting chain of community, that member of it whose nature it is to read the community into language, to be “the scribe of all nature,” its poet—he wants to be “the corn & the grass & the atmosphere writing” (9/2/51). His active and continual investment of his self, bodily and intellectually, in that community will bring all the myriad detached pieces of it into a whole, a cosmos—not in the mind, but connected through mind as participant, the agent of “love,” connection, sympathy.
Seeing New Worlds, Laura Dassow Walls
While Thoreau at times had mystical inclinations (he even once described himself as a mystic) he resisted the temptation to collapse the differences between himself and the world around him into one unified identity devoid of particularity. Instead, he keeps the fissure between himself and his more-than-human neighbors wide open but doesn’t allow himself to be removed from the world as a detached and aloof observer. Which is to say, his attention and devotion to all the plants and animals in his home place cultivates a relationship to them that is more familial than mystical or scientific.
Immersed
Thoreau’s descriptions of sympathy with the multitude of other-than-human creatures and their perspectives suggests that, like Merlin, through an embodied, somatic knowledge he can become them, be them. Just as Merlin made kin with the creatures of the forest by becoming them, so too does Thoreau desire to make kin with his neighbors by being them, by being a participant in the processes of nature-naturing.
The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing.
Journal, 2 September 1851
Thoreau doesn’t just want to know about the corn and the grass and the atmosphere he wants to be the corn and the grass and the atmosphere. Collecting data through attentive observation and then writing conclusions or generalizations about patterns based on those observations demands one’s head be separated from the rest of the body, demands a separation from the corn and the grass and the atmosphere. But Thoreau wishes for his head—his intellect—to be immersed in his body, to be properly situated and related to the whole. Only then can he be the scribe of all nature, only then can he be the corn and the grass and the atmosphere.
The relationship Thoreau describes between the intellect and the rest of the body correlates to our external relations as well, and in some sense is dependent on them: if you are only attentive to the phenomena of your life as a head standing out too dry from the rest of your body then you have removed yourself from being an active participant immersed in and sympathetic to the other-than-human world.
Herein lies the problem of simply being attentive: I conceive of and practice being attentive in a way that is detached from the world. I remove myself from the community of beings in which I am a part and in the process they become objects of study, things to know about. Being attentive or observant in this way necessitates that I both pluck myself out of that web of relations yet also place myself in the center as an unaffected observer of that web.
“I had studied with fascination the intricate connections between plants and the rest of the ecosystem. But the web of interconnection had never before included me, except as an outside observer, outside looking in.”
Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Part of what I’ve been struggling with lately, feelings of disorientation and guilt about being inattentive to the phenomena of my life, presumes that I, as the individual subject, remain central and yet discrete from the world around me. What I feel I should be doing (being attentive and devoted) is built on a foundation of privileged subjectivity and human- and self-centeredness. Yet in order to actually fulfill my desire to know another without remainder, to know as not just about, I must dig up that foundation of individual separateness and locate myself within the web of relations between real subjects. Which is to say, I am but one subject among a multitude of subjects, each with our own ways of being in the world. Being attentive to them, seeing them, devoting myself to them, sympathizing with them, knowing them—this requires that I redefine my own selfhood as well as the selfhood of others.
Away from Myself
The self is not to be empowered by nature. It is rather to be converted to nature.
Writing Nature, Sharon Cameron
It seems to me that when Thoreau speaks of sympathizing with muskrats and minnows he is expressing his desire not to eliminate the self but to convert, redefine, or transform the self, properly situating it as one voice, one way of being among a symphony of beings. Only when his own identity was naturalized in this way could he be the grass and the corn and the atmosphere writing. His experience of selfhood isn’t different from the selfhood of the grass and the corn and the atmosphere itself—all are subjects. Merlin’s experience of the polyphony of subjectivity, of being a salmon or a stag, was possible because of a similar redefinition of the self: selves transform into and know as another while, paradoxically, maintaining their own particular perspective.
Perhaps what I need is not to empower myself through attentive observation of the natural world but to convert myself, my individual identity, to nature. I must become naturalized in that kindom of otherness, become a citizen of the other-than-human, devote myself to being the grass and the corn and the atmosphere. Attention, properly conceived, might be more about pursuing somatic knowledge of another as another, sympathetically vibrating so that one may come to know another’s way of being in the world as they themselves know it.
Feeling continually uprooted and out of place and time is understandable when the normal solutions available to me only offer to strengthen my individual self. My selfhood, by itself, cannot orient me, locate me, root me in my environment. I am radically contextual, and it is only through others—through otherness—that I am oriented and located and rooted. Being attentive to the things around me, observing the phenomena of my daily life, internal or external, only gets me so far, only gets me so far away from myself.
What if for each moon cycle you practiced thinking, feeling, knowing like something else?
Make Me Good Soil, Sophie Strand
My desire to know another without remainder, whether my brother or my other-than-human kin, is, I think, really a desire to be known by them. If my identity, my self, is not fixed but porous then not only can I know another through sympathy with their being, but that another can know me through sympathy with my being. We find our place in the web of interconnection through sympathy, not mere attention—through being, not knowing. Seeing that scarlet oak and being seen by that scarlet oak redefines me as oak-kin and locates me, places me: I find myself because I have been found by another; I know myself because I have been known by another.