Life in the Transitions: Emerson, William James, Wallace Stevens

JONATHAN LEVIN Life in the Transitions: Emerson, William James, Wallace Stevens In memory ofJoseph N. Riddel Life," William James wrote in a 1904 essay titled '? World of Pure Experience," "is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected ."1 This is the sort of peculiar comment James was given to making , committed as he was to reversing the ways philosophers had of getting experience into language. He continues: . . . often, indeed, it seems to he there more emphatically, as if our spurts and sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the farmer proceeds to burn. In this line we live prospectively as well as retrospectively. It is "of" the past, inasmuch as it comes expressly as the past's continuation; it is "of" the future in so far as the future, when it comes, will have continued it. James's whole psychological and philosophical project was in many ways a lifelong effort to hasten, even to inspire, such "spurts and sallies forward." Whereas philosophers have traditionally focused on the isolated (or at least potentially isolated) reality of some ideal, concrete, or subjective state or condition, James suggests here that life is made up not only of such states or conditions but also of the processes that Arizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 4, Winter 1992 Copyright O 1992 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-161 76Jonathan Levin connect them, the dynamic energies that constitute movement among them; indeed, that life may be felt more emphatically as this very movement rather than as any single state or condition in static isolation. And what James cannot represent, he offers as a movement of his own language: the "spurts and sallies forward" of his own tropes and inflections , from the advancing line of flame to the shifting vocal emphases of his o/s and its. These verbal transitions also bear the accent of Emerson , for whom a kind of naturalistic vitalism led to an emphasis on the pure vitality of an always dynamic present and, by extension, of an always dynamic linguistic resourcefulness. James's resistance to certain philosophical habits of speech reflects his own commitment to this Emersonian vitality. I will have more to say about this trajectory of influence in what follows, but it is worth pausing to remark at the outset just how difficult the notion of living more emphatically "in the transitions" is to conceive . This is, as James suggests in his Principles of Psychology (1890), because the very language we would use to conceive it is inherently predisposed to hypostatize the states or conditions, or the specific ideas or concepts, that we ordinarily use to make sense of our world and our selves. James called these the "substantive parts" or "resting places" of our thought. As he comments in "The Stream of Thought" chapter of the Principles, "We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to be named after all of them, but it never is."2 Because our linguistic habits predispose us to focus almost exclusively on the concepts and ideas within the stream of our thought—those parts we can bring forward as nouns—we typically neglect all of the dim but essential activity that holds together, or keeps apart, or otherwise variously relates, the countless concepts, ideas, and thought-images that only partially constitute mental activity. James claims that all our culture 's usual assumptions about language keep us from acknowledging or valorizing these neglected mental processes. Indeed, we should have a hard time conceiving of life "in the transitions" if only because to succeed in doing so would be, in effect, not to have done so at all. For to conceptualize this life is already to replace the "transitive parts" of the stream of thought, as James calls them, with yet another "resting place." Life in the Transitions77 This is why James, like Emerson before him and Stevens after, is so little interested in...