By Way of Bewilderment: Emerson's and Stevens's Sound Effects

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Experience"

LIKE THE OPENING LINE of Hamlet, the opening sentence of Emerson's "Experience" turns the act of reading on its head by reading the reader, the book, the act of reading all at once: where do we find ourselves, reading this slowly unfolding pile-up of figures—part allegory, part myth, part mystic vision? "Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes," Emerson writes, "as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree" (471). Night here is a figure for sleep, but also a kind of figure itself, a vehicle for the elided tenor shade, which, although like night in its darkness, is something else entirely, made possible, in fact, by the presence of daylight. And then sleep, too, is a figure for something else, for our limited access to some full and fully awake kind of knowing, which, Emerson speculates, following Plato, was ours before we came through the door of earthly existence. If the opening question disorients, turning the text around to read the reader, what follows, though in the guise of an answer, serves only to multiply bewilderment. Part of the technique of this disorientation is the simplicity of its figures: stair, cup, sleep, fir-tree. Surely we know what these things are. But the paragraph bereaves us of our knowing, takes away what we thought we knew. Who's there?

In thinking through how to talk about the strange room in my mind that the writings of Emerson and Stevens share, it occurred to me that I might approach the subject by talking about failure. I have never once successfully taught a Wallace Stevens poem. I've had better luck with Emerson, but luck feels like the right word: he sticks sometimes, somehow, to my students' thinking, in spite of me. The words adhere. Maybe there is something unteachable about both Emerson and Stevens, something that resists any approach besides inhabitation.

Lately, in reflecting on these pedagogical failures, I've been thinking about what knowing is, and how, under "course goals" on my syllabi, I'd like to write, quoting a Muslim prayer cited by Fanny Howe, "Lord, increase my bewilderment" (Howe). I would write on the lintels of my classroom, Whim. I am interested in what Emerson says about knowing in "The Method of Nature," which is that it involves becoming like, or, in its most radical formulation, actually becoming that which one would know. He suggests that "all knowledge is assimilation to the object of knowledge" and that, "as the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the description of it be" (126). This model of knowing, in which the learner approaches the "object of knowledge" in a way that threatens both her own boundaries as subject and the object's status as discrete, knowable entity, is in keeping with the emphasis on reception and surprise in Emerson's work, a theme elaborated in Kate Stanley's wonderful new book, Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson. In "Experience," Emerson writes,

All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything, I found...