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2. An Everywhere of Silver
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
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2 AnEverywhereofSilver Emersonian philosophy often captures the attention of literary criticism because it is, secretly, all about words. The operation of Emerson’s sentences creates a drama more compelling than anything he describes outside the library. One of the highest compliments he seems able to pay to sensory engagement in the outdoor world is to call it literary: “Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march.”1 Such writerly reference points for Emerson’s work, its essential bookishness, ought to disqualify him from inspiring poets of sensation—especially modernist poets who have absorbed William Carlos Williams’s dictum “No ideas but in things.” Often, indeed, Emerson’s things—like the seashell of “Each and All”—are held at a distance: “An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at” (“Experience” III.29). Frequently ignoring the footprint in favor of abstract, silent seas of alienation, Emerson can seem an airy, old-fashioned thinker whose poetics are no more useful to later poets than his poems are. It is the task of this chapter to reclaim true sensation as an Emersonian feature of art, and to find it precisely in that very image of alienation—the sea that dwarfs the beach-walker. The ocean horizon bears a human aspect (albeit a cold one): it is imprinted by the senses just as much as the sand is by the writer’s foot. Encounter with nature need not mean tight proximity between human desiring and sensory facts. When the human footprint is placed in the foreground of an Emersonian horizon, it no longer suggests a harmony between world and poetic work, but an absolute contrast, a relation of incommensurability that pragmatism cannot govern. And yet the unity of the horizon proceeds from the nature of the eye itself: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second” (“Circles” II.179); “The health of the eye seems 24 | an everywhere of silver to demand a horizon” (Nature I.13). Again and again in the essays, the link between eye and horizon suggests that Emerson is less interested in the marks made on the world by touch than in the mark made by vision. It is as natural for the eye to create infinity in its object as it is for the foot to map itself in the sand. The eye’s mark, in the tradition of idealism, is wholeness: idealist vision imposes conceptual unity on a world of parts. Thus the concavity of the (infinitely distant) firmament corresponds perfectly to the (infinitely receptive) convexity of the eye. The eye-print, however, unlike the footprint, has a kind of scope that vexes its own source. The matching of firmament and eyeball breaks down when the extremity of size asserts itself. In one Emersonian story of knowledge, the eye forms the horizon, but another story reverses the sequence: “Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference” (“Experience ” III.29). Infinity is not just made by the human gaze; it also imposes itself upon human cognition. In the horizon is the sign of every look’s inadequacy: space opens out indifferently, not seeming to require its perceiver. This difficulty with infinite (as opposed to merely continental) space is not a critique of Emersonian philosophy. The issue is of crucial concern to Emerson himself, a fact that becomes apparent when the category of size is foregrounded in key passages in Emerson—not only the late Emerson of “Experience” but also the more buoyant early Emerson of Nature. The tininess of the head and the eye in the locus classicus, the “transparent eye-ball” passage, contrasts starkly with the absolute vastness into which nature introduces the senses: Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. . . . In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. (Nature I.10) The terms of size in this passage carry out an ongoing and uncomfortable dialectic of largeness and smallness—between the head’s consoling bath near earth and its subjection to the yank upward; and, in...