Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition

DUALISM/UNITY/CONTROL

DUALISM/UNITY/CONTROL Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Ives Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye softpipes, play on-, Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties ofno tone. —John Keats ("Ode on a Grecian Urn") I will now address certain affinities between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Ives. After briefly describing their experimentalism , I will show that they hold similar aesthetic views regarding the inherently dual relation between humanity and nature. Both identify art as capable of unifying the two via the use of a particular symbolic practice called transcendental correspondence. EMERSON The first necessary question may initially seem obvious: does Emerson belong in the experimental tradition? At odds with such an association is his well-known allegiance to idealism. As Russell Goodman has written, "Because he is an 'idealist/ it might seem that Emerson must be committed to the idea, which attracted Hegel and Plato, of a completed and unchanging account of the world."* In his essay "History," Emerson seems to support such a view: "always the thought is prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws."2 Mentioning thought as "prior to the fact" clearly suggests idealism. Further, his consideration of historical facts as pre-existent laws of the mind implies afixedrather than open-ended worldview. However , Goodman goes on to say that "Emerson is committed to experimentation; his idealism is, as Dewey's was to be, experimental ."3 Emerson describes his experimentalism in the essay "Circles": "[L]et me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter . Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back."4 Emerson seems to proclaim two differing views when one compares the quotation from "Circles" to his words in "History." In the former, Emerson describes an experimental process similar to that of myfirstdefinition of experiment: an open-ended process with nofixedresults. In the latter, Emerson speaks of "laws" existing "prior to facts" that are located in the mind, a fixed conception of the universe that seems to contradict his earlier notion of experimentalism. How can one reconcile such difference? Idealism, as practiced by Emerson, consists offixedlaws that exist a priori to our experience. These laws, however, must be reconciled to experience and the results then disseminated by the experimenter. Emerson himself finds such reconciliation in the "soul." In the sentence immediately following the words just cited from "Circles," Emerson continues: "Yet this incessant [10] DUALISM/UNITY/CONTROL movement and progression which all things partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul" (SE, p. 236). And, from its very beginning , "Circles" still puts humanity in the center: "the eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second" (SE, p. 225; emphasis added). One place where the soul is located is within humankind. In "The Over-Soul" Emerson remarks: "[W]ithin man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle , the subject and the object are one" [EE, p. 190). Such unity is an important aspect of Emerson's aesthetics; note, too, that it requires an "act of seeing," in other words a human act, to make subject and object "one." Emerson's dualisms center on the separation of humanity and nature. They can be found throughout his writings. For Emerson , "subject and object are one" within the "soul." Whereas humanity partakes of the soul, nature does not. As he puts it in Nature: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE...