A discursive essay: Chlorofoming the butterfly / Ralph Waldo Emerson

In my previous blog — The uses of criticism — I think it could be said that I was highlighting a long–running fallacy: that close study of any subject will ruin our spontaneous enjoyment; that we dissect effectively to murder; and that (at worst) our vision will be destroyed — be it in the spheres of art, music, poetry, or anything involving deep aesthetic pleasure. It is of course true that it is possible to analyse any subject to deadening effect. For example, a student of Latin may pride himself on knowing the entire case system, etc., without having the least appreciation of Virgil’s Aeneid. It has to be admitted too that, in ‘digging deep’, we may uncover unwelcome truths. If, like me, you have a love of landscape which at times borders on the mystical, then you may feel somewhat subdued by the following passage:

Look out on any tranquil country scene on a summer’s day and you might be deceived into illusions of peace and calm. In fact, underneath it all, life is killing and munching and swarming and breeding and dying. [Richard Holloway, Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity]

Equally, lovers of Dickens may not welcome the following fact from John Carey’s The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination:

It is noticeable...that though he customarily laments the inadequacy of the successive systems of Poor Relief, he congratulates those who would never deign to accept it. In Our Mutual Friend persons seeking public charity are likened to ‘vermin’, while old Betty Higden, fleeing it, remains a ‘decent person.’

Yet it should be noted that the above facts do not detract from the aesthetic beauty of a landscape, nor from the greatness of Dickens as a writer (and the first words in Carey’s book are, ‘Dickens in infinitely greater than his critics.’).

It is worth considering too, that there are some subjects which we must either study or remain completely in ignorance of. Geology is one such: enrichment grows only from knowledge, and in its absence you will look at the landscape as if blind. A single example will illustrate this. For decades I have been aware of a ripple pattern on the slopes of the hill town of Winchelsea in East  

History, geography, geology. Winchelsea still shows the town planning of Edward I    

Sussex. The slopes are in fact degraded sea cliffs, dating back some five hundred years to the time when Winchelsea was an island in the sea. The cliffs therefore are wave–formed, and retain their pattern despite centuries of rainfall and other erosive effects of the weather and man’s activities. And this is a paradigm example of knowledge feeding the imagination.    

In another previous blog — On the difficulty of poetry — I quoted a remark of a friend who is a graduate of English Literature: ‘Nothing makes you feel more stupid than a poem. You read it two or three times, and the odds are that it will baffle you. Not until you have practically wrung its neck will it begin to yield up its meaning.’ Well, it can be the same with a painting. It can be worse with a painting. Because, whereas most of us have learned to read, comparatively few have learned how to ‘read’ a work of art. And while it is true that in many instances study is not essential for appreciation — as for example Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, or a Cezanne still life — the same cannot be said for Ezra Pound’s Cantos, or for Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avingon (which is still regarded by some as ‘modern art’ despite the fact that it was painted 104 years ago!).  

‘I am a great believer in the shock of the old’, writes Will Self. This is an excellent statement: much writing and art of centuries past remains deeply disturbing to the contemporary consciousness. Time, we may say, is in a certain sense of no account: if we cannot accept or countenance certain ideas of the Ancient Greeks, or if we pale in front of the existential loneliness of a Caspar David Friedrich painting, then that impresses upon us potential power locked in any book we have not read or painting we have not seen. As for the ‘shock of the new’, Tracy Emin seems to be many people’s favourite contemporary artist to rubbish. Well, despite what I consider to be the poverty of her work, I should not as a result dismiss out of hand anything she may say. She had, a few years ago, a regular column in The Independent: ‘My life in a column’. I found it engaging, truthful, and wonderfully outrageous! As a nation we have tended to be ‘boxed in’, and terrified of truthful expression: a godsend to the arts, but a blight on our lives. Things have greatly changed, and yet still there seem to preponderate such as Emerson described in a journal entry of 1848:

Men live on the defensive, and go through life without an action, without one overt act, one initiated action. They buy stock, because others do, and stave off want and pain the best they can, defending themselves; but to carry the war into the enemy’s country; to live from life within, & impress on the world their own form, they dare not. Thousands and thousands vegetate in this way, streets full, towns full, & never an action in them all. (Journal XI: 200)

If this applies to proportionally less people now than in 1848, Emerson’s sentiment is nonetheless sound and inspiring. He is not easy to read: he can be highly disconcerting, and on occasion write with chilling candour. His essays do not so much take the form of an argument or themes followed through with consistency, but tend rather to consist of series of aphoristic sentences following one another in dizzying succession. Here is an example from ‘Circles':

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it all this train of cities and institutions.

This is not very digestible. It is a curious way of writing, and the only other writer we might be reminded of is Nietzsche. It is no surprise therefore that Emerson was one of Nietzsche’s favourite writers. Still, if you can stomach them, both writers can be very inspiring. W N P Barbellion said that ‘he felt like a mastiff’ after reading Nietzsche. Here is one of Emerson’s more inspiring pieces, from ‘Heroism’:

Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, “Always do what you are afraid to do.”

How frowned upon would that advice be today! Well, we must bring Emerson in again: ‘Everything must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition to understand anything rightly.’ Read Emerson enough and you will find sentences or aphorisms that put checks on one another, but it can be rough going in the meantime! As O W Firkins expresses it, ‘[Emerson] had his own defences. He jogged the row–boat so recklessly because he knew he could swim. He forgot, perhaps, that he had fellow–passengers.’ I wish that I had found Firkins’ Ralph Waldo Emerson earlier. He provides a necessary corrective: ‘Emerson, sitting in his fireproof universe, admires the activity of the torch–bearer and fire–kindlers. The common man’s morals are unfortunately not lined with asbestos.’ It would be no bad thing if every copy of Emerson’s essays were bound together with Firkin’s book. It was published in 1915, and despite the enormous number of critical works published since then it remains one of the most empathetically critical work available. The last word goes to Emerson:

We think that our civilisation advances, but we still go back to our primers.