Reconstruction 6.3 (Summer 2006)

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Overlooking, Rivers, Looking Over / T.S. McMillin

 

Abstract: In this hybrid essay, composed of literary theory, cultural history, and fieldwork, T.S. McMillin attempts to connect the humanities to other disciplines and to connect scholarly work to the land. In the first part of the essay, he briefly develops a theory of palindromes and palindromic reflection. Palindromes connect thinking to movement and to reflection, and in turn serve as a model for experiencing texts or terrain. Occurring in music, literature, film and video art, mathematics, painting, even genetic code, palindromes underscore the complexity of the nature of things and the necessarily complex thinking that understanding the nature of things requires. In the next section, McMillin tests the palindromic theory with his own experience traveling in the Netherlands. Next, he applies the theory to a fundamental text in American literature, Henry Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, considering some of the ways in which rivers and ideas of nature connect with writing and ideas of culture. The result is a new definition of Transcendence, one that owes as much to Thoreau as to Jacques Derrida. In The Post Card, the latter wrote that "It is bad, reader, no longer to like retracing one's steps"; palindromes, McMillin proposes, can assist us in a transcendental re-tracing of our interpretive encounters. The nature of texts and the nature of "nature" require diverse and versatile interpretation; interpretation requires not only depth and concentration but also imaginative thinking, broad-mindedness, and engaged connection-making. Palindromes, given their complex simplicity, can shake things up, turning the present inside-out and enabling us to retrace our steps. Because of this potential, Thoreau uses a structural palindrome in his book to deepen our riparian relations. Describing a journey in which he goes out and comes back by the same fluvial course, Thoreau's palindrome provides a different view of historical events and everyday occurrences, of place and perspective, of reading and rivers. Though streams usually flow in one general direction (physically down, from a higher elevation to a lower, and by metaphorical extension, forth, from the past to the future), Thoreau's Week reminds us that we can reverse our experience of flow by virtue of our own ways of moving and knowing. By taking us upstream as well as down, Thoreau draws attention to rivers' potential for improving our sense of place and time.

 

 

It is bad, reader, no longer to like retracing one's steps.

Jacques Derrida, The Post Card

 

Overlooking, Rivers

<1> In the Summer of the Palindrome—2002—I traveled to Rotterdam to present a paper at the annual meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (IAPL). Flying into Philadelphia to make a connection to Amsterdam, we were put into a holding pattern, and circled for some time above two rivers: the great Delaware and its largest tributary, the Schuylkill. Looking over the terrain from several miles high, I admired the shape and magnitude of the Delaware, which appeared to organize greater Philadelphia. The river lay at the heart of whole communities, surrounded by tennis courts, swimming pools, baseball fields, row after row of dwellings, industrial sites, and other places of business. Except for the sailing crafts angling toward the bay, however, the river seemed so central, so integral, so deeply a part of things as to be forgotten, in the same way that we seldom measure, contemplate, or even regard the beating of our own hearts, the flow of blood.

<2> Forgetting the Delaware is nothing new. Giovanni da Verrazzano, probably the first European to see the river, overlooked the Delaware in his account of the 1524 voyage up the coast of North America, as if he were late for an appointment in New York. Less than a century later, Henry Hudson, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company and aboard the Halve Maen ("Half Moon," in Dutch), sailed into what became Delaware Bay and a little way up the river, but feeling the purse-strings tug all the way from Holland and finding the river a challenge to navigate, he too left the river unexplored. In a 1972 study, engineer Robert V. Thomann observed that, "From its earliest beginnings the quality of the waters of the Delaware has largely been taken for granted." Not long after Hudson poked his prow up the river in August 1609, the lives of a thousand or so Lenni Lenape were disrupted by Dutch, Swedish, and English colonizers, and the overwhelmingly "pleasant tasting water" of the river began to change. "Large quantities of wastes were discharged to streams and rivers, and the only cautionary note was that water for drinking purposes be drawn from relatively unpolluted sources. The country was just too busy with many more important matters than the quality of its rivers and streams" (99) [1].

<3> This has changed—somewhat. In the last half of the twentieth century, efforts were begun to clean up the Delaware and some have succeeded. But the Delaware is not the only neglected river in the United States, and pollution is only one way (albeit the most obvious and most immediately destructive way) in which we have forgotten, disregarded, ignored—in a word, overlooked—the nature of flowing water, the meaning of rivers. Discussing the neglect exhibited by "the preeminent city on the longest river in America," for example, William Least Heat-Moon writes that "Kansas City, born of the Missouri, has turned away from its great genetrix..." (226), and Philip Fradkin suggests that, due to the lack of care for the Colorado River, it is "a river no more." Even when looking for rivers Americans have overlooked rivers: John Wesley Powell, the first to thoroughly explore the Colorado River through Grand Canyon, "barely acknowledged" the San Juan River when he passed its outlet into the Colorado, and his survey crews "ignored the waterway the Utes call River Flowing from the Sunrise" (Aton 1). Americans, it would seem, have overlooked rivers east and west, south and north, as if overlooking were a by-product of American business, whether you take that to mean our nation's preoccupation with commercial and industrial activity or a general tendency to keep busy that decreases time for reflection.

<4> The rivers of North America have not always been overlooked: beginning with the Transitional or Terminal Archaic peoples who lived in the Delaware region 1800-800 B.C.E., for example, the rivers' floodplains were the primary habitat (Cotter 9). The Lenape were drawn to the Delaware-Schuylkill confluence by the abundance of fish and game, and called the latter river "Manayunk"—Place Where We Go to Drink (Cotter 32). Early European transplants crowded into the banks of the river: around 1701, "Practically all two thousand of [ Philadelphia's] inhabitants insisted on living as close to the Delaware as they could get" (Cotter 39). And even today much of our business and some of our pleasure, for good and ill, are directly with or on rivers. Nevertheless, a majority of Americans pay little attention to the nature and significance of streams.

<5> I was not actually thinking about these things as we circled the Delaware and the Schuylkill, my own business being more on my mind. In other words, as I overlooked (looked down upon) the two rivers and their confluence, I overlooked (failed to heed) the rivers themselves. There I was, on my way to Holland to discuss a major American literary figure (Ralph Waldo Emerson) and his Transcendentalist version of English culture with a group of philosophers, overlooking two major American rivers, one bearing a Dutch name and the other "discovered" in the name of the Dutch by an Englishman, flying over (and over and over) the political birthplace of the United States. Surely a lesson lies in those sundry coincidences, crossings, and connections. Our business frequently being such that we tend to ignore or disremember places, things, and their effect on human understanding, it follows that a little retracing might be in order if we wish to deepen that understanding, the sense we make of the world in which we live. It wasn't until quite some time later, as I looked over my experience from a different perspective, that I began to regard and reconsider the Schuylkill and the Delaware. What precipitated that new perspective, the revised outlook that redressed overlook? What processes might make such a change possible?

<6> One response to such questions lies between "theory" (which, for my purposes, includes intentionally intellectual activity, academic endeavor, and especially an inferential type of thinking that produces a hypothesis, plan, or schematic to explain certain phenomena) and "experience" (which includes, on one level, the testing of hypotheses, and on another the daily, multifaceted exposure to phenomena, as well as the observation, processing, and coming-to-awareness of phenomena). My work in the Netherlands involved my own developing theory of "in-betweenness": In Rotterdam, I confronted fellow academics with a set of questions regarding the connection between our concepts of nature and culture, between human experience (which, I proposed, is commonly aligned with our concept of nature) and theory (which is commonly considered an act or exemplum of culture). How do our lives and experiences affirm, contradict, or otherwise participate in the theories we form about life, truth, reality, etc.? In what ways do those facts of my existence that contribute to my experience of the world—body, mind, ecosystem, social organization, etc.—affect the worldview I construct conceptually? What roles do the places we inhabit and their topographical features play in the approaches we take to the work we accomplish, the lives we lead? I noted that rivers, for example, connect interiors with exteriors, cultures and countries, the present with the past: Da Vinci wrote that "L'acqua che tocchi dei fiumi é l'ultima di quella che andó e la prima di quella che viene. Così il tempo presente" [2]. ["The water you touch in rivers is the last that passed and the first that comes. So with time present."] If, as he suggests, we can extrapolate a theory of temporal experience from our experiences with flowing water, I wondered if rivers might enable us to connect our theoretical pursuits at the conference to the topography and history of Rotterdam and the Netherlands. What, for example, might the river Rotte, which gave our host city its name, or the river Maas, which gave the city its livelihood, or Rotterdam's post-war bridges and rebuilt newness, which had attracted the conference organizers, have to do with the theories we had come to share? My interest in these theoretical questions led me to explore the greater Rotterdam region by bicycle, and my experience of the relations between the Dutch and water informed my thinking about the connections between rivers and intellect, literature and philosophy, nature and culture. Failing to consider these sorts of connections poses a problem for philosophers, literary theorists, and other professional thinkers who have overlooked such relations, separating phenomena into distinct categories of study and keeping theory away from experience. "Do but observe our grim Philosophers," Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote (about 500 years ago), "that are perpetually beating their brains on knotty Subjects, and for the most part you'll find 'em grown old before they are scarce young. And whence is it, but that their continual and restless thoughts insensibly prey upon their spirits, and dry up their Radical Moisture" (112). Perhaps scholars lose their "Radical Moisture" when theoretical work and lived experience become severed, or when either our objects of study or our methods of study become disconnected from the Earth, 80% of the surface of which is water.

<7> Emerson intimates as much in his own version of intellectual fluidity. "Embosomed for a season in nature," he wrote in his first book (Nature), "whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past...?" (1:9). Metaphorically, at least, water is everywhere, figured in life's flow. Physically, there is nothing like it in terms of its role in the development of life on Earth—"Water," scientists know, "plays a part in all physical and biological processes." As the geomorphologist Luna Leopold has written, "by coincidence of favorable size and location in the solar system, Earth alone among the planets has oceans, an atmosphere, and thus a hydrologic cycle. The grand circle of movement of water from ocean to atmosphere to continent and back to ocean is the essential mechanism that allows organisms—including humans—to emerge, to develop, and to live on Earth" (1). Nonetheless, the significance of water is often overlooked, even in the search for Truth.

<8> Leopold points out that the people of the United States "have acquiesced to the destruction and degradation of our rivers, in part because we have insufficient knowledge of the characteristics of rivers and the effects of our actions that alter their form and process" (ix). Rethinking the nature of rivers, I believe, presents us with an opportunity not only to repair riparian systems but also to redress dry-as-dust scholarship, to make connections, to reconsider the relations between nature and culture and thus do our work better. If one reckons that the planet on which we live and even the bodies in which we live consist mostly of water, then it is a short step to seeing the enormous role that water plays in human experience. Scholars, whether in the Humanities or the Sciences, who neglect the "floods of life stream[ing] around and through us," who overlook an essential element of their experience, bury their scholarship in arid soil. To overlook the relations between the hydrologic world and human experience, between our experience and the theories we formulate about the world, is to deny both the existence of the greater text that scholars must consider and the greater contexts in which scholarly consideration occurs. Erasmus's desiccant, canting, grim lover of wisdom "is wholly ignorant of common things, and lives a course of life quite different from the people..." (132). No matter how well studied one is or how dedicated one is to the pursuit of truth, one's thought dries up when removed from the "course of life."

<9> The present work attempts to reconnect experience and theory via a watery route. It is something of an interpretive retracing of steps, though I care less about Heraclitus's inability to step in the same river twice than I do about Da Vinci bending down to touch the temporal in-between of l'acqua dei fiumi. Through attention to water and especially rivers, I develop a theory of interpretation that revolves around betweenness. Rivers, in leading us to consider the moment between the last that has passed and the first that comes, provide a means of "interpreting" (the roots of which mean negotiating or moving between) theory and experience, text and terrain. To explore the in-between, I make use of palindromes. Words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs (in short, texts) that read the same from left to right and right to left, palindromes "run back again," as the word's etymology suggests. In other words, palindromes retrace their literal steps. They connect reading to movement and to reflection, and in turn serve as a model for experiencing and theorizing textual terrain, especially because the nature of their movement highlights the area between the beginning and the end, by going over it twice from different directions.

<10> An odd and seemingly artificial figure, palindromes are useful for several reasons. For one, they can be experienced, as I will show in a brief account of the IAPL trip to the Netherlands; but palindromes also function theoretically, as can be seen in a work of Emerson's fellow Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Describing a journey in which he goes out and comes back by the same fluvial course, Thoreau's palindrome provides a different view of historical events and everyday occurrences, of place and perspective, of reading and rivers. Though streams usually flow in one general direction (physically down, from a higher elevation to a lower, and by metaphorical extension, forth, from the past to the future), Thoreau's Week theorizes that we can reverse the experience of flow by varying our ways of moving and knowing. By taking us upstream as well as down, Thoreau draws attention to rivers'—and literature's—potential for improving our sense of place and time. The palindrome, then, answering Derrida's admonition that readers retrace their steps, offers a solution to the problem of overlooking, whether it be literature and meaning or rivers and nature that we overlook. Palindromic inversions can convert overlook (neglect) into looking over and looking into (again).

 

Palindromes: Running Back and Forth

<11> Palindromes, which have been around at least since Sotades (a 3rd-century B.C.E. Greek poet), mean the same thing coming and going: "Mom," for example, or "Campus motto: 'Bottom's up, Mac.'" In other words, a palindrome takes on special value by virtue of the fact that its meaning or form does not change when approached from the opposite direction. Palindromes occur in music, literature, film and video art, mathematics, painting, even genetic code—Friedrich Cramer writes that palindromes "are in fact present in the double helix" and "apparently serve there as some sort of higher-level recognition signal along the relatively monotonous information band of DNA" (155). Operating in the dark heart of nature, palindromes inform the information that being itself is made of. In various arts, they often take on a mirror-like form, an inversion that reveals something about the original it reflects, which then often leads the beholder beyond the present situation to further considerations. Palindromes usually assume a structure of a-b-c-b-a (or a-b-c-c-b-a, wherein the pivot is doubled). The history of painting provides a range of examples, from mirroring symmetries of the Middle Ages to contemporary folded canvas. In music, one finds a similar scope, including Hindemith's Ludus tonalis (1942), in which the concluding "Postludium" mirrors the opening "Praeludium" both vertically and horizontally, and Haydn's Symphony No. 47 in G major (1772). The score of the latter lays out the first half of the third movement in detail; the second half is summarized with the simple instruction, "Menuet al reverso," and the first half is played exactly backwards [3].

<12> Calculated to bring a smile to the listener's lips, the minuet gambit is more than a gimmick. With it, the composer works within the rules of composition but alters them: the simplicity and order of the minuet form is troubled by its mirroring, so that the retrograde (the backwards part) challenges listeners to listen differently and to approach the music's structure, progression, even musical nature itself "from the other side," as it were. Musical palindromes restructure the experience of sound. In literature too palindromes—"reversible writing" in Howard Bergerson's phrase (v)—span historical periods and assume different shapes, those most prominent being literal, rhetorical, and structural. The literal or letter-unit palindrome is the most recognizable as such. Although it seldom seems to move beyond an amusement, the contrivance can function to puzzle and provoke. Twentieth-century Mexican writer Juan José Arreola summarizes a work titled Palindroma on the book's endpage: "...eres o no eres...seré o no seré...¡He aquí el palindroma!" ("You are or you are not; I will be or I will not. Here is the palindrome.") The lines suggest that questions of subjectivity, relation, and time elicit palindromic thought. It is no less cute than "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama," but Arreola's device brings, along with a smile, a potential line of philosophical and/or psychological questioning. The artistic palindrome opens doors.

<13> More common but less obvious than the literal type, rhetorical and structural palindromes build on the figure's inherent reflective qualities. Rhetorical palindromes entail a syntactic reflection in which the form of the first part of the sentence is mirrored in the second, either in parts of speech (e.g., adverb, verb, subject <-> subject, verb, adverb) or phrasing (e.g. Frederick Douglass's "...a man was made a slave;...a slave was made a man" [Gates 294]) [4]. Instead of letter units, rhetorical palindromes consist of word units, phrase units, or even sentence units, as in J. A. Lindon's poem "Doppelgänger" [5]. A literary work may be said to be structurally palindromic when events or images assume a certain kind of reflective form. In a recent example, Lisel Mueller's poem "Palindrome" works with a possible consequence stemming from the notion in theoretical physics that there might be a galaxy in which time moves "backward." The poet imagines a woman like herself moving from death to old age, then adolescence and childhood:

She has unlearned much by now.

Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,

her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,

she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his

shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,

but their ardor increases. (90)

The turning-point—"Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am putting on"—dramatizes the reflective effect of time's reversal. The poet can see events from the past, which her anti-senescing double is about to enter, from a different angle, and can begin to work through imagined scenarios of her own present and future. The inversion gives future, present, and past different meaning.

<14> If Mueller's poem demonstrates how palindromes can help us think about temporal matters, in another recent poem, John Balaban uses a palindrome to consider spatial relations. "Palindrome for Clyde Coreil in Saigon," which connects the speaker to a friend in another continent, investigates place, culture, and difference. The second stanza inverts a sequence of images and terms laid out in the first stanza: pigeons, fluttering, music, women, clutter, feet, lunch, newspaper, coffee, valueless talk, cigars <-> cigars, valueless talk, etc. (29). Balaban's reflection draws closer attention to the conditions in which both parties live, questioning what at first appears to be a true connection; for though the image-sequences seem familiar, thus creating a common bond, the inversion also causes the distances between the two situations to increase. The seeming connection goes up in smoke at the cigar turning-point. Thus, like their counterparts in other arts, literary palindromes offer the opportunity for informed reflection on questions of time, movement, relation, order, and space or place.

<15> Poetic palindromes such as Mueller's or Balaban's help us understand travel palindromes and the opportunities they offer us for experiential reflection. Palindromic travel resembles structural rather than literal palindromes, with segments of the journey functioning as units. The traveler returns via the same route she or he went, which means that palindromic procession by nature involves a retracing of steps—one sees the same sights twice but from a different angle, equipped with information and experience gained from the original perspective, subsequent turning-point, and reversal. Largely a matter of economy, the travel palindrome is often a result of (time, energy, and/or resource) conservation given the geomorphological and political nature of the land through which or over which the traveler journeys. It appears in myriad forms, from pilgrimages to river-boat pleasure-cruises, mountaineering expeditions to commercial airline routes. In such cases, the pivots become true turning-points, temporary destinations where travelers reverse course but also moments in which the potential for deeper perspectival change is heightened. There are tremendous possibilities for learning in these turning-points and in the movement itself—the "running back and forth" indicated by the roots of "palindrome"—that make palindromes something more than efficient options for travelers and the industry that serves them.

 

Turning-Points

<16> 2002 was made palindromic for me not only by the happenstance of the year's numerical identity but also by the nature of travel, especially air-travel. Like a good number of airplane trips, those I took to the IAPL formed a palindrome of airports and connecting flights: Cleveland, Philadelphia, Amsterdam <-> Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Cleveland. The addition of a couple short side trips by bicycle extended the primary palindrome: e.g., Rotterdam, De Zweth, Delft <-> Delft, De Zweth, Rotterdam; Amsterdam, Volendam, Edam, Middenbeemster <-> Middenbeemster, Edam, Volendam, Amsterdam. There are other forms of travel—circuits, sallies, voyages of no return—but the palindrome was most in evidence during that summer's business journeying.

<17> In addition to these geographical palindromes, analogous structures describe other forms of movement during the Netherlands journey. One might say that the IAPL trip began in American literature, ventured into Dutch landscape, then returned to American literature: the going-forth segment moves from literary and theoretical concerns (Transcendentalist writing) to travel and experiential concerns, pivots in Rotterdam (where both theory and experience are in play), and returns to American Transcendentalism. It is worth noting that Emerson himself wrote unkindly of travel, calling it "a fool's paradise." But then again, Emerson's typical course, from the Grand Tour to the lecture circuit, usually took the form of a circle instead of a palindrome. Still, his theories of experience and its importance to the scholar, his notion that scholarly endeavor must be connected with other aspects of human life, are much to the point. A key element of American Transcendentalism involves self-reflection—the premise being that a scholar's contributions to human experience will have greater worth if that experience becomes part of what is studied. Emerson complains of "the book-learned class" that they "value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution..." (Works 1:91). His observation appears in "The American Scholar," an address that alternates between incisive cultural critique and inspiring directives to prospective scholars. I take Emerson's words as a reminder to relate the human constitution to nature, nature to book-learning, etc., such that each will inform the other and the whole will inform our understanding. Thus the Netherlands afforded me the opportunity to relate where I was with what I was doing there, to consider the places where theory and experience connect.

<18> To the traveler's eye, the nature of the Netherlands itself—a place fundamentally transitional between land and water—metaphorically reflects the transitional nature of the traveler's experience: the sense of being unsettled, not at home, en route, in-between. From the surrounding sea to the intricate canal system, from river complex (including the Rijn, the Maas, the Schelde) to artificial and natural meren (lakes), it seems as if water is nearly everywhere in the Netherlands and that it has everything to do with the nature of the place, involved in the constitution of the land itself, the nation's rise to economic glory, and perhaps, at least according to the country's critics, even the disposition of its people. Andrew Marvell, for example, wrote in "The Character of Holland," that the place "scarce deserves the name of land." According to Marvell, the transitional quality of the place had turned the people themselves into "Half-anders" (instead of Hollanders or Whole-anders)—"half wet, and half dry" (88-92). Napoleon claimed that the land had washed down from his empire, that it was but the alluvium of France's principal rivers. Dutch historians counter that "The truth is that the Netherlands were born of the sea" (Vlekke 1). Most agree, in any case, that the Netherlands, to remain the Netherlands, must ever struggle with water. As another traveler to Holland, the Sardinian writer Edmondo de Amicis (1846-1908), observed in his classic account of 1874, "The enemy against which the Dutch had to defend their country was threefold—the sea, the rivers, and the lakes" (16).

<19> The visitor encounters a place ever in the making, a country on the verge, a site where water is ever becoming land and land water. A "sort of transition between the earth and sea" (12), the Netherlands exists by virtue of a fluctuating equilibrium, and what de Amicis wrote of it in the nineteenth century serves as well today:

One who looks for the first time at a large map of Holland must be amazed to think that a country so made can exist. At first sight, it is impossible to say whether land or water predominates, and whether Holland belongs to the continent or to the sea. Its jagged and narrow coast-line, its deep bays and wide rivers, which seem to have lost the outer resemblance of rivers and to be carrying fresh seas to the sea; and that sea itself, as if transformed to a river, penetrating far into the land, and breaking it up into archipelagoes; the lakes and vast marshes, the canals crossing each other everywhere,—all leave an impression that a country so broken up must disintegrate and disappear. (11)

The constant exchange of water for land and land for water underscores both the power of physical forces (ice, surf, wind, etc.) and human ingenuity. Dike, canal, and windmill convert sea into lake and lake into polder; seas recover coast. The give-and-take results in perpetual formation and reformation of the Netherlands: "As one glances over the latest map, he may be sure that in a few years, it will be useless..." (21).

<20> The map-negating oscillation between water and land puts the inhabitants of that place in an uncertain situation, one that raises questions of the relationship between concepts of "culture" and concepts of "nature." If water seems to war with the land, both seem to constitute "nature," with which humans must contend for control of place. "Artifice" emerges as the main means of defense in what begins as a water-land war but becomes a nature-culture war. Rivers, for example, are "regulated,...divided with rigorous precision, and sent in different directions"—a restriction and control of flow that renders them more like canals than rivers (17). Cultural control of nature requires constant maintenance of the barriers, constant pumping, constant vigilance, and increasing artifice. Artifice, in most travelers' experiences, becomes a central trait of Netherlandish nature. De Amicis, summarizing the work of other writers, notes that "on one point they were all agreed, and expressed themselves in the same words: Holland is a conquest of man over sea; it is an artificial country; the Dutch made it; it exists because the Dutch preserve it, and would disappear if they were to abandon it" (12). "Man" against "sea," "culture" over "nature"—Dutch artifice appears to mark the triumph of the first term of such pairs over the second. But to the traveler willing to retrace the steps that lead to a seemingly necessary antagonistic relation between the so-called natural and the so-called artificial, an alternative relation comes into view. Biking through the engineered countryside, along the banks of the old canals, passing slow-turning windmills, atop the diligent dikes, one is constantly given examples of what De Amicis and others considered battlements in the nature-culture war. Coursing over the well-planned fietspad, which allows the traveler to negotiate fleetly a range of environments from the thick urban traffic to pastoral quietude, the bicyclist tends to applaud the triumph of human ingenuity. And yet it is the very bikepath, accentuating artifice, that leads to further reflection on the relationship of humans and nature: the fietspad leads into palindrome.

<21> I do not mean to suggest that Dutch bikepaths are designed and laid out palindromically. A glance at the Netherlands Board of Tourism's Cycling Map turns up mostly circular routes such as "The Golden Circle" (running "all around the IJsselmeer, the former Zuider Zee"). But any segment of a circle or line can be converted into a palindrome, and as one bikes along the elevated dike, looking down upon fresh water that once was sea, immersed in a cultural relationship with nature in which life and land have been won from the water, one enjoys a peculiar prospect. Among the "half wet,...half dry" people, moving through and over terrain as fluid as it is solid, I found myself emphatically in-between. Between nature and artifice, water and earth, moving along a path from point of origin to temporary destination, from temporary destination back, my trajectory reflected. I experienced, not so much being "caught between" as being momentarily liberated to betweenness, introduced to participation in a reflective movement that can provide reflective "vision," both seeing and thinking. On the return, the back became the front, the start became the finish, and the point lay between.

<22> As the pivot of the palindrome, the Netherlands was a temporary destination, where the larger forth-going movement of the journey paused. During that pause, other minor palindromes arose, and when the journey recommenced, the moment of cessation of momentum—the turning-point—had yielded smaller turning-points, all contributing to and accentuating reflection. Lesser palindromes, those that occurred within the caesura of the larger one, include pivots at Delft and outside Amsterdam. The first of these (Rotterdam, De Zweth, Delft <-> Delft, De Zweth, Rotterdam) made clear that, though an engineered landscape, the Netherlands is no less natural, the concrete canals teeming with life: herons innumerable, coots and their offspring, mallards and assorted diving and dabbling ducks, white and black swans, sheep and cow and pig and pony, a tattooed man in a black brief with a pierced nipple and a bald head. The canals feed farms, change the sea water into a fresh-water reserve, and trouble the definition of rivers. Biking the dijk from doorstep to Delft and back over unfamiliar ground on a rented machine and untested legs, I rolled along by the Schelde. What passes for a current in the river is manufactured by the motion of the watercraft it carries. Crossing streamless streams, from city hubbub to suburb to farm village and on, past the Delftware factory parking-lot packed by tour buses, through residential outskirts with bike-lined sidewalks outside busy grocers, finally (though momentarily) into the medieval center of Delft (amid intensified and thoroughly modern tourist traffic), I grew profoundly conscious of the different zones of the trip, and then doubly conscious on the Rotterdam return. It was on the Delft trip, really, when I first became aware of the travel palindrome and its potential for reflection.

<23> On what truckers call the flip-flop, the palindromic return helped me reconsider Delft, the area between Delft and Rotterdam, and travelers' experience of nature and culture. In other circumstances, the trip could have assumed a different structure. If I did not have conference obligations the following morning, had I been more familiar with the territory and conditions, had I been a more avid bicyclist, I might have gone circular—say, from Rotterdam to Delft, then on to Den Haag, down the coast of the North Sea, back to Rotterdam along the Maas River. I went palindromic instead, and because I returned to Rotterdam via the same way I went, my route, zones, the land, its flora and fauna and figures were seen from a different perspective, and contributed to a different sense of perspective itself. As with artistic palindromes, the Delft palindrome called attention to the order of the original venturing-forth and its constitutive elements by emphasizing its reverse. Although the pivot was instructive and refreshing and evocative (at the center of which evocation I would place the burial site of Vermeer), Delft served as a turning-point mostly because I turned there. With greater effect, returning to Rotterdam, I now passed through places I had just been, the nature of the recent going-out itself highlighted by its inversion. Heeding the Derridean admonition to retrace my steps, I read the text of the road anew.

<24> The effect was not unlike that of Vermeer's View of Delft (c. 1660-1). In that painting, a placid river lines the foreground. On it, there is little movement, though its potential for conducting traffic is indicated by boats moored along the top bank. The principal function of the river in this scene appears to be reflection: on its waters, the Rotterdam Gate towers and the Schiedam clock tower are reflected in shadow, providing contrast for the highlighted Nieuwe Kerk ("New Church," 1383-1510), which marks the market place and forms a center of commercial, governmental, and religious activity—the heart, as it were, of Delft. Arthur Wheelock, Jr., in the catalog for an exhibition in Washington D.C. and The Hague, describes Vermeer's groundbreaking transformation of a realistic vista into something more revealing:

No other artist has conveyed to such an extent the physical presence of the city lying before him, whether it be the rough stone of a bridge, the brick and mortar of walls, or the rippling roof tiles. No topographical artist ever relegated the foreground of his cityscape to shadow, as did Vermeer, not only to suggest the expansiveness of the receding sky, but to draw the viewer into the sunlit interior of the city. Finally, no topographic artist ever moved beyond descriptive realism to create a mood that conveys something of the history and character of a given city. (120)

Vermeer's View of Delft has a quality I find at work in travel palindromes. Forth-and-back movement makes for reflection; reflection promotes "topographical exactitude" (Blankert 40)—an improved vision of the surroundings through which one passes; topographical exactitude by turns nourishes and is nourished by physical, visual, and imaginative reflection.

<25> Reflective vision has the potential to revise overlooking, a form of vision that misses details and neglects larger meanings. In Vermeer's painting, light and shadow and the river's reflective quality are used to highlight something that we cannot see: life in the heart of Delft. The exterior—including human figures on the lower bank (none of whom seem to be viewing the river), the Schie and its shadowy images, the walled embankments and massive edifices of the older section of town (topped by the towers of the Schie Gate and the Oude Kerk or "Old Church")—while more immediately visible than the interior, is obscured, leading paradoxically to the increased visibility of what we cannot see. The illuminated interior invites our imagination, calls it into play in order to complete the unfolding scene, thus reminding us of the need for an attentive, creative, reflective, self-aware, contextualizing way of looking. In like manner, new ways of seeing can arise from the palindromic "al reverso," an experiential reflective movement that converts overlooking into looking over (again).

 

Thoreau's Literary Experiment

<26> Palindromes, given their complex simplicity, can shake things up, turning the present inside-out and enabling us to retrace our steps. Thoreau explores palindromic potential in his first book, using literature to combine the sort of visual reflection found in Vermeer's painting with a traveler's physical reflection in a structural palindrome that reverses Americans' overlooking of rivers through imaginative retracing. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers comprises a double experiment, part experience and part theory, undertaken early in his career as a writer. Part One of the experiment involves a two-week trip with his brother John in the late-summer of 1839, boating on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, taking roads and trails into the White Mountains (the ultimate source of the Merrimack), and returning by more or less the same route to their hometown, all the while living "by their wits on the fish of the stream & the berries of the wood," as their neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson recorded in his journal. After hearing a lecture by the educational reformer Horace Mann, Emerson complained that "We are shut up in schools & college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years & come out at last with a bellyfull of words & do not know a thing." Comparing himself unfavorably with the Thoreau brothers just after their return from the river trip, Emerson grumbled about "wordmen" like himself, who "do not know an edible root in the woods" and "cannot tell our course by the stars nor the hour of the day by the sun." Scholars, according to the great American Scholar himself, had to do more than read books (JMN 7:238) [6].

 

Concord River
(Picture Taken by Author)

[click image for larger version]

 

<27> Part Two of the experiment involves a literary adventure based on Part One, in which the writer travels back up the stream of time, guiding readers on literal and metaphorical rivers, going against the flow of experience and seeing anew various confluences: of place and history, writing and life, nature and culture. Thoreau's first book alters the time scheme of the actual river-trip and leaves Thoreau's travel partner unnamed, but otherwise retraces the brothers' journey, using it to contour and convey the writer's developing Transcendentalist theories. Although framed and informed by the travelers' movement through Massachusetts and New Hampshire watersheds, the bulk of the pages of A Week consists of a series of reflections (on History, Religion, Homer, Time, Friendship, Literature, Silence...). The reflective poems and essays, some of which had been previously published in the notoriously transcendental magazine called the Dial, are loosely connected to the brothers' fluid movement on the titular rivers and organized by chapters that follow the days of the week, from "Saturday" to "Friday." The literary changes Thoreau makes to the actual trip, including the reflections he incorporates into the narrative (and/or the bits of narrative he folds into his theoretical reflections), constitute the experimental nature of Part Two: the creation of a book structured by a palindromic voyage.Thoreau's literary experiment reveals an imaginative country as real as—and inseparable from—the hills and history of New England. Taken as a whole, the experiment brings together sensual experience of place and time with a reflective theory of textual experience.

<28> Critics and the reading public in general did not receive the experiment well. Few copies were purchased (the remainder famously and unceremoniously dumped on the author's front porch), and James Russell Lowell's contemporary critical witticism appears in many a later critique or apology: "We were bid to a river-party, not to be preached at" (16). Lowell and others reacted unhappily to the numerous and lengthy reflections (the theory part), preferring that the author stick to an account of his experiences on the trip. But Thoreau's insistence on connecting preaching and river-party deserves a second look. That connection constitutes the "experiment in natural philosophy" of A Week, which is also an essay on interpretation (49). Throughout the book, the writer observes the world through which the travelers pass and raises questions about what we commonly call "nature," urging readers to become mindful of something beyond our customary conception of the order of things, "a nature behind the common," in Thoreau's words, usually "unexplored by science or by literature" (56). Going where science and literature commonly do not go, exploring unexplored nature in A Week, Thoreau experiments with different ways of approaching, receiving, imagining, and communicating the world. His writing moves in a particularly peculiar fashion, asking readers to move with it—between science and literature and beyond—and perhaps be moved by it [7]. He calls his compatriots to be at once more critical, more contemplative, and more creative; he invites and even cajoles his readers to become both wilder and more worldly. Thoreau's Transcendental treatment of travel on New England waterways in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers combines flow and reflection in an attempt to connect literature to life, nature to culture, the here-and-now to elsewhere and beyond.

<29> This unique combination and the connections it fosters are accentuated by the form of the journey itself, which takes the shape of a palindrome. The brothers cast off from their hometown, float down the Concord, sail or row up the Merrimack, stow their craft for a time and venture into the White Mountains of New Hampshire; the trip eventually pivots on Agiocochook (Mt. Washington), after which the Thoreaus retrieve the boat, float down the Merrimack, row or sail up the Concord, and finally "leap gladly on shore" in their hometown (393) [8]. The topical reflections occurring within the structurally palindromic reflection allow Thoreau to reconsider and extend his thinking on such things as memory and loss on a personal level (his brother having died of lockjaw three years after their river trip) while connecting them to such larger philosophical issues as knowing, time, and being. As Lawrence Buell has observed, "Like the river, like the trip itself, the speaker's imagination in A Week moves both upstream and down, forward toward self-realization but simultaneously back into time: the biographical past, the regional past, even the cultural past, as far back as the beginnings of civilization" (1973, 210) [9].

<30> In A Week, the structure of the Thoreau brothers' journey reflects the style of thinking advanced in Thoreau's writing. His account attempts to rework the nature of literature and literary study, relating them more closely to such things as everyday experience, time, place, and spirituality, and emphasizing their possible role in understanding the nature of things. The palindromic experience of the Concord and Merrimack Rivers presents an opportunity for a different kind of literary criticism, according to which literature can help us learn about the meaning of rivers; but, al reverso, rivers can help us rethink the nature of letters, of interpretation, of meaning.

 

"Its Water Was Fuller of Reflection"

<31> One of the persistent arguments in A Week is that culture and human activity are more intimately related to nature and natural phenomena than common sense usually allows. One might even say that, instead of being opposed to one another, nature reflects culture and culture reflects nature. Thoreau pursues the question throughout his rendering of the brothers' experiences on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. In discussions ranging from dams and animals to language and larceny, he continually entangles nature and culture, subtly insisting that, as the Concord itself, given its slow flow, is something betwixt a fluvius and a lacus, our lives are situated somewhere in-between (110). Human experience and the processing of that experience—the "making sense" of things—is always intermediate, connecting natural and cultural elements. The connection takes shape on the second day of their journey. As the morning fog of the chapter "Sunday" dissipates, the brothers enjoy the calm waters of the Concord. The narrator retells a scene that reflects the Thoreaus' own situation, providing another view of their experiences and his interpretation of them:

Two men in a skiff, whom we passed hereabouts, floating buoyantly amid the reflections of the trees, like a feather in mid air, or a leaf which is wafted gently from its twig to the water without turning over, seemed still in their element, and to have very delicately availed themselves of the natural laws. Their floating there was a beautiful and successful experiment in natural philosophy, and it served to enoble [sic] in our eyes the art of navigation, for as birds fly and fishes swim, so these men sailed. It reminded us how much fairer and nobler all the actions of man might be, and that our life in its whole economy might be as beautiful as the fairest works of art or nature. (48-9)

The two men in their skiff function as a figural reflection of the Thoreau brothers, one of four modes of reflection operative in A Week, the other three being literal, (e.g., "the reflection of the trees" in the water), conceptual, and structural. Here, the figural reflection emphasizes, through doubling, a scene of human activity: the art of navigating or sailing in a vessel (a cultural artifact). These men—all four of them—and the two man-made objects in which they float, represent "a beautiful and successful experiment in natural philosophy," the same experiment on which Thoreau has been working since he and his brother cast off, the same experiment on which A Week is built. Though boating may seem artificial or cultural, humans are nonetheless floating on nature's familiar waters. Boat-making and boat-floating are every bit as natural as the activities of fishes and birds, and reflect, to Thoreau's eye, what we all might aspire to: a way of life shaped by and never disconnected from nature, an artful economy of living modeled on natural systems, a mode of being in and experiencing the world that reflects the place and forces—the elements—that make us what we are.

<32> The "two men in a skiff" scene of the "Sunday" chapter occurs on the last day of the Concord segment of their going-forth. Once the brothers enter the waters of the Merrimack, Thoreau will use the word "reflection" occasionally in reference to the philosophical ruminations included in his account of their voyage, but only on the Concord does the writer reproduce literal reflections. Visible reflectivity is a distinctive quality of the Concord River, one of its primary influences. That quality is related to flow, calmer waters permitting more distinct reflections, but Thoreau's attention to reflection intensifies, through extension and in some instances inversion, the effects of flow. Before they come across their counterparts in the skiff, Thoreau remembers that "the surface was so calm, and both air and water so transparent, that the flight of a kingfisher or robin over the river was as distinctly seen reflected in the water below as in the air above. The birds seemed to flit through submerged groves, alighting on the yielding sprays, and their clear notes to come up from below. We were uncertain whether the water floated the land, or the land held water in its bosom" (45). The river provides an inverted view of the world, heightening the writer's awareness and unsettling the boaters' understanding of the nature of things. The form of uncertainty the Thoreaus experience is informed by a healthy, imaginative open-mindedness, and leads to more thinking, to further reflection.

<33> Thoreau uses the reflections of the river to connect thing and image, and then directs our attention to other significant pairs. After an excerpt from an Ellery Channing river poem, the paragraph of the kingfisher/robin, water/land reflection continues to explore changes in the world seen by the brothers: "For every oak and birch too growing on the hill-top, as well as for these elms and willows, we knew that there was a graceful ethereal and ideal tree making down from the roots and sometimes nature in high tides brings her mirror to its foot and makes it visible." Observation of reflection gives way to reflection on the connection between the real and ideal, that which we physically see and that which we imaginatively envision. "The stillness was intense and almost conscious," Thoreau proceeds, "as if it were a natural Sabbath, and we fancied that the morning was the evening of a celestial day. The air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture, to give it an ideal remoteness and perfection." Through a series of inversions, the natural and the cultural, the terrestrial and the celestial, world and representation are brought into relation, allowing Thoreau to move between actual landscape and a conceptual land suffused with imagination: "The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairy-land."

<34> Reflection thus gives us a new world to view or at least another aspect of the world to consider. In drawing our attention to the inverted scene in which morning is evening, up is down, and the ideal is real, Thoreau highlights nature's inversions as an opportunity for thinking about the world differently. Reflective inversion then becomes a lesson learned from the river, a method of optical amelioration. If literal reflections can affect what we see, conceptual reflection involves how we see. After a poetic interlude in which he remembers sailing "on this same stream" with "a maiden," Thoreau returns to reflection and connects it to improved vision. First, he treats reflection as a form of representation: "It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only nature may exaggerate herself." When art is separate from nature, it cannot faithfully represent natural phenomena. To represent nature, one must "unseparate" oneself from nature in order to be able to exaggerate nature—"magnify beyond the limits of truth; represent something as greater than it really is" (OED). It is reflection or mirroring, however, that Thoreau is calling exaggeration. Nature's inversions deeply intensify the world through which we move; in order to faithfully represent rivers and the brothers' experience of them, Thoreau's account will need to mirror that intensifying. To do so, he structures the account as a palindrome, an inherently reflective element of rhetoric. His theory of reflection converts the experience of motion into literary form.

<35> Next, he reports that nature's reflections result not only in doubled scenes but in multiplied potential meaning, making it more difficult to get to the bottom of things. "The shallowest still water is unfathomable. Wherever the trees and skies are reflected there is more than Atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground." Whenever the river's surface reflects the elements of its setting, nature represents itself as not readily measured or exhausted, multiplying the possible meanings of a scene and extending interpretation, perhaps endlessly. In such a setting, fancy or imagination will not reach a limit; it can easily be kept afloat, if one attends to it. To make good on the opportunity for meaning-making afforded us by reflection, we must learn to look differently, in a manner that acknowledges the multifaceted nature of all phenomena. "We noticed that it required a separate intention of the eye, a more free and abstracted vision, to see the reflected trees and the sky, than to see the river bottom merely; and so are there manifold visions in the direction of every object, and even the most opaque reflect the heavens from their surface. Some men have their eyes naturally intended to the one, and some to the other object" (48) [10]. Thoreau promotes a way of seeing that recognizes both the heavenly and the earthly aspects of "every object." Such seeing requires double intentions and the ability to move between those intentions. While some of us are realists, tending to see the thing, others are idealists attending to the reflection (a distinction that might explain why neither science nor literature, as commonly practiced, helpfully explore a nature behind the common). Since we cannot quite manage to look at both sides of an object, situation, or event at the same time, we must try to gain different vantage points, see both sides in turn, and connect those two views in order to get more of the meanings they offer us.

<36> Thoreau's reflections on reflection belong to his own "natural philosophy" being developed in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and are intimately connected to the larger reflection that structures the book. Most critics have emphasized either the cycle of seasons or the device of the week as organizing motifs, but it is important to keep in mind that the summer-passing-into-autumn and Saturday-to-Friday aspects occur within the structural palindrome of the journey; the narrator's movement and the narrative itself are neither simply circular nor linear [11]. The travelers go out and come back by roughly the same path, pivoting but by no means culminating in "Thursday" on "the summit of AGIOCOCHOOK" (314) [12].

<37> As the turning-point, Agiocochook plays a significant role in the palindrome. Many commentators, however, reckon the summiting of Mt. Washington something of an anti-climax. H. Daniel Peck, for instance, writes that A Week "is a journey book with a mountaintop as its turning-point, and inevitably it raises our expectations that it will fulfill the terms of this classic structure: progress to the source, which, when reached, will provide enlightenment and enable the return" (28). Unfortunately, those expectations are not met, according to Peck. Instead, Thoreau offers a "flat and perfunctory rendering of that experience," part of an anti-climactic account that "robs that setting of its significance as a turning-point" (31). Frederick Garber, too, calls the ascent "sorely inadequate," "flat and anticlimactic" (1980, 336). Thoreau's narrative is indeed terse and the travelers' experience of the peak understated, but to characterize it as flat or insignificant is to neglect both the physical and reflective traits of the turning-point ascension of Agiocochook.

<381> The route the brothers followed, which they had "traced up the river to which our native stream is a tributary, until from Merrimack it became the Pemigewasset that leaped by our side, and when we had passed its fountain-head, the Wild Amonoosuck" (314) [13], is anything but uninteresting. Mt. Washington, Thoreau's Agiocochook, is situated east of the Pemigewasset valley. After stashing the boat at Hooksett, the brothers walked to Concord, New Hampshire, took the stage to Plymouth, walked north up the Pemigewasset through Thornton, Lincoln, and Franconia (where they visited the Old Man of the Mountain, may he rest in peace), then headed east to Crawford Notch, where they arrived Sept. 9. They "ascended the mountain" the next day, which is all the journal says on the matter, descended, and then rode to Conway, Concord, and finally Hookset [14]. To test the observations of critics and understand Thoreau's representation of the land, my friend Andrew Marcus and I once retraced the route in a borrowed Oldsmobile we named "The Deliberator," driving from Concord, Massachusetts to the White Mountains, parking and trekking up the Ammonoosuc Ravine until it meets Crawford Path at the Lake of the Clouds and on up to Agiocochook's top (a short but steep ascent, vertically about 3700 feet) in weather most foul. As we found, the approach from the west can take climbers through the worst of the mountain's fabled weather (called by many the worst in North America, by others simply the worst in the world), is capable of creating perilous hiking conditions (with slick rock and hard scrambles), provides some of the finest views in the White Mountains (which we did not learn until the clouds broke during our descent), and leads to "the highest peak east of the Mississippi River and north of the Carolinas…" (altitude: 6288 feet; White Mountain Guide 9). It is difficult to imagine the ascent of Agiocochook, under any conditions, being either flat or insignificant (unless, of course, a modern explorer drives all the way to the top via the east or takes the train).

<39> From Crawford Notch, where they likely began on Sept. 10, to Agiocochook's summit, the brothers climbed approximately 4300 feet in roughly 8 miles, about half of the route being above treeline. The final ascent via Crawford Path requires less exertion than the Ammonoosuc section, but is a good, tough hike nonetheless, even for such fit lads as the Thoreau brothers: scholar William Howarth, no stranger to those trails himself, after remarking on the likelihood of encountering "some of the world's most dangerous weather," observes that "For its last mile, the Crawford Path becomes steep and boulder-strewn" (222). Andrew and I, groping along Crawford Path toward the peak above Lake of the Clouds amid lichen and quartz in a deep mist, visibility severely curtailed and breathing hard, the way losable and the stories of those who perished on Mt. Washington legion, discussed Thoreau's taciturn write-up, in both journal and published account, of the mountain-top part of his trip. Maybe he was too worn-out by the climb to write (our first, but not best, thought). Perhaps he could not express the sublimity of the experience. Maybe he did not want to take away from the riparian by making the mountainous too momentous, turning the account into a "Journey to Agiocochook."

 

Author at Mt. Washington (Agiocochook) Summit
(Picture Taken by Andrew Marcus)

[click image for larger version]

<40> I have come to see that the summit of Agiocochook, as a turning-point, resembles the Netherlands in my own account of travel palindromes. The mountain functions reflectively in Thoreau's Week—not as a mirror that gives back an image of a scene but as the place where scene and image, reflection and reflected, material and ideal, spiritual and physical come together. The peak experience serves as a fold or hinge that highlights the relationship between the two parts it connects. Thoreau's experiment—the trip, the text, the palindrome—hinges on Agiocochook. The peak, in this way of reading, is neither climactic nor anti-climactic, for climax isn't really the point. As the hinge of the palindrome, summiting Agiocochook is not the focus of the story but rather enables the story by structuring the reflective, going-out-coming-back nature of the trip. Enlightenment, in A Week, is not to be found on top of the mountain. Instead, the return and the overall structure to which it belongs are the enlightenment. The silence that follows "AGIOCOCHOOK" in the text—the physical space of a section-break and then some lines from Herbert as an epigraph for the next section—emphasizes the process of enlightenment, underlining the fact that enlightenment is an on-going, back-and-forth process, not a once-and-for-all attainment, thereby transferring its significance from physical object or place, however freighted with mythological value, into that of experiential, imaginative, reflective turning. As a geographical source of headwaters, the mountain makes rivers possible; as a structural hinge, it makes Thoreau's experiment possible.

 

"And All Things Seemed with Us to Flow"

<41> With the figure of the hinge, I hope to keep several propositions in play, regarding connection, turning, and function. As a joint, the hinge represents the connection between two things, allowing for a particular kind of movement, which can then enable other forms of action. Physically, Agiocochook serves as a hinge to the two parts of the brothers' trip, connecting the forward motion to the return. By structuring both the trip itself and the account of the trip with the hinge, Thoreau connects their experience to his theory: "river-party" and "preach[ing]" operate together, though not without a certain squeakiness that irks readers. The first pivot (that of the trip) refers to the second pivot (that between theory and experience), and together the pivots supply the ingredients of Thoreau's experiment in natural philosophy. In the first case, the turn happens once and for all; in the second, the turn keeps occurring, as observation turns into reflection, reflection turns into observation, summer turns into fall and the present turns into memorialized past, experience turns into theory and theory into experience, and intellectual steps are traced and retraced. Thus the hinge, by connecting various elements, events, and modalities, makes Thoreau's experiment go. Where it goes, however, is another matter.

<42> As I said before, Thoreau's writing's movement is peculiar, and its peculiarity, I think, represents a difference in Thoreau's version of Transcendentalism. Rather than the "rising above" or "climbing across" that transcendence usually signifies, Thoreau's movement in A Week doesn't go anywhere; that is, he winds up where he started. Just like any mechanism featuring a hinge, his experiment functions by moving and standing still at the same time. Put another way, the destination becomes important only in so far as it is considered in relation to the origin, and this, in turn, highlights the movement-between. Having pivoted and headed back the way they came, having retrieved their boat and now fleetly coursing downstream on the Merrimack, the brothers, still in the hinge chapter "Thursday," experience a profound sense of centeredness. Thoreau, following a stream of reflections (concerning, for example, the nature-culture connection: "Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense" [316]), finally reflects on flow itself:

Thus we "sayled by thought and pleasaunce," as Chaucer says, and all things seemed with us to flow; the shore itself, and the distant cliffs, were dissolved by the undiluted air. The hardest material seemed to obey the same law with the most fluid, and so indeed in the long run it does. Trees were but rivers of sap and woody fibre, flowing from the atmosphere, and emptying into the earth by their trunks, as their roots flowed upward to the surface. And in the heavens there were rivers of stars, and milky-ways, already beginning to gleam and ripple over our heads. There were rivers of rock on the surface of the earth, and rivers of ore in its bowels, and our thoughts flowed and circulated, and this portion of time was but the current hour. Let us wander where we will, the universe is built round about us, and we are central still. (331) [15]

<43> His experience here is the antithesis of "overlooking" rivers. Going out, turning on the hinge, and coming back leads to experiential participation in the primary trait of rivers: flow. The hinge or pivot accents the structural palindrome, the palindrome leads to insight into flow, and flow yields reflections in which rivers are seen everywhere one looks. Rivers, according to Thoreau, can serve as a model for the cosmos, in its earthly (matter, rock, flora) and celestial (stars, galaxies) forms, and also for human consciousness. Because of the flow and circulation of our thoughts and the relations to which they belong, we have the capacity to connect these diverse rivers to one another, understand the relations better, and communicate the meaning of those connections. In recent years, physicists have said that time does not flow. Time just is, its apparent flow resulting from consciousness, and "talk of the river or flux of time is founded on a misconception" (Davies 40). Maybe one lesson from A Week is that life flows, if not time, and life's flow teaches us something about innate fluidity and connectivity. Thoreau's "all things seemed to flow" does not necessarily mean that "all things flowed"; rather, it means that, in the brothers' experience, all things assumed the quality of the river on which they moved, all things became connected by their new way of seeing. And that way of seeing, developed into a "theory" in the course of A Week, springs from participation—conscious, imaginative participation in; reflective experience of—the flow of things, the fluid unfolding of the world in time.

<44> Stream ecologists such as H.B.N. Hynes observe that "The way in which water flows and the fact that it actually forms the patterns of rivers and streams and their beds are fundamental to most of the properties of biotic habitats in running water" (3). Flow creates the river itself, from bed to bend and beyond; flow largely determines what type of lifeforms live in or near rivers and how they will live. The river is, as geologists say, "the carpenter of its own edifice" (Leopold 281); flow functions as architect, contractor, and builder. But while the physical world provides numerous examples of flow's lessons, Thoreau's evolving natural philosophy does not confine itself to biotic or geologic questions. While engineers might measure flow in terms of acre-feet and geographers in cubic feet per second or inches of run-off, the natural philosopher reckons those but also the less quantifiable aspects of flow. Fluvial processes, natural laws such as gravity, and down-to-earth material movement meet and mingle with philosophical fluidity, intellectual movement, and spiritual onwardness. When all things seem to flow, the natural philosopher registers both the workings of geomorphology and what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "optimal experience," the condition in which "the contents of consciousness are in harmony with each other" (24). One experiences a sense of deep connection between self and situation, person and place. Actor, action, scene, and setting come together.

<45> Flow, in this sense, is the experience of involvement in moments and events: cultural anthropologist Victor Turner speculates that, when experiencing flow as optimal experience, one reaches out to nature and to others. Flow encompasses origins, destinations, and moving between; for Turner, it is a lesson in liminality (57). Thoreau uses his travel experiment as a basis from which he can discursively experiment with a kind of liminal writing that will lead to optimizing the experiences of his readers, as a means of introducing us to flow. And this extreme form of participation in nature (or the world, or the cosmos, or physis) is the function for which Thoreau's hinge-mechanism has been built. His experiment in natural philosophy, operating somewhere between "science and literature," works to reveal a "nature behind the common," a nature obscured by the common, perhaps, or a nature from which our common perception of it emanates.

<46> Although the literature of recent centuries had, for Thoreau, disconnected from and consequently concealed uncommon nature, writing and reading play an enormously significant role in his experiment in natural philosophy. In his important study of A Week, Linck Johnson argues that Thoreau "proclaims the dawning of a new literary era in Concord. In what amounts to a compressed history of western literature, Thoreau in later chapters expresses his ideals of writing and charts the decline of such writing from early epic poets to poets of more civilized eras. Finally, he asserts his own potential role in the creation of a native American literature, rooted in nature and bearing fruit in works like A Week" (164). Connecting the decline of literature to "the destruction of the wilderness by civilization," Johnson reads A Week as offering new kinds of writing and reading as potential means of reversing both the lapse of literature and the civilizing of the wild (241). The relationship between the destruction of the wild and literary decline requires the approach Thoreau has taken in A Week: the combining of river-party and preaching, experience and theory.

<47> The upshot of this combination is that Thoreau's natural philosophy depends on literature for development and exposition, but only insofar as literature is connected to science and culture is connected, through language, to nature. Transcending cultural problems does not require escaping from culture; it requires careful observation of the present moment in all its spatio-temporal, socio-historical, eco-linguistic complexity. And observation alone will not suffice, but must occur along with interpretive reflection and imaginative vision of alternative ways of living in the world. Thoreau thus revises Transcendentalism, emphasizing a kind of intellectual movement that goes back and forth instead of up and away. Through movement of this sort, Thoreau presents his structural palindrome as a naturalizing artifice, a necessary inversion that leads to reversal and renewal. A Week demonstrates how to read the Concord and Merrimack and the lands and times through which they run, providing a model for thinking about "rivers from end to end" (211). In doing so, it revises the nature of literature, turning it out of the library or drawing room, releasing it from its binding, so to speak, and representing it instead as a peculiarly connective mode of experience and communication, a mode of language as natural as it is cultural. Offered as the best means for bringing together observation and reflection, and thus for understanding flow and complexity, literature, in Thoreau's experiment, creates a special opportunity for turning and connecting, for reversing, revolving, and revolutionizing. Literature, or working reflectively through language in relation to the world, reveals the hinge.

<48> For literature to perform that function, however, it needs to be interpreted relationally and reflectively. Thoreau hoped he had succeeded in taking literature outside, as he wrote in his journal two years after the publication of A Week: "I trust it does not smell of the study & library—even the Poets [sic] attic, as of the fields & woods." But, though he wished the book to be "Open to all weathers—not easy to be kept on a shelf," the American reading public has too readily acceded to the latter part of the wish (6/29/1851). We have overlooked Thoreau's book on rivers perhaps even more doggedly than we have overlooked rivers themselves. Were readers to do otherwise, we would become part of Thoreau's experiment. He is, after all, trying to obtain and communicate new views of rivers, literature, and nature, a newness he describes near the end of his story: after the pivotal climb of Agiocochook, heading now down the Merrimack on the return leg toward disembarkation, even Henry and John see the world differently: "Sitting with our faces now upstream, we studied the landscape by degrees, as one unrolls a map..., and there was variety enough for our entertainment in the metamorphoses of the simplest objects. Viewed from this side the scenery appeared new to us." More than just entertainment, the new perspective generated by the palindromic return provides the writer with the opportunity to "begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous every where" (349).

<49> Thoreau's experiment tries to share the new view not just because of its novelty or his generosity, but because nature, as he has come to see it, requires it. Viewed from the usual side, the world is seen from one angle only, objects appear unidimensional, nature seems discontinuous and disconnected from us, and such things as rivers and literature are confined to distinct categories. Consequently, subscribers to that point of view have not discovered where they really are, and the result, as Thoreau jokes much earlier in the book, is not pretty: "Most people with whom I talk, men and women even of some originality and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut and dried,—very dry, I assure you, to hear, dry enough to burn, dry-rotted and powder-post, methinks..." (69). Most people's thinking lacks moisture, lacks life. Thoreau uses the palindromic rivering of A Week to water our ways of knowing.

<50> If I've sufficiently followed his drift and allowed myself to become a participant in the experiment, how can I go forward to some sort of conclusion in regard to overlooking rivers without first going back to the Delaware? Thoreau's rivers demonstrate the need for readers to retrace steps and rethink the nature and meaning of rivers, the meaning and nature of literature, and the area in-between. Like the Concord, the Delaware River, with its few rapids and relatively slow current along its 400-mile course from mountain sources to New York City water-glasses, invites up-and-downstream movement, in-between thinking, and thus enables one to experience a different perspective. To do so, however, requires going against the current—not just across the stream, like George Washington, miraculously staying dry in the winter of history; not just downstream, with history behind us and oblivion ahead. To overcome overlooking and become aware of the Delaware's manifold meanings, one needs to go up- and downstream, in and out of books and theory, back and forth in experience, amid the flow of the world.

 

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Notes

Thanks to numerous colleagues who patiently allowed me to pester them with my ideas, questions, and drafts, especially Sebastiaan Faber, Nick Jones, Laurie McMillin, Kirk Ormand, Jeff Pence, Bob Pierce, Sandy Zagarell, Tom Van Nortwick, and John Knott. None of this is their fault.

[1] Richard C. Albert notes, "On the lists of great American rivers, the Delaware River is often missing" (1). The Delaware is also "one of the last undammed major rivers in the United States" (xi). [^]

[2] I first saw this passage on the title page of Julian Rzóska's On the Nature of Rivers. Rzóska' cites da Vinci's Codex Trivulziano folio 34 r., Milan. [^]

[3] For an introduction to musical palindromes, see Newbould. Of Ludus tonalis, Newbould points out that "the substantial Postludium is not merely a palindrome (or horizontal mirror image) of the equally lengthy Praeludium, but a vertical mirror image too...." [^]

[4] As such, rhetorical palindromes resemble chiastic structure; but whereas chiasmus is based on crossing, the palindrome stresses reflection. Douglass's palindrome, which is a pithy summary of the narrative's project, refers to what he later decribes as "the turning-point in my career as a slave" (298). Seen as characterizing palindromic movement, Douglass's statement emphasizes that he already was a man, then was made a slave, then remade himself into a man. [^]

[5] Lindon begins the poem with the image of a man espying a spy: "Entering the lonely house with my wife / I saw him for the first time / peering furtively from behind a bush...." The poem maintains a sentence-unit palindrome throughout, concluding with the opening lines reversed, which reverses the narrator-spy relation: "Peering furtively from behind a bush, / I saw him, for the first time, / entering the lonely house with my wife" (Bergerson 118-19). [^]

[6] Walter Harding refers to the trip as a "vacation lark" that took on increasing significance for Thoreau (Days 93). Emerson's lines remind us that the lark was no less a challenge, one requiring experimental engagement with the land, the river, and the diverse lifeforms inhabiting those places. Cf. Carafiol: "A Week is an experiment in living, an inquiry into the very possibility, in the face of historical instability, of meaningful life" (125). [^]

[7] Many critics have remarked on the relationship between Thoreau's own movement (especially in his walks) and that of his prose (e.g. Broderick 136). Harding and Meyer connect the image of water to "the flow of Thoreau's thoughts" in A Week (183), and Garber finds that the rivers' flow relates to "narrative flow" (1991, 47). Cf. Tanner (772 and 766) and Rowe (95). [^]

[8] In my view, commentators mislead readers when they claim, as John McPhee does in his introduction to the recent Princeton edition, that the brothers "were bound for Hooksett, New Hampshire..." (ix). They were bound for Concord, by way of Agiocochook. Cf. Linck Johnson, who observes that "the narrative as a whole describes the movement from Concord to a mountain and back to Concord" (15). Robert D. Richardson, Jr. makes a similar point: in all the drafts of A Week, "what stands out is not the goal or the getting there, but the setting out and the return" (64). Christie comments that "Thoreau transformed the ordinary ritual of river travel, not by tampering in any way with the basic structure of the travel account, but by adding to it the dimensions of a more imaginative response" (255). [^]

[9] Joyce Holland states that "To go downstream is to submit to fate and to the laws of creation," while "Going upstream is a deliberate choice, an exploration of the secret and primal sources of existence and a quest for a life outside time" (50). Similarly, Frederick Garber distinguishes between downstream ("natural") and upstream ("contranatural") experience in A Week. In his reading, downstream "is a way we have to go," while upstream "is a way we can go if we are spiritually aware" (336; see also 329). Although Garber deems this a "bifurcation" (adding that "bifurcation is one of the central experiences of the book" [330]), I suggest that it is less a "fork" than a fold, stressing the connection between the two types, an intimate relation in which one reflects the other. [^]

[10] Jonathan Bishop draws a sharp line between the "profane 'river bottom'" and the "sacred" reflection (76). Conversely, Paul David Johnson finds that "Thoreau's major discovery...is based on the insight that both images, the river bottom as well as the reflection, are made by human consciousness. I agree with Johnson that the "natural perspective" Thoreau cultivates here is designed to "make us see freshly the connection between the bottom and the reflection" (27). [^]

[11] Holland, Boies, and Tanner, for example, stress the importance of circles and circularity in A Week ( Holland, 55; Boies, 350-1; Tanner, 763). P. Johnson posits that circularity underlies linearity, the latter being cultural and distancing while the former is natural and "recurrent" (30). Buell claims that while readers "start to see the voyage not as a line but as a circle, from Concord to new Concord (almost) and back again," circularity is countered by the "flux of events," which leads to a "sense of fatality" (Literary Transcendentalism, 210-1), an observation similar to the one he makes in The Environmental Imagination (244). Alternatively, both Garber (1980, 327-29) and Peck (24) attend to river-travel as structuring the narrative. [^]

[12] As William Howarth shows, the actual trip's pivot was more of a loop than an abrupt reversal and retracing. In the literary version, however, the palindromic device obtains. See a map and Howarth's commentary (189 and 205-23). He notes that "Agiocochook is an old Indian name for Mt. Washington; it means, approximately, 'home of the Great Spirit'" (222). [^]

[13] The river is actually the Ammonoosuc. There is also a "Wild Ammonoosuc River," which lies west of the Pemigewasset River valley and flows into the Ammonoosuc River near Bath, NH. In The New England Gazetteer (which the Thoreau brothers consulted), John Hayward describes it as "a stream 40 yards wide, and, when raised by freshets, very swift and furious in its course" (unpaginated and alphabetically arranged). Thoreau, however, refers to the Ammonoosuc itself, adding the epithet "wild" to describe its charm. Climbing alongside it you can see why: the "wild" Ammonoosuc comprises boulders and shallow roaring whitewater rushing down a terrific decline. Cf. Christopher McKee, 205. [^]

[14] See Thoreau's Journal Vol. 1: 136-7. Harding describes this section of the journey in Days (92); for a more detailed reconstruction, see McKee. [^]

[15] Thoreau begins with a reference to Chaucer's Dream, which he quotes at length 14 pages earlier. As William Brennan points out, "This poem is no longer thought to be Chaucer's and is now generally known as Isle of Ladies" (279). [^]

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