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Show ZEPHYR/OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2005 Here’s my seminar contribution, an attempt to link Thoreau’’s amazingly modern attitudes, by referring to Ellen Meloy’s bold writing and to Val Plumbwood, an equally forthright writer from Australia who describes herself as “a crocodile survivor.” (Yes, I too would like to know what that means). - Inone of the famous passages in The Maine Woods where he confronts Nature in the raw, Lhoreau writes: ” .. It was Matter, vast, terrific -- not his Mother Earth ... not for him to tread on, or be buried in,--no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there--the home this of Necessity and Fate.” (1) But at Cape Cod, where he senses the Ocean is at least as wild as the wildest north woods, we find him standing at remnants of a drowned human: { “ ..as 1 stood there they [the bones with some adhering flesh] grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and I was impressed as if there was an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out...” (2) telcom.com Contrasts like this are a recognized Thoreauvian manner: every encounter creates its own flavor, its sensual and emotional individuality, its own cluster of thoughts. The particularity, the individuality of experience, this is the thread I’m following, a thread that _ is especially clear in the north woods writings. Here we have three journeys into a country where the living is not easy. Thoreau and his companions encounter blackflies, mosquitoes and no-see-ums; they scramble through swampy down-timbered portages, run rapids or pole a bateau upstream in rock-strewn currents; they look for camp sites on shorelines dominated by oppressive, closely ranked growth. Coming to a lake is to reach a most welcome clearing in the endless forest. From those arenas of struggle we receive, |. LOSING SOLITUDE let us say, reports. “.. we heard come faintly echoing or creeping from far through the moss-clad aisles, a dull of the of the When The By Martin Murie dry rushing sound, with a solid core to it, yet as if half smothered under the grasp luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry damp and shaggy wilderness. If we had not been there no mortal had heard it. we asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, “Tree fall.” report continues with a comment: “There is something singularly grand and impressive in the sound of a tree falling in a perfectly calm night like this, as if the agencies which overthrow it did not need to be THOREAU THEN AND NOW © excited, but worked with a subtle, deliberate, and conscious force, like a boa constrictor, Last winter I re-read some of Henry Thoreau’s writings, preparing for a seminar at the meetings of the Association for Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). I was and more effectively than even in a windy day. w impressed more than ever with how much that man accomplished in his short life. One of his great achievements is the journal, 47 volumes of handwritten pages covering the period 1837 - 1861. In all of his writing he kept a critical, and sometimes appreciative, eye on his society in those early turbulent nineteenth century years. He was no recluse, though he did appreciate being alone much of the time, to use his extraordinary “paying The particularity, the individuality of experience, this is the thread I'm following, a thread that is especially clear in the north wood attention” mind in furthering his lifelong project, experiencing and trying to understand nature, And hehad an activist yearning, publicly protested the American invasion of Mexico. Damn! There I am again, remembering old wars, in the shadows of newer ones. Frederick Douglas called the Mexican invasion a “disgraceful, cruel war.” Daniel Webster ranted against it. U.S.Grant, future president, then an army lieutenant in the invasion force, participated in the capture of Mexico City, regretted that “I had not moral courage enough to resign.” The 1848 treaty negotiator, Nicholas Trist, who presided over transfer of huge chunks of northern Mexico to the United States, wrote that he felt “shame as an American.” The lie used by President James Polk to cross the border in full force was that a skirmish of U.S. and Mexican patrols had shed American blood on American soil. The truth was that the blood was shed 150 miles south of the Texas border. (Neuces River). Congressman Abraham Lincoln asked for the precise location of shed blood, received no reply. writings. Congressman John Quincy Adams publicly urged military officers to resign and Edward Abbey... soldiers to desert. Thirteen percent of the regular army did desert, a rate twice that of the Vietnam war. Some Irish immigrant draftees not only went AWOL, they formed the Saint Patrick’s Battalion and fought on the Mexican side. They took heavy casualties; most of the survivors faced a firing squad at war’’s end. In 1861 France, having taken Algeria and Vietnam, went into Mexico and shipped in contempating the bust of Thoreau. an archduke from Austria to be emperor. And so on, there’s more, but that’s enough. I mention these events because I have to, and because I am a member of ASLE, an organization with global outreach that tries to cross academic boundaries. War should not be exempt from such crossings, especially when war has grown into a voracious environmental bulldozer run ram : As an indication of ASLE’s effort, the four topics of the seminar entitled “Henry David Thoreau, Part 1,” were as follows: Thoreau, nature and poetic language; Thoreauvian activism, exemplified by Long Island Baymen’s defense of their livelihood, an analysis of Thoreau’s writing about Ktaadn, suggesting that he recognized certain areas of our planet not suited for human dwelling (Remember Ed Abbey having a similar thought?); and my iece on relevance of Thoreau’s north woods and Cape Cod essays to current literary /environmental work. It was a good meeting, lots to think about. By the way, Thoreau’s north woods essays are being translated into Japanese. ae SS eg i J Fin Sty, Then, as if to undercut the fanciful interpretation, a prosaic finale: “Tf there is any such difference, perhaps it is because trees with the dews of the night on them are heavier than by day.” (3) In that passage, in muted form, are some of Thoreau’s writing habits: extravagantly precise description, the imaginative interpretation, the matter-of-fact statement. But his quiver holds more than that. “This was what you might call a bran new country; the only roads were of Nature’s making, and the few houses were camps. Here, then, one could no longer ORDER SIGNED COPIES DIRECT FROM MARTIN MURIE: LOSING SOLITUDE: cowtown....$14.95 A contemporary Western. Developers invade a WINDSWEPT: Birdwatchers & a biker from Montana tangle with corporation extremists in Medicine Bow. 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