HOUSE-WARMING

I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter.

—HD Thoreau

The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

—G Bachelard

He who walks with his house on his head is heaven.

—C Olson

For Kirsten and Emilie

Settling into our new house up on the ridge in Todd, NC this week, unpacking boxes, walking the dog over to see deer tracks in the Daniel Boone cemetery, carrying in firewood, learning new students’ names, and driving down slippery mountain roads in the snow, I am thinking about HD Thoreau’s house warming at Walden. The buzz of living close to the bone in his cabin allows Thoreau to dream of a house “larger and more populous” than most of the houses he sees in Concord. Dedicated to eternity, Thoreau’s dream house stands in “a golden age, of enduring materials.” It is expansive and open to others; it allows more of the world into it, and it goes to the world.

Thoreau’s initial descriptions also stress practicality and simplicity in a way that calls to the writing of Walden. His house is “without gingerbread work,” it “consists of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one’s head, —useful to keep off rain and snow; where the king and queen post stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof.” In contact with the elements, this house honors the old gods by restoring its inhabitants to the activity of nature. Even the seeming ambiguity of Thoreau’s use of the word some is a clarity as it blurs the distinction between the human-world and the world at large: “Some may live in the fire-place, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose.”

Honoring the old gods, Thoreau commits himself to ancient hospitality traditions. One of his primary desires is that his house is capable of providing rest to “the weary traveler” during storms. It shelters the way poems shelter; it provides a brief respite to travel just as Walden provides rest because it leaves a fossil of Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond, marking the experience of a life that continues. (Remember that Thoreau’s introduction to Walden in “Economy” states in explicit terms that he is not there anymore: “I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”) The word shelter also doubles, becoming an exposure as the house shelters by revealing the frayed edge where domesticity gives way to the experience of wilderness. Asserting that the only way into the house is to “[open] the outside door,” Thoreau identifies his home with an ecstatic realization of outside space. Doing so, he recognizes wildness in the doorway that ends “the ceremony” of routine by awakening inhabitants from the dull wood into an expansive precision where “everything hangs upon its peg” according to its own nature.

In heaven, the work is eternity (which is no work). The bifurcation between now and then melts into a measureless present where Thoreau dedicates life to the cultivation of attention. His house answers the present without giving thought to what exists outside the moment (after). It “[contains] all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping.” (It is a process like “Old Marlborough Road,” not a product: “Nobody repairs it,/ For nobody wears it;/ It is a living way.”)

As shelter promises rest and makes way for exposure, good housekeeping gives itself away. Walden, Thoreau’s dream house, doesn’t hide anything. (“You can see all the treasures of the house at one view.”) All of the inhabitants are presented to guests upon arrival. Everything in the field is luminous, including traces of the circumstances in which Walden was composed, and Thoreau counts himself one among the other objects. His home is generous as a poem can be: “[its] inside is as open and manifest as a bird’s nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there, —in solitary confinement.” Opening his door to guests and readers alike, Thoreau welcomes them into the most vital parts of the house. He relinquishes privilege to divorce authorship from authority, warning that the dangerous implications of agency “poison” the possibility of true companionship: “Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you.” Thoreau knows that the buoyancy and warmth of guests charges the creative process of homemaking (“worlding”) anew. He also knows that readers, in turn, write the afterlife of Walden.

When Thoreau closes his discussion of his dream house in “House-warming,” he puns, linking parlor to parlaver in order to critique empty or profane talk. He dismisses metaphors, techniques, and “artistry” that unnecessarily complicate our houses (“slides and dumb-waiters”) by keeping guests and readers at a distance from the reality of the places where we eat and work: “It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into parlaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.” Focusing on craft, etc., we orient ourselves to representations rather than activity. We get the “parable of dinner,” and I want the real thing. I’m hungry.

What’s for lunch? Atlas Sound while wind carves drifts down the ridge from our house where snow glitters in the sun like tinsel. Finches fall down from branches like leaves, and a little woodpecker hammers a new tree at the window.

I want that for a sandwich.

DEPARTURES ARE ARRIVALS

In my World Literature class this semester we have been talking about wandering as transformational experience in a way that corresponds with HD Thoreau’s discussion of ecstatic contact in “Walking.” For Thoreau, walking combines aimlessness with a sense of holy purpose; it is a means of stepping out of agency, security, and the trappings of privilege in order to be organized by “Higher Laws.” There is no return for Thoreau’s walker (“Knight Errant”) because the activity of walking is change. Thus, he encourages us to walk using the same language that Jesus uses to call to his disciples in The Gospels: “We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”

Getting ready to leave Tuscaloosa for North Carolina later this week, I keep returning to Rimbaud’s poem “Departures” from Illuminations. I have known the Louise Varese translation by heart for years

Seen enough. The vision was met with in every

air.

Had enough. Sounds of cities, in the evening and

in the sun and always.

Known enough. Life’s halts.—O Sounds and Vi-

sions!

Departure in new affection and new noise. (New Directions 1946)

*There is a note in the margin that I wrote ten or more years ago in a script that I now barely recognize as my own: “Departures are arrivals.”

Thankfully, my teacher Donald Revell has recently translated “Departures” anew

Seen enough. The vision strives against itself in all atmospheres.

Had enough. Hubbub of cities, at evening, and in the sunshine,

and always.

Known enough. The impediments of life. —O Hubbubs and Visions!

Departure into new affections and noise! (Omnidawn 2009)

I’ll take two.

Both translations evidence the way departures and arrivals press against each other to celebrate Rimbaud’s realization that leaving makes way for wakefulness as it allows us to see our surroundings with fresh eyes—we arrive “into new affection and noise.” (Ezra Pound in a guerilla cage at Pisa: “Nothing counts save the quality of the affection.”) Revell’s translation also cuts in two directions because it addresses tensions of departures related to perspective by emphasizing that “the vision strives against itself” to be born.

Virgil’s Eclogues explore this tension as a matter of attachment, marking the elegiac nature of departures as his shepherds often find themselves displaced. Meliboeus: “But we have to leave our homes and go far way” (“Eclogue 1”). Doing so, Virgil calls to life as a constant birthing forward that couples joyfulness with sorrow:

I was trying to drive my goats along the path

And one of them I could hardly get to follow;

Just now, among the hazels, she went into labor

And then, right there on the hard flinty ground,

Gave birth to twins who would have been our hope,

Back on our farm. (Meliboeus, “Eclogue 1”)

Change is especially terrifying when we are fixated on what must be left behind—our friends, our family, our routines and our sense of safety. Meliboeus is emotionally shattered to leave his home and fields because he loves them. Lycidas is, likewise, heartbroken that he will forget all of his songs because he knows that our new lives forget the old ones—they are the beginning of a new circumstance. “Having no particular home,” they must, necessarily, learn to be “equally at home everywhere” like Thoreau’s walker.

Leaving, Virgil’s shepherds find themselves singing as a means of processing their loss and moving forward “into new affections and noise.” Because they walk while they sing, their songs score distance and a dispersal of agency; the poverty of the “I” extends outward towards the “you” the way an echo spreads out as it carries through the forest. Lycidas: “Let’s keep on going, but singing as we go./ Singing makes the journey easier./ I’ll carry the basket for awhile, so you can sing” (“Eclogue IX”). Making way for company, The Eclogues also reveal change to be harrowing and solitary as Lycidas’ inability to recognize a song he has heard speaks to the insurmountable distance across which they attempt to translate. Lycidas: “What was that song I heard you singing, alone?” (“Eclogue IX”). Ecstasy is transit and ecstatic experience is always, finally, absolutely singular as it finds us alone with God. (W Whitman: “I am afoot with my vision.”)

Reading Virgil’s Eclogues in the beginning of the Christmas season, I am overwhelmed by the promise that the angel of the Lord first delivers the gospel of Christ’s birth to shepherds. While I look around our apartment, preparing to begin to pack up what’s left of our stuff, it’s hard not to feel like we failed here. We’ve made some new friends, for sure, and I am forever grateful. My partner wrote a beautiful book. This was also a hard place to live, far away from loved ones and primary company. Like everybody else, I worked my ass off working full-time for part-time pay sans benefits, and it was hard to buy groceries the last couple of weeks between paychecks. I am not leaving for a job. I have been trying hard to get one, but I can’t seem to pull it off—most of our friends can’t get jobs. The economy is bad and the current academic “system” is a fucking nightmare. It seems like there’s no room for us at the inn.

Faced with what have felt like soul-crushing circumstances this fall, I am desperately clinging to Thoreau’s belief that the poverty of wandering is advantageous because it strips away what is unnecessary. (I woke up thinking about the Gospel of Luke this morning.) I know it’s true. God comes the way of the lowest. I have seen plenty of evidence. I am also scared as Hell. (“The impediments of life.”). Paradise Lost admonishes us that home moves to begin in Hell or otherwise. We are going. We’re gone. (Milton’s Satan: “Space may create new worlds.”) Looking backwards to some perceived sense of safety is ruin; it’s a problem of perspective. (Satan: “I myself am Hell.”) Getting caught up “trying” to agent our way out of the circumstances is ruin—feeling tired, worried, angry, etc. Even the obligation of hope is exhausting.

Like Thoreau’s “Walking,” Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems calls to the advantageousness of poverty as Maximus advises that, in America, the poet should “take the way of/ the lowest” because “the light does go one way towards the post office,/ and quite another way down to Main Street.”

Presence is the baseline and we are leveled to it. Thoreau: “We need to witness our own limits transgressed.”

W Whitman: “Why should I wish to see God better than this day?”

WC Williams’ “Burning the Christmas Greens” also asserts that “the vision strives against itself” by locating the Christmas tree (a symbol of our renewal) as a part of a much longer Lucretian process as Williams watches its ashes crackle in the fire: “All recognition lost, burnt clean.”

My disappointment, shame, anger, and, finally (hopefully), my grace.

WCW: “Ash and flame and we, in/ that instant, lost,// breathless to be witnesses,/ as if we stood/ ourselves refreshed among/ the shining fauna of that fire.”

We leave here, and we arrive here. Robert Creeley: “Here now—/ begin!” (Pieces).

There is no room for privilege or accumulation.

I am sitting at an old card table that my dad found by the side of the road, eating soup with my girl in a strange place that never felt like home (not for a second); our dog is asleep on the carpet next to us.

“Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.”