Willow Lake

I was looking at the traffic zipping by as I walk over the fenced in bridge. I never really talk about the traffic that circles this quiet place. You can hear cars off in the distance, trucks honk, you can see the movement.

Someone bushwhacked my little spot and cleared out about 10 feet of reeds. I guess it’s a fisherman because fishermen want better access to the lake so they can fish. There are planks where a fishman can stand. I haven’t seen any women fishing so far, but they are welcome to, I’m sure. 

Someone in the tower across the thing was flashing the sunlight back at me. I don’t know if it’s actually trying to communicate with me or not, or if it’s just random. The sun is to my back in the morning so I’m looking west.

I bought five wood chips to begin to start out a wood chip platform.

This is a sacred space that I share with others, human and non-human.

I wonder what it was like to dig this lake. One time I asked a park fellow if he thought it was more of a pond than a lake, and he said, “yeah, it’s a city lake.”

The loons sit low in the water unlike the ducks who seem to float a little higher. They dive under the water and seek fish. One takes a while to get out of the water and was running and flapping like the dickens for about 20 to 30 feet before he can get past the water, and catch up to his friends.

The leaves are still just starting to turn. It’s been a fairly warm fall, but the cold weather is finally triumphant.

Fireside poets

Thoreau had the dickens of a time getting his works published, and to add insult to injury, James Russell Lowell wrote a poem lambasting the Transcendentalists, A Fable For Critics. Mocking their lack of popularity is funny because I've maybe heard of Lowell before, but I don't remember him. I'm no poetry scholar. I wondered if he had a sense of how Thoreau would be the non-fiction hero of the Transcendentalists, thousands of books about him. Lowell even wrote to Howells about their disappearance. How popular they were perhaps also included their derivative nature on the English romantics. 

Thoreau could self publish if he would pay for it, but after staying with the Emersons to cover for Ralph's travels, he worked a lot to get money. He was a handyman, painter, gardner, construction and worked for the pencil factory. He went as far as New Jersey as a surveyor. 

Thoreau made an important step of going from giving free lectures to paid lectures.

Lowell is associated with the fireside poets: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. The American poets who were the first popular poets in America. Before radio, Americans would gather by the fireside and read the anthologies of these poets. Sounds like a wonderful time to me. I once read a random poem by Robert Service on a camping trip by the fire, and my friend was really impressed. Poems by the fire can seem profound, or rather their profoundness is more available. 

In turn Twain made fun of them. 

I went online to find An American Anthology, 1787–1900 and it's over $30 for a hard copy. It's a weird book because it takes 72 pages to get to the first poem.

The first poet in the anthology is Philip Freneau (1752 –1832). "Freneau's close friend at Princeton was James Madison, a relationship that would later contribute to his establishment as the editor of the National Gazette. Freneau family tradition suggests that Madison became acquainted with and fell in love with the poet's sister, Mary, during visits to their home while he was studying at Princeton. While tradition has it that Mary rejected Madison's repeated marriage proposals, this anecdote is undocumented and unsupported by other evidence."

"Although he is not as generally well known as Ralph Waldo Emerson or James Fenimore Cooper, Freneau introduced many themes and images for which later authors became famous."

"Freneau's nature poem "The Wild Honey Suckle" (1786) was considered an early seed to the later Transcendentalist movement..."

"Romantic primitivism was anticipated by Freneau's poems "The Indian Burying Ground" and "Noble Savage.""

I've ordered a poetry book from my library. Still like the hard copies. Woof, not really into this, good to learn that.

Links:

Poetry Foundation

Poets

Wikipedia

Harrison Blake

Harrison Blake could be considered Thoreau's first disciple. He invited Thoreau to talk in his house in Worcester, and was his literary executor after his death. Blake's letters don't survive, but Thoreau's letters to him survive (see link below).

To get a disciple also spurred Thoreau to write. He wrote about Thomas Carlyle.  Horace Greeley got the essay published and hassled the publishers to actually pay Thoreau. He wanted essays on Emerson and Hawthorne, but he ended up writing about Walden, and used those lectures as chapters in his book.

I thought publishing was hard in this day and age, and yet, I can self publish this blog. Thoreau wrote Greeley about the Walden experiment, and he published his short note in his paper, and that might have brought him a little fame. Thoreau put an essay into a Peabody journal and that journal folded. He renamed the essay Civil Disobedience and of course it's read around the world now.

Things I could study more: These letters, the essays, the journal, Thomas Carlyle. I really need to read more Thoreau, maybe A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. This is my problem with reading, there are too many tributaries to row upstream, and too many veins to mine.. I should just finish the biography.

Thoreau amends no government to better government. I almost feel like since his time we're working to refine just what government is good for. Building roads, taking away garbage, educating citizens, public transport. People bitch like their bitching will get more or swear off government because they are disappointed, but honestly good government is the aim, not no government. 

(woodcut of Thoreau by Antonio Frasconi)

Links

Letters to Harrison Blake.

Thoreau's essays

WSJ book review: ‘Henry David Thoreau’ Review: The Jester at Walden Pond

Describing how his pristine mornings bring ‘back the heroic ages,’ Thoreau is interrupted by a mocking mosquito.

By Christoph Irmscher on Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently by Lawrence Buell, ends, 

"Mr. Buell’s book powerfully motivates us to treat Thoreau “not as an oracle but as a stimulus to see and be beyond the ordinary.” Regularly satirizing his own forays into secular sainthood, Thoreau came to embrace this world as all the heaven he needed. He could find a whole universe reflected in the evanescent miracle of the snowflake landing on his sleeve during an afternoon walk—a sparkling star dropped right from the sky, its six rays resembling little pine trees, as perfectly formed and beautiful as any of his sentences."

Willow Lake

 

So what is the trigger that makes leaves of deciduous trees begin to turn color in the fall? Is it sunlight is it temperature? Is it moisture? Is it health? What kind of combinations of all those four things stop? Leaves have begun to turn at Willow Lake.

Some asshole came through and cut down a few young trees with an ax. He can tell it wasn’t a park ranger because they left the trees on the path, blocking the path. They also cut the trees off at high heights, so that obviously they were just doing what was convenient not what was needed. I was thinking about what defines an asshole. An asshole is impulsive and limited in their vision. They don’t really understand their impact on others and they’re transparently selfish. They they have no regard for everyone else. I know that conservatives don’t buy into the left-wing version of trying to help everyone and think that all we can be is selfish and I know that that’s 50% of personalities. I don't think that it’s OK to not think about others, and to everyone needs to learn how to behave to support others. Thinking about others isn’t a waste of time for my own selfishness.

After Walden

Henry David Thoreau left Walden, but in a way you carry that experience around with you. He stayed with the Emerson family while Waldo traveled to Europe to do lectures. Such an odd thing to step in and be the male role model and leader in another family temporarily, but it makes sense in a way.

We know what happened to Thoreau during this period because he wrote letters to Emerson.

Sophia Foord (1802-1885) proposed marriage to Henry. A 45 year old women who taught Emerson's children for a year, when Henry was 30. She had lived with the Alcott's. Henry declined the offer. She sent him semi-incoherent letters and saw herself as his soulmate, they would be united in heaven.

Amos Bronson Alcott was hired to build a structure, maybe thought to be a writers place, but it was too ramshackled. It's speculated that it was a way to give Alcott and Thoreau money for Emerson. A quixotic project they seemed to work on for a while that never quite came off. 

The Walden home was moved, and it was almost a new home until the gardener fought with his wife and left, and the rebuild languished. Then it was moved again and then later scrapped for parts, and you could say some boards still exist in a barn in the area.

The railroad sparks kept setting fire to Emerson's land, at Walden and by his home. They fire burned woods would eventually be clear cut, and Thoreau's Walden would be gone.

Emerson's (second) wife Lidian got sick. Emerson was worried but took a side trip to Paris in time for the 1848 revolution. Meanwhile Margaret Fuller was writing about the revolutions in Rome. Emerson wanted to rescue her, but she was married and with child. Lidian recovered, and resumed writing letters abroad to Emerson. With such an intimate relationship, one wonders what it was like for Lidian and Henry. 

We have no information about Thoreau's sexual life, was he gay or bi or asexual? Was sexuality so cut off in these times? As a naturalist, he saw it all as natural, he wrote some things Walt Whitman would approve of in his journal. But the trail goes dead and we just don't know.

The fall

It's overflowing Willow Lake. I couldn't get to my meditation spot. 

I slipped and fell in the mud. I'm the mud man. I thought about leaning in and rolling around for a while to really do a good job, but I worried about what people would think in the long walk home.

I had to walk back all muddy, but it's from behind so not really that noticeable to people I pass walking. But at the park I ran into a fellow who is friendly, so I confessed my fall, and he went on and on about how people pay for that in a spa. 

My daughter has taken to calling me Mud Man.