6 - Howe/James

Summary

In childhood, if we are lucky, Nature furls us in the confidence of her huge harmony. Assimilation into civilization's chronology, its grammatical and arithmetical scrutiny, calls for correcting, suspecting, coveting, corrupting my soul into a devious definition of Duty. I must pursue and destroy what was most tender in my soul's first nature. A poem is an invocation, rebellious return to the blessedness of beginning again, wandering free in pure process of forgetting and finding.

— Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson, 98

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff “pure experience,” then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its “terms” becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known. This will need much explanation before it can be understood.

— William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 4

Beginnings: America/Howe

Lurking behind or hovering, like a ghost, above this work — the explicit concern of which is the relation of mind to world in the work of a constellation of poets and philosophers — is the particularly fraught designation “American.” Tracing a scattered lineage, I have found myself traversing Concord and Cambridge, the terrain of the “American Renaissance” — ground that has been profoundly contested in recent decades, perhaps most visibly by Sacvan Bercovitch. I was well underway in this project before it struck me that eight of the ten writers whose work I explore are, like myself, native New Englanders.

Throughout the writing of this book I have been haunted by the persistence of two facts — the intimate, almost-voiceless reality of motherhood and the (to me) frighteningly distant, dangerously abstract reality of war. The former has made me wonder about the relevance of women's lives to the writings of the mostly canonical, mostly male writers about whom I have written. The latter has made me wary of further enshrining the idea of “America” which has rendered the brutality of the United States all but invisible to its own citizens.