Routes, paths, roads; coursings and periplus. Navigating the world by the well-worn ways whether taken by ourselves or others, we tend to retrace our steps, incurring unconscious repetition. A habitual automatism is inevitably conditioned, and our innate spontaneity of thought and body, movement and freedom, is trampled beneath the heavy and banal footfall of habituation. As Henry David Thoreau’s Walden articulates, “How easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.”¹ These paths, Thoreau informs us, can be formed in as little as a week and prove firm against being undone. Yet in Walden, we see that with a programmatic self-bewilderment, a breaking out from the routine route of life, we can re-encounter the infinity of reality. 

          In a digression on routes, Thoreau writes:

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In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons or headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not til we are lost, in other words, not til we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.²

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This becoming “lost” in order to reawaken ourselves to the infinitude of Nature takes on many forms in Walden, as many as Thoreau can manage to include: the inversion and multiplication of sight and viewpoints; a positive impairment or loss of tonality and language; the estrangement of words into their component parts and histories; an underlying refusal of only one mode of being; and a permanent revolution against tradition. These techniques of bewilderment (from τέχνη, art, craft, skill) propel the book’s formal changes along. Such formal changes constitute the lasting accretion of self-bewildering experiences; breakages, leaks, freezings and new pathways dissolve the old formations and tear through the limiting sets of habits one wrongly takes for reality in his impoverished conditioning. This pattern of estrangement for inventing new ways of perception is especially abundant in the latter half of the book.

          A bewilderment of speech via hearing emerges in Thoreau’s relationship with a deaf fisherman who hums as the former philosophizes, so that “not many words passed between us.”³ What is lost here is the habitual, surface level conversation-forms the two individuals might have engaged with if there were no sensory oddities or quirks to divert them from conventions. The habit of conversation is blocked or frozen over by the other’s deafness; instead of a normal discourse, “our intercourse was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by speech.”⁴ Here, as elsewhere (i.e. the uneducated woodsman that is such a source of poetic wisdom in his way of being for Thoreau, despite his coming short of verbal eloquence), the particular ‘odd’ case or encounter is superior to the well-prepared for, repeated, conventional (and thus trivial) speech-encounter… the tax-man’s subpoena, the preacher’s script. The loss of normal channels of conversation is a boon that releases the individuality of the two from a needless and externally imposed lifestyle, and liberates them both to pursue their own whims and interests. Individuation, not stereotype, is the mode of growth here, new harmonies produced from bewildering accidents. The discordance of exterior elements is valued by the seeker of “the infinite extent,” of new and uncharted musics of relating, for that discordance is what habit flees from in its safety-seeking: “Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more wonderful.”⁵  

          A bewilderment of thought via touch comes shortly after, as Thoreau describes his “hours of midnight fishing.”⁶ The habit in this case, which must be wildly dissolved, is thinking or philosophizing, the very habit we see break into Thoreau’s experience in the wordless relation with the fisherman. As the latter psalmed quietly, the former was liberated to think. But the channels of thinking, especially for one who considers himself a thinker, must be opened wide into newness by breaks and jumps, by subjecting oneself to bewilderment. In danger of becoming habit, thought is interrupted by “the movement of the line” and “a slight vibration along it.”⁷ A “faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams” serves to “link you to Nature again.”⁸ The routine and conditioned separation between the physical and the metaphysical (a habit encouraged by most traditions of metaphysical speculation), mind and body (thought and extension) is bridged by the unpredictability of natural phenomena: the subaqueous circulations and bitings of fishes. Back within the body with a tug on the line, faintly felt, and hidden by the dark waters, these piscine interruptions ensure that even the habit of philosophizing can be subjected to wildness, and the mind and body remarried. A unification of Nature and thought requires unfamiliar events to shock the latter out of its traditional routes. 

          A methodical bewilderment of seeing comes next, with the multiplication of viewpoints and lookouts in the descriptions of Walden Pond, in which height, depth, distance, and the art of seeing enter into endlessly new combinations with light, weather, color, and natural surroundings. “Looking with divided vision”, so Thoreau describes a moment of conscious estrangement where the pair of eyes, by habit stifled by the conventional oneness of vision, become two free instruments.⁹ The eye is habituated to stereoscopically surveying the water from differing heights and angles, perceiving a corresponding doubleness disclosed in the color of the pond’s surface, fine green and finer blue, over and under. The previous two examples are patterned in two-pairs with the individuality of each term emphasized and intertwined in the forging of new and more complex harmonies of dissonance.¹⁰ Individuality is retained within multiplicity, an individuality of difference, or parallax.¹¹ On the other hand, any trivial oneness, any frozen lake of perception, is burned up by the flaming skates of the desirous observer breaking through to a deeper surface. 

          Doubleness is valued as superior to the singleness of routine pathways, liberating the individuality of things. So the poet declares, “Love is a thing of twoness.”¹² Some people, viewing the ponds from a distance, perceive only a superficial blueness, without the full immersion in immanence that is necessary for one to unify oneself with its branching multiplicities. This immersion requires one to leave off, in any case, the preconceived notions of observation, carried like dusty and begrimèd lenses preventing vision from dividing itself into further truths (greens blues browns held at once from the same viewpoint!). Bewilder, and the colors will proliferate like roots through water. Not just height and distance, but total inversion is necessary. “When you invert your head”––a technique which alters the shoreline such that it appears as “a thread of finest gossamer…separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another.”¹³ The landscape is turned on its head as the observer is turned on his head: the pond becomes the firmament and the trees its nebulas and constellations. Things metamorphose into their opposites; here a process of revolution, of turning-about, is acted out in the body (late 14c., revolucioun, originally of celestial bodies). The ever-revolving eyeball of bewilderment is an exhortation to a specific kind of do-it-yourself, a self-reliance that melts the strictures of the self into a circulation with Nature. A freely moving planet still subjected to an enmeshing gravity, a wildly ordered surroundings. This is an egoism that destroys the limits of the self, and is not self-destructive like limitation qua habit. Immanent and connatural to it through a willfully multiplied vision, the observer is united with the observed, and vice versa. Thus, the former is freed from the old into a bewildering new perception of color, and the latter is honored in its several realities. Truth gradually comes into being as the seer accumulates viewpoints and combines them into a complete, open, and generative whole. 

          Yet it is not just the individual that changes his environment in the way he alters his angle and style of perception of it through a programmatic and spontaneous defamiliarization; Nature, too, estranges herself from the old through constant cyclings of change: the weather and the seasons, undulations and ephemeralities. Thus there cannot be said to be any strict difference between the movement of the seer to a vantage point, capable of “distinguish[ing] the circling undulations” and the undulating circulations themselves. Both movements are held within the same moment, interdependent; within one another just as water is held within the earth, and as the face of the earth is likewise held within its waters. The lake, Thoreau compares, to the earth’s eye. Observer and observed are a doubled oneness, coupled in the moment of vision, realized in the combination of disparate moments into a knowledge of a cyclic law and harmony, concordant in discordance. In such relations, it is possible to combine interbeing and becoming. The number and variety of such relations certainly approaches the infinite, and the keen observer of these processes (himself the site of uncountable and correspondent becomings) is able to “appreciate the vastness and strangeness” of these relations.¹⁴ Thus he sees as much as possible in order that the primal faculty of wonder remains free and unbounded. The lenses of life might be presently wiped and adjusted at every moment, to see if we are not missing anything. Bewilderment becomes an anti-habit, generating newness and regenerating oneness. Like Nature’s undulating cycles and periods, bewilderment is a return without repetition (a revolution), and will always seek to break apart the immediate surface. Bewilderment seeks to transmutation: the dead, inherited leaves of the past seasons, the sedimentary and the sedentary, thus regenerated into fertilizer for springs and suns as yet unseen and unheard of. “It was one of the most thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such as these plains never saw nor heard.”¹⁵  This is not mere surface-skating, but an approach to the infinite depth and height of reality. If all is surface, let all be surface, meanwhile “let us not play at kittlybenders.”¹⁶ The impulse to bewilderment brings forth a malleable, spontaneous, and infinite set of techniques that corresponds and aligns with the infinite multiplicity of viewpoints waiting in each moment to be observed in Nature. There is no set formula, only observation and interaction in the freest sense, for the purpose is to break with habit, not reinvent its structures whilst breaking it. To replace the old path with a new one, no matter how beautiful, is poor form and a putrefaction of a renewing Nature. Thus Thoreau refuses to write purely aesthetically or scientifically, exaltedly or earthily; instead, Thoreau renews his style always as the pond renews its colors with its shifting skies and surroundings. 

          Does one impress himself on the landscape by this constant urge to further seeings? Does one somehow disturb the natural order of things? Is it elegy, when Thoreau writes, “I saw a double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other, one on the ice, the other on the trees or hill-side”?¹⁷ This multiplicity of shadow-selves, produced by “one who has…frequented it [and] lived by its shore,” is the result of a long revolution and combination of viewpoints.¹⁸ He is so reflected into an infinitely divided vision that his individuality seems to dissolve in its profusion across the landscape. “Finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider’s web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the channels worn by the water flowing from all sides to a centre.”¹⁹ This “new freezing,” taken as Walden itself, is the compendium of recorded observations that emphatically research the multiple within the single, the internal and “dark figures” within the “ice…beautifully mottled… from all sides to a center.”²⁰ Thus the accumulated viewpoints converge and flow into oneness: is this oneness the ego, the writer, his work? The work is composed in “ice rosettes,” where the petals are moments of observation and its pistil is the Nature-ego complex, the Self unified in its infinite relatedness.

          Within this ego, the self-bewildering, disobedient ego, is an ever-breeding manyness, a teeming multitude of potentialities of thought and sense. In a twoness with Nature, which is equally multiple, its separateness reaches an at-one-ment, a oneness in which endless difference is recognized as the constituting generative and vital power of the world.²¹ In atoning for his separateness, Thoreau observes that: 

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the sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, re-creating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all his faults are forgotten.²² 

 

This springtime connaturality between the eye (I) and its surroundings is the seasonal, never-finalized point of rest for one who has constantly renewed the proper art and technique of bewilderment (be- "thoroughly" + archaic, wilder “lead astray, lure into the wilds”), the temporal opening of the worlds. 

 

Notes

 

¹ Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” in Walden and Civil Disobedience, ed. Owen Thomas, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 213. 

² Thoreau, Walden, 114-5.

³ Thoreau, Walden, 116.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Thoreau, Walden, 192.

⁶ Thoreau, Walden, 117.

⁷ Ibid

⁸ Ibid

⁹ Thoreau, Walden, 118.

¹⁰ (1. fisherman-Thoreau, psalming-thinking, deafness-hearing; 2. body-mind, speculation-fishing line, thought-fish, water-air)

¹¹ From French parallaxe, from Greek parallaxis ‘a change’, from parallassein ‘to alternate’, based on allassein ‘to exchange’ (from allos ‘other’). The general sense     of ‘fact of seeing wrongly’ might well reflect the distrust vision is met with when it divides from traditional modes of seeing, from routing and rote.

¹² Love is a thing of twoness. / But underneath any twoness, man is alone.” D. H. Lawrence, "Deeper Than Love," in The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, vol. 2 (New York: Viking Press, 1964).

¹³ Thoreau, Walden, 125.

¹⁴ Thoreau, Walden, 114.

¹⁵  Thoreau, Walden, 180.

¹⁶  Thoreau, Walden, 218-9. Kittlybending is the common New England pastime of skating over thin ice.

¹⁷  Thoreau, Walden, 194.

¹⁸  Thoreau, Walden, 117.

¹⁹  Thoreau, Walden, 194.

²⁰  Ibid.

²¹  1510s, "condition of being at one (with others)," a sense now obsolete, from atone + -ment.

²²  Thoreau, Walden, 208.

 

Bibliography

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Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature” and "Self-Reliance". In Essays & Lectures, edited by Joel Porte, 257–82. New York: Library of America, 1983.

Lawrence, D. H. "Deeper Than Love." In The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. Vol. 2. New York: Viking Press, 1964.

Thoreau, Henry David. "Walden." In Walden and Civil Disobedience, edited by Owen Thomas. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966.