To live deliberately

On embodiment and abstraction. With references to H.D. Thoreau, W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, Bodil Malmsten and Claire-Louise Bennett, among others.

Photo by Eleanor Philips on Unsplash

I can’t get out of my mind an image of a painting by the French artist Suzanne Valadon, whom I discovered via this recent essay by

Anne Boyd

.

In the painting, titled Reclining Nude, a woman reclines on a couch, as is common in traditional Western art.  But in this image the tradition is upended. The figure is contemporary, not classical, and the painting seems intended to provide not the experience of looking at the figure, but rather the experience of being the figure: of being a fully embodied human being who is lying on a couch.

Its emphasis, as I see it, on the experience of being alive as a human being in a physical body in the physical world, reminds me of a passage by Thoreau, at the start of the second chapter of Walden.

The chapter begins:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  […. ]  I wanted to [… ] live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.¹

Valadon’s painting is new to me, but Thoreau’s passage, especially that opening sentence, has been in my mind for much longer.  And there was a period some time ago when the first words of the sentence were ringing in my ears regularly, like a kind of calling or need. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately….   

Thoreau’s model was to go a mile or so outside of the small town where he had an established life, and where he had family and friends, and to live in a deeply physical way for a couple of years.

He built a one-room cabin — the image at the top of this essay is of the spot he chose, on the shore of Walden Pond — and planted beans, and worked at maintaining them, and observed the world.  He thought, and wrote, but his emphasis was on engaging with the material, bodily, physical world.

It may seem such a simple thing.  But at that time four or five years ago, when his phrase kept coming into my mind, I was floundering in an internal landscape in which engaging with the world of abstraction - thinking, reading, helping other people with their thinking and reading and writing — was relatively easy; but engaging with the basics of the world of materiality — cooking, or fixing things, or basically anything to do with anyone’s immediate physical well-being — was difficult, sometimes overwhelming.

I needed a reset, and Thoreau’s phrase represented a way to do it.  I wasn’t going to build a cabin or plant a bean field, but I arranged to borrow an old onetime farmworker’s cottage in a tiny hamlet far in the countryside, near no one I knew.  There were no restaurants or cafes or bookstores, and the nearest grocery store was a bus ride away.

For three months, the idea was, I would simply live, deliberately.

Instead of relying on takeout I would cook everything that I ate, and pay attention to the process.   

Instead of museums and bookstores and conversations with friends and colleagues, I would depend on the physical world to stimulate me. 

Entertainment and distraction would come from walks, and cooking, and cleaning, and maintaining the little cottage, and keeping the fire going in the wood-burning stove.

I would read books I brought, and I would, maybe, work on the novel I’d been trying to write, but those were secondary.  The main thing was to try to reset the balance, to experience a temporary situation of very little even possible responsibility for anyone else’s physical well-being, and of total responsibility for my own.

Not long before that plan fell into place I had included a segment on engagement/rejection in a course I was teaching on Law and Literature. Among the literary texts we looked at were Antigone (Sophocles’ and a page or two of Anouilh’s); extracts from Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer; “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King, Jr.;  poems by Blake and Auden; and short pieces by George Orwell and Ursula Le Guin; as well as a few other pieces, including secondary texts.

I was interested in exploring the question of responsibility when it comes to the world around us: what we consider it important to notice or respond to, and how we decide whether to engage with things we find problematic, or to disengage from them, and why. All of the writers we looked at, along with a few legal texts on discretion that I won’t bore you with now, approached one of those questions from one of various angles.

I’m not sure which of the literary texts the students tended to find most thought-provoking (at a guess, most would say the ones by Sophocles, Le Guin or Blake), but when I think of what I was grappling with when I made the plan to borrow the farm cottage, I find myself coming back to Auden, and in particular to his famous “Musée des Beaux Arts.”

Here is the poem:

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.²

A very different poem, also well-known (though not as much as Auden’s), but which I did not include in the course, could be read as the opposite of what I see as Auden poem’s call to direct our attention to our fellow human beings.

This is James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.”³ In it, a speaker beautifully notices the natural world from a hammock, ending with the following lines:

To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,   
The droppings of last year’s horses   
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

The ending, if one takes it mean that the speaker believes themself to have wasted their life by not spending it passively tuning into the natural world (it could of course be read the other way), can be seen as a form of dropping out, or disengaging from the normal, intertwined world of human social life.

When I made the plan to try to reset myself, as much as I wanted a pause from my self-generated, unworkable sense of an overwhelming duty of care towards the world at large,⁴ I didn’t want to drop out in the way that the Wright poem implies, not precisely, and definitely not permanently.

But there were still Thoreau’s words, I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately… hovering around in some way. They were saying to me that I wished to go…somewhere…because I wished to live…somehow. That continuing as things were was not going to work.

In the end, the pandemic intervened, and my plan of three months in the borrowed farm cottage never happened.

Later I learned that the cottage was full of mice, and had other problems, so likely I wouldn’t have lasted there then. But it’s probably because of that planning, and that thinking, that in the middle of the pandemic I upended my life and moved altogether to the little village where I live now, where instead of giving up on responsibility for others I took it on, and at the same time received more help than I can ever express adequate thanks for in suddenly managing a house and a garden, and cooking, and everything else material. What I wanted had happened, in a completely unexpected, and by far more workable and sustainable, way.

By then, instead of Thoreau, Auden or Wright, I was thinking in terms of two novels, one by the Swedish writer Bodil Malmsten and one by the Irish writer Claire-Louise Bennett. I have not read either one in several years now, so what was on my mind was probably partly the novels themselves and partly my own reimaginings of them, as we all have of the books we read, inventing meanings and even sometimes entire passages that are not actually there when we go back to look. (I think that it’s Umberto Eco who gives an account of such an experience in one of his essays.)

But in any event, the two novels are The Price of Water in Finistère (Priset på vatten i Finistère, originally published in 2001) and Pond (originally published in 2015), respectively.

Both are narrated by main characters who write, and who pick up and move alone to new places where they know no one. The two books are interesting to look at together in terms of earnestness and irony, and I’ll likely write a more detailed essay about them at some other time.

But for now I just want to focus on how the characters in the books relate to the material world. Malmsten’s character (Malmsten, incidentally, was a major Swedish poet and writer who passed away in 2016), engages with it fully. There is an extended discussion of her attempts to lay a stone pathway in the house that she finds in the village in France that she lands in. She tends a baby oak tree. She meets people, and writes to be published, and — no, there is no room to go into it all. But just to summarize that even as she leaves everything to go somewhere new with no connections, she connects with the real world, both physically and societally.

In Pond, the main character, even while paying close attention to the physical world in her cottage in the countryside, is leaning far more towards the abstract, word-driven, idea-driven life that I had felt the need to reset.

When I moved to Linnesby, the village that I’m writing this essay from, it was Bodil Malmsten’s character I had in my mind, and not Claire-Louise Bennett’s, delightful as it is to read the latter’s book.

What does all of this have to do with Valadon’s painting?

On moving to Linnesby, I realised that I was in some ways doing a do-over of a childhood in a very beautiful small hippie village in California, where I’d been so self-reliant in material, physical things that I actually think that it backfired on me in adulthood.

I wanted to recapture that self-reliance from a better place, and to keep all of the good things from those days, in particular the close, deep awareness of the natural world and its cycles.

I wanted to learn again to always know how full the moon was without needing to check, and to know without thinking where in the sky the setting sun would be, and how soon the the feel of rain in the air would translate to actual downpours. I knew the world, as a child, and wanted to know it again after an entire adulthood in cities and a completely different kind of worldliness.

But I’m not sure that even with that, I wasn’t seeing myself as a kind of abstraction, and especially since starting an online publication that has me looking at social-media-like feeds in a way that I never had before.

In his 1909 science-fiction novella “The Machine Stops,” E. M. Forster painted a prescient picture of what it would be like to live in a world in which technology has removed both the need for, and the practice of, living a solid, embodied life in the companionship of embodied other human beings. He imagined a world in which most communication happens remotely, from screens in one’s private living space. Here are some passages from Forster’s novella:

For a moment Vashti felt lonely.

Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. [….] There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

Vashti's next move was to turn off the isolation-switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date?—say this day month.

To most of these questions she replied with irritation—a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one—that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.

The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her arm-chair she spoke, while they in their arm-chairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primæval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musician of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas.

Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.⁵

Valadon’s painting came as a reminder that that kind of abstraction of oneself into a disembodied communicator comes at a cost.

I saw the image and it served as a reminder to consciously remember that one exists here and now as an embodied person, not only in everyday life but also when thinking, and reading, and writing, and all of those things that involve mainly the mind.

Somehow it matters to me, that simple reminder that one exists in the physical world as well as the world of language, even when staring at the page. It may not be something that others need, but it seems a pretty powerful thing, for a painting seen only on a little screen, far away from the museum where it lives.

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Many thanks to

Ann Kennedy Smith

,

Mark Bramhall

,

Nick Hornby

,

Emma Hemingford

,

Deborah Vass

,

Jacqueline Saville

,

Tina Lee Forsee

and

Anna Schott

for recommending Pen, Book and Garden: Notes from Linnesby to their readers.

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1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854. Available at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm.

2. Available online at https://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html

3. Available online at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47734/lying-in-a-hammock-at-william-duffys-farm-in-pine-island-minnesota

4. For a sensitive, moving account of this kind of overwhelming sense of responsibility to a stranger, see this essay by Anna Schott:

I Could Have, but Didn't

5. E.M. Forster, reprinted in The eternal moment, and other stories, Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1928, available online at Project Gutenberg at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/72890/pg72890-images.html.