Emily Dickinson and H. D. Thoreau are very much alike.  While they quarrel with the limitations of the Renaissance, they consolidate its achievements,[i] and do so in very much the same language.  Owen Barfield also knows enough “to move forward to a new plane that includes, rather than replaces, the old.”[ii]   Thoreau has this move in mind when he says that “old laws [should] be expanded” with “new, universal, and more liberal laws.”[iii]  Thoreau, Dickinson, and Barfield are so much alike, because they are all grounded in what William W. Quinn has called “the only tradition”[iv] and, before him, what Joseph Campbell called the “monomyth.”[v]  In Thoreau country “a particular mountain . . . has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form.”[vi]  In particular, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Barfield would convince us visually that the profiles we see are not objects but images and, therefore, that the world is more a window rather than a prison wall.[vii]

          Windows imply eyes, and Emerson too uses nature to look through nature.  At our highest moments, he says, we become “a transparent eye-ball”[viii] and a poet, therefore, does not “write poems from fancy, at a safe distance from his experience,”[ix] but takes a very close look at things. Dickinson knew well what it means to take the risk and put her eye “Upon the Window Pane — ” (327) of experience.[x]  Thoreau cuts more than one whole through “the culmination of idolatry in the nineteenth century”[xi] with sharp visual images.  Punning also on “see” and “meter,” he puts Emerson’s well-known dictum to work, for “it is not metres, but metre-making argument, that makes a poem,”[xii] and accordingly Thoreau would “stand right fronting and face to face with a fact. . . .as if it were a cimeter [scimitar] , and feel its sweet edge.”  His “see-meter” can see “the sun glimmer on both its surfaces.”[xiii]  Emerson, Dickinson, and Thoreau all know that “The thought and the form are equal in order of time, but in order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.”[xiv]  Readers of Barfield’s Saving The Appearances will recognize Emerson’s “metre” as an earlier name for the “alpha-thinking” which turns the “fountain of life into a system of laws.”[xv] But Barfield goes Emerson one better: his thought not only precedes but also shapes the form. And with such “laws” we arrive at William Blake’s bête noire, Sir Isaac’s metrical universe of opaque “bodies moving through a gravity-free, frictionless vacuum.”[xvi]

          Such “metre-making arguments” make Dickinson’s poetry difficult and Thoreau’s prose challenging.  Dickinson in particular is a “hard read,” because she is read empirically even though she is not saying empirical things.  Barfield suffers the same fate.  But once you catch on to this epistemological blunder (cf. poem #1684), Dickinson’s apparently bizarre metaphors, odd punctuation, and garbled syntax, not to mention Thoreau’s equally bizarre paradoxes and Barfield steely arguments, become the soul of transcendental clarity.  Indeed, all of them are so clear, and consistent, that if relishing factitious complexity did not put bread on the table, many critics would find such clarity boring and themselves with nothing to say (and on the lookout for more useful masterpieces).

          A transcendental “eye-ball” is BEM enough to boggle any empiricist.  The world may be a collection of objects, but under such gaze these are neither opaque nor arbitrary.  In Emerson’s nature objects, “being used as a type,” possess “a second wonderful value,” because “there is no fact of nature which does not carry the whole sense of nature. . . . the poet turns the world to glass. . . .”[xvii]  And “it is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. . . . Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. . . . A fact is the end or last issue of spirit.  The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world.”[xviii]  The poet’s job is to put his eye to the lens of the world and focus upon its reality, because “‘Faith’ is a fine invention . . . But Microscopes are prudent.”[xix]

          Both Thoreau and Dickinson do this.  The world they see is a transparent image, literally a window of opportunity, enabling us to see reality in the lens.  In Walden, in the chapter called “House Warming,” Thoreau develops an elaborate visual typology.  He compares the ice on Walden Pond to physical matter making up the surface of the world.  Just as ice covers the pond, matter covers reality.  And just as we can look through the ice and see the bottom of the pond, so can we look through the matter which makes this world and see the sun glimmering on both its surfaces — down from above and up from below, inside and out.

          Thoreau’s allegory of the world as the icing on the cake is not static, but incorporates time.  No one living on thin ice, as it were, lives forever, so we must make the most of the brief “window of opportunity,” called life, when we can take advantage of the “ice,” before the body loses its “vital heat” and itself turns cold.

The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over [with ice] in the shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or weeks before the general freezing.  The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant like a picture behind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then. . . . But the ice itself is the object of most interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study it. . . .  But as the last two days had been very warm, like Indian summer, the ice was not transparent, showing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish gray, and though twice as thick was hardly stronger that before. . . . [T]he beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. (221-22, emphasis added)

A full explication of Thoreau’s allegory would be long.  But briefly, on one level, matter obscures, covering reality like ice covers a pond; on another level matter reveals, uncovering the reality beneath in a way which makes ice and reality, lens and image, inseparable.[xx]  Advantages and disadvantages of looking through the ice, that is, of existing in the world of forms and having eyes to see the world, go hand in hand.  Although matter enables us to see into the bottom of things, these things are not so far down as we may think.  This world is undeniably mysterious, but there are deeper identities and mysteries, because, as Thoreau puts it, “The amount of it is, the imagination, give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature Goes.”[xxi]

          Nonetheless, Thoreau is an optimist and dwells on the felix side of culpa.  His general message is clear:  The mystery of mysteries is existence itself, and that is precisely what makes the in-between world of the “ice itself” into “the object of most interest.”  Ice is the supreme instrument of knowledge.  We have to start where we are.  The world according to Thoreau is, therefore, “a lower heaven itself so much more important,” (78) precisely because, unlike the heaven above, it is accessible to experience during the “window of opportunity” called life.

          In a following chapter called “The Pond in Winter,” Thoreau tells us more about the method and urgency of using the world as a window of opportunity.  He expands upon what we can see if we take timely advantage of the ice and use the chance it gives us:

Standing on the snow-covered plain [of the frozen pond], as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants.  Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. (253-54, emphasis added)

In both passages, ice is compared to window glass — here in the second passage with a pun which turns earth into glass.  Dickinson has her own name for “the parlor of the fishes”; she calls it “their golden floor” (117, 8).  The world one sees in and through matter is timeless and serene. If we take a good look when we are young and ice is transparent, it becomes “a window under [our] feet.”  In sum, opaque matter is not a vast clod, but a phenomenon in the etymological sense of the word, an “appearance,” “the end or last issue of spirit,” and it functions as that elusive middle thing called an image, and for awhile gives us a chance to look into other mansions.  If we fail to make the most of a chance of a lifetime, “the beauty of the ice [will be] gone, and it [will be] too late to study the bottom.”

          Dickinson uses the world in the same concentric way.  Her earth too is “a lower heaven itself so much more important,” because as she puts it:

          The Fact [is] that Earth is Heaven —
          Whether Heaven is Heaven or not . . . . (1408, 12)

She practices her own variety of existential optics.  The “Convex — Concave Witness — ” (906, 13) of the earth displays a curious polarity and is known to have “reversed her Hemispheres — ” (378, 3).  The deepest well in the earth is an eye which has a “lid of glass,” and to return its gaze is to risk looking “In an abyss’s face!” (1400, 6, 8).[xxii]  There we see the “waveless serenity” of the “syllable-less Sea” (#1700, 3) all around us, and we learn, as Dickinson puts it, that the world is indeed a “Possibility” “numerous of Windows — ” (657, 1, 3).

          It is in a poem which begins “Before I got my eye put out” (#327), however, where Dickinson uses the same nexus of thought and images found in Thoreau’s allegory of ice.  She uses the images of eyes and windows to discuss the rewards and dangers of experiencing the world as a magic surface. The risks of standing face to face with the facts is a theme which runs throughout her work, for:

Divulging it would rest my Heart
But it would ravage theirs —(1410, 5-6)

Had we the eyes within our Head —
How well that we are Blind —
We could not look upon the Earth —
So utterly unmoved —(1284, 5-8)

Even with our “finite eyes” (327, 13) we can experience the world as “Finite infinity” (1695, 8). Clearly, Dickinson’s world is also “itself . . . the object of most interest.”  In her poetry looking through the surface of the world is like putting one’s naked eye against a window pane.  A person can be blinded and lose the comfort of visible darkness:[xxiii]

Before I got my eye put out
I liked as well to see —
As other Creatures, that have Eyes
And know no other way. (#327, 1-4)[xxiv]

In Thomas Gray's gentler terms, "No more; where ignorance is bliss,/ 'Tis folly to be wise."  Yet in another poem she compares herself to a tiny gnat and laments that unlike this tiny winged creature she does not have the power to escape by dying on the transparent boundary between captivity and freedom:

Nor like Himself - the Art
Upon the Window Pane
To gad my little Being out -
And not begin - again -
(612,13-16)

Before Dickinson looked into the world, however, like other people she was satisfied with looking at it.  But her ordinary “20 x 20” vision got “put out” by the sun glimmering on both its surfaces, so that the outer surface could neither satisfy nor, for that matter, protect her eyes.  She could no longer look upon the world “utterly unmoved.”  Yet she reminds us, as harrowing as living an unsafe distance from experience may be, the road to heaven is “Enabled of the Eye — (647, 2).  Also suffering from a transcendental astigmatism and looking the “other way,” Thoreau, saw that “Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere,”[xxv] and he uses much the same words to give us his version of the risk.  The light of the world can have the same effect upon natural eyes as darkness. “The light which puts out our eyes,” he says, “is darkness to us.”[xxvi]

          But the words in Dickinson’s poem “Before I got my eye put out” become another “object of most interest” upon which we must risk our eyes.  In contemporary jargon, her window is  “pro-active,” and she puts the image to work.  “Before I got my eye put out” continues:

So safer — guess — with just my soul
Upon the Window pane —
Where other Creatures put their eyes —
Incautious — of the Sun —. (18-21)

If we want to play it safe, as it were, it is more prudent to speculate, than to look through the window pane and see that the world and the abyss are the same place and “. . . differ — if they do — / As syllable from Sound — ” (632, 11-12).  Mutual ineffability cancels the risk of the other world for the soul, but plausibility is precarious for eyes.

          At the same time, however, Dickinson’s window pane, like Thoreau’s ice, commands an indispensable utility, because it alone enables us to see reality.  Without the window of opportunity the world provides, which enables us to risk our eyes “Upon the Window pane,” we should remain blind.  Knowledge requires the hard edges of experience, and there is no experience without a world.  Thoreau warns that we must use the ice and ourselves when it is clear, before it grows “opaque and whitish gray.”  Dickinson expresses this same urgency but more dramatically. Her famous poem about dying recapitulates the ars moriendi of a gnat gadding out of the window world:

          I heard a fly buzz — when I died —                   
          .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
          .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . — and then it was
          There interposed a Fly —

          With Blue — uncertain stumbling Buzz —
          And then the Windows failed — and then
          I could not see to see —                     (465, 1, 11-16)

 The image of failing windows, however, is much more than a nineteenth-century euphemism for “then I died.”  To say “the Windows failed” is another way to say that she lost the use of the world because the “ice” had become “opaque and whitish gray.”  In any case, when “the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom” clouds over, “the beauty of the ice [is] gone, and it [is] too late.”  Then, as Dickinson says in another poem, it is “Too late to choose again” (1012, 8).  Making further use of the world is at an end.

          When Dickinson and Thoreau use the images of “ice,” “eyes,” “glass,” and “window panes,” they are tapping the traditional understanding that eyes are the windows of the soul. The eye is at once the periphery, the center, and the interface of experience.  There are differences, but as far as using the world first as a “window” and then as “opportunity,” Thoreau and Dickinson see eye to eye.

          Barfield rarely uses explicitly visual imagery, but the very title of his seminal essay, Saving The Appearances, A Study in Idolatry, suggests that he is looking in the same direction and encouraging his readers to use the world in the same way.  In his final chapter, “The Mystery of the Kingdom,” however, he does engage the act of seeing as such, via St. Matthew’s, “. . . because they seeing, see not.”[xxvii]  Otherwise his focus is more narrowly phenomenological, and only indirectly remedial.  Although he does not neglect the religious implications of materialized consciousness, nor the “chaotically empty or . . . fantastically hideous world”[xxviii] it can lead to, his book deals more with origins, that is, more with diagnoses than literary therapies.[xxix]  Just the same, his phenomenological emphasis remains implicitly visual.  People no longer see the world correctly, and he explains what has happened to their eyes, by tracing the rise and fall of the modern consciousness Dickinson and Thoreau strive to remedy with the “fairy medicine” of summer and “God’s Drop.”[xxx] 

          Barfield, too, is no easy read, and he admits that his evolutionary phenomenology works “beneath the threshold of argument.”[xxxi]  His challenge to “our modern mechanomorphic consciousness”[xxxii] is more often misunderstood or ignored than appreciated, because “the impulse to ignore or explain away any evidence to the contrary is almost irresistible.”[xxxiii]  At the very least, the terminology of original participation, evolving consciousness, figuration, collective representation, alpha-thinking, loss of participation, idols, beta-thinking, and final participation evokes “a certain irritation, a faint, incipient aggressiveness,”[xxxiv] in those who just do not like this style of thinking.

          Specific parallels between Barfield, Dickinson, and Thoreau are not far to seek.  The general agreement uniting them is articulated by many specific ideas and images.  Dickinson’s poetry and Thoreau prose are replete with “beta-thinking” aimed at the recollection that “‘things’, that is, phenomena, are collective representations and, as such, correlative to human consciousness.”[xxxv]  As part of the “mechanical model constructed by alpha-thinking,”[xxxvi] Thoreau’s “ice” and Dickinson’s “window pane” after all begin as “idols.”

          Barfield’s treatment of idols is complex and deals with “innumerable ramifications,”[xxxvii] but one passage in particular bears a remarkable likeness to the imagery of his transcendental colleagues:

          The idols are tough and hard to crack, but through the first real fissure we make in them we find ourselves looking, how deeply, into a new world!  If the eighteenth-century botanist, looking for the first time through the old idols of Linnaeus’s fixed and timeless classification into the new perspective of biological evolution, felt a sense of liberation and of light, it can have been but a candle-flame compared with the first glimpse we now get of the familiar world and human history lying together, bathed in the light of the evolution of consciousness.[xxxviii]

If we read “ice” for “idol,” and “cut my way . . . and open a window” for I “the first real fissure we make in them,” we find ourselves looking “deeply” into Thoreau’s “soften light . . . as in the amber twilight sky” which, “sufficient to itself,”[xxxix] illuminates Dickinson’s “golden floor” this time with “the light of the evolution of consciousness.”  In Barfield’s words, “the way out may still lie through and not back.”[xl]

          The strategic parallels continue, for to get through, out, and back along the road “Enabled of the Eye,” Barfield must also risk this “lower heaven” of a world and start where he is.  We have no other choice, he admits, because “our beta-thinking is bound to begin with the assumption that alpha-thinking has a valid relation to truth . . . .What else can we do?”  Above all, “We must give up double think,”[xli] precisely because, as Thoreau phrases it,“[f]or the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out,”[xlii] for indeed “idols are tough and hard to crack.”  The double case we suppose, of course, is the glass box of alpha-thinking “savants” who have too many “scholar-like thoughts.”

          Dickinson, Thoreau, and Barfield also see eye to eye about the urgency to get people to see through the box.  His brand of transcendental “Windex” has a distinctly Emersonian flavor:

The relation between the mind and heart of man is indeed close and delicate one and any substantial cleft between the two is unhealthy and cannot long endure.[xliii]

         The progressive loss of original participation necessarily involves one of two alternatives, either an ever-increasing experience of inwardness of the Divine Name and the Divine Presence — which is the religious aspect of what I have called ‘final participation’ — or an ever increasing idolatry, in religion as elsewhere.[xliv]

In other and fewer words, time for “quiet desperation” is running out.  But “by looking back” at the world and risking our alpha-eyes on the icy window pane of concrete experience, we can, in Barfield’s words, “bring to life the apprehension of form in space as an image or representation.”[xlv]  When we look at the world as our window of opportunity, “hitherto unperceived parts of the whole field of the phenomenon necessarily become perceptible.”[xlvi]

          If Emily Dickinson and H. D. Thoreau are very much alike in seeing the world as a window of opportunity, the same can be said of Owen Barfield, who joins them, from the Old World, in looking deeply into a New World. [xlvii]

Raymond P. Tripp, Jr.
P. O. 326, Concord, VT 05824
Emeritus, University of Denver

Notes

                An Unreality is lent,

                A merciful Mirage

                That makes the living possible

                While it suspends the lives.