Emersonian transparency and the anatomy of crystal.
Wilson, Eric
In this essay, I meditate on the riddle of Emersonian transparency,
mainly as it appears in Nature. Not pretending to solve the enigma, i
offer a fresh perspective from which to study its difficulties. This
context is Emerson's interest in crystal shapes. Aware of the
important place of crystalline forms--prisms, bits of quartz--in the
history of optics, physics, chemistry, and biology, Emerson knew that
the limpid lattice reveals powers and structures that in other phenomena
remain hidden: the principles of light, electricity, chemical affinity,
perhaps life itself. Yet, Emerson also realized from his scientific
studies that these energies shining in the geometrical jewel are not
simply lawful, not merely predictable and stable. These
currents--luminous waves, galvanic forces, molecular polarities, vital
pulses--are also obscure, abysmal, beyond the mind. Crystal translucency
is opaque; crystal opacity, apocalyptic. If these prismatic virtues
inform Emerson's transparency in Nature, then his clarity might be
confusion, his revelation may be veiled, his hyaline eye-ball, through
which he sees all, could be blind. Emersonian transparency does not open
into Neoplatonic lucidity or Newtonian clarity; rather, it vouchsafes
blurry, lurid vistas of a sublime cosmos too richly complex to be simply
clear.
**********
Meditating on the mysterious relationship between spirit and
matter, Emerson in Nature (1836) pauses to admit that the essence of
this connection is frequently an enigma all insoluble: "It is the
standing problem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every
free genius since the world began; from the era of the Egyptians and the
Brahmins, to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of
Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age,
as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her
riddle" (N 43). (1)
Emerson's prophetic essay is another attempt to solve this
puzzling marriage between invisible and visible. Throughout this first
book, Emerson tries to transform the opaque, fragmented cosmos into a
"transparent" glass through which might shine the laws,
otherwise unseen, harmonizing the universe--Plotinus' concords of
soul, the smooth equations of Newton. His primary assumption appears to
be: impervious density is illusion, and the true world is transpicuously
pervious--intelligible light passing through intelligible light.
Yet, a close look at Emerson's idea of transparency reveals
that it, too, is a riddle, a sphinx by the road. Does Emerson, like
Plotinus, desire the visible world to pass away before spiritual
intelligences? Or does he, like Newton, wish more to convert solids into
clear vessels of physical rules? Is the limpidity he envisions
insubstantial, mere air, or palpable, solid prism? Is his mode of
transmuting opacity to pellucidity intuitive or inductive? Is Emerson a
visionary or an optical theorist?
Several astute readers of Emerson over the years have tried to
solve these riddles surrounding Emersonian transparency. (2) The reason
for these hermeneutical efforts is clear: transparency is one of the
keys to understanding not only Emerson's Nature but also his entire
canon. To explore Emerson's sense of the transparent is to
encounter the main tension agitating his work: between Emerson the
transcendentalist and Emerson the naturalist. Examining this rift, one
is compelled to decide if Emerson in the end found matter wanting, a
thick corruption of blithe spirit, or if he ultimately embraced material
events as intrinsically valuable portals to salubrious principles.
Here I take my turn at the riddle of Emersonian transparency,
mainly as it appears in Nature. Not pretending to solve the enigma, I
offer a fresh perspective from which to study its difficulties. This
context is Emerson's interest in crystal shapes. Aware of the
important place of crystalline forms--prisms, bits of quartz--in the
history of optics, physics, chemistry, and biology, Emerson knew that
the limpid lattice reveals powers and structures that in other phenomena
remain hidden: the principles of light, electricity, chemical affinity,
perhaps life itself. Yet, Emerson also realized from his scientific
studies that these energies shining in the geometrical jewel are not
simply lawful, not merely predictable and stable. These
currents--luminous waves, galvanic forces, molecular polarities, vital
pulses--are also obscure, abysmal, beyond the mind. Crystal translucency
is opaque; crystal opacity, apocalyptic. If these prismatic virtues
inform Emerson's transparency in Nature, then his clarity might be
confusion, his revelation may be veiled, his hyaline eye-ball, through
which he sees all, could be blind.
In 1832, Emerson recorded in his journal a remarkable entry on the
relationship between random energy and cogent form:
There is a process in the mind very analogous to crystallization in
the mineral kingdom. I think of a particular fact of singular beauty
& interest. In thinking of it I am led to many more thoughts which
show themselves [...] first partially and afterwards more fully. But in
the multitude I see no order. When I would present them to others they
have no beginning. There is no method. Leave them now, & return to
them again. Domesticate them in your mind, do not force them into
arrangement too hastily & presently you shall find they will take
their own order. And the order they assume is divine. It is God's
architecture. (JMN 3:316)
Unruly thoughts leap into pristine compositions. Amorphous forces
coalesce into pellucid patterns. Both processes--mental arrangement and
physical crystallization--are bipolar forms, coincidences of flux and
harmony. In their tensions is revealed the divine logic of the universe:
disorder hides order; pattern emerges from chaos.
Emerson in other early passages invokes crystalline shapes as
especially powerful revelations of the relationship between mysterious
energy and symmetrical form. In "Humanity of Science" (1836),
he wonders if the fact that the "phenomena of crystallization
resemble electric laws" might reveal the "common law that
pervades nature from the deep centre to the unknown circumference"
(EL 2:29). Likewise, in "The Uses of Natural History" (1833),
Emerson marvels at the "formation of snow," finding in its
lattices hints toward the principles of chemical formation. The
"texture of that self weaving blanket"--comprised of
"little hexagon[s]," each featuring "invariable angles" in the "radii" of its "star[s]"--is a
"philosophical experiment performed in a larger laboratory and on a
more magnificent scale than our chemists can command" (1:15).
Emerson further wonders at snow crystals in "Water" (1834). He
is amazed that the "invisible water" in the ubiquitous air can
so felicitously organize itself into "stars of six rays,"
"primitive crystal[s]" (1:64). In "The Naturalist"
(1834), he celebrates the possibility that the connection between
"polarized light" and "crystalline architecture"
might reveal one unifying law. Indeed, the integral relationship between
waves of light and crystal polarities is--as Emerson claims in a passage
deleted from this lecture--as important for his age as the voyage to
Plymouth or the Revolutionary War was to earlier times. If crystal
patterns reveal the structure of light, then prismatic forms open into
light's invisible origins--totally transparent energy. As Emerson
intones in an 1841 journal entry, "If I see, the world is visible
enough, clothed in brightness & prismatic hues. If again I see from
a deeper energy,--I pierce the gay surface on all sides, & every
mountain & rock & man & operation grows transparent before
me" (JMN 7:435).
The crystal is revelatory. First of all, its structure--a merging
of amorphous energy and symmetrical pattern--suggests cosmic morphology:
the ways that beings, organic and inorganic, compose distributed flux
into cogent configurations. Secondly, the crystal discloses in its
limpid windows the concourse of galvanic waves--their nature and
function. Thirdly, the crystal's tendency to polarize light--to
divide it into double refractions--hints at the bipolar nature of all
matter. Finally, through the pied hues spanning the prism, one can sense
ubiquitous whiteness, otherwise undetected.
Emerson gleaned these morphological, chemical, optical, and
physical conclusions during the 1830s, when he was reading David
Brewster's Life of Sir Isaac Newton (1831), John Herschel's A
Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1832), Humphry
Davy's Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812), and Goethe's
and Schelling's respective works on morphology. From these texts,
he learned that the crystal is a privileged shape--an especially
engaging revelation and embodiment of polarities and powers that
simultaneously agitate and harmonize the world.
Studying Herschel's Preliminary Discourse, Emerson found the
following statement: "the chief of all optical facts" is
"the production of colours in the ordinary refraction of light by a
prism." (3) According to Herschel, Newton provides an elegant
explanation of how distributed, invisible light differentiates into
discrete, visible colors. Light for Newton is an unseen diffusion of
minute particles, each of which--like all physical particles--is
"acted upon by attractive and repulsive forces, residing in all
material bodies." These polarized forces deter light particles from
their "natural straight-lined course," either repulsing the
luminous atoms through negative force or refracting them through
positive. When light is bent in this way--repulsed or curved--it spreads
into colors. (4) Newton reached this conclusion by passing sunlight
through a prism. Described in Brewster's Life, this experiment
showed Newton that white light, containing all colors in potentia,
spreads into the spectrum based on the velocity of its atoms. Atoms
appearing as red pass through the glass at the highest speed; those
corpuscles that turn violet transmit at the slowest rate. Particles
traveling at intermediate velocities comprise other shades: orange,
yellow, green, blue, indigo. (5) Using the prism as a model for the eye,
an orb that bends unseen particles into vibrant shapes, Newton thus
revealed that colors are tropes, synecdoches: turnings of distributed,
invisible light into pied parts.
Herschel emphasizes the explanatory power of Newton's
conclusions concerning the prism. First of all, his basic theory of
light, confirmed in the transparent angles, enabled him to account for
strange phenomena, such as the colors on very thin films--spectrums on
soap bubbles or rainbows on air. Newton explained these events by
supposing that light particles travel in "fits of easy transmission
and reflection." Each luminous corpuscle passes "in its
progress periodically through a succession of states such as would
alternately dispose it to penetrate or be reflected back from the
surface of a body on which it might fall." (6) Brewster explicates.
A thin transparent medium, like water or air, reflects or refracts light
based on the alignments between the electrical charges of the light
particles and the charges of the medium. Revolving around "an axis
perpendicular to the direction of its motion," a light particle can
approach a refracting medium with either its attractive or repulsive
axis directed toward the angle of entry. If the attractive axis first
touches the medium, the particle is drawn and refracted. If the
repulsive axis initially meets the medium, the particle is repulsed and
reflected. (7)
As Herschel further notes, Newton's insights into the prism
also confirmed his overarching theories of matter and motion. Scrying in
the crystal, he concluded that light, like all matter, is comprised of
minute, indivisible atoms, and that light moves, as does everything
else, through the agency of gravitational attraction and repulsion.
Hence, the "same dynamical laws" that generate and organize
planetary motions motivate and structure the color of the rose, and the
hues of dreams. Like a Babylonian augur, Newton discovers in his crystal
the destiny of the planets and the composition of the stars. (8)
As Emerson additionally learned from Herschel, Christiann Huygens,
a contemporary of Newton, accounted for these same optical phenomena
with a wave theory of light. Although Huygen's theory came under
attack in the age of Newton, it later proved a powerful hypothesis for
explaining the polarization of light, yet another phenomena revealed by
a crystalline shape. First noted in the late seventeenth century by
Erasmus Bartholin, the polarization of light, also known as double
refraction, occurs when certain transparent shapes, especially rock
crystals, split into two the images they refract. According to Huygens,
this effect occurs because light waves traveling through crystal move
more slowly than when propagating through air. Densities inside the
clear stone divide certain light waves in two and cause one half to
travel more slowly than the other. The result of such splitting is two
identical refractions. (9) As Brewster notes, Huygen's explanation
of double refraction is more elegant than Newton's. Assuming that
the crystal is a sieve allowing corpuscles of a certain shape to pass
while screening others, Newton clumsily concluded that a doubly
refracting crystal allows passage to atoms of light that possess
"sides" and therefore project two images. (10)
According to Herschel, few scientists studied light polarization
during the eighteenth century. However, as the nineteenth century
dawned, scientists returned to the problem. In 1808, Etienne-Louis
Malus, an engineer retired from the French army, found that when light
strikes any transparent surface at a certain angle, it splits into two
images. He concluded that the polarization of light is not an isolated
phenomenon but present, in varying degrees, in all refractions and
reflections. The degree of polarization is contingent upon the angle of
incidence--the site where the ray meets the medium--and that certain
angles, called polarized angles, almost always polarize refracted light,
even if these polarizations are not visible to the naked eye. (11)
Meanwhile, as Herschel further reports, Thomas Young, an English
scientist, and Augustin-Jean Fresnel, a French one, were also explaining
why light doubly refracts in transparent surfaces. Inspired by Huygens,
Young in 1801 proved that light travels not in particles but waves. In a
famous experiment, he shined a beam of light through two adjacent
pinholes onto a screen. In certain places on the screen, the beams
overlapped, forming in their blendings alternating bands of brightness
and darkness. Young concluded that these rays behave like water: crests
of light combine to form bigger waves (brighter bands) while troughs
meet only to cancel each other out (creating darker lines). Working
independently of Young, Fresnel also articulated a theory of wave
interference. Invoking this theory to account for double refraction in
crystal shapes, Fresnel claimed that most light waves are transverse,
comprised of several waves moving in various directions; however,
crystals and other transparent surfaces split these multidirectional
waves into two unidirectional currents that constitute two equivalent
images. Young, working separately, reached the same conclusion at almost
exactly the same time. (12)
According to Herschel, these findings--especially developed by the
optical work of Brewster himself (who revealed relationships between
crystal angles and refractive qualities)--suggest the possibility that
the "intimate structure of crystallized bodies" is
"closely connected" with the undulation of light. Crystal
forms reveal luminous currents, polarized oscillations of crest and
trough. Split light discloses the curious virtues of crystal shape--its
ability, on the one hand, to diversify unified white light, and, on the
other, to simplify multidirectional waves into unidirectional currents.
For Herschel, this connection between crystal and light excites
"the highest sort of interest--that sort of interest that is raised
when we feel we are on the eve of some extraordinary discovery, and
expect every moment that some leading fact will turn up, which will
throw light on all that appears obscure, and reduce into order all that
seems anomalous." This "extraordinary discovery" might be
nothing less than the one law underlying all phenomena--the one energy,
the one form. (13)
Emerson's passages, cited above, suggest that his studies of
the laws of optics and the physics of light intimated these facts. The
crystal as prism reveals virtues of white light otherwise unapprehended
and also discloses relationships between the one--ubiquitous
brightness--and the many--diverse colors. The crystal in the form of
clear quartz unveils the polarized, undulatory form of invisible light
and thus hints at the possibility that all phenomena might in essence be
oscillating waves in varying degrees of velocity and density. In each of
these cases, as Emerson realized, the crystal is apocalyptic. Bending
(turning, troping) unseen, amorphous energies into vivid, cogent
figures, it synecdochally reveals the unbounded whole and its relation
to finite parts.
If the optical theorist discovers in the crystal the principles of
vision, then the physicist and the chemist apprehend a more fundamental
power and form underlying all waves, luminous and otherwise. As Herschel
claims in his section on crystallography, the physical and chemical
study of crystals, a relatively new science, is extremely important, for
it focuses on the ways that "primitive forms" connect with
"other forms capable of being exhibited by the same substance, by a
certain fixed relation." Hence, in delving into the mysteries of
crystal symmetry, crystallography ponders the riddle of all matter--the
nature of its monads, their modes of combination. (14)
Crystallographic meditations on matter were initially bogged in
Newtonian atomism. In the late eighteenth century, Rene-Just Hauy, one
of the first crystallographers, accidentally dropped a crystal. He saw
its larger geometry shatter into smaller symmetries, each identical with
all the others. After further study, he concluded that crystal forms are
aggregates of a set number of primitive structures--crystalline
atoms--that combine in mathematically predictable ways. Likewise, even
though he criticized Hauy for ignoring the chemistry of crystals,
Eilhardt Mitscherlich assumed that crystals are comprised of
"particles or atoms." For Mitscherlich, crystals assume
different shapes not through the agency of a set number of primitive
molecules but rather by way of different chemical compositions. (15)
For Herschel, these theories of crystal, thoroughly Newtonian, are
important revelations of the "conception of
polarity"--"the perpetual action of attractive and repulsive
forces" that combine and separate the essential elements of matter.
While one generally associates polarity with the magnetic needle, one
can also, as Herschel observes, connect attraction and repulsion with
crystallization. To watch minute crystal geometries aggregate into
larger symmetries is to observe "little machines" working out
the most basic principle of the universe: affinity and repellency. (16)
Yet, as Herschel elsewhere suggests, the crystal might reveal not
mechanical atoms but fields of electromagnetic energy--not bits banging
in a void but boundless undulations. In his section on magnetism and
electricity, Herschel discusses Davy's discovery of chemical
affinity in the early nineteenth century. Curious about the composition
of seemingly indecomposable compounds, such as alkalis and earths, Davy
struck these elements with strong electromagnetic currents. The
compounds "yielded to the force applied." Thus, a "total
revolution was [...] effected in chemistry," for "chemical
affinity" was revealed as a process "due to electric
attractions and repulsions." (17) Davy's experiment also
opened up the possibility that magnetism and electricity might be
interconnected manifestations of a deep force. Hence, Davy's
findings worked to account for yet another strange crystalline
phenomenon. Certain "crystallized minerals" become electrified
when heated. This galvanization causes these transparent stones to
behave like magnets, to develop "opposite electric poles at their
two extremities." (18)
Emerson did not need Herschel to suggest this non-Newtonian vision
of matter, crystalline and otherwise, as a field of an electromagnetic
plenum. While he was perusing the Preliminary Discourse, he was also
studying Davy's Elements of Chemical Philosophy. (19) In this work,
Davy details his 1807 discovery of chemical affinity and speculates on
the possible repercussions of this revelation. He wonders if matter
might be constituted not by Newtonian atoms but by "physical points
endowed with attraction and repulsion." Likewise, he conjectures
that the "laws of crystallization" and the "electrical
polarities of bodies" are "intimately related": crystal
arrangements possibly reveal the structure of universal undulations.
(20) Electrified by these hypotheses, Emerson in an early lecture (as we
have seen) embraces Davy's theory of chemical affinity and his
analogy between crystal and spark as hints of "the central unity,
the common law that pervades nature from the deep centre to the unknown
circumference" (EL 2:29). (21)
In this same lecture passage, Emerson enthusiastically reports that
light and heat and sound are also analogous to electricity and
magnetism. All invisible energies of the inanimate world are waves,
polarized undulations. All inorganic forms are patterns of an
unfathomable unity, a circle whose center is everywhere and
circumference nowhere. In its transparent panels, the crystal reveals
all things as limpid geometries of a wispy abyss.
As Emerson learned from Goethe, the biological realm likewise
thrives through crystallization, the organization of amorphous vitality
into cogent structure. Indeed, in celebrating crystallization as a
revelation of the "central unity" emerging from a "deep
centre" and expanding to an "unknown circumference,"
Emerson alludes to Goethe's proclamation in On Morphology
(1817-1824): "Nature has no system; she has--she is--life and
development from an unknown center to an unknowable periphery."
(22) For Goethe, as for Emerson, organic and inorganic, leaf and
crystal, are not different in kind but only in degree, in mobility and
consciousness. As Emerson observes in an early lecture, Goethe was
"much impressed" by the possibility that the "whole force
of Creation is concentrated upon every point"--that an unbounded,
vital power originates and animates each individual being, regardless of
its agility and complexity (EL 1:72).
Studied in Goethe's On Morphology as well as in his
Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) and Italian Journey (1786-88), Emerson
knew that Goethe's primary scientific idea was this: the cosmos is
comprised of a mysterious principle of being, abysmal, that coalesces
into recurring archetypal forms. (23) The primal plant pattern is the
leaf, a primary structure that organizes unbounded life into the
metamorphoses of seed into stalk, stalk into petal, petal into fruit.
The archetypal zoological phenomenon is the vertebra, transforming the
living abyss over time into toe bones, the spherical skull, the brain.
The primitive rock form is granite, which crystallizes the infinite
eventually into quartz and emerald. (24) Hence, though nature appears to
have no "system," to unfold centripetally from a mysterious
core to an ungraspable circumference, the universe is in fact structured
by centripetal powers, cohesions of formlessness, Urbilden. (25) The
abyss organizes itself into geometries, variously mobile: round bone,
eye of leaf, and quartz spheroid. Each event is a crystallization of the
whole, an architecture of chaos.
While reading Goethe in the 1830s, Emerson also became aware of
Schelling. (26) In his works on Naturphilosophie, Schelling develops
Goethe's scientific ideas into a striking vision of a cosmos fully
crystal. In Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797), Schelling claims
that an abysmal Absolute explores its own mysteries by emanating into a
dialectical universe, comprised of interactions between infinite and
finite, subject and object, irritation and satisfaction, attraction and
repulsion. Generated by such oppositions, each form of this cosmos is
both a polarized pattern of this invisible principle and a marker of
this principle's developing consciousness of itself. (27) For
Schelling, the most primitive form of this abyss is the crystal. A
bipolar pattern of inanimate forces--positive and negative charges--the
prism reveals spirit at its lowest level of consciousness and thus
comprises the ground from which more complex, more conscious patterns
grow. Plants transform the crystal's galvanic polarity into
irritation and satisfaction; animals transmute the plant's agon
into a more dynamic interplay between subject and object, organ and
environment; humans convert the struggle with habitat into the interplay
between finitude and the infinite. Each level contains and transcends
the levels that comprise it. Crystals are early humans. Humans are
advanced crystals. (28)
If optical theorists from Newton and Huygens to Young and Brewster
frame the crystal as a lucid revelation of enigmatic light and inorganic
polarity, galvanically-minded chemists like Davy and
biologically-motivated thinkers like Goethe and Schelling exhibit the
crystalline form as a disclosure of cosmic vitality and organic
structure. In both cases, the limpid stone--crystal as optical speculum,
crystal as primal pattern--performs several apocalyptic functions,
revealing on several levels relationships and potencies otherwise
veiled. The crystal suggests an anatomy of crystalline exposures, each
of which constitutes a lens for reading Emersonian transparency.
First of all, the crystal is a window through which one beholds
holistic energies otherwise hidden. Divulging to a seer immanent powers,
the crystal is further a mirror: it shows an observer depths of his own
being formerly unapprehended. As mirror and window, the crystalline
shape is also a limen. Refracting white light into diverse hues and
polarized exposures, manifesting galvanic force as bipolar waves, the
crystal is a boundary between one and many, invisible and visible,
matter and spirit. Reflecting to an observer these relationships hiding
in his very bones, the crystalline shape merges subject and object, self
and other. A blurring of numerous oppositions, the crystal, despite its
clarity, is in addition a labyrinth. Transparent and opaque, cool
geometry and fervid flickering, the crystal is as likely to confuse as
to enlighten, as prone to be scried by the amazed diviner as it is to be
measured by the staid scientist. Bending mysterious energies into
shifting shapes, the crystal is additionally a trope, a turning of
unseen complexities into attractive forms. As a poet torques lubricious feelings into symbols, so the prism curves viewless waves into rainbows.
A part standing for and disclosing the whole--a synecdoche--the prism is
moreover an eyeball, an ordinary and extraordinary way of seeing. Like a
normal eye, the prismatic form refracts and reflects bland light into
vivid shapes; like a microscope or telescope, this same crystal
structure discloses connections formerly imperceptible. Finally, an
uncommon eye, the crystal is a numinous microcosm. It reveals with
special power what is always true of everything else. Just as a tornado
suggests that everything, no matter how static, is an eddy of immense
force; just as the Communion intimates that all beings, no matter how
quotidian, are wondrous vessels of spiritual blood: so the crystal hints
this--all events are crystallizations of the absolute.
In a key passage in Nature, Emerson invokes this latter revelation
of the crystal. He claims that all events, correctly viewed, are
transparent revelations of the whole.
To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of
instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their
view, man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates,
and they never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason
mars this faith. The first effort of thought tends to relax this
despotism of the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a
part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat.
Until this higher agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with
wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the
eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added,
grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection,
and abate somewhat of the angular distinction of objects. If the
Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces
become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are
seen through them. (N 62)
To the man who employs only his empirical faculty, his
Understanding, the world is comprised of opaque bits, hunks of discrete
matter. Wherever he looks, there is only density--thick boundaries. Yet,
if this man activates his Reason, his intuitive power, then he
apprehends things not only as outlines and surfaces but also as
permeable portals, transparent conduits through which invisible causes
and spirits circulate.
Emerson's account of intuitive vision and cosmic transparency
raises several difficult questions, provocatively addressed, as we shall
see, by the anatomy of crystal. When one transforms opacity into
transparency, does opacity fall entirely away? Does one then behold only
faint lines and viewless air? Or, does opacity somehow remain, forcing
the seer to practice a double vision, to value, equally, impervious
matter and pervious spirit? In sum, does the transparent vision
apocalyptically annihilate the physical world and thus apprehend only a
metaphysical realm; or does this way of seeing strike a balance between
palpable and impalpable? One further wonders about the nature of the
"causes and spirits" that course through the cosmos. Are these
energies Neoplatonic harmonies hiding behind material corruptions? Are
they smooth Newtonian laws, numbers and equations on the move? Or, are
these energies double, troubling--turbulent and ordered, reassuring and
obscure? In other words, does Emerson's vision of transparency
yield clarity or enigma? What is at stake in these questions is more
than Emerson's theory of transparency. Also in play are his sense
of matter and his idea of spirit, his ostensible idealism and his
possible naturalism.
Emerson's first mention of "transparency" in Nature
begins to address these questions. In his initial chapter, Emerson
claims that the arrangements of the stars sometimes make the atmosphere
appear to be "transparent" with "design," and thus
"give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the
sublime" (N 9). This claim is contradictory: the stars reveal both
design--plan, purpose, pattern--and sublimity--boundless, strange,
asymmetrical power. How can astral transparency open to order and the
lack of order? A few sentences later, Emerson seems to answer: sidereal formations "awaken a certain reverence, because though always
present, they are always inaccessible" (10). Stars are both
discernible and abysmal, present and absent, something and nothing.
Making the horizon "transparent," they intimate clear meaning
and the erasure of signification, limpidity and obscurity.
As Emerson explains in the next clause, all "natural
objects," "when the mind is open to their influence,"
"make a kindred impression" (N 10). This claim suggests,
again, that each event, seen in Reason's light, is a transparent
conduit to mysterious powers. Later, Emerson elaborates. When an
observer beholds the connection between mind and matter--material events
are visible forms of mental laws--"the universe becomes
transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own, shines through
it" (43). Yet, these bright laws are occult occurrences. Expressing
his wonder at the cosmos turned limpid, Emerson asks, quoting Macbeth:
"Can these things be/ And overcome us like a summer's cloud,/
Without our special wonder?" Significantly, Macbeth delivers these
lines just after he has seen the ghost of Banquo. This ghost, a
"horrible shadow," is a dark revelation of the crime and guilt
Macbeth has attempted to repress. (29) A return of ignored energy,
possibly supernatural, this specter strikes Macbeth with wonder, as
would a summer cloud--bright and veiled, sunny and misty. For Emerson,
this same sensation overwhelms the visionary of the transparent cosmos.
When the world becomes glass, the laws that shine through combine
enduring light and ephemeral gloom, reassuring design one would like to
remember and unsettling turbulence that one all-too-often forgets.
Aptly, after likening transparency to ghostly opacity, Emerson
claims that the revelation proffered by the translucent universe--the
relationship between mind and matter (invisible and visible, one and
many, subject and object)--is as riddling as the sphinx. Among the
enigmas surrounding this unveiling is the nature of matter. On the one
hand, matter appears to be an intrinsically valuable pattern of spirit,
for there "seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in
material forms." Yet, on the other hand, this material realm is
also the "scoriae," refuse or dross, of an eternal mind (N
44). Is matter integral or superfluous? This question is complicated
when Emerson claims that matter is a "mirror," a glass that
reflects the moral and intellectual nature of man (41, 44). If this
mirror is a proper circumference of spirit, then it purely reflects
invisible powers. But if this glass is a corrupt copy of eternity, then
it distorts and confuses.
Where are we? We have learned that matter, properly viewed in
Reason's eye, is a transparent window in which otherwise invisible
energies appear. Revealing these currents, matter as translucent plane
further discloses their nature. They are accessible--gorgeously
arranged--and inaccessible--boundless, ungraspable. The cosmos become
limpid moreover makes apparent relationships between mind and matter. In
the hyaline window, a limen between oppositions, one recognizes that
palpable forms are elegant manifestations of a spiritual consciousness
and murky degradations of this same eternal intelligence. To encounter
these relationships in the universe turned transpicuous is to feel
wonder over labyrinthine imbrications of opaque gloom and pristine
lucidity, laws and ghosts. Moreover, matter is a mirror in which one
beholds interior, invisible laws reflected in exterior, visible
structures. Viewing his reflection in the world's glass, he sees
through the frame to holistic energies coursing through everything. He
thus apprehends relationships between subject and object. Watching inner
energies shine in outer forms, he beholds a synecdoche, a visible part
standing for the invisible whole. This trope, a refraction of unseen to
seen, is earth's eye--a vision of open secrets. In sum, a material
event become transparent pattern is a numinous microcosm--a revelation
of what is true of everything else, though hidden: each being is a
torqued form of an abysmal principle of being, a paradoxical solution of
cosmic mystery.
Recalling crystal, Emersonian transparency is not pure
transparency. It is not pristine clarity, unadulterated spirit,
unsullied invisibility. It is not Plotinus' realm of ideal
intelligence, where "all is transparent, nothing dark, nothing
resistant; every being is lucid to every other, in breadth and depth;
light runs through light." (30) It is not the bloodless abstraction
of Newton's quantifiable essentials of matter: numerical masses and
motions, extensions and hardnesses. (31) Emerson's transparency is
crystal transparency. (32) Not forsaking the concrete for the abstract,
the visible for the invisible, it blends conceptual light and
perceptible colors, flickering part and unseen whole. Not opening to
clean harmonies devoid of agitation, it reveals vast polarities,
mutually interdependent oppositions--turbulence and pattern, nothing and
something, brightness and shadow, self and other. Not idealist vision or
scientific mechanism, Emerson's hyaline glass doubly exposes beings
for what they are: convolutions of an ungraspable potency.
Emerson overtly renders these revelations of the crystal in the two
remaining invocations of transparency in Nature: the "transparent
eyeball" passage and the sequence on the "axis of
vision."
In the latter case, Emerson meditates on how the correspondence
between inner and outer dictates the nature of vision: "The ruin or
the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The
axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they
appear not transparent but opake [sic]. The reason why the world lacks
unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with
himself' (N 91). Emerson here draws on Brewster's and
Herschel's respective descriptions of Newton's theory of
"fits of easy transmission and reflection." (33) Recall: a
transparent medium--a crystal or prism, a soap bubble or moist
air--reflects or refracts light based on the alignments between the
electrical charges of the light particles and the electrical charges of
the medium. Organized by positively- and negatively-charged axes
positioned at right angles to each other, a revolving light particle can
approach a medium with either its attractive or repulsive axis directed
toward the angle of entry. If the attractive axis first touches the
medium, the particle is drawn and refracted. If the repulsive axis
initially meets the medium, the particle is repulsed, reflected.
Translating physical to spiritual, Emerson supposes that proper
seeing requires a "coincidence" of internal and external. If
the observer is at odds, if he egotistically resists the distributed
energies sustaining him, then he is "negatively" directed to
himself and the world. The cosmos appears to him as an opaque wall.
However, if the beholder agrees with his being, if he charitably
consents to his unique patterning of universal currents, then he is
"positively" disposed. The universe becomes a pervious
crystal.
A man coinciding with the prismatic cosmos recognizes this: he is
himself a crystalline being, a polarized geometry of ubiquitous energy.
As Emerson continues, a "man cannot be a naturalist, until he
satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand, as
perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other. In the
uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is
thought. Deep calls unto deep" (N 91). Only when a man apprehends
that he is a pattern of holistic spirit can he behold things turn into
limpid revelations of cosmic unity. To achieve this apocalypse, he must
possess double vision. On the one hand, he requires the sight of the
naturalist, which sets subjects against objects and thus acknowledges
differences between self and other. On the other hand, he needs the
insight of the lover, who embraces the world as the same, who recognizes
only identity between other and self. Attaining such double refraction,
he grasps that his being and all other beings are discrete forms of a
distributed power, gatherings of geometry and abyss. Deep calls to deep.
Crystal, shape of air, merges with crystal, airy form. The cosmos
becomes an immense labyrinth of windows and mirror, symbols and
eyeballs--each of which reveals the All.
Emerson crystallizes these general meditations early in Nature, in
the "transparent eye-ball" sequence. Crossing in cloudy
twilight a bare common, covered in snow puddles, Emerson metamorphoses
into a diaphanous outline of spirit: "Standing on the bare
ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite
space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am
nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of God" (N 12-13). Walking over
slush--water spangled with stars of ice--Emerson experiences himself as
a crystal, a transpicuous lens through which boundless forces oscillate.
His axis of vision coincident with the axis of things (his eye of Reason
opened), he realizes that his being, properly viewed, is not autonomous
and separate, not a self-contained ego, but a discrete geometry of
distributed energy, a pervious orb of abysmal currents.
As a crystal organization of unseen power, a window to life, he is
also a prism capable of refracting viewless light. Bending the invisible
circulations of Universal Being into a visible pattern, an eye-ball, and
thus revealing the infinite origin and polarized structure of the
cosmos, Emerson as prism is not only a threshold between one and many,
invisible and visible. He is also a synecdoche, a point partaking of and
disclosing the unbounded. Aptly, this trope takes the form of an eye
possessing special virtues: x-ray vision, the ability to see vital
pulses behind solid surfaces; and infra-red sight, the power to
visualize potencies otherwise dark. Transparently refracting, Emerson
also opaquely reflects. Otherwise, he would not be able to see
"all," or anything else. A blind eye is unable to reflect
light; an acute orb mirrors the world. Drawing and repulsing the
universe, Emerson as crystal is an intricate, labyrinthine
interpenetration of self and other, identity and difference, light and
darkness, nothing and something.
Apocalyptic and obscure, a surreal coincidentia oppositorum,
Emerson as eye is not a freak of nature. Rather, in throbbing between
antinomies, he numinously discloses the oscillations organizing his
entire environment, and perhaps the whole cosmos. He proves a convoluted
part of a torqued whole. The common over which he treks is slushy,
liquid and solid. The time is twilight, day and night. The sky, obscure
and clear, is cloudy yet opens to infinite space. The blithe air,
spirit, bathes, as matter. These local tensions mimic global currents
and circulations, tensions between positive and negative, crest and
trough. Emerson turned crystal reflects his haunt: a crystalline cosmos.
A labyrinthine trope of the arabesque whole, Emerson renders his
striking vision in crystalline style--lucid and obscure, unified and
divided, intricate as a labyrinth. His transparent eye-ball passage is
itself a synecdoche. It is what it is about. Notice the first sentence
of the passage, already quoted above: "Standing on the bare
ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite
space,--all mean egotism vanishes." Enacting in language the
transformation of ego into "nothing," Emerson employs a
dangling modifier. He does not provide the subject, "I," that
the phrase "[s]tanding on bare ground" clearly modifies. The
'T' falls away. Yet, it immediately reappears in another form:
"I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the
currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or
particle of God." How can Emerson's visionary self be both
nothing and something, formless and formed? Moreover, if he is a purely
transparent lens, and thus unable to reflect light (and thus is blind),
how can he see anything, much less everything? Either he is totally
transparent and therefore both blind and clear-sighted; or he is
simultaneously transparent and opaque, and hence actually capable of
sight. We further ask: as a "current" of the "Universal
Being," is this visionary a physical flow, an electromagnetic
current, or a divine power, a spiritual draft? Finally, why is the
visionary "part or particle" of God? If a part, is he then a
synecdoche of God, a cogent pattern revealing and containing the whole?
If a particle, is he a speck or fragment broken from a whole, and thus
separate from God? (34)
These stylistic disturbances, like the vexations surrounding
crystal transparency, are not easily calmed. Like the crystalline forms
they reflect, these linguistic patterns both signify and de-signify.
They suggest rich harmonies--reconciliations of the one and the many,
stasis and change. They hint at unhealable rifts--irreducible gaps
between spirit and matter, order and chaos. Paradoxical and
contradictory, these verbal crystals leave the attentive reader
wandering in a luminous gloom, on a threshold between confusing light
and darkness that reveals.
Holding darkness in the midst of light, Emerson's sense of the
transparent--intimated by his arabesque style as well as by his
labyrinthine content--suggests a tentative conclusion: reading
Emerson's Nature requires (at the very least) double vision--double
refraction. On the one hand, the book opens into the harmonies of
Plotinus and Newton's laws. Yet, on the other, this same essay
remains an intractable mystery, an unsettling mixture of concord and
turbulence, mystery and rule. As Thomas Carlyle once said,
Emerson's "little azure-colored" book is indeed an
apocalypse, a lucid unveiling of essential truths. (35) However, as
Frances Bowen remarked at about the same time, the piece is also a
"disturbed dream" inspiring "fits of severe
meditation." (36) Both men are right. When one contemplates Nature
in a certain mood, one finds an elegant, stable, eternal geometry
organizing the painful flux of time. The world seems simple, manageable,
good. Yet, in another disposition, one discovers in the book deeps
dissolving into deeps, flickering riddles combusting into more
horrifying enigmas. The universe turns labyrinth. If Nature is Kenneth
Burke's "happiness pill," it is likewise John Jay
Chapman's crystal cabinet, whose prisms "sparkle in the
mind" or "get driven into your mind like nails." (37)
From the angle of crystal vision, Nature is, strangely,
transparent, a revelation of what Emerson calls nature's "open
secret [...] not translateable into words" (EL 1:78). By contrast,
the former version of the book is opaque, an obfuscating simplification
of insoluble mystery. Viewing the crystalline Nature as a double
exposure of riddling transparency and comforting opacity, one further
realizes that the essay cannot be reduced to simple categories. Valuing
matter as an essential and gorgeously prismatic revelation of spirit,
the piece cannot be called simply "Neoplatonic" (even though
Emerson draws from Plotinus for his epigraph to the 1836 edition).
Peering through material events to an enigmatic abyss, it cannot be
termed merely "naturalistic" (regardless of the essay's
primary question: "to what end is nature?" [N 6]). Not
exclusively an idealist treatise, not solely an empirical study, Nature
is both at once. Like the crystal, it blends the discernible shapes of
matter and the contingent quivers of spirit. In the book's crystal
cosmos, the idealist turns the world to glass only through detailed
observation. He becomes a hyaline eye only through closely registering
snow-puddles at twilight. Likewise, the naturalist grasps the meaning of
events only through knowledge of the whole. He turns interpreter of
facts only through envisioning universal currents.
Suggesting a middle way between mystery and solution, abyss and
pattern, thinking and thing, Nature as crystal asylum, despite its
insoluble riddles, at the very least suggests a definite hermeneutical
mean: when interpreting Emerson, one must take a double road, a highway
that accommodates both fact and spirit. Emerson's claim,
"Nature is the symbol of spirit," is not idle. It is the
ruling principle of his work. From Nature to "Fate," Emerson
translates physical process into metaphors for spiritual energy, and
spiritual intuitions into tropes for material facts. Reading Emerson,
one should engage in the same transmutations, assuming that a concrete
scientific context underlies abstract metaphysical speculation. The
chemistry and physics of electromagnetism likely underlie Emerson's
invocations of "currents." The burgeoning sciences of life
probably inspire his paeans to "metamorphosis." Astronomical
immensities and geological durations are perhaps behind his notion of
the "sublime." Beneath his theory of "transparency,"
disturbing its purity, is crystallography: sphinx-like prisms, pieces of
quartz, and stones that grow.
Wake Forest University
Notes
(1) In citing Emerson, I use the following abbreviations:
EL The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller, 3 vols.
(Harvard UP, 1972).
JMN The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth
et al., 16 vols. (Harvard UP, 1982).
N Nature: A Facsimile of the First Edition, Introduction by
Jaroslav Pelikan (Boston: Beacon, 1985).
(2) There have been several excellent readings of Emersonian
transparency. See, for instance, Barbara Packer's Emerson "s
Fall: A New Reading of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982),
57-84, which brilliantly reads Emerson's idea of transparency
through the lens of Blake's myth of the fall as well as through the
perspective of Newton's optics; Lee Rust Brown's The Emerson
Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole (Harvard UP,
1997), 42-58, which interprets Emerson's sense of transparency as a
pragmatic tool for seeing through particular events to more powerful
universal concepts; James M. Cox's "R.W. Emerson: The Circles
of the Eye," Selected Papers from the English Institute: Emerson,
Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence, ed. and foreword by David Levin
(Columbia UP, 1975), 57-82, which reads fully the nuances of
Emerson's "transparent eye-ball" passage; Richard R.
O'Keefe's Mythic Archetypes in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Blakean
Reading (Kent State UP, 1995), 29-68, which analyzes Emerson's
transparency in light of Blakean vision; and Eric Cheyfitz's The
Trans-Parent: Sexual Politics in the Language of Emerson (Johns Hopkins
UP, 1981), 1-35, which reads Emerson's notion of the transparent as
a key concept in sexual politics. Each of these readings has
significantly informed my own; however, none has focused on the possible
role of crystallography in Emerson's famous passage.
(3) John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural
Philosophy, foreword by Arthur Fine (U of Chicago P, 1987), 252. As we
know from Emerson's sermons, Emerson had read Herschel's book
by 1831, when he compared it favorably to Milton's Paradise Lost
(The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 4 vols, ed. Albert J. von
Frank et al., [U of Missouri P, 1989-92], 4: 157). For a history of the
study of light insofar as it relates to crystals, see Vasco Ronchi, The
Nature of Light: An Historical Survey, tr. V. Barocas (Harvard UP,
1970), 160-208, 237-41; and Carl B. Boyer, The Rainbow: From Myth to
Mathematics (Princeton UP, 1987), 233-39, 251-58, 282-87.
(4) Herschel, 250.
(5) John Brewster, The Life of Sir Isaac Newton (London: John
Murray, 1831), 22-28. Emerson was reading Brewster's Life as early
as 1832 (JMN 3:326). In his journal of 1833, he quotes Brewster quoting
Newton on the "law of light" (4: 87). Packer in Emerson's
Fall notes Emerson had a copy of Brewster's biography, with
"autograph and notes," in his library (238).
(6) Herschel, 253. For Newton's own discussion of his optical
theory insofar as it relates to the prism, see Newton, Opticks, Great
Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago:
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 404-9.
(7) Brewster, 70-78.
(8) Herschel, 250.
(9) Herschel, 250; Brewster, 108-9.
(10) Brewster, 108-9. For Huygens's description of his theory
of double refraction, see Traite de la Lumiere, Great Books of the
Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia
Britannica, 1952), 579-606. For Newton's account of his theory, see
Newton, Opticks, 524.
(11) Herschel, 258-59. See also Etienne-Louis Malus, Theories de la
double refraction de la lumiere dans les substances cristallisees
(Paris: Baudoin, 1810), 219.
(12) Herschel, 260-62; Brewster, 103-6. See Thomas Young, "An
Account of Some Cases of the Production of Colors, Not Hitherto
Described," Philosophical Transactions, XCII (1802), 387-92. Also
consult Young's Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical
Arts, 2 vols. (London, 1807), 1: 470, 2: 643.
(13) Herschel, 259.
(14) Herschel, 240.
(15) Herschel, 240. See Rene-Just Hauy, Essai d'une theories
sur la structure des crystaux (Paris, 1784), passim; Hauy, Traite de
Mineralogie, 5 vols. (Paris, 1801), 1:19-109, 2:249-55; and Eilhardt
Mitscherlich, "Ueber die Kristallisation der Salze in denen des
Metal der Basic mit zwei proportionen Sauerstoff verbunden ist,"
Abhandlugen der koniglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin
(1818-19), 427-37. For a history of this segment of crystallography, see
John G. Burke, Origin of the Science of Crystals (U of California P,
1966), 86-106; 120-33.
(16) Herschel, 245.
(17) Herschel, 339.
(18) Herschel, 339.
(19) Emerson read Davy's work assiduously throughout the late
1820s and early 1830s, and praises the scientist often in his journal
and early lectures. For a detailed discussion of Emerson's
relationship to Davy in particular and the science of electricity in
general, see Eric Wilson, Emerson's Sublime Science (London and New
York: Macmillan/St. Martin's, 1999), 76-97.
(20) Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, vol. 4, The
Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy (London: Smith,
1839-40), 39-40.
(21) As I show at length in my forthcoming book, The Spiritual
History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (New York:
Palgrave Press of St. Martin's Press), another possible influence
on Emerson's senses of crystal (as well as on Thoreau's) is
Emanuel Swedenborg. Before he became a prophet blown by his visions of
heaven and hell, Swedenborg was a chemist, engineer, and metallurgist.
In his first book, the 1721 Principles of Chemistry, Swedenborg
discusses the formation of ice and salt crystals in ways that predict
the work of Hauy and Davy alike. Indeed, an anonymous article in the New
Jerusalem Magazine 8 (Nov. 1839), 118-19, entitled
"Swedenborg's Scientific Merit" and probably read by
Emerson, reports that Jean-Baptiste Andre Dumas praised Swedenborg as
the originator of crystallography.
(22) Johann Wolfgang yon Goethe, Scientific Studies: Collected
Works, vol. 12, ed. Douglas Miller (Princeton UP, 1988), 43.
(23) Emerson was reading Goethe's scientific works closely in
the 1830s. For a discussion of Emerson's relationship to
Goethe's science, see Wilson, Emerson's, 61-67.
(24) Goethe, 76-97; 111-16; 131-35.
(25) Goethe, 43-44.
(26) This 1835 journal entry suggests that Emerson knew of either
Schelling's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797) or his System
of Transcendental Idealism (1800)--or perhaps both--for he accurately
summarizes Schelling's main tenets: "The Germans believe in
the necessary Trinity of God,--the Infinite; the finite; & the
passage from Inf. Into Fin.; or, the Creation. It is typified in the act
of thinking. Whilst we contemplate we are infinite; the thought we
express is partial & finite; the expression is the third part &
equivalent to the act of Creation. Unity says [Bohmean] Schelling is
barren. Duality is necessary to the existence of the World. Shall I say
then that the galvanic action of metals foreshows from afar the God
head, the zinc the metal & the acid; or the marriage of plants the
pollen the ovary, & the junction?" (JMN 5:30).
(27) F.W.J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, tr. Errol
E. Harris and Peter Heath, Introduction by Robert Stem (Cambridge UP,
1988), 17-18, 44-49, 83.
(28) Schelling, Von der Weltseele (Hamburg, 1798), 189, 219. For a
discussion of Schelling's crystallography, see Burke, 149-51.
(29) Macbeth, 3.4.135-37.
(30) Plotinus, Enneads, tr. Stephen Mackenna, Introduction by John
Dillon (New York: Penguin, 1991), 414.
(31) Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and
System of the World, tr. Andrew Motte, rev. Florian Cajori (U of
California P, 1934), 398-400; in Newton: A Norton Critical Edition, ed.
I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall (New York and London: Norton,
1995), 117.
(32) While here I am mainly interested in the ways that Emersonian
transparency corresponds to crystallography, I should note that Emerson
in Nature on two occasions mentions "crystal." Though he does
not single out the crystal as an especially numinous shape, he
nonetheless does associate it with revelation of the spirit and
relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. In the first instance, he
notices the crystal, along with several other forms, as a gist of the
moral laws pervading nature: "Therefore is nature glorious with
form, color, motion, that every globe in remotest heaven; every chemical
change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of
vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of the leaf, to
the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function
from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of
right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments" (N 51). In the next
instance, Emerson casts the crystal, again, along with other natural
shapes, as a microcosm of the macrocosm: "The fable of Proteus has
a cordial truth. Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal,
a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection
of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the
likeness of the world" (54-55). Surely it is significant that in
both cases, Emerson invokes the crystal in tandem with the leaf. This
correlation suggests that Goethe's archetypal morphology is
somewhere in back of these glances at crystal. Likely, Emerson saw in
the crystal a primal organic form--the archetype of inorganic matter.
(33) Packer in Emerson's Fall (72-84) brilliantly discusses
the relationship between this passages and Emerson's reading of
Brewster's Life of Newton. I follow her ideas closely here.
(34) As I noted in Emerson's Sublime Science (193), several of
Emerson's strongest readers have noticed in Emerson's prose
the unsettling, turbulent, galvanizing qualities that I here locate in
the transparent eye-ball passage. John Burroughs, writing of
Emerson's style in 1877, claims that it is "akin to that
elusive but potent something we call electricity" (Birds and Poets,
with Other Papers [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895], 192). William James,
one of Emerson's most sensitive readers, said in 1903 that
Emerson's greatest achievement was as an "Artist" because
his "matchless eloquence.... electrified and emancipated his
generation" ("Address at the Emerson Centenary in
Concord," Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Milton R.
Konvitz and Stephen E. Whicher [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1962], 20). More recently, Barbara Packer has observed that
Emerson's essays, especially Nature, were characterized by
"ambiguities, lacunae, paradoxes, and understatements" so
"generously" placed that the sentences in his essays are
"charged terminals that the reader must take the risk of
connecting," the reward being a "certain electric tingle"
(Emerson's Fall, 6). Where F.O. Matthiessen senses in
Emerson's prose a "multiplicity of ... conflicting
statements," Eric Cheyfitz feels a palpable "volatility"
(American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and
Whitman [Oxford UP, 1941], 3; The Trans-parent, xii). Emerson's
sentences, Alan Hodder writes, are as dynamically attractive as atoms,
jewels, or plants (Emerson's Rhetoric of Revelation: Nature, the
Readers, and the Apocalypse Within [Penn State UP, 1989], 121). Lawrence
Buell agrees. He concludes that Emerson's style exhibits an
"unpredictable, vigorous fecundity" (Literary
Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance [Cornell
UP, 1973], 161).
(35) Thomas Carlyle, The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed.
Joseph Slater (Columbia UP, 1964), 157.
(36) Francis Bowen, "Uncertain and Obscure," in
Emerson's Nature: Origin, Growth, and Meaning, ed. Merton M.
Sealts, Jr., and Alfred R. Ferguson (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969), 82.
(37) Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life,
Literature, and Method (U of California P, 1966), 186; John Jay Chapman,
"Emerson," quoted in Milton R. Konvitz, ed., The Recognition
of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Criticism Since 1837 (U of Michigan P,
1972), 108.