Experience Through Memory
This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison:
In Victoria’s blog post entitled, “Intangible vs. Tangible” she brings to light a major component of the argument that Man’s relationship with Nature is experience based upon experience: Experience Through Memory. Conclusively, her post states that part of Man’s interaction with Nature takes an intangible form through the memory of nature. She finds her argument rooted in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison.”
In the poem, Coleridge is met with despair, as he is physically unable to join his friends on a specific walk he has taken many times near his cottage This walk through the surrounding nature is
one that Coleridge thoroughly enjoys and one that he can vividly recall. As he sits in his “prison” of the Lime-Tree Bower, he is imagining every step that his friends are taking on this walk based off his own memory of when he experienced it. In the beginning, he is so bitter about the fact that he was excluded from the walk that he is not fully focusing, but as his mind wanders through his memory and the natural scenery of this walk becomes more vivid in his head, he suddenly feels attached to his friends by experiencing nature through his memory, almost as if he is physically there with him. This causes Coleridge to have a revelation:
Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
(Coleridge, 58-66)
This is a clear example of man’s relationship to nature being experience based upon experience, as Coleridge is experiencing nature through memory and realizing “That Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure” (Coleridge 59.)
William Wordsworth:
The earlier scholarly article mentioned from OAK, Philosophical ideas of the Sublime (brief summary of Longinus, Burke, and Kant), contains a reference to “Wordsworth on the sublime and the Beautiful: in speaking of seeing the mountains of Langdale pike.” The article quotes a belief of Wordsworth relating to Man’s memory heightening experience, “Human sight rises in intensity from memory through salience to the occlusion of the visible.” [Philosophical ideas of the Sublime (brief summary of Longinus, Burke, and Kant, OAK.)] Wordsworth’s belief is one that directly ties the importance of Man’s intangible relationship to nature in relationship to Man’s tangible relationship to nature. This, as Wordsworth claims, is due to memory.
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog:
(Caspar David Friedrich)
Friedrich was a Romantic artist who often portrayed Nature as an expression of the Sublime. In this painting, in particular, he not only is expressing the sublime through Nature, but he is expressing Man’s relationship with Nature through experience based on memory. In Warren’s blog post, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”he explains that the fictional scene is a “blend of real, natural landmarks,” including the Swiss Zirkelstein table mountain and the German Elbe Sandstone Mountains. Obviously, this painting is bringing in a multitude of other aspects in regards to the relationship between man and nature and the experience of the sublime, but the fact that it incorporates images of real places in nature according to Friedrich’s memory is just another example of experience based upon experience through memory.
Experience Through Others
From the Fossils to the Clones: on Verbal and Visual Narrative:
In Marilyn Gaull’s article, From the Fossils to the Clones: on Verbal and Visual Narrative, she describes how human constructs and human perception of histories are products of generations of social narratives, origins, and human interaction. This claim can go even farther when describing Man’s relationship with Nature based on experience through others.
“The Romantic writers were the first generation to know that they lived in a world of fossils, that the bones and debris littering the landscape were the remains of monsters, aberrations such as leviathans, dragons, unicorns, even giraffes. Fossils came into being, literally, in the 1790’s as part of a quest for origins, originality, authenticity, authority, with which theology, philosophy, natural history, literature and the arts were preoccupied everywhere” (Gaull, 78.)
“Living in a world of fossils” ties in with the theme of the relationship between Man and Nature being based on the experience of others, as “fossils” represent the human constructs and histories of previous generations that has shaped that relationship. http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/wcircle/gaull.pdf
Poems on the Naming of Places:
In Dr. Seuss’s blog post on William Wordsworth’s “Poems on the Naming of Places,” he makes an argument that Wordsworth’s poem explains, “the naming of places can be associated with incidents and feeling experienced by local residents that give the places peculiar interest.” Dr. Seuss points to the example in the poem of the naming of Emma’s Dell:
“By any who should look beyond the dell.
A single mountain Cottage might be seen.
I gaz’d and gaz’d and to myself I said,
‘Our thoughts at least are ours; and this wild nook,
My EMMA, I will dedicate to thee.’
--Soon did the spot become my other home,
My dwelling, and my out-of-doors abode.
And, of the Shepherds who have seen me there,
To whom I sometimes in our idle talk
Have told this fancy, two or three, perhaps,
Years after we are gone and in our graves,
When they have cause to speak of this wild place,
May call it by the name of EMMA'S DELL” (Wordsworth, 367-379.)
In the case with Emma’s Dell, Wordsworth is able to bring to light the fact that all future relationships that Man will have with Nature in that locality will be one based on experience through others, and in this case, that experience is of the man in love with Emma.
Experience Through Perception
Constable, Clouds, Climate Change: http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/wcircle/gaull.pdf
Gillen D’Arcy Wood analyzed the art of the English Romantic painter, John Constable in an article titled, “Constable, Clouds, Climate Change.” When analyzing Constable’s painting of landscapes, Wood pointed out a very ingenious finding: that being Constable’s relationship with nature based on experience through p
erception,
“The relationship between paint and perception is entirely fluid, depending on where one stands in relation to the canvas. The closer one peers at a particular element— light reflected on the water, the outline of a cloud—the more indistinct, in fact mysterious, the technical achievement becomes. Naturalism is an inadequate word for that achievement. “The Hay Wain” is an artificial reality-system dependent in equal part on scrupulous attention to “natural” effects of which a viewer might be reminded in his own optical memory, and the translation of those effects in the studio into a virtuosic language of pigment-signs, organized to produce the impression of both a conscientious dependence on nature and stand-alone totality” (Wood, 29.)
Constable’s relationship with the nature in his paintings wa
s completely based on this experience through perception, as Wood explains, because his relationship with the natural setting is portrayed in his painting, and his painting is his perception that he experienced. Any Constable painting, and any natural landscaping artist is portraying an experienced perception of nature, and the relationship that one has with nature from viewing these paintings is one based off this experience through perception.
Much of Constable’s work includes mankind or markings of mankind on the landscape that he is painting, and this further makes the argument of this natural relationship being based on experience through perception, as it is clear that our relationship is one based on the painter’s perception, but not necessarily the perception of the individual painted in the landscape, as they would be experiencing a completely different perception, and thus their relationship with nature and the landscape is different.
(White Horse, John Constable)
Beachy Head:
In my own blog post, “The Written Sublime” , referencing Charlotte Smith’s poem, “Beachy Head,” I discuss how poets like Smith attempt to connect their readers to the sublime in their writing through the use of framing and layering. In particular, looking back on this post, I feel that these tactics used in the written sublime is another example of experience through perception, and unlike with the painter, John Constable, this relationship with nature based on perception is experienced by the reader through the poet and not the viewer through the painter. I explain that the written sublime is about “drawing specific focuses to differently layered centers of the poem.” One example of the layering of specific focuses or different perceptions in the poem that I use is Smith’s attention to the vessels out at sea.
“That but a little crisp the summer sea.
Dimpling its tranquil surface.
Afar off,
And just emerging from the arch immense
Where seem to part the elements, a fleet
Of fishing vessels stretch their lesser sails;
While more remote, and like a dubious spot
Just hanging in the horizon, laden deep,
The ship of commerce richly freighted, makes
Her slower progress, on her distant voyage,
Bound to the orient climates, where the sun
Matures the spice within its odorous shell,
And, rivalling the gray worm's filmy toil,
Bursts from its pod the vegetable down;
Which in long turban'd wreaths, from torrid heat
Defends the brows of Asia's countless casts” (Smith.)
Smith, like Constable, includes mankind in her overall experience of Beachy Head that she is portraying by describing the vessel she sees in the distance. The section of the poem above, however, is not portraying the perception of Beachy Head from those on board the vessels, rather it is portraying Smith’s perception of what she believes is occurring on those vessels far out on the “crisp summers sea.” This is called layering. The readers are experiencing Beachy Head through Smith’s specific layered perception, thus defining the readers relationship with nature in this instance.
Experience Through Imagination
Darkness:
In Dr. Seuss’ blog post, “darkness,” he discusses how Lord Byron’s apocalyptic poem explores the outer realms of the human mind, and how “Darkness” classifies what consists of the Universe outside of human existence. The following portion of the poem points to the personification of the Universe as Dr. Seuss describes:
“The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped
They slept on the abyss without a surge -
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need
Of aid from them -She was the Universe!” (Lord Byron)
Man’s relationship with nature is based on experience through imagination s it is confined within the realms of the limits of human imagination. This description of the universe after human existence being dead and dark portrays this relationship that man feels with nature, one based on experience through imagination.
On the Sublime and Beautiful: http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/107.html
In Edmund Burke’s work titled “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” he is speaking of the sublime, but really this idea of “sublime” and the limits of man’s knowledge goes back to the beginning of this essay, “knowledge is through experience.” As Burke states in his section “on the sublime and beautiful,”
“I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasure which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body, could enjoy,” (Burke)
When Burke refers to “strongest emotion” I interpret this to mean limitations of the human imagination. These limitations are what define feelings of suffering and pleasure. These limitations are what define our relationships with everything around us, and as stated in the poem, “Darkness” everything around us is our imaginative, personified universe, which comprises Nature. Our relationship with Nature is based on our experience through imagination.
Conclusion
All semester long in class discussions we have tried to define Man’s relationship with Nature, and use our conclusions to explain man’s interactions with nature, what the Romantics are trying to tell us, and how this should shape the future of this relationship. It is clear that this relationship is built on experience based upon experience. Without memory tying us to Nature or stories from previous generations or perceptions of how we view nature or limits on our imagination to how nature is shaped by human existence, we cannot define a relationship between man and nature. These elements are key to this definition and apparent in every piece of literature we have read or discussed in class this semester. What defines Man’s relationship with Nature is Experience Based Upon Experience.
Works Cited
Burke, Edmund. On the Sublime and Beautiful. Vol. XXIV, Part 2. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001. www.bartleby.com/24/2/. [Date of Printout].
Wood, Gillen D. "Constable, Clouds, Climate Change." Urbana-Champaign. University of Illinois. Web.
Gaull, Marylin. "From the Fossils to the Clones: On Verbal and Visual Narrative." New York University. Web.
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