Part two of 'What does being Gay have to do with it'

Man in nature
* Some of his earliest journal entries speak of "young buds of manhood in the streets." "this suculent [sic] and rank-growing slip of manhood," "some rare specimen of manhood," or "a handsome younger man --a sailor like Greek like man." These phrases turn males into objects. Thoreau admires in most of his journal entries the males as embodiments of "manhood." Even when he hides behind some willow trees at the swimming hole in order to watch boys swim carefully describing their skin for his journal, he adds that their nakedness foreshadows "man in nature ". They are both objects and versions of self-ideals".
*Heterosexual romance interprets gender difference as a sign of the irreducible phenomenological difference between persons. Women and men at present can be counted on to have different histories, different relations to power, different rights of access to their own bodies, even different rights of access to thinking of themselves as selves or as objects. In the legitimating structure of heterosexuality these systematic inequalities and relations of power are interpreted as mere difference, reassuring individuals that in desiring the other they are not desiring themselves. Though he was anything but critical about the power relations of gender, Thoreau did not adopt the protective misrecognitions that constitute heterosexuality.
*Without those misrecognitions, however, he can only stress what appear to him to be paradoxes, since the prevailing discourse of gender and sexuality persistently implies that relations among men must be redundant, a relation of sameness. He speaks of two men as being "so one and single" that they think common thoughts "as one mind," while going on to say that "they will at the same time be so two and double, that each will be to the other as admirable and as inaccessible as a star." The buried image of the mirror becomes virtually explicit when he concludes the same passage, "So only shall we see the light of our own countenances." In 1840 he wrote. "I would live henceforth with some gentle soul such a life as may be conceived--double for variety, single for harmony." A year later he speaks of the male lover/friends as "not two united, but rather one divided"; a year later still they are "those twain who feel their interests to be one. ... All beauty--all music--all delight springs from apparent dualism--but real unity. I see his nature groping yonder so like mine--Does there go one whom I know then I go there." These entries obsessively circle around self and other as structuring terms, but only to disavow their coherent opposition. They stress the sameness of the other.
*As Thoreau treats the terms, other is as much ‘self’ as ‘self’ is other: "I only know myself as a human entity, the scene, so to speak. of thoughts and affections, and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me which, as it were is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you." This passage, later copied into Walden, has the tone of a lament, but the internal division it describes could also be thought of as critical serf-consciousness. Such self-dividing criticism is normative for modernity, and Thoreau preached its necessity as much as anyone: his two major works are, after all, a journal and a kind of autobiography. When he says his critical self is "no more I than it is you," he is speaking to himself. He makes an odd spokesman for modernity, then, because he only imagines self-consciousness as being anything other than painful division when it is mediated through another--even if the other is nature. The mediating relation that results, however, is understood as mirroring rather than as mediating.

On Reflection:
*Mirror imagery fascinates Thoreau because he never fails to notice that in desiring another he also desires an ideal relation to himself. But he also never tires of explaining to himself. as though anticipating an emergent language of pathology, that in a relation with another he desires both otherness and self. "When I meet a person unlike me, I find myself wholly in the unlikeness. In what I am unlike others, in that I am." Thoreau emphasizes "wholly" because it is a typically paradoxical pun: as the other's other he finds himself whole, where as an unrelated whole he felt defective and incomplete. "We do not want the double of ourselves--but the complement rather. ... After the longest earthly period he will still be in apogee to me." Or again, "It is not a chamber of mirrors which reflect me. When I reflect, I find that there is other than me."
*We might think of Thoreau's scene of reflective desire as an organizing problematic through which the dispersed erotics of the body come to be centralized as a sexuality of self/other relations. Not all erotic desires must have their source in self/other relations in order for them to be understood as though they do. Thoreau had, for example, an intense erotic investment in hearing that does not require him to thematize any particular relation to others or to a self. "Transport, rapture, ravishment, ecstasy. These are the words I want. This is the effect of music." Often sound represents an occasion for self-dissolution. "I would be drunk, drunk, drunk, dead drunk to this world with it forever. ... The contact of sound . . . is coincident with an ecstasy." Like many other intense pleasures that Thoreau describes, his ecstasy over musical sounds reminds us that an increasingly official liberal sexuality, with its self/other logic of "love," does not exhaust the possibilities of the erotic. Yet Thoreau's pleasure in hearing may be an exception that proves the rule, showing how an apparently unrelated pleasure can get incorporated in the self/other structure of liberal erotics: he finds dozens of occasions, not only in the journal but in Walden and A Week, to frame the erotics of sound as self-reflective. No sound excites him so much as an echo. "All melody is a sweet echo" he claims. "I should think that savages would have made a god of echo."
*Thoreau knew that the Greeks, if not exactly the "savages," had a mythology of Echo. While surveying in 1853, he found an echo that especially thrilled him, and in a long journal entry described it as the most memorable event of the day: "After so many days of comparatively insignificant drudgery with stupid companions, this leisure, this sportiveness, this generosity in nature, sympathizing with the better part of me; somebody I could talk with,--one degree, at least, better than talking with one's self. Ah! Simon Brown's premises harbor a hired man and a hired maid he wots not of." The hired maid in the last sentence is of course Echo. But who is the hired man that Echo speaks to: Thoreau himself, or Narcissus? Thoreau seems to have no shame about identifying with Narcissus. "There needs some actual doubleness like this in nature," he writes in the same entry. "Under such favorable auspices I could converse with myself, could reflect."
*With the pun on "reflect" Thoreau links pleasure in contemplating his image to the reflective self-consciousness of the modern individual. It may be his favorite pun. "Our minds should echo at least as many times as a Mammoth Cave to every musical sound" he writes elsewhere. "It should awaken reflections in us." Even more than echoes, reflective surfaces of water occasion the same pun. While watching reflections, he says, "My thoughts are driven inward, even as clouds and trees are reflected in the still, smooth water." He even goes so far as to say that the pun describes a causal link: "Most men, as farmers, hunters, fishers, etc., walk along a river's bank, or paddle along its stream, without seeing the reflections. Their minds are not abstracted from the surface, from surfaces generally. It is only a reflecting mind that sees reflections." These passages introduce the themes Thoreau is famous for: pleasure in self-contemplation and nature, scorn for the unreflective self of custom and tradition.

*"What signifies the beauty of nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them."
* "the reflection has the force of a great silent companion."
*The lakes and rivers acquire a glassy stillness, reflecting the skies, the reflex of the day. I too am at the top of my condition for perceiving beauty. ... The attractive point is that line where the water meets the land, not distinct, but known to exist. The willows are not the less interesting because of their nakedness below. ... The water, indeed, reflects heaven because my mind does. ... (The Vital Force)With what sober joy I stand to let the water drip from me and feel my fresh vigor, who have been bathing in the same tub which the muskrat uses! ... Think of a mirror on so large a scale! . . . if [only] men were social in a high and rare sense.
*"Thoreau represents himself as both ecstatic and self-conscious. He stands naked and dripping in the August evening in order to feel not just his skin or the air but his "fresh vigor." He sees in the reflective water not just images of nature, but images of his own reflective mind. All of nature becomes a mirror. The reflections of nature enable him to imagine an unalienated self-contemplation, which he also imagines when he speaks of men being social in a high and rare sense. High and rare indeed. Thoreau was so heavily invested in the erotic idealizations of reflective surfaces that once when a breeze disturbed the water the effect was ruined for him, he claimed, "as if some water nymph had written 'slut' with her finger there."
*"Reflection enchants us, just as an echo does," he says in one sentence before going on in the next to say: "I must make my life more moral, more pure and innocent . . . I must not live loosely, but more and more continently." Reflection seems to be a kind of continence; it confirms the self's boundaries under an ascetic inspection. Perhaps because the mirroring of the other has been construed as the means of perceiving the self's autonomy and integrity, any loss of that mirroring would threaten a capitulation to the other, a sacrifice.

Winter92, Vol. 11, Issue 3Database: Academic Search Elite