The flitting memory of Dickinson and Thoreau

Recollection in forgetting, memory in motion

Asclepias syriaca (common milkweed) gone to seed. Forks of the Credit Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada, October 2006. Via Mdf, CC BY-SA

“If recollecting were forgetting,” Emily Dickinson writes cryptically, “Then I remember not.” I was surprised to discover that, though many butterflies flit through her verse, she never invokes the monarch by name. Does her work remember the monarch, somehow, as it flit through her blooming garden? When she observes a “butterfly’s assumption gown, / In chrysoprase apartments hung,” I suspect it’s a monarch chrysalis she is spying: chrysoprase, a semi-precious variety of chalcedony, shares the cocoon’s jade hue. Emily’s butterfly emerges from this opalescent cocoon not as a doughty migrant, but casually, a debutante “condescending to descend, / And be of buttercups the friend.” Of the migratory habit that we associate with the monarch today, she has nothing to say.

To be fair, the monarch failed to catch the attention of most nineteenth-century observers. Henry David Thoreau never mentions monarchs in Walden, I think, and only occasionally takes note of them in the Journal. He has much to say about memory, however, if by memory we mean the treasury of the human past: custom, habit, history. The past cannot be presented, early Thoreau claims: memory is imaginary, and history irretrievable. Throughout his early Journal, he distrusts memory, complaining of “the treachery of memory and the manifold accidents to which tradition is liable,” and avers that “I read history as little critically as I consider the landscape, and am more interested in the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than in its groundwork and composition.”

Memory is less successful as project, Thoreau seems to be saying, than as phenomenon. “With how little cooperation of the societies, after all, is the past remembered!” Nature and time keep traces; “the monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead.” He continues:

The Pyramids do not tell the tale confided to them. The living fact commemorates itself.… Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is…. We will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs again. Does Nature remember, think you, that they were men, or not rather that they are bones?

This last observation fascinates me: Nature remembers that they are bones. The past is present: the thick irreducibility of the now in all its insistent, moldy specificity. With Emerson, Thoreau prefers the empirical to the memorial, and the autobiographical to the biographical. History, he complains, “is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the back side of the picture on the wall, as if the author expected the dead would be his readers.” And yet here, he notes that the empirical, the phenomenal, the co-arising unfolding vital stuff of the natural world, is already mnemonic in character: the world remembering to be a world.

In that vast organ of collective memory known as the Linnaean taxonomy, the monarch butterfly takes the name Danaus plexippus. It was Linnaeus himself, in 1758, who bestowed the epithet plexippus—derived from the Greek, for “horse driver,” a seeming echo of the monarch's traveling ways. Danaus, eponym of the genus, was a mythical son of the king of Egypt, whom legend credits with building the first ship in order to flee with his daughters, escaping over the Ionian Sea to the Peloponnese to avoid their forced marriage. 

We can’t know how much of this story ever passed for fact, nor how it passed into legend (myth, though mnemonic, battens itself on forgetting). In his Natural History, Pliny suggests that Danaus made his voyage in the year known to us as 1485 BC—by which time ships of all sizes were already known in Egypt. The import of the tale is clear, however: Danaus was willing to go to the greatest lengths, inventive lengths, indeed to wander, in furthering the interests of his children. Kinship was a key part of the myth: Homer calls his wandering Greeks Danaans to signify their descent from this founding navigator. 

The Danaus myth tells of recklessness, of pioneering (or invasion)—and of beauty, as Homer’s preening Danaans suggest. But this was not what nineteenth-century scientists called the monarch, whose famous migration was not yet known. The genus name for the monarch then was Anosia—an epithet of Aphrodite, which signifies “unholy”—wanton, lascivious, all the excesses of beauty. To my ear, it also seems kin to “agnosia,” which means not to know, or to forget.

While Thoreau had little to say about the monarch, he doted on milkweed. In a late essay called “Dispersal of Seeds,” he considers milkweed down, the wind-loving silken threads by which its seeds sail forth in the fall—“finer and fairer than that of thistle,” he notes, reporting that the poor collect it to fill their beds. With a parachutist’s alacrity, the plant packs this finery into the “faery-like casket(s) ” of its seed pods; split open, these pods reveal “unsoiled silk closely compressed,” the seeds “arranged in an imbricated manner”—some two hundred seeds “in a little oblong chest armed with soft, downy prickles.” The insides of these dehiscent vessels shine with pearly profligacy, baring opalescent threads that crowd forth from the open pod. A careful observer, Thoreau notes that these silks begin as “conduit(s) for nutriments” for each seed; when ripe, the strands detach, and become “the buoyant balloon which, like some spiders’ webs, bears the seeds to new and distant fields.”

To Henry, these seeds are imbued with wanderlust and ambition: a seed hangs by its flocking on the lip of a recently burst pod like “a vessel moored with long cables and lying in the stream, prepared to spread her sails and depart any moment.” Sifting seeds from burst pods, he watches as the silk threads “fly apart at once, opening with a spring—and then ray their relics out into a hemispherical form, each thread freeing itself from its neighbor, and all reflecting prismatic tints…"

I let one go… I fear it will make shipwreck against the neighboring wood….. Feeling the strong north wind, it is borne off rapidly in the opposite direction, over Deacon Farrar’s woods, ever rising higher and higher, and tossing and heaved about with every fluctuation of the air, till at fifty rods off and one hundred feet above the earth, steering south—I lose sight of it.

To Thoreau, the plant is a pioneer, a migrant in full, flying off into the swirling night until the moist air goes still, whereupon the seed “descries its promised land and settles gently down between the woods… and its voyage is over.” And yet the end of this eolian voyage is the beginning of another story, whence a new plant will spring; thus the seed “stoops to rise,” Henry reminds. “From generation to generation it goes bounding over lakes and woods and mountains. How many myriads go sailing away thus…? At any rate, I am interested in the fate or success of every such venture which the autumn sends forth.”

Through the nineteenth century, the monarch’s annual disappearance remained a mystery, and Thoreau didn’t know that monarchs follow the north-rolling emergence of the milkweeds up and down their vast meadowland empire. But he realized something we have forgotten: that milkweed too is a wanderer, whose mobile habits set the great migration’s course and extent. The adult monarch remembers the milkweed that sustained them as caterpillars—a discrete, individual memory that uncannily survives the storm of metamorphosis. This memory, for northbound migratory monarchs, becomes the chief navigational directive. So milkweed is memory, as the vast tribe of Asclepias plants, emerging and blooming northward with the tide of Spring, remind hungry monarchs northward with their freshening abundance.

For Thoreau, the intergenerational generosity of plants suggests an ethical standard: “He who eats the fruit, should at least plant the seed… there are seeds enough which need only to be stirred in with the soil where they lie, by an inspired voice or pen, to bear fruit of a divine flavor.” Scholar Joel Porte argues that Thoreau is expressing here a  “fable of dissemination” to set against New England’s grim gospel of decline and decay. Indeed, our consent is not even required, as nature “condescend(s) to make use of us even without our knowledge, as when we help to scatter her seeds in our walks, and carry burrs and cockles on our clothes from field to field.” The meadow plants that spring up at our passing are the recollection of our own ephemeral comings and goings.

Though so closely associated with a particular place, Henry toward the end of his life was moving toward a theology of dispersal, embracing movement as the spirit animating the grand mystery of life. Only by staying in and studying one place with such fixity, perhaps, could Thoreau witness how movement aids the evolution of all these blind marvels.

Darwin arrived late for Thoreau, but he read and absorbed him with keenness in the last year of his life. He must have appreciated how Darwin begins in Origin of Species with the dispersal of fauna and flora, as Bradley Dean points out in the Introduction to his edition of Thoreau’s writings on plants. I want to say that Darwin recognized that the appearance of species here and there on the surface of the earth constituted a kind of memory: a recording not of discrete episodes of separate creation, but the movement and metamorphosis of species into other species, of bodies changing into other bodies. 

In the late blush of his Darwinian awakening, Thoreau observes that “we find ourselves in a world that is already planted, but is also still being planted as at first.” By the same logic, we are blown into a world already thronged with memories; coming to rest in their midst, we twine with them and become memory ourselves.