One June afternoon, I found myself idling about a meadow at the top of a forest in the northwest of the Pacific Northwest. I ate a rough lunch and slept, hands in pockets and cap on face. When I awoke, the sun was still high and the bees buzzed and the meadow kept its drowsiness on me—and so I opened a book of essays I’d been carrying around for the better part of a week and turned to Henry David Thoreau’s 1862 essay “Wild Apples,” one of his last, a praise song to extended metaphor.
The essay opens plainly with exactly what it is, a conjecture that “the history of the apple–tree is connected with that of man.” Thoreau launches into a history of the apple, beginning with its classical lineage in Greece and Rome—fruit the gods competed to procure—and on through a discussion of the natural history of this most “humanized” of fruits. The cultivated apple, he says, emigrated with humans to the Americas—but the true wild apple is the indigenous crab, which Thoreau holds above all others. Wild apples, he says, are best taken with the “sauce” of the “November air”; indoors, they are too sour for words. The tang and smack of the wild apple is an acquired taste, not for farmers or townsfolk but meant for the special outsiders: errant boys, walkers like Thoreau, the Indian or “the wild-eyed woman of the fields.” Thoreau prefers an apple forest of cultivars gone to seed (as he so understands himself) growing alongside the indigenous crab apple: in this he finds a good American cider. But it certainly did not appear that things were headed that way in 1850, and so the essay is a lament. His notes on the truly wild apple are from memory rather than recent observation. Trees, by the mid-nineteenth century, are no longer free but are private property requiring purchasing, and so farmers are apt to claim the forest of the crab apple for farmland and grow cultivars in a “plat” by the house, where no saunterers, scalawags, witches or “Savages” may gain the gleanings. Says Thoreau: so goes the wild apple, so goes society.
With Thoreau’s great zest for the extended metaphor in mind, I thought to pay my respects to the old apple tree on the field’s edge. Thoreau reported some older English customs (“popular antiquities”) regarding the apple, believed to descend from pre-Roman pagan rites. Among them is the practice of Devonshire men to toast the apple trees on Christmas Eve with a bowl of cider pressed from their fruit. There is also “apple-howling,” practiced on New Year’s Eve by packs of boys who encircled a tree, shouted an incantation in chorus and “wassailed” the trees by rapping them with sticks. It was a nice relationship the old English peasants had with their apple trees, it seems; Thoreau reports one old English manuscript that counsels, “The mo appelen the tree bereth the more sche boweth to the folk.”
I had no cider bowl but thought I might at least manage some light apple-howling. The apple tree in question was lichen-laden and dead-limbed with only half the branches leafed. Yet still, it had hard green fruits the size of gooseberries on it: so there was hope yet for the folk.
●
Here is Transcendentalism at its best, my favorite part, running wild with the imitative impulse. Like the German Romantic thinkers of whom they were quite fond, New England’s transcendentalists sought a kinship between body and mind, between the rational and the passionate, between—as Goethe’s science writing began to chart—the patterns of nature and the patterns of the human body and soul. In his famous 1836 essay “Nature,” Emerson alluded to the “occult relation between man and the vegetable”; in Thoreau’s journal from 1840, he concluded, “So the forest is full of attitudes, which give it character. In its infinite postures I see my own erectness, or humbleness—or sneaking.”
As our veins branch so too do trees branch, as tides rise and ebb so too our blood beats; to accept nature is to become ourselves more fully, for already, we are of it. This was also a theology. Nature, Emerson says, is the route through which Man reaches God, because Nature is a metaphor for God. Nature is the tool and the occasion, Emerson says, not the revelation: “The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” Maybe. But then is there no actual nature, because everything is just a symbol for God and the human mind? Does metaphoric thinking erase the actual world?
This is why I love Thoreau, because the revelation for him is not God but experience. This means that metaphor is not just an always-failed route to locating the divine-beyond-the-world, but is rather the direct route into the world itself. The imitative impulse isn’t a feint, a back door to God, but the realization that several things are true at once: meditating on an apple isn’t a way to reach Emerson’s God; the apple is the apple and it is also God, which also just means you and me. Where Emerson, with his religious beginnings, is often figurative and “emblematic,” for Thoreau—bad student, good pencil-maker, striving writer, day laborer, insufferable moralist— all is tangible, all is now, that is the only divinity worth the name. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
The reformist zeal of the transcendentalists—their yen for feminism, abolitionism, land reform, their predilection for silly utopian schemes—stems from the philosophical injunction to live rightly and in so doing live rightly with others. It was an impulse that led them, as Robert Richardson wrote in his biography of Thoreau, “more often into the world than away from it.” The idea that philosophy was for everyone because it started with attention to one’s own life is American transcendentalism’s greatest insight and grants it its distinctly democratic flavor: “this was the heroic age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.”
Tellingly, Thoreau himself argued for the importance of experience by using metaphor. In his essay “Walking,” written during the 1850s, he likens taking a walk to living rightly:
I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. … sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.
Here’s the answer, and the magic trick of the transcendentalists: metaphor is both an explanatory literary device but also the most profound truth. Taking a walk is like living and also is living. If we know both, we can experience rightly (“live intentionally,” as your yoga teacher might say today). Watching the spring freshets vein and branch into Walden Pond, Thoreau observed that they moved like blood through the human body. Excited, he rolled downhill with the little streams toward his point: “Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen.” The lip, the nose, the chin, formations of a cave, the cheeks a slide down into the “valley of the face” and thus—“one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature.” Allow your fondness for metaphor to run wild: we are this hillside! We are apples, all!
●
My path homeward led through a second smaller grass field, and I noted that the grass here was peppered with some of the finest oxeye daisies—Leucanthemum vulgare!—I had yet seen. The oxeye daisy is the common daisy that, like Thoreau and like myself, was brought from Europe long ago and introduced into the Americas in colonized little garden plats before becoming an invasive species and spreading across the country, wresting habitat and water away from native plants. It is now common at every roadside crossing and grass lawn from Salem, Massachusetts to Salem, Oregon.
The grass in this meadow was high as a forearm, and the daisies had grown nearly the same length to open their faces to the sun, rendering their stems both exceptionally long and, to support the flower head, uncommon thick. These were perfect conditions for making a daisy chain. The impulse—the subtle magnetism pulling on our hearts that will direct us aright—the impulse, flickering and sparkling through our days! And so I set aside my afternoon plans and promptly sat down in the field.
Making a daisy chain is quite akin to thinking and to writing, or to any other pursuit where the goal is to bring pieces together into an intelligent whole; and though daisy-chain making is seen by adults as the province of children and hippies, I recommend it to anyone who finds themselves shut up inside at a desk, surrounded with the crumpled paper of false starts. It is tricky to write, however, or to make a daisy chain, when one is an apple. And here we bump up against the zaniness of the imitative impulse: Are they really serious that metaphors are real? Can apples even write? Don’t metaphors, extended too far, obfuscate more than elucidate? Are we talking about writing, or apples, or daisies, or settler colonialism, or philosophy?
Thoreau, though an apple like you and me, doggedly wanted to be a writer above all else. He kept a series of extensive journals and notebooks, and in his mid-twenties began to laboriously copy and recopy them, reworking the best material and slowly winnowing the chaff. He kept a “Long Book” where the best material became a full draft and polished for submission and publication. He taught himself to be his own editor: there is constant commentary in his journals on how sentences should be formed, what the structure of an essay should be, what writing ought to tell a reader. The man who said true wealth was needing nothing owned a shelf of dictionaries.
But if the goal was direct experience, why mediate it through writing—and for god’s sake, why further alienate it through the soul-crushing process of trying to publish? Why not just hang out in the woods communing with the other apples?
Because language was what sewed together inner and outer experience, what brought the objects of the world and the objects of the mind into one common cloth. Emerson meditated on this when he devoted a section of his essay “Nature” to language; so did, in his workaday way, Thoreau, as he tried to teach himself how to write better, commenting that descriptive writing was not enough: “We may easily multiply the forms of the outward, but to give the within outwardness, it is not easy.”
If language was the thread, metaphor was the stitch, the clearest way to wrestle experience onto the page while preserving all its wild smack and experiential tang. Metaphor on the page had the same function as metaphoric thinking in the world: it rendered experience more truly, so that the reader could grasp the truth of that experience too. “The unpretending truth of a simile implies sometimes such distinctness in the conception as only experience could have supplied.”
And while I don’t think Thoreau or the transcendentalists ever put it (or thought of it) quite this way, what follows from this is a theory of language as a crucial part of the world. This is the simple truth any writer knows: that the purpose in giving “the within outwardness” is to bring your mind out of your skull and gift it back to the world from which it, organic and crenellated like a mushroom or a coral, came.
●
There are two schools of daisy-chain making. The first is the thread-the-needle school, and advocates the delicate piercing of a single stem with the thumbnail and then threading a second stem through the cut until the flower head makes a natural knot; and so continuing the process on to the next, and the next. This is more like surgery than chain making, and yields a sparsely flowered and weak chain—though this method cannot be faulted for its precision. I am not suited to it, however, by temperament or by my large rough hands, so I will leave it to the surgeons and the poets to explain and will focus on the second method: the braid.
To begin is always the most difficult and tentative part, as true in a daisy chain as in writing. You are, don’t forget, pulling the facts and the words out of their natural habitat and singular expression and forcing them into new relation, making of their unnatural mixture a provocative social proposal, or a new story, or a texture of feeling, or a piece of prose that will speak to the hearts of men. Or so you hope. And thus you must choose your first three daisies with care, for it is these initial flowers that will signal the direction of your attempt, and these three stems that will set out your line of inquiry and see it on its way.
It is my recommendation to choose with first consideration for the stems, for the first few turns of the plait are the most difficult and you must be sure you can make something with them; but second in importance is the size and vigor of the flower, for these three heads must hold together steadfastly without unraveling. A novice might wish to start with the biggest and brightest flowers, and so hope to begin in high style. They are urged on by the received wisdom of the publishing elites, who cry: Don’t bury the lede! What’s your hook? How will the reader know what this essay is about? from their Manhattan office chairs and their expensive MFA programs, demonstrating just how many of them might benefit from planting their potted ideas down in the grass for an hour or two to learn something. True professionals counsel patience. Tend to the structure and the setup of the thing and save your flourish for the well-developed chain’s middle, where it might shine like a diadem.
If you have chosen well, the stems are fibrous and flexible such that each strand of the braid holds without snapping or crimping limp. After the first few plaits, it is now time to add to your braid, weaving in a new flower at pleasing intervals. But this also takes care, and you must constantly look to the state of your three strands as you weave in new flowers. Just as ideas reach the end of their tether and can be, like a metaphor, turned into a simile and then mixed past all utility until you lose the horse entirely, so too with daisy stems. Be sure to weave new flowers into the shortest of your strands, thus lengthening and enlivening their discursive source and their contribution to the overall essai.
This is not so easy as it sounds. Inevitably, a stem snaps or a flower slips its purchase, a strand thins too soon, and the chain wobbles. This is akin to an opening metaphor in a piece of writing that, while seeming to flow so easily from mind to hand to page, turns out, in the end, to be headed in quite the wrong direction. You have a stylistic choice to make here, for with daisy chains it is usually possible to salvage a chain by braiding in new flowers more frequently. With writing, though, it depends on whether one seeks analytic precision or, instead, to bring the reader on the saunter along with them: Is it tightness or voice that the reader requires? More exposition or less? Doubling down on flowers may not, in the end, yield a smooth or strong chain. But if your courage and determination are as thick as your stems, you will find that while the viewer sees a continuous band of daisies nonexistent in the wild field of scattered thoughts, underneath the marvel flows a strong braided rope of effort and intent.
●
What comes of all this work, all this labored attention to daisies, to one’s own notebook, to bringing into the commons the wild “mallard thoughts” that fly across one’s field of vision? What comes of a reliance on metaphor as the tool by which individual experience is preserved into jam for the public banquet?
What comes is an instinctive mirroring, symmetry, patterning and, finally, a purely flowing cycle from the world to eye to mind to words to page and back to the world again. The writer holds the world close, close as she can, embraces it like a lover—expecting everything, missing nothing, amazed and brokenhearted in equal measure. In Thoreau’s case, he hugged the world close and he gave that world back to us richer than it was before. He insisted society be better than it was. In his zeal for experience and his labor to wrest it onto the page, he wrote rollicking and thundering prose, some of the best in American letters. He was a man who acted just as he thought, who called on John Brown’s spirit to haunt the American republic, who went to jail (for one night, at least) rather than support a war of conquest expanding slavery, who could tell time by looking at the flower petals in a swamp, who wrote essays to his favorite fruits, who contracted the bronchitis that killed him from an exploration to count tree rings one rainy December night. If you are guided by the imitative impulse, everything is important, from the new buds of spring to the first winds of war; everything is your purview and your scope. You, apple, common ordinary person in the common ordinary heroic age, realize you are already divine. Divine as mud. Divine as a daisy chain.
“Nothing goes by luck in composition, it allows of no trick,” wrote Thoreau in his journal. “The best that you can write will be the best you are.” So, completed, I hung my circlet of daisies on the wild apple tree, and headed home.
One June afternoon, I found myself idling about a meadow at the top of a forest in the northwest of the Pacific Northwest. I ate a rough lunch and slept, hands in pockets and cap on face. When I awoke, the sun was still high and the bees buzzed and the meadow kept its drowsiness on me—and so I opened a book of essays I’d been carrying around for the better part of a week and turned to Henry David Thoreau’s 1862 essay “Wild Apples,” one of his last, a praise song to extended metaphor.
The essay opens plainly with exactly what it is, a conjecture that “the history of the apple–tree is connected with that of man.” Thoreau launches into a history of the apple, beginning with its classical lineage in Greece and Rome—fruit the gods competed to procure—and on through a discussion of the natural history of this most “humanized” of fruits. The cultivated apple, he says, emigrated with humans to the Americas—but the true wild apple is the indigenous crab, which Thoreau holds above all others. Wild apples, he says, are best taken with the “sauce” of the “November air”; indoors, they are too sour for words. The tang and smack of the wild apple is an acquired taste, not for farmers or townsfolk but meant for the special outsiders: errant boys, walkers like Thoreau, the Indian or “the wild-eyed woman of the fields.” Thoreau prefers an apple forest of cultivars gone to seed (as he so understands himself) growing alongside the indigenous crab apple: in this he finds a good American cider. But it certainly did not appear that things were headed that way in 1850, and so the essay is a lament. His notes on the truly wild apple are from memory rather than recent observation. Trees, by the mid-nineteenth century, are no longer free but are private property requiring purchasing, and so farmers are apt to claim the forest of the crab apple for farmland and grow cultivars in a “plat” by the house, where no saunterers, scalawags, witches or “Savages” may gain the gleanings. Says Thoreau: so goes the wild apple, so goes society.
With Thoreau’s great zest for the extended metaphor in mind, I thought to pay my respects to the old apple tree on the field’s edge. Thoreau reported some older English customs (“popular antiquities”) regarding the apple, believed to descend from pre-Roman pagan rites. Among them is the practice of Devonshire men to toast the apple trees on Christmas Eve with a bowl of cider pressed from their fruit. There is also “apple-howling,” practiced on New Year’s Eve by packs of boys who encircled a tree, shouted an incantation in chorus and “wassailed” the trees by rapping them with sticks. It was a nice relationship the old English peasants had with their apple trees, it seems; Thoreau reports one old English manuscript that counsels, “The mo appelen the tree bereth the more sche boweth to the folk.”
I had no cider bowl but thought I might at least manage some light apple-howling. The apple tree in question was lichen-laden and dead-limbed with only half the branches leafed. Yet still, it had hard green fruits the size of gooseberries on it: so there was hope yet for the folk.
●
Here is Transcendentalism at its best, my favorite part, running wild with the imitative impulse. Like the German Romantic thinkers of whom they were quite fond, New England’s transcendentalists sought a kinship between body and mind, between the rational and the passionate, between—as Goethe’s science writing began to chart—the patterns of nature and the patterns of the human body and soul. In his famous 1836 essay “Nature,” Emerson alluded to the “occult relation between man and the vegetable”; in Thoreau’s journal from 1840, he concluded, “So the forest is full of attitudes, which give it character. In its infinite postures I see my own erectness, or humbleness—or sneaking.”
As our veins branch so too do trees branch, as tides rise and ebb so too our blood beats; to accept nature is to become ourselves more fully, for already, we are of it. This was also a theology. Nature, Emerson says, is the route through which Man reaches God, because Nature is a metaphor for God. Nature is the tool and the occasion, Emerson says, not the revelation: “The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” Maybe. But then is there no actual nature, because everything is just a symbol for God and the human mind? Does metaphoric thinking erase the actual world?
This is why I love Thoreau, because the revelation for him is not God but experience. This means that metaphor is not just an always-failed route to locating the divine-beyond-the-world, but is rather the direct route into the world itself. The imitative impulse isn’t a feint, a back door to God, but the realization that several things are true at once: meditating on an apple isn’t a way to reach Emerson’s God; the apple is the apple and it is also God, which also just means you and me. Where Emerson, with his religious beginnings, is often figurative and “emblematic,” for Thoreau—bad student, good pencil-maker, striving writer, day laborer, insufferable moralist— all is tangible, all is now, that is the only divinity worth the name. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
The reformist zeal of the transcendentalists—their yen for feminism, abolitionism, land reform, their predilection for silly utopian schemes—stems from the philosophical injunction to live rightly and in so doing live rightly with others. It was an impulse that led them, as Robert Richardson wrote in his biography of Thoreau, “more often into the world than away from it.” The idea that philosophy was for everyone because it started with attention to one’s own life is American transcendentalism’s greatest insight and grants it its distinctly democratic flavor: “this was the heroic age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.”
Tellingly, Thoreau himself argued for the importance of experience by using metaphor. In his essay “Walking,” written during the 1850s, he likens taking a walk to living rightly:
Here’s the answer, and the magic trick of the transcendentalists: metaphor is both an explanatory literary device but also the most profound truth. Taking a walk is like living and also is living. If we know both, we can experience rightly (“live intentionally,” as your yoga teacher might say today). Watching the spring freshets vein and branch into Walden Pond, Thoreau observed that they moved like blood through the human body. Excited, he rolled downhill with the little streams toward his point: “Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen.” The lip, the nose, the chin, formations of a cave, the cheeks a slide down into the “valley of the face” and thus—“one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature.” Allow your fondness for metaphor to run wild: we are this hillside! We are apples, all!
●
My path homeward led through a second smaller grass field, and I noted that the grass here was peppered with some of the finest oxeye daisies—Leucanthemum vulgare!—I had yet seen. The oxeye daisy is the common daisy that, like Thoreau and like myself, was brought from Europe long ago and introduced into the Americas in colonized little garden plats before becoming an invasive species and spreading across the country, wresting habitat and water away from native plants. It is now common at every roadside crossing and grass lawn from Salem, Massachusetts to Salem, Oregon.
The grass in this meadow was high as a forearm, and the daisies had grown nearly the same length to open their faces to the sun, rendering their stems both exceptionally long and, to support the flower head, uncommon thick. These were perfect conditions for making a daisy chain. The impulse—the subtle magnetism pulling on our hearts that will direct us aright—the impulse, flickering and sparkling through our days! And so I set aside my afternoon plans and promptly sat down in the field.
Making a daisy chain is quite akin to thinking and to writing, or to any other pursuit where the goal is to bring pieces together into an intelligent whole; and though daisy-chain making is seen by adults as the province of children and hippies, I recommend it to anyone who finds themselves shut up inside at a desk, surrounded with the crumpled paper of false starts. It is tricky to write, however, or to make a daisy chain, when one is an apple. And here we bump up against the zaniness of the imitative impulse: Are they really serious that metaphors are real? Can apples even write? Don’t metaphors, extended too far, obfuscate more than elucidate? Are we talking about writing, or apples, or daisies, or settler colonialism, or philosophy?
Thoreau, though an apple like you and me, doggedly wanted to be a writer above all else. He kept a series of extensive journals and notebooks, and in his mid-twenties began to laboriously copy and recopy them, reworking the best material and slowly winnowing the chaff. He kept a “Long Book” where the best material became a full draft and polished for submission and publication. He taught himself to be his own editor: there is constant commentary in his journals on how sentences should be formed, what the structure of an essay should be, what writing ought to tell a reader. The man who said true wealth was needing nothing owned a shelf of dictionaries.
But if the goal was direct experience, why mediate it through writing—and for god’s sake, why further alienate it through the soul-crushing process of trying to publish? Why not just hang out in the woods communing with the other apples?
Because language was what sewed together inner and outer experience, what brought the objects of the world and the objects of the mind into one common cloth. Emerson meditated on this when he devoted a section of his essay “Nature” to language; so did, in his workaday way, Thoreau, as he tried to teach himself how to write better, commenting that descriptive writing was not enough: “We may easily multiply the forms of the outward, but to give the within outwardness, it is not easy.”
If language was the thread, metaphor was the stitch, the clearest way to wrestle experience onto the page while preserving all its wild smack and experiential tang. Metaphor on the page had the same function as metaphoric thinking in the world: it rendered experience more truly, so that the reader could grasp the truth of that experience too. “The unpretending truth of a simile implies sometimes such distinctness in the conception as only experience could have supplied.”
And while I don’t think Thoreau or the transcendentalists ever put it (or thought of it) quite this way, what follows from this is a theory of language as a crucial part of the world. This is the simple truth any writer knows: that the purpose in giving “the within outwardness” is to bring your mind out of your skull and gift it back to the world from which it, organic and crenellated like a mushroom or a coral, came.
●
There are two schools of daisy-chain making. The first is the thread-the-needle school, and advocates the delicate piercing of a single stem with the thumbnail and then threading a second stem through the cut until the flower head makes a natural knot; and so continuing the process on to the next, and the next. This is more like surgery than chain making, and yields a sparsely flowered and weak chain—though this method cannot be faulted for its precision. I am not suited to it, however, by temperament or by my large rough hands, so I will leave it to the surgeons and the poets to explain and will focus on the second method: the braid.
To begin is always the most difficult and tentative part, as true in a daisy chain as in writing. You are, don’t forget, pulling the facts and the words out of their natural habitat and singular expression and forcing them into new relation, making of their unnatural mixture a provocative social proposal, or a new story, or a texture of feeling, or a piece of prose that will speak to the hearts of men. Or so you hope. And thus you must choose your first three daisies with care, for it is these initial flowers that will signal the direction of your attempt, and these three stems that will set out your line of inquiry and see it on its way.
It is my recommendation to choose with first consideration for the stems, for the first few turns of the plait are the most difficult and you must be sure you can make something with them; but second in importance is the size and vigor of the flower, for these three heads must hold together steadfastly without unraveling. A novice might wish to start with the biggest and brightest flowers, and so hope to begin in high style. They are urged on by the received wisdom of the publishing elites, who cry: Don’t bury the lede! What’s your hook? How will the reader know what this essay is about? from their Manhattan office chairs and their expensive MFA programs, demonstrating just how many of them might benefit from planting their potted ideas down in the grass for an hour or two to learn something. True professionals counsel patience. Tend to the structure and the setup of the thing and save your flourish for the well-developed chain’s middle, where it might shine like a diadem.
If you have chosen well, the stems are fibrous and flexible such that each strand of the braid holds without snapping or crimping limp. After the first few plaits, it is now time to add to your braid, weaving in a new flower at pleasing intervals. But this also takes care, and you must constantly look to the state of your three strands as you weave in new flowers. Just as ideas reach the end of their tether and can be, like a metaphor, turned into a simile and then mixed past all utility until you lose the horse entirely, so too with daisy stems. Be sure to weave new flowers into the shortest of your strands, thus lengthening and enlivening their discursive source and their contribution to the overall essai.
This is not so easy as it sounds. Inevitably, a stem snaps or a flower slips its purchase, a strand thins too soon, and the chain wobbles. This is akin to an opening metaphor in a piece of writing that, while seeming to flow so easily from mind to hand to page, turns out, in the end, to be headed in quite the wrong direction. You have a stylistic choice to make here, for with daisy chains it is usually possible to salvage a chain by braiding in new flowers more frequently. With writing, though, it depends on whether one seeks analytic precision or, instead, to bring the reader on the saunter along with them: Is it tightness or voice that the reader requires? More exposition or less? Doubling down on flowers may not, in the end, yield a smooth or strong chain. But if your courage and determination are as thick as your stems, you will find that while the viewer sees a continuous band of daisies nonexistent in the wild field of scattered thoughts, underneath the marvel flows a strong braided rope of effort and intent.
●
What comes of all this work, all this labored attention to daisies, to one’s own notebook, to bringing into the commons the wild “mallard thoughts” that fly across one’s field of vision? What comes of a reliance on metaphor as the tool by which individual experience is preserved into jam for the public banquet?
What comes is an instinctive mirroring, symmetry, patterning and, finally, a purely flowing cycle from the world to eye to mind to words to page and back to the world again. The writer holds the world close, close as she can, embraces it like a lover—expecting everything, missing nothing, amazed and brokenhearted in equal measure. In Thoreau’s case, he hugged the world close and he gave that world back to us richer than it was before. He insisted society be better than it was. In his zeal for experience and his labor to wrest it onto the page, he wrote rollicking and thundering prose, some of the best in American letters. He was a man who acted just as he thought, who called on John Brown’s spirit to haunt the American republic, who went to jail (for one night, at least) rather than support a war of conquest expanding slavery, who could tell time by looking at the flower petals in a swamp, who wrote essays to his favorite fruits, who contracted the bronchitis that killed him from an exploration to count tree rings one rainy December night. If you are guided by the imitative impulse, everything is important, from the new buds of spring to the first winds of war; everything is your purview and your scope. You, apple, common ordinary person in the common ordinary heroic age, realize you are already divine. Divine as mud. Divine as a daisy chain.
“Nothing goes by luck in composition, it allows of no trick,” wrote Thoreau in his journal. “The best that you can write will be the best you are.” So, completed, I hung my circlet of daisies on the wild apple tree, and headed home.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.