I'm catching up on the diaries I normally read. Taking a vacation means no computer to me. Even if I had a laptop I think I would only use it to write. At the Internet Cafe in Kihei I had not the slightest interest in checking my email while John was checking his. So I have nearly a week's worth of interesting entries to catch up on.
I was especially taken with Jessie's excellent entry for October 11th. She has thoughtful, insightful comments on magic, literature, Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series, and the internal mandate to craft and tell your stories and poems (tapping into "that dream-power," as Ralph Waldo Emerson said) no matter what.
I found the entry especially interesting because of her comments on Emerson. Having been raised as a Christian Scientist I have long had a special interest in the religious and utopian communities of mid-Victorian New England. Biographies of Louisa May Alcott and Mary Baker Eddy introduced me to the Transcendentalist movement in high school. In college I studied it further thanks to literature and women's studies classes. It was all very interesting that Emerson (and Bronson Alcott and most of the other New England Transcendentalists) insisted on turning their back on the world so they could focus on their philosophy and social insights, but it pissed me off. All that male freedom to intellectualize about changing society was made possible by the unchanging social roles for females. While they contemplated greatness their wives raised the kids (sometimes on peculiar and incomplete diets, like Alcott's brown bread and apples) and took care of all domestic duties, inarguably considered the "natural" work of women. Did any of them have the option, let alone the time, to sit out by Walden Pond? Not a chance. Well, Elizabeth Peabody did, but she wasn't anyone's wife, either.
I have a fondness for Peabody because of her work for women's suffrage, and Christian Science theology is quite definitely influenced by Emerson's philosophies so I find Emerson familiar and comforting as well as inspiring. But I haven't much use for the rest of them, including Thoreau. He reminds me of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who earlier in the century experimented with "getting back to nature" and the social relevence of poetry. They may have been the breadwinners, but they couldn't have done it without their wives and sisters to tend to the necessities of life, I'll tell you that. I'm also inclined to think Dorothy Wordsworth, a very good poet, got the short end of the literary stick thanks to societal conditioning and a severe case of hero-worship focused on her brother. I particularly recommend A Passionate Sisterhood: the Sisters, Wives, and Daughters of the Lake Poets by Kathleen Jones if you're interested in the complications and peculiarities of being a female associated with male literary genius, or if you just want to revel in the sexual and political intricacies of the poets' lives.
At any rate, perhaps if I were to follow my therapist's advice and get back to nature myself I would feel more kindly inclined towards the noble ideals of the Transcendentalists. But I'm definitely with Jessie and Emerson: do what you must creatively, social approbation or no. Let no one, least of all yourself, keep you from doing what you were born to do. If you have a story, tell it. If you have a poem, write it.
I have a voice. I believe I'll use it.
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