Thoreau's hound: On hiddenness

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2002 by Hirshfield, Jane

"I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken to concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves." These words of course are Henry David Thoreau's, from Walden. And here, different yet not unrelated, is a sentence from Emerson's "Experience"-"Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree."

Homo sapiens sapiens: the name defines a species that wants to know. Yet an odd perversity equally present within us is thirsty for the opposite of knowledge. Who would think Emerson's fir tree more beautiful if the darkness were stripped from its depths, or prefer Thoreau's elusive turtle dove caged and in hand? "Heard melodies are sweet," wrote Keats, "but those unheard are sweeter." A fidelity to the ungraspable lies at the very root of being; the steepest pitches of the heart and mind make their own shade. Within that cool and dimness, emotions and thoughts small as new mosses and lichens begin the slow, green colonizations of incipient life.

Concealment does not presume conscious intention. Perspective, though, is essential: hiddenness requires the presence of both a seer and something that might be seen. The English word for hiding is related to the hides of animals' bodies; both senses derive from Old German and Sanskrit terms for protection. The German huota lingers on in the intimate dwelling-place word of "hut." Hiddenness, then, is a sheltering enclosure-- though one we stand sometimes outside of, at others within. One of its homes is the Ryoan-ji rock garden in Kyoto: wherever in it a person stands, one of the fifteen rocks cannot be seen. The garden reminds that always something unknowable is present, just beyond what can be perceived or comprehended-yet that something is as much part of the real as any other stone amid the raked gravel. It is our subjectivity, not the world, that creates the unknown.

In Western literature, explorations of hiddenness go back to the beginning. The largest hiddenness and initial mystery is that which surrounds birth and death, and the culmination of Gilgamesh is the unhiding of death to human perception. To accept death's immense and ungainsayable threshhold as one we must cross is perhaps the cost of entrance to full consciousness-self-awareness is needed to recognize the vanishing of selves, and the realization of the self as separate, interconnected, and transient lives in Gilgamesh's outcry upon his friend Enkidu's death, "This will happen also to me!" In that moment might lie the division between animal-consciousness and the fully human -while animals may feel, may dream, may solve, it does not seem they grapple with the foreknowledge of death. Only we lead our lives face to face with that secret, a walled-up gate whose through-- passing makes us who we are.

Hiddenness appears and reappears throughout the works of the Greeks, in the tragedies which so often turn on the wheel-rim of an incomplete knowledge, compassion, or vision, and also in the Homeric epics. The Odyssey, in particular, can be read as a consummate study of hiddenness in a human life, the way it can, rightly welcomed, develop and temper our nature. An odd symmetry of disappearance marks the opening of each epic. After the Iliad's initiating quarrel, the hero Achilles retires to his tent, not to re-emerge for another eight books. For the first four books of The Odyssey Odysseus is similarly unseen: he has been "banished into black obscurity" in the goddess Calypso's grottoes. During his subsequent wanderings, Odysseus is dipped repeatedly back into the condition of the obscured. He is concealed in dense thorn bushes and mists; he escapes the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus by suspending himself beneath the belly of a thick-wooled ram; when he finally reenters Ithaca it is disguised in the rags of an aged beggar. This is not the first time. When the man of craft, as he is called, scouts the city of Troy before executing his plan for the Trojan Horse -another stratagem of invisibility, it need hardly be said-he also dresses as a beggar, even to the point of covering himself in self-inflicted bruises. Who would look for a hero in such battered form?

Homer's poems are full of seastorms and battles, event and drama, yet the stories turn on strategic or sullen withdrawals, on the threshold-moments when things are not what they seem. A king and a heroic warrior each behave like a spoiled child. A wooden horse is abandoned on a beach by a seemingly departed army. A far-travelling hero learns to trust no one, to lie about his name and history, to receive the abuse of a goat-herd and keep his tongue silent. Even the goddess Athena, entering into human events at various times to ensure an outcome, disguises herself in the form of a shepherd or serving girl or long-trusted friend. When the gods appear in the world of ordinary beings, they borrow the shapes of the earth.