poetry

At the end of The Gita Within Walden, Paul Friedrich writes, “In the most general and abstract terms as well as many specifics of image and trope…, the Gita is indeed ‘within’ Walden; someone familiar with both texts can open the latter at random to any page and find or at least have intimations of the underlying, discursive presence of the Gita within” (148). One could say the same of Friedrich’s work, with respect to both the Bhagavadgita and Walden, both of which are present in every page — books within books in “a world of words to the end of it,” each instance illuminating all the others. Friedrich speaks of a reader who brings familiarity with both texts to Walden, and he is certainly such a reader. The effect for readers of his work, whether we come to it with familiarity of either or both, is a  marvelous encounter with three interrelated worlds — the world of the anonymous poet of the Gita, the world of Henry David Thoreau, and the world of Paul Friedrich.

Thoreau is undeniably at the center, and that is partly a reflection of Friedrich’s intimate connection with the poet of Walden. Their New England biographies connect them with Walden Pond and with the place in which it is located; and both read their places with care, inhabiting them in ways that carry them through particular “locals” to global vision. Both are exemplars of the science of close observation, and this little book is as much an introduction to Friedrich’s anthropological method as to Walden and the Gita. He notes early on in his enumeration of goals for the book that anthropology is comparative or it is nothing; but he does more than simply place two objects side by side. One of Friedrich’s great gifts is his ability to stop a reader or hearer cold with a juxtaposition of ideas (a practice of metaphor, in a broad sense, of which he is a master), often embodied in cultural artifacts such as texts. He does this in his lectures; he does this in his poems; and he does this in this book. He doesn’t simply compare. Reading through Walden, he reads the Gita with Thoreau. Reading with Friedrich, we read both. Walden is a glass through which Friedrich reads the Gita again and again; and, in the reading, he brings us back to read Walden with new eyes. Those eyes turn in turn to reading the worlds the poets of the books inhabit and to reading the worlds we inhabit — reading being, in each case, a kind of dwelling.

The purpose of anthropology, Clifford Geertz wrote, is to enlarge the universe of human discourse — to grow worlds of words. This work serves that purpose well. And all of this provides some insight into why Friedrich, a poet as well as a linguist and an anthropologist, reads both the Gita and Walden as poems.

There is no denying (and no reason to deny) the sonic dimension of poetry, and the music of the Gita, which is explicitly a song (or a collection of songs), is evident. But sound is intertwined with sense — the sense of the poem and the senses with which we know the worlds in which we live. Friedrich writes, “For both authors the poet-seer is semi-sacred and produces work in a poetic form entangled in the poetry of sacred texts… Both poets eclectically cycle vast systems of ideas into rigorously poetic form” (5). Friedrich speaks of “the phonically dense poetic textures of both books” and of the interplay of oral and written dimensions in both. But it is the cycling of vast systems of ideas into rigorously poetic forms that is most striking. The richness of the sound (and whether the text is read or heard, its sound is present) is inextricably connected with the constellations of ideas within which the texts take form. In each case, the poet is a seer, and “seeing” is a matter not just of the eyes but of the whole body, the whole body of the text, the whole body of a world embodied in text that is self-consciously “scriptural,” marked, as Friedrich puts it, by the interplay of uniqueness and antecedent sources.

The book consists of nine chapters, beginning with “God” and an historical retrospect, moving through twenty-two underlying absolutes, four shared complex metaphors, social-ethical absolutes, purity, reality and being, three ways to God, and a poetics for activism. Circling from “God” and the shared conviction that God is “really real” and should be striven toward (7) to three ways to God emphasizes a “persuasive thrust” toward “God” that Friedrich shares. But it is important to bear in mind that the circle is informed by texts that figure “God” as Krishna (in the case of the Gita) and Nature (in the case of Thoreau). Friedrich speaks of Thoreau’s “complex supernatural,” a monotheistic God in “a variously pantheistic, pluralistic, or henotheistic context” (15), a complexity that is common to the poets of these books. God is “really real,” but this really real “God” is (as John Lennon, summarizing Marx, famously put it) “a concept by which we measure our pain,” among other things. Friedrich’s insistence on the embrace of paradox, particularly in Thoreau, is a critical factor in preventing a merely fundamentalist reading of the persuasive thrust toward God. After the circle from “God” to “ways” to God is “a poetics for activism” that is, arguably, the heart of the book. Friedrich does not forget that both Thoreau and the Gita informed the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., two of the most important activists of the twentieth century — but also two activists whose work, far from being collections of ad hoc reactions to particular injustices, embodied an articulate and consistent philosophy of social justice. The convergence on “absolutes” Friedrich notes in the Gita and Walden underwrites the committed activism Gandhi and King embodied. But the embrace of paradox, particularly in the interplay of Brahmanical elitism and anarchic egalitarianism, shatters even the absolutes that fuel active engagement. Paradox insures that (as one of Thoreau’s main sources, Ralph Waldo Emerson, suggested, in Leonard Cohen’s elegant paraphrase) “there is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

Friedrich “finds it irritating that the Gita is stereotyped as a charter for asceticism (often seen as a perversion), the Indian caste system (which by any other name would smell as foul), and other negative things.” And he is “outraged… by the way many persons stereotype Thoreau as a lifelong recluse who lived in a hut hermit-style and… was ‘self-serving and asocial.’” Thoreau, Friedrich insists, was an engaged citizen, deeply concerned with the shape of the city in which he lived — a consummately political writer who “seems relevant now, even prescient” (134). Thoreau’s writing, informed by the Gita, was one of the ways in which his social action was embodied — and that makes him one of the most interesting and instructive exemplars for a politically engaged poetics. That Gandhi and King both took him up as a model reinforces this point, and Friedrich makes it forcefully.

Thoreau is a consummately political writer precisely because he does not subordinate writing to an ideological agenda: writing is a political act, not simply a means by which to support or instigate political action. And his model for this political act is the narrative of the Gita, which moves Arjuna from paralysis to engagement. Both the poet of the Gita and Thoreau effect this move by close and consistent reading of their sources (including, for both, Buddhism) and by a critical engagement with time that underwrites action here, now. “The most striking thing about time in Thoreau… is his radical philosophy of the here-and-now, which for many readers resonates with modern phenomenology or existentialism” (115, 116). Friedrich cites two examples of “the ultimate reality of the now” that “run throughout Walden”: Thoreau’s statement that “God himself culminates in the present moment” and his characterization of the present moment as “the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future.” The present moment is the meeting of two eternities, a moment of truth, a “drenching of reality” indebted both to the Gita and to the Buddhist texts on which it drew. That moment of truth underwrites Thoreau’s activism at the same time that it informs his “complex supernatural.” As Friedrich notes, “Thoreau goes beyond the Gita… in his vision of how unimaginable stretches of time can collapse into one blinding moment of total beauty” (116), a vision that is at once aesthetic and ethical. That moment is the encounter with “God” that grounds engagement in the world, and that is a remarkably powerful model for lyric poetry. Nowhere is that model more clearly articulated than in Thoreau’s impassioned defense of John Brown,  the message of which Friedrich characterizes as “consistent with the Gita: violence is bad, but social evil is worse” (137). More properly, I think, as Gandhi and King would both insist — and as Dom Hélder Câmara explicitly argued, social evil is violence. It is radical violence in the sense that it penetrates to the root, so that social vision will have to attend to the violence of that evil without — as Thoreau, Gandhi, and King, would all agree — simply succumbing to it.

By attending to the complexity and beauty of Thoreau’s argument — a persuasive wandering, as he so clearly understood — and reading through it to a dazzling array of sources that includes the Gita, Friedrich not only illuminates the two books under consideration but also sheds some light for writers and others engaged in seeking to envision a social reality that is not permeated by violence.

reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago

Paul Friedrich. The Gita within Walden. Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7914-7617-8.