WALDO WALLIE EMERSON NARRATIVE HISTORY AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Wallie Emerson
1836 October 30, Sunday: By means of an unsuccessful bloodless putsch in Strasbourg, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte attempted to overthrow the French monarchy (King Louis-Philippe would banish him to the United States of America). That night Mrs. Lidian Jackson Emerson gave birth to Wallie. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. Wallie Emerson Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project
1841 August: Little Wallie Emerson, age almost 5, wrote a letter to his sister Ellen Emerson, age 2 1 / 2. He and Henry Thoreau were building her a dollhouse. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT October: The first traveling Daguerreotypist arrived in Concord. John Thoreau, Jr. thought to have little Wallie Emerson s picture as he was just turning age 5. Wallie Emerson Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project
October: Margaret Fuller was houseguest of the Emersons, and they had strange, cold-warm, attractive-repelling conversations. She would go into his library in his absence and fondle his books. Emerson and Fuller passed notes between each other, little Wallie acting as the messenger, notes such as there is nothing I wish more than to be able to live with you without disturbing you. Caroline Sturgis referred to them as the rock and the wave. Waldo dreamed of the world as an apple and ate it, although what if anything this dream had to do with his days spent with Fuller is unknown who can figure dreams out?
November 22, Monday: A real pipe organ was purchased for $1,050 for Concord s parish church. Returning to Concord from a business trip to Boston, Waldo Emerson found Lidian Emerson with Edith Emerson, born at 5PM. He wrote to William and Susan Haven Emerson: Be it known unto you that a little maiden child is born unto this house this day at 5 o clock this afternoon; it is a meek little girl which I have just seen, & in this short dark winter afternoon I cannot tell what color her eyes are, and the less, because she keeps them pretty closely shut: But there is nothing in her aspect to contradict the hope we feel that she has come for a blessing to our little company. Lidian is very well and finds herself suddenly recovered from a host of ails which she suffered from this morning. Waldo is quite deeply happy with this fair unexpected apparition & cannot peep & see it enough. Ellen has retired to bed unconscious of the fact & of all her rich gain in this companion. Shall I be discontented who had dreamed of a young poet that should come? I am quite too much affected with wonder & peace at what I have and behold & understand nothing of, to quarrel with it that it is not different. (Not only little Edith, but also Henry Thoreau joined the Emerson household on this day.) At some point along in here some events would occur, that later, approaching a lamentable 20th anniversary on January 17, 1862, Waldo Emerson would muse about in his journal: JOHN THOREAU, JR. Long ago I wrote of Gifts, & neglected a capital example. John Thoreau Jr. one day put up a bluebird s box on my barn fifteen years ago, it must be and there it is still with every summer a melodious family in it, adorning the place, & singing his praises. There s a gift for you which cost the giver no money, but nothing he could have bought would be so good. I think of another quite inestimable. John Thoreau, Junior, knew how much I should value a head of little Waldo, then five years old. He came to me, & offered to carry him to a daguerreotypist who was then in town, & he, Thoreau, would see it well done. He did it, & brought me the daguerre which I thankfully paid for. In a few months after, my boy died, and I have ever since had deeply to thank John Thoreau for that wise & gentle piece of friendship.
[Bluebird, Eastern Sialia sialis] At 9PM, John York and Jehiel Kinney set out from Port Day for Hudson s Tavern, two miles above Chippawa on the Niagara River above the falls, with a load of six barrels of whiskey. They would be caught in the rapids and go over the always-deadly American Falls. In the night, Mahomed Akber Khan, second son of the late Ameer Dost Mahomed Khan, arrived in Cabul, Afghanistan from Bameean.
January 24, Monday: During the course of this morning, after the doctor and the Thoreau family had given up hope, it became apparent that Henry Thoreau s symptoms were a sympathetic reaction rather than the result of an infection. His paralysis although life threatening was sympathetic, and although it left him in a weakened condition for a number of months, he did gradually recover and gradually resume various work activities, chopping wood, etc. On his walk he found a tree in the stripped forest that had retained all its leaves, to rustle sere and tattered in the winter gusts. Investigating, he found that it had been blasted by lightning that summer, and sympathetically noted that it had been unable to summon adequate life energy to cast them off. 1 The injured man with querulous tone resisting his age & destiny is like a tree struck by lightning, which rustles its sere leaves the winter through, not having vigor enough to cast them off. In his childhood, Henry, terrified at thunderstorms, had taken refuge in his father s bedroom. William Blake had said a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. Can you see this lightning-blasted tree, and why this lightning-blasted man noticed it? But enough about Thoreau and his sympathies, for on this evening Wallie Emerson, age 5, began to have symptoms of scarlet fever. This was the day on which Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts was presenting a petition that the federal union be dissolved. Waldo Emerson had returned to Concord from his 8th and final lecture on The Times at the Masonic Temple 1. Huntington Library Manuscript 13182, I, 25, quoted in Johnson 1987, page 74.
in Boston, and, in a letter to his brother, he wrote: My pleasure in getting home on Saturday night at the end of my task was somewhat checked by finding that Henry Thoreau who had been at his father s since the death of his brother was ill & threatened with lockjaw! his brothers disease. It is strange unaccountable yet the symptoms seemed precise & on the increase. You may judge we were all alarmed & I not the least who have the highest hopes of this youth. This morning his affection be it what it may, is relieved essentially, & what is best, his own feeling of better health established. TETANUS
January 27, Thursday: Wallie Emerson, Waldo Jr., died at 8:15PM of scarlet fever. When one of the girls of the Alcott family came to the door to ask how little Wallie was doing, his father faced her there. Child, he is dead.
The next day Waldo Emerson entered in his journal: Yesterday night at 15 minutes after eight my little Waldo ended his life. On Sunday I carried him to see the new church & organ. & on Sunday we shall lay his sweet body in the ground.
And thus from the pages of Louisa May Alcott s LITTLE WOMEN: WALLIE It was late when she came back, and no one saw her creep upstairs and shut herself into her mother s room. Half an hour after, Jo went to Mother s closet for something, and there found little Beth sitting on the medicine chest, looking very grave, with red eyes and a camphor bottle in her hand. Christopher Columbus! What s the matter? cried Jo, as Beth put out her hand as if to warn her off, and asked quickly, You ve had scarlet fever, haven t you? Years ago, when Meg did. Why? Then I ll tell you oh, Jo, the baby s dead! It had been just prior to this difficult month of January 1842 that Emerson had read his lecture THE TRANSCENDENTALIST at the Masonic Hall in Boston: The Transcendentalist Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Approaching a lamentable 20th anniversary that would fall due on January 17, 1862, Waldo Emerson would reminisce about a bluebird box that had been put up on his barn by John Thoreau, Jr. [Eastern Bluebird Sialia sialis], and a Daguerreotype that had been made of his son who would so soon be deceased: Long ago I wrote of Gifts, & neglected a capital example. John Thoreau Jr. one day put up a bluebird s box on my barn fifteen years ago, it must be and there it is still with every summer a melodious family in it, adorning the place, & singing his praises. There s a gift for you which cost the giver no money, but nothing he could have bought would be so good. I think of another quite inestimable. John Thoreau, Junior, knew how much I should value a head of little Waldo, then five years old. He came to me, & offered to carry him to a daguerreotypist who was then in town, & he, Thoreau, would see it well done. He did it, & brought me the daguerre which I thankfully paid for. In a few months after, my boy died, and I have ever since had deeply to thank John Thoreau for that wise & gentle piece of friendship. MAGISTERIAL HISTORY IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Wallie Emerson
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this read-only computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace resulting in navigation problems allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. It s all now you see. Yesterday won t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. Remark by character Garin Stevens in William Faulkner s INTRUDER IN THE DUST Prepared: October 8, 2014
ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT GENERATION HOTLINE This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot Laura (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in
the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary writerly process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world. First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.