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Friday, February 4, 2011
 
Walking Stewart

  A while back I came across mention of a minor historical figure I had never heard of before, John "Walking" Stewart. History is full of interesting people. But it is also long and repetitive, much of it has escaped me. "Walking" Stewart walked, that's why they called him Walking Stewart and apparently what he is remembered for Walking Stewart - Wikipedia.

 An indifferent student as a boy, his father sent him off to Madras from London, at age 15 to a clerical job for the East India Company. This was in 1763. Nothing about the British colonial procedure in India was in accord with his inclinations. As a teenage clerk he wrote letters to the company's directors explaining the failings and misunderstandings of their endeavor to them (particularly their consistent refusal to learn local languages). When they declined to listen John Stewart left their employ. In those days a clerical position in the empire's endlands was an indentured servitude. You didn't earn enough money to book passage back to England. If you had an eye for the game then you could rise through the system and exploit a fortune out of the country in a dozen or so years, then book a starboard passage home to retire. Stewart walked away from it all. He walked first to the employ of a couple of allied, or independent princes of India. In time he walked away from them as well. By the account he gave people later he eventually walked all the way back to Europe from India, across sundry desserts and wildernesses.

 At any rate by 1786 he was back in Europe. Something about this initial set of experiences broke him, or at least sun-struck him into the mold of an eccentric; a character and committed solitary wanderer. He ranged across the European and apparently American continents. In 1792 he was in Paris, a few years later he was in the young United States where he wrote a book and had it published locally. He did this sort of thing a lot -- Results for 'au:Stewart, John, 1749-1822' [WorldCat]. John Stewart was a Traveler, Naturalist, Vegetarian, and Philosopher. Each of the above defined him and informed his writings by turns. After thirty years of unremitting wandering he settled down to a life of taking turns around London. There self-publishing books on his passions, and hosting dinners parties in order to harvest his guests as a captive audience. He was, perhaps, the Professor Sea Gull of his day.

 No one has written a biography of him. There does not seem to be that much existing information on him. When I first started looking I was struck by the degree the few sources I could find all seemed to be quoting each other. Some of his books still exist, held by a few libraries. One book is available online from the Hathi Trust Travels over the most interesting parts of the...  The American one is also available as an ebook from Newsbank The revelation of nature : with The prophesy of reason. [Two lines of verse]. (eBook, 1795) . About half of this book is a long impeneratable poem, but the prefacing 20 page "Dedication to America" essay is fascinating, keeping in mind De Tocqueville he's not. He dismisses the sloganeering enumeration of the days and months of revolution (1 May, 14 Jun etc.) as empty jargon to be avoided. Warns that any recourse to war even in the face of European provocation would lead to a tax burden that would tear the fragile new nation apart. A nation that possesses the necessities of life, he says, will always have an advantage over one that keeps to luxuries. He warns also against falling back into a Confederate monarchy, and that civil differentiation eventually will equal civil war. Reading through this you do get a sense that he was moving from an observant phase of his life to a pedantic one, by this point.

 Much of what information of his life does exist comes from obituaries written after his death in 1822, from essays by friends like Thomas De Quincy, and an entry in the British Dictionary of National Biography. In 1943 Bertrand Bronson later known for his books and articles on 18th and 19th century English child ballads wrote an article on Walking Stewart for a University of California journal ["Walking Stewart", Essays and Studies, 14 (Los Angeles, 1943)] trying to synthesis a narrative of his life and resolve some discrepancies. This journal is obscure and hard to find now.  but fortunately the essay was reprinted in his 1968 collection Facets of the Enlightenment; studies in English literature and its contexts. (Book, 1968) [WorldCat.org] (which McKeldin where I work holds). This article remains the fullest treatment of John Stewart's life to date. In the last ten years another writer, Kelly Grovier, has turned to Stewart twice. Both times to examine influences Stewart had on William Wordsworth. The overall spectre of the French Revolution that hung over Stewart and Wordsworth's life, echoed through my reading of theses pieces and portions of Wordsworth's Prelude while Tunisia and Egypt rose up and overthrew their Ancient Regimes.


 Stewart was a metaphor even in his own lifetime. Symbolizing something of the nature of his preferred thesis the atomized and living nature of all things. The wraith of roiling existence and doubled consciousness. In the first article  Shades of the Prison House JSTOR: Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Fall, 2005), pp. 341-366 Kelly examines possible influences Stewart may have had on Wordsworth on the subject of dualistic natures, the alienation of these consciousness from each other, more simply the alienation of the self from the identity that our memories provide (Tintern Abbey). The subsequent imprisoned nature of our being and bodies, in time by space in space by time. Grovier then tries to demonstrate that this anticipated Michel Foucault's views on the same subjects concentrating on a notion (from Ernst Kantorowitz) known as "the Kings two bodies". The royal person is at once a mortal and the lasting body politic, divine manifestation and subjugated leviathan.  In the latter article Kelly Grovier - Dream Walker: A Wordsworth Mystery Solved - Romanticism 13:2 (2009) Grovier tries to identify the perplexing and wraith-like Arab traveler -- from the opening dream sequence of book five of Wordsworth's Prelude with Stewart himself. It certainly seems possible that this figure is a transfiguration of Stewart. More likely it could be read as an amalgamating overlay of Stewart and Coleridge.

  Stewart had an autodidactic intellectualism. As Bronson's 1943 piece points out Stewart was no studious being. He was a man of physical practical experience regarding his learning. What stuck to his mind was what was in the air, what was as available to everyone in that revolutionary, questioning and skeptical era. A reflection of the zeitgeist through his highly personalized set of convictions. Bronson refers to his philosophical system as "an image surprisingly free of literary references". Earlier he approvingly quotes De Quincy referring to Stewart as embodying "a rude and unscientific Spinozism."  Its unclear what the Arab traveler represents. The Prelude book five is named Books. The book itself begins with the narrator falling asleep while reading Don Quixote. The suggestion is that the Arab Traveler represents the type of experience accumulation, learning, that comes from reading. The ways certain people can be essentially represented in your experience as a living book. The autosuggestion is that this is a quixotic way of working towards fundamental meaning. Wordsworth always seemed to be looking for someone to supply him with a philosophic structure which he could place both the English and French enlightenment in, and fit both Bastilles as well. The one that always stands, the one that lays as rubble.


 I've see two stories recently about blogging slowing Bloggers quitting what they call a demanding task with few rewards | Business Of Life | Crain's Chicago Business , even falling off  The End of Blogging | The New York Observer. Both these stories emphasize how much work blogging really is, how hard it is to do well enough to build an audience single handed. How unsuitable it is as a casual hobby or ready-made creative outlet.  The absurdity of writing without being paid Is Writing Online Without Pay Worth It? : NPR.

 An autodactyl character like John Stewart puts me at pause. He wrote voluminously and poorly. All of it self-published. Yet he counted Thomas Paine and De Quincy among his friends and Wordsworth among his acquaintances. He was engaged in a myriad of ideas, though not always rigorously managed. What he brought to a conversation was unique experience, radical sensibility and a point of view born of a thousand horizons. At times; though, he seems like a shadow moving through people's description of him. Peculiarly none of his books were travelogues in any traditional sense. his books and discussions rarely treated on descriptions of his experiences and travels, but only on  practical essences he chose to distill from them.

 All writers assign themselves the task and role of communicator. Rarely if ever are they invited to it. All writers carry a soapbox under one arm, even if it is no thicker than a notepad. Writing -- blogging ought to have some purpose and effect, it ought to be directed towards some end, the presumption of an audience engaged or challenged by it in some way. The larger portion of hits I get are to pieces I write about the Navy and the plane the squadron I was assigned to flew. I like writing those pieces, but it is just a portion of the past. I don't want it be what this is about. I rarely write about the second half of my enlistment working at Op Nav in the Pentagon as a 2nd class Petty officer, living at Fort Meyer. These experiences are little different to me; memories of the same period. More than personal reminisces. What motivates me to write here is observing certain events move through the media or public consciousness and attending to  any sense that its essential meaning is not being met directly, while avoiding the muddy trodden path of the immediate discussion. At the risk of blurring what little focus I have here I know this doesn't always work and I should try to write about a more diverse set of topics. There's always pop culture to talk about, but I'm not so sure about my notion of pop culture. How come no one has ever has made a Mutt and Jeff movie? That's what the people are looking for. Oh wait there are a few - ' Bulling the Bolshevik ', 'Back to the Balkans'. Good stuff I'm sure.

 Not to disfavor randomness, or novelty, but writing is best grounded in personal experiences. The process is to analyze, summarize, synthesize experience through native abilities;  what we know (what we've read) what we've encountered, where we've been, who we've known. What paths we've walked.


11:00:55 PM    ;;


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2011 P. Bushmiller.
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