How to Sharpen a Scythe

From "Distraction and Attention," a folio of responses to Caleb Smith's Thoreau's Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture. To read the entire folio, click here.

Instead, Smith reveals, in twenty-eight readings of short passages drawn from the works of mostly nineteenth-century writers, poets, clergy, and reformers, a complex history of attention that has as much to do with social control as with care.

And so we learn that attention can be a violent tool of white supremacy, wielded by a person like James Dana, the white minister who preached at the 1790 hanging of Joseph Mountain, a Black man sentenced to death for raping a white child. Public executions have always been a spectacle, and Dana worried that, if left untutored, his white audience would pay a debased kind of attention to Mountain’s punishment, reveling in its violence. In the minister’s mind, the point of the execution was not simply to mete out punishment but, as Smith puts it, to “reconstitute the lawful, Christian community of the living.” The point was to discipline the white spectators alongside the Black victim. Dana’s sermon, Smith writes, sought to command “the crowd’s attention and [turn] it inward, to the examination of each person’s own transgressive tendencies.” But it was also meant to focus the white crowd’s collective attention on the mission of racial superiority, to rally them around the cause of white womanhood.

Much of Thoreau’s Axe cuts deeply into American culture, revealing how discipline and punishment, often wielded from above, have defined for us the proper objects of attention: God, country, race, and the capitalist grind. But the blade of Smith’s analysis is subtle, and what I find most remarkable about Thoreau’s Axe is Smith’s comfort with ambiguity, the apparent ease with which he makes space for contradiction, the degree to which his method depends on it.

Disciplined attention may be a tool of social control—“attention means subordination,” writes Smith in a gloss on Marxist alienation—but in the right hands it might also be liberatory, as it is in Smith’s lovely reading of Frederick Douglass’s use of the conditional mood in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Douglass recounts a story of his time with Mr. Covey, the “slave-breaker” whose brutality was infamous but who also publicly fashioned himself as a devout Christian. Covey called his entire household, including the enslaved, to attend to his god and often asked Douglass to lead the group in song. “I would at times do so,” Douglass wrote. “At others, I would not.” Douglass had learned that Covey couldn't carry a tune, and that, when he held his tongue, Covey would stumble and stagger, turning his profession of piety into public farce. In this moment, Douglass flips the roles of master and servant by making “strategic use of distraction”—for the benefit of his fellow enslaved people as well as the audience of his autobiography, those watching Covey fail. For Smith, the power of Douglass’s passage hinges on the conditional verb would: “the conditional is the mood of uncertain, future-oriented possibility,” he writes, and that future-oriented possibility belongs not just to the narrator—to Douglass—but to the attentive, morally disciplined reader as well.

Smith’s keen feel for attention’s ambidextrousness—its dual capacity to subordinate and liberate—mirrors his instinct both for critique and for empathy. For he, too, yearns for a fulfilling life. Consider his handling of Walt Whitman’s instructions on how to live, from Leaves of Grass:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals . . . take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men . . . read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul. . . .

It would be easy to point out the seeming hypocrisy between Whitman’s professed antiauthoritarianism (“re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book”) and his opening injunction (“This is what you shall do”), then acidly write the whole thing up as just one more bid for cultural authority. But Smith stays close to the contradiction, feels its pull, and ends up reading Whitman’s passage as an invitation that is only as forceful as any individual reader’s response to it: “saying yes, as Whitman invites you to imagine it, is not an act of compliance, not a surrender. It can be an expansion of yourself.”

This is where Smith ends up: the dialectical tug of war between discipline and punishment, attention and distraction, leads him to devotion. Though “devotional literature” is often used to describe any overtly religious writing, what Smith has in mind is something more particular involving “ascetic practices of attunement and fidelity.” But neither Smith nor his historical characters equate turning in with turning away. Devotion, for them, is a relational kind of attention, an expansive attention that, though it begins with self-discipline, promises “intimacy, not isolation.”

Thoreau’s Axe is Smith’s devotional: “Maybe attention can be a way of engaging with the world instead of trying to transcend it, and discipline can be for self-composure, not for purity,” he writes, and in the great care of his writing is the performance of devotion. This performance is also a subtle invitation to the disciplined reader, echoing the invitation Smith heard in Whitman’s call to love the earth. It is an invitation to intimacy.

No tool is simple, neither discipline nor scythe. I had all sorts of reasons to begin mowing my lawn with an antiquated hand tool—economic and environmental and ideological—but there is nothing inherently good in any of this work. For all the therapeutic feeling Levin received when he mowed with his peasants, he remained, at the end of the day, their lord whose comfort depended on their sweat, and the scythe can certainly be classed among the tools of “imperial conquest and settlement,” as Smith notes of Thoreau’s axe.

Yet, with scythe in hand, I have begun to notice a change. I like how the tool sharpens my focus, as well as how it conditions my experience of living on this particular patch of earth. A patch that is also changing. Over the past four mowing seasons, what was once a standard rural lawn has transformed into a close-cropped meadow filled with moss, daisies, aromatic herbs, wild strawberries, bluets, and comfrey; it fairly vibrates during the day with the wings of pollinators fruitfully searching for a meal. Every season brings increased variety, which is another way of saying that every season brings increased possibility, and when I drift off to sleep at night, worn out by the day’s demands for attention, it is to the meadow singing with cricket song.