Walden Choragraphy: Frog Maintenance

Map: Waldon Pond
 The Frogs appeared in my scholarship eventually, in a chapter of Avatar Emergency (2012), entitled "Frog." It was published as an essay orginally, as "Walden Choragraphy: Frog Maintenance."   (Discourse, 2009). The method was to approach Thoreau through inventory and commentary on all the "frogs" present in Walden: not only the actual frogs reported, but any object or thing associated with the name, whether in slang or otherwise. Jacques Lacan, for example, discussing the structure of joke-work in the discourse of the unconscious, advised always to look for the "frog" in the tracks, that is the "switch" that jumped a train from one line to another. The railroad line near the pond is a motif in Thoreau's meditations, representing the presence of this switch frog in the text. 

Walden is a well-defined site, showing how a real place corresponds with imagination, how it may become a receptacle or chora for imagination, to be internalized and create a place of valency for value as such. There is much more to be said about chora and choragraphy, which is the name for what we are doing in worlding. 


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