On Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”

In his beloved poem Mending Wall, Robert Frost offers a gracious exploration into the opposite orientations that characterize human beings. He contrasts our instinct toward wall building with that towards wall destroying, portraying the tension between our inclination towards Apollonian qualities such as order and individuation vis-à-vis our tendency towards Dionysian chaos and unity. Frost himself once told his friend and fellow poet Charles Foster that he was “both wall-builder and wall destroyer”¹ and in his essay The Constant Symbol he wrote that as it pertains to the disciplines from “within” and from “without” that “he who knows not both knows neither."² As these assertions suggest, it is only in the dialectical intersection of these two opposing instinctual forces that we reach an artful, healthy state of authenticity.

Spring is the mischief in me ¶

Mischief is the spirit of the 21st century, a period of tumultuous cultural transition marked by globalization—a breaching of boundaries in an unprecedented scale—giving place to a community in which distance and isolation have been dramatically reduced. In the 1960s Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan coined the apt term “global village” in anticipation of such a paradigm shift. He foresaw the advent of digital media as herald of such interconnection, which brings to the surface human faculties and modes of association that had been neglected by the primarily visual (read: Apollonian) aptitudes (fragmentation, specialism, detachment, mechanization, etc.) largely favored by Western civilization. In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan offers insight into the message of the digital medium of this Mess Age as it pertains to our social organization:

Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable. Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than “a place for everything and everything in its place.”
You can’t go home again.

Despite our dogmatic denial, in the face of such a powerful force the walls we’ve built are being swiftly destroyed. We’re connecting.

Good fences make good neighbors ¶

But why do they make good neighbors?

Walls are as much part of a prison as they are part of a home, and while the prospect of being incarcerated can be dreadful the idea of living without a home can be even more terryfing. How shall one weather the elements and find the safety necessary to function at all without a proper home? This need is the mother of our primordial instinct towards wall building: individuation. While a reckoning with the Dionysian is imperative for our health it also threatens to completely subjugate our prerogative towards individuation and all its affordances, to be made feel “boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind in the world of emotion, [ruled] by primordial intuition, by terror."³ The erosion of Apollonian qualities and dissolution of individual identity leave a power vacuum that we now see trying to be filled by the likes of technology companies and other such entities; an inability to guide oneself leaves one susceptible to being guided. Abuses of privacy—the state of being an individual free from this electric judgment—and of our capacities of focus and deliberate action are examples of this usurpation.

Walls can only ever be provisional, but they too are necessary for our health.

Let’s be alone together ¶

The only sound way to be is to work together to keep ourselves apart—to be alone together. Embracing that the fertile interplay of seeming opposites circumscribes our lives and makes possible the multifariousness of virtue that characterizes us human beings is what enables an earnest expression of our will and highest ideals: it leads us to become what we really are.