As a wanna be Existential Absurdist who’s all in with team Existence Before Essence, my initial reaction to most universal-type questions, whether they be a priori, a posteriori, or somewhere in between is usually…
Meh.
I mean, such blathering existential debates to me are complete and absolute exercises in futility…
I’m not a philosopher despite the fact that it is my belief that everyone with a thinking brain, and especially those without, is one, whether it be as a witting one or not.
No, I’m not a Philosopher, despite my occasional philosophizing about philosophical stuff, in the same regard that I’m not a Poet, despite the fact that I occasionally write poetic-like stuff.
Philosophy as a studied discipline is way too confounding for my confounded brain.
However, practicing a philosophy as a means for navigating life comes as natural to me as the act of breathing or as the desire to include unnecessary descriptive and expounding words, especially those oh so delightful words of the adverbial persuasion, into as much of my writing as possible.
For instance, I have no idea how many times other than a lot that I’ve attempted to read and understand such profound Philosophers as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Heidegger and Sartre and Camus and, regardless how many times it’s been, without fail and after only a few pages I have to put their books down in angry frustration and embarrassment from my inability to read the words that they have carefully and thoughtfully written for me with any sustained comprehension. It is maddening to me that, while I can read and understand just about any individual sentence of theirs, when moving on to a succeeding sentence, of which I can also read and understand, I invariably lose comprehension of the sentence which had just preceded it and which only seconds before I had understood.
If hell is other people, then a deeper hell is other people other than the people I can understand…
Reading the work of real Philosophers, just like reading the poetry of real Poets, leaves me feeling inadequate and insignificant, just like I felt in high school during any class not related to Civics, English, or Shop.
Yet, despite the negative feelings the Philosophers’ writings leave me with, or, more likely, because of them, I have somehow managed through these feelings and through the course of my life to come to some level of understanding of the Philosophers and their writings.
Just as, when I drive my car I know not all the inner workings of the machine that allows it to move, or, when I click the keys on my keyboard, I know not all the math and electronics that enable the words to magically appear on my monitor, I know not why my life is, I only know that through my practice of it, it, powered by a mystical Absurdist and Existential philosophical elixir, is.
For, I know without knowing when I first knew or learned it, though I dare not declare it instinctual, that my life in its physical being certainly preceded my life in its essence or spiritual being.
And I know just the same that every choice I make can only but leave me with a sense of both knowable and unknowable angst from it, as well as from those choices I choose not to make.
And I again know just the same that while I [want to] believe that there is an Essence to Life, a Universal and Infinite Guiding Force, a God, so to speak, I, too, [truly] believe that it is absurd to believe that we can ever know with certainty the existence of such an Essence while alive and spinning helplessly within an infinitely indifferent and chaotic universe(s).
Such as it is, we will and must come, with or without a wit, want, or wont, to an understanding of our personal philosophy of life only through the act of living it.
One of the biggest and most influential aspects on my understanding of life, and of the development of my personal philosophy about it, is through the reading of Literature.
Just like Philosophy and Poetry, I read the stuff, not always or even usually understanding it, but ever always feeling it.
I feel bodily the expansive melancholy and spinning hopelessness that Kafka, by not allowing his protagonists the knowledge of the greater forces working against them or the ability to counter these forces (such is life), has magically suffused within The Trial and The Castle deep down to where, if their is one (and I [[truly] want to] believe there is), my essence resides.
And I feel just the same the nihilistic madness and absurdity of life Camus suffers upon his protagonists in his short novel The Stranger and short story “The Guest,” and of whom he only allows but a brief moment of sudden clarity upon their realization of life’s only one knowable truth: that it will end.
And I again feel just the same from many such similar great works of Literature that I have had the privilege and pleasure to read incomprehensibly.
It is these feelings accumulated within me that, over time, has brought me to my understanding of life and provides me with a philosophy of how I wish to live it.
Paradoxically, and absurd as it may seem, the literature that has taught me most how to live my life to its fullest and most pleasurable is that which has made me feel the most small and miserable.
By living an Absurd and Existential life, supplemented liberally by a literary verisimilitude of imagined misery, hopelessness, and suffering. I have developed a chosen philosophy that guides me happily down a path paved with angst-ridden choices going where I know not less its final destination.
I imagine many of you of a certain age were thinking perhaps a song more apropros for this post would be this fun, light-hearted one by Edi Brickell. However, I chose not to choose that one, not only because it would be the easier, non-substantive and least impacting choice to make, but mostly because the Blind Melon song leaves me philosophizing over the contrary and indelible feelings of melancholia and hopefulness it buries deep within me.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Give me the Forest
give me the forest
the whispers
the wind
where only the keening call of the morrow
dare break the sacred calm of the sylvan now
the ritual of the soaring hum
give me the forest
the neglected
the free
where there are no rules
but the rooting scrawls of the cloven beast
unearthing pagan creeds
blasphemous guides to the dark
to the place where all the fears are found
all the magic
give me the forest
the sanctified
the holy
where the haunted howls of midnight
call to worship
to prayer
all the pious and profane
all the naked unbelievers who mock the baptismal of the moon
give me the forest
the ancient
the eternal
where the tattered persona is stripped away
ripped away and hung from the treetops
desperate semaphore signals for the dire
the damned
where the anima dances on fresh laid graves
sodden with tears of the holy
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
Here we find Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the opening passage of his introduction to his seminal essay “Nature,” bemoaning the distance he and his generation are from anything Original and True as compared to preceding generations. As he sees it, only through the firsthand experiences and the tales of our forefathers and foremothers have we been able to learn our life’s lessons and traditions. The gleaming highest highs our civilizations are able to reach are only because of the solid foundations built from and with Nature’s sacred mud by the caring and calloused hands of those to whom have gone before us and who now uplift us still.
If the great Emerson, a transcendental man, perhaps the Transcendental Man as he was in possession of a most extraordinary ability to focus and perceive that which the eye of most mortals miss, is shocked by such a revelation, then it seems to this less-than-transcendental and exceedingly mortal man just how far we find our present selves from those God beholding foregoing generations would bring about the death of fright to such a perceptive and feeling man as he.
And it is not just a distance in generational time I am referring to, but also, mostly, a distance in understanding, as perhaps the same could be said of Emerson’s meaning; though as far as he felt his generation was from an understanding of the Original and True, just how much farther away from understanding we of the present are is too hard for me to imagine.
Just what does our generation know of Nature? of God? of the Universe? Just how many more countless sepulchres have we built and how many more countless biographies have we written? Surely we know greatly of nature and of god and of the universe through the words and misdeeds of our spawning and splintering sects and religious disorders, and through the kaleidoscopic lens and the equations of the material, the physical, carried out to the farthest nth of a degree, accessible to only but a few of our most scientific of brains. Yea, ours is but a weak and plastic generation with hardly one of us finding even a germ under the nail let alone a fleck of sacred earthen mud, so far removed from Nature and Her Elements are we.
Like the everlasting trees Of the most symbolic
Our ancients bare green before us Full in their lustrous branches Roots firmed in their foundation While with the passing breeze Our limbs naked and thin We waive
Lo! but look at me. Look at me, me with my naked, thin limbs waiving away my right of birth to ancient spirits more alive long dead than I whose blood still courses hot will every be. I whose blood still courses hot but whose heart has grown cold and without passion for the Original, the True. I lie content each night having yet let another day slip away without once baring my feet and stepping into the grass; without once feeling the raw moonglow on my rusty skin.
But it wasn’t always so. I wasn’t always so distant from the Original and the True. And neither were you, for we were all born of and from the Original and of the True. It is who, in essence, I am and who you are.
We just forgot, that’s all.
We just allowed each passing day to take us farther and farther from who we were born to be.
So much time has
passed since then,
since I last felt raw
moonglow on
my rusty skin,
that I have forgotten
how the breath of night
can upturn a sallow face.
Long ago,
when I could still remember
how to pause,
and how to listen,
and how to breathe,
for more reasons
than just to breathe,
I knew fields
and wood,
and calico aster;
I knew how to kneel,
and how to observe,
and how to bring myself to quiet.
And I knew,
without knowing,
that if I lay
on my back
beneath the reeds
and remained hushed,
as night clouds
floated by,
shadowed and silent,
that my Self
would simply fall
away.
As romping youth we did not have to be told how to meditate, how to pray. We just knew. We had no need for such technical terms as spirituality or epiphany or satori, for it was in our unknowing that we were able to truly know them. And now that we know them, we know nothing.
I suppose the question is, then, can we return to our essence? Can we, in our knowledge and understanding, return to the bliss of ignorance, to the wisdom of youth, so that we can come back again, if even just a little closer, to the Original and True.
Are we able to do that, knowing what we know?
Tonight
I’ll bare my feet
and step old and aching
into the caliginous balm
of the cool redemptive night.
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes;
And speaks all languages of the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Too often I’ll show little regard to introductions and read through them with hardly reading them at all, my eyes skimming dismissively over the words in an effort to get to “the true essence” of the work. However, as I have resolved to not just read, but to read deeply the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I have to remember, then, that care needs to be given to each of the words that Emerson had specifically chosen to pen, as he had entrusted each chosen word to convey its part of a broader message that he had, himself, intended to convey. So it is with care and attention that I proceed.
~~~~
Other than the title, the above poem is our first encounter with the essay “Nature,” the first piece presented in The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson; and, consequently, the first commitment to that which I have resolved myself. But before considering the poem, we mustn’t overlook the essay’s title; for, from it, we can focus more clearly on the meaning of the poem specifically, as well as the body of work writ large.
Hardly can there be a title broader in meaning than “Nature,” for the word encompasses so much: the essence of the Natural Environment – all within the world and all the worlds within the universe; the essence of the Human Environment – all that which the mind thinks and the body feels; as well as the Environment of the Animal, which may or may not include humans, depending on one’s belief. Though broad and ambiguous, it is full of meaning, as any title should be, as it prepares our minds for all the largesse and grandeur that both Nature, Herself, and the mind and poetic ambition of Emerson can account for. The title, therefore, helps us greatly in our discovery, in that it prepares us to read both the poem and the essay with a universal and open mind, where metaphors and allusions are to be found with meaning, and meaning more.
The poem, itself an introduction to the introduction, is both untitled and unattributed. Often we find authors will select poems and quotes from others, mostly those recognized by history as being of the elite authorial class, as a preface or opening to his or her work. These introductions in brief are generally an attempt to provide a broad look into the author’s mind and, hopefully, to the direction that his or her writing will be taking us. However, as it is untitled, and as Emerson’s reputation precedes his work, for he, himself, is regarded by many to be an elite author, it is easy enough to assume that the poem is an original piece by him. Still, the poem remains untitled, which only means that we will have to rely more heavily on its content, looking closely at each sentence and the words within for us to gain of it our fullest appreciation. So with the poem, let us begin.
A subtle chain of countless rings / The next unto the farthest brings;
Right away, the poem’s “subtle chain” announces that in the essay, as in Nature, we should expect revelations of mysteries linked yet boundless; simple in form, perhaps, yet complex and profound in meaning. For the “subtle” or simple chain, a common yet powerful metaphorical device, enlightens us with its “countless rings” – its circles of life – by alluding to the eternal fact that Nature in all her majesty enjoins all together in common constituency within her universal realm, from the most diminutive to the most grand, “unto the farthest brings” – to the infinite’s endless end.
The eye reads omens where it goes;
Sad would be the soul who hasn’t walked even the shortest way into the wood or out into the empty, expansive field, to where everything slows down to quiet and allows one to hear Nature’s call, be it through the creaking sway of the trees or the hum of the wind upon the grass. For once where She Her presence reveals, so, too, will Her omens, signs signalling the nature of our Collective and Universal Soul through the mundane: acorns scattered on the wooded floor signals life’s endless cycle of birth and death, as the mist of the passing clouds signals the transformative and transient nature of life itself.
And speaks all languages of the rose;
While not all of us speak the same language, we all can look at the rose and equally understand its beauty. And, regardless of all the many different ways we may express it in words, we all have that same feeling of awe and humility as we arrive at that deep and soulful understanding of just how small our presence is when looking up towards that grand vastness above filled with its countless twinkling diamonds of light.
And, striving to be man, the worm / Mounts through all the spires of form
The line suggests that the worm in its striving is emulating our behavior; however, I read it as further suggesting that from the worm’s behavior we have learned to strive, from the worm we have evolved, and as the worm forever works through all forms of nature – be it the soil, the wood, the apple – to realize its true nature, we, too, forever work “through all spires of form” – be they the physical or metaphysical – continuous “unto the farthest brings,” as do links of an endless “subtle chain,” in a most noble and enduring of effort to realize our own true nature.
~~~~
With this meditation on a one-word title and one-sentence poem we discover that, while both may appear simple in form, both hold complex and profound messages that are, we must assume, a herald’s call as to the further complexities and profundities that await us.
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Edition 003-15 is germane
