God's foot upon the treadle of the loom

I've been blogging off and on lately about the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with an initial focus on his seminal essay Nature. As I've said before, parts of it seem memorable while others are a bit cloying. That's especially true for me of his overly optimistic view of the universe and his belief that everything in nature corresponds to the soul in some kind of dreamy and positive way.

A good antidote to Emersonian optimism is good old Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. In that work, a deep encounter with nature doesn't necessarily lead to transcendental bliss, although it sometimes does. It can also lead to madness and destruction.

This comes out loud and clear in the story of Pip, the black child who sails on the Pequod and is briefly abandoned at sea during a whale chase. Pip's encounter with nature pretty much fries his brain:

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyless, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects  that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's food upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at least to the celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

Next week: The American Scholar.

SEQUESTRATION. Here's a look at what it means. And, by the way, I'm getting sick of government by artificially manufactured crisis.

AND THE "SEQUESTERS" are dissected here by Robert Reich.

MORE ON THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MASSEY at Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo.

BIRDSONGS AND HUMAN SPEECH discussed here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A mute gospel?

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the  work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a preeminent 19th century figure in American life and letters. The focus at the moment is his essay Nature (see last week's posts).

One thing that struck me the first time I read Nature (and every other time) is how totally pre-Darwinian are many of the ideas discussed. This is only to be expected, since Nature came out around 1836 and The Origin of Species more than 20 years later. Still, the gap between Emerson's universe and the modern scientific view of the same is vast.

Emerson believed that there was a deep correspondence between nature and the soul and that natural facts corresponded to moral facts, a far cry from the amoral universe of relentless natural selection.

Consider this passage:

...every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal preach to us.

Nature is beautiful and all but it is pretty red in tooth and claw. In a living world of prey, predators and parasites, I'm not sure how edifying the sermon would be. It is beyond good and evil.

Then he really steps in it:

What is a far but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun,--it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes the fields.

Let me just say that if Goat Rope Farm is a mute gospel, it is one that didn't make the New Testament cut. Also, if you think about it farming is kind of the opposite of nature--that's why it's so hard. Creatures want to do their own thing, not the thing of the farmer. They also want to do it where they want, which often isn't where the farmer wants. All cultivated species, whether plant or animal, are a far cry from their original natural state, having been bred over many generations through artificial selection. If that were not the case, there would be no need to farm them.

There's something touching about such a cozy view of our relationship with the natural world but it seems to me to be clearly a relic of another time.

SPEAKING OF DARWIN, here's E.O. Wilson on human nature.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT. Here's a look at the facts about the minimum wage.

REASON 238128 TO EXPAND MEDICAID. It would help a lot of veterans.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

An occult relation between man and the vegetable

One of my favorite Dylan songs is an early acoustic effort, Lay Down Your Weary Tune, which is about how the music of nature outdoes any human effort. The chorus goes,

Lay down your weary tune, lay down
Lay down the song you strum
And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum.

Around here, a lot of the best music comes from the wind through the trees. Dylan put it this way,

The branches bare like a banjo played
To the winds that listened best

Not surprisingly, Emerson noticed that in his early essay Nature,

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.

MOMENTUM. The big political news yesterday was the announcement that Republican governor Rick Scott of Florida, a major foe of the Affordable Care Act, intends to expand Medicaid coverage to low wage workers in that state. That makes him the 7th Republican governor to make that decision. Meanwhile, West Virginia's Democratic governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, hasn't made his decision yet. I hope this makes it easier.

FOLLOWING THAT THREAD, this item from Politico highlights the conflicts the Affordable Care Act has caused among Republican governors between pragmatists and ideologues.

PRISON REFORM should also be on the agenda in WV now. Here's a call for making it better.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Their admonishing smile

This is a busy time for El Cabrero, so rather than hunt up stuff to post each day, the theme for this stretch is the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essays and poems had such a huge influence on much of American life and letters in the mid 1800s. This week, we're looking at his essay Nature, in which he makes more than one good point.

I admire this passage, which is in part about solitude and in part about how we don't value that which we take for granted.

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches  One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years  how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty  and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

It really is true that if these celestial lights were only visible once in a great while we would give them more of the attention and reverence they deserve. The same is no doubt true of many other things.

WAR ON COAL? Whatever.

CHILD POVERTY PROBLEM? Real.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A transparent eyeball

Caricature of an image from Emerson's essay "Nature" by Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892).

The theme at Goat Rope these days is Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great 19th century essayist and Transcendentalist, whatever that means. This week, I'm looking at his seminal essay/lecture Nature, which not only has many memorable passages but, as the picture above illustrates, sometimes lends itself to amusing images.

Here's Ralph on what a good walk in the woods does for the soul:

In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith  There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,--no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. 

And here's an image for you:

Standing on the bare ground--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing  I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

Although some of this essay seems a bit loopy to me, I love those lines and have even felt them a time or two. Except maybe for the transparent eyeball thing.

LET'S DO IT. Here's Paul Krugman on raising the minimum wage.

REGRETS. Here are the top five at the end of life.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

An original relation to the universe

 This is the time of year when things get a bit crazy for El Cabrero, so it might be good to have a theme around here to tie things together. And the theme at hand is the work of America's first (or maybe second, behind Franklin) sage, or at least one of its leading early public intellectuals, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Over the coming weeks, I plan on sampling some of his essays and poems and trying to figure out whether he was a wise man, a wind bag, or some combination thereof.

And what better place to start than his signature essay and speech, "Nature," which has had a huge impact. I have to admit that when I first read it, two kinds of thoughts ran through my head. The first was, the boy can turn a phrase. The second was, this is SOOOOO pre-Darwinian as to seem loopy. Maybe it's just a temperamental thing, but I wonder about people who seem too smug about their place in the universe...

Anyhow, the first lines of the essay are pure Emerson and are keepers. They express his signature idea that the same spirit which inspired the prophets, poets and seers of old is right here with us today and that we shouldn't settle for their leavings but have and trust our own immediate experience. (That kind of thinking helped end his career in the Unitarian ministry, which was quite a bit more doctrinally strict then than today.)

Here goes:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers 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 enjoy and 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? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out its faded wardrobe? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

I guess times have changed. These days, people tend to credit their own insights and neglect the wisdom of tradition.

ACTION ITEM. If you're concerned about the corrosive effects of money on our democracy, Tuesday is a day of action by West Virginians for Democracy. They plan to lobby legislators in support of a resolution calling for "ending the corrupt practices enabled by the Citizens United decision 3 years ago." They will hold a rally on the ground floor of the Capitol rotunda from 11:30-12:30. For more info, call WV Citizen Action Group at 304-346-5891. Read more here.

HEALTH CARE REFORM is coming. It looks like WV is taking some decent steps towards its implementation.

IT'S A LITTLE LATE FOR VALENTINE'S DAY, but here's a look at animal love.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Weekend birthday poetry fix

This man is celebrating El Cabrero's 50th.

Today marks my 50th year on the planet. I could think of no better poem for the occasion than "Nature," Longfellow's meditation on aging. Not all my playthings have been taken away yet, but the writing is on the wall.

AS a fond mother, when the day is o’er,
Leads by the hand her little child to bed,
Half willing, half reluctant to be led,
And leave his broken playthings on the floor,
Still gazing at them through the open door,
Nor wholly reassured and comforted
By promises of others in their stead,
Which, though more splendid, may not please him more;
So Nature deals with us, and takes away
Our playthings one by one, and by the hand
Leads us to rest so gently, that we go
Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,
Being too full of sleep to understand
How far the unknown transcends the what we know.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: TRANSCENDENTALLY UNKNOWN