Insist on yourself

For a good little stretch the theme a Goat Rope has been the life and thought of 19th century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here's one last bit of advice from his signature essay Self Reliance:

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare?  Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare  Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

JUST DO IT. Yesterday, nearly 200 West Virginians gathered to urge Governor Tomblin to expand Medicaid coverage to low wage workers.

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's Krugman on the same topic.

PERCHANCE TO DREAM. Scientists are making progress at decoding dreams. Where will this end?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Ashamed before the blade of grass

The theme at Goat Rope these days continues to be the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with a focus at the moment on his famous essay Self Reliance, which is a call for and declaration of spiritual independence.

There is a pretty good bit of irony in today's selection, which involves quoting from a bit of his essay that opposes quoting other people. I beg to disagree with Waldo here. I love finding examples of people who say things better than I ever could. It happens all the time. But the paragraph also contains some good insights into the difficulty we have of living in the present.This is another example of how Emerson's ideas both reflected his interest in Buddhist thought and anticipated elements of it as yet unknown in America. And you can quote me on that.

Here's goes:

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

A GOOD IDEA. Here's economist Dean Baker with a column on how the US could improve its employment picture with a more extensive use of work sharing, which involves reducing hours rather than cutting jobs and letting affected workers draw partial benefits for the lost wages. El Cabrero and friends have tried to push this idea in WV. It actually made it through one legislative committee this session despite the irrational hostility of the state Chamber of Commerce for a business friendly measure and an equally bizarre attempt at sabotage at the state workforce agency.

ONE MORE LINK JUST FOR FUN. Here's a look at some of the whackiest things televangelist Pat Robertson has said. I'll bet it was hard to whittle it down to 10.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A foolish consistency

I've been blogging the last stretch about the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who exerted a huge influence on American literature during and after the 19th century. I have to fess up to a love/hate relationship with old Waldo. Sometimes he seems like a pompous windbag. Sometimes I have no idea what he's talking about. But sometimes he's right on. One such case in point is a passage from Self Reliance about the dangers of consistency. Sometimes we stick to a bad opinion or course of action just because we don't want to seem to change. His advice: get over it.

Here's a great passage with one of his more famous lines:

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. 

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

SAD NEWS FROM WV. I'm in Vermont at the moment and was saddened and shocked by the news that Mingo County Sheriff Eugene Crum was gunned down outside the county courthouse.

STILL SAD THREE YEARS LATER. Here's Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo on how we continue to fail coal miners by not enacting tougher safety regulations.

Do your work

During this busy season, I've been blogging off and on about the life and work of 19th century American literary giant Ralph Waldo Emerson. Right now I'm on his most Emersonian and American essay, Self Reliance.

Contrary to the associations such a title might bring to mind today, Emerson was not an intellectual predecessor of the vile Ayn Rand. Rather than exalting greed in the economic sphere, he was exhorting us to spiritual, personal and intellectual independence. 

The passage I'm highlighting today reminds me of the Hindu classic the Bhagavad Gita, a favorite of Emerson's. In that scripture, the god Krishna admonishes Arjuna to follow his own dharma or path of duty in the world, saying "It is better to fail in your own dharma than succeed in someone else's." In other words, do your own work and become yourself.

Here's a dose for the day:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. 

JUST ONE LINK. I couldn't join this massive rally by members of the United Mine Workers union in Charleston yesterday, but I was there in spirit. I hope they win justice from Patriot coal for union retirees.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Society everywhere is in conspiracy

Humans are by nature social animals. As Aristotle, whom Dante described as "the master of those who know," put it in his Politics, "to live alone, one must be either a beast or a god." On the other hand, group dynamics can really bring out the beast and drive away the god.

A lot of human evil and just plain pettiness can be attributed to group behavior, conformity, and obedience. Emerson takes a famous whack at those in Self Reliance.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

(I'm guessing this applies to women too.)

LINK TRUCK BROKEN TODAY 

Stuck with ourselves

The theme at Goat Rope lately is the work of 19th century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. At the moment, the focus is on his signature essay Self Reliance, which is a kind of spiritual declaration of independence.

Today I want to highlight one passage of the essay that reminded me of a tough time when I was in high school. My situation at the time seemed untenable, but somehow I knew deep down that it was better to be miserable as myself than happy as someone else. Here's how Emerson put it:

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried...God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace.

 

His advice seems to be this: become yourselves. No wonder Nietzsche loved him.

WAY COOL. The Roman Catholic bishop of WV urged Gov. Tomblin to expand Medicaid coverage to low wage working people.

SOCIAL ANIMALS are we. If we want to live long, anyway.

NOTE: busy days and travel ahead so posts may be irregular.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

We recognize our own rejected thoughts

One of my favorite Dylan songs--and the list is long--is "Trust Yourself" from the underrated album Empire Burlesque. In it, Bob strikes the familiar American chord of self reliance.

That theme might have been most forcefully laid out in a much sunnier manner in  Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay of the same title. That essay and the vehemence with which it pushed its argument may have been in part a reaction to some of the hostile reviews and controversy that came in the wake of his controversial Harvard Divinity School Address (see previous posts).

It's easy to misunderstand what Emerson meant by self-reliance. The essay is not a paean to unregulated capitalism. Rather it is a call to intellectual and spiritual independence, as this selection from the opening power shows:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

I'm not sure I'd go that far, at least with the thoughts that flit like bats around my head, but he does have a point. I have on more than one occasion read, heard, or seen something in print or in some work of art that had previously occurred to me but that I did nothing to capture. He puts it like this:

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Ralph can be a bit out there sometimes, but passages like this make up for some of that. At the very least, they challenge the reader to not let some many ideas and inspirations get away.

PRISON REFORM is on the legislative agenda in WV, where a decent bill promoted by the governor sailed thorugh the state senate. I hope it succeeds in the house. These efforts got a boost in, of all places, the New York Times.

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY. Here are some snapshots from the growing divide.

THREE YEARS AND COUNTING. The Affordable Care Act had a birthday this weekend. The Spousal Unit and I actually attended a party in its honor (we didn't have to buy gifts anyhow). Here's a look at how it's working so far.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED