It is time to be old?

This blog has been running a series about the life and writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson for a good while now. As the series draws to a close I'm looking at some of his poems. Today's feature is "Terminus," named after the Roman god of boundaries.

It's interesting because it is about aging and yielding gracefully to it. You can compare and contrast that sentiment with Tennyson's poem Ulysses, in which the hero closes by saying

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Emerson, by contrast, aims to trim himself to the storm of time. As it turned out, the poem was prophetic. In his last years, he developed dementia and the man of words developed aphasia, forgetting his own name at times.

As someone who isn't getting a whole lot younger at the moment, I kind of like both poems but at the moment I'm leaning to Tennyson. This weekend I plan on dragging my creaking bones to a half marathon trail run on very hilly ground and I hope not to yield before crossing the finish line. Anyhow, here's one to think about:

Terminus

 It is time to be old,

To take in sail:--

The gods of bounds,

Who sets to seas a shore,

Came to me in his fatal rounds,

And said: 'No more!

No farther shoot

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.

Fancy departs: no more invent;

Contract thy firmament

To compass of a tent.

There's not enough for this and that,

Make thy option which of two;

Economize the failing river,

Not the less revere the Giver,

Leave the many and hold the few.

Timely wise accept the terms,

Soften the fall with wary foot;

A little while

Still plan and smile,

And,--fault of novel germs,--

Mature the unfallen fruit.

Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,

Bad husbands of their fires,

Who, when they gave thee breath,

Failed to bequeath

The needful sinew stark as once,

The Baresark marrow to thy bones,

But left a legacy of ebbing veins,

Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--

Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,

Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.'

As the bird trims her to the gale,

I trim myself to the storm of time,

I man the rudder, reef the sail,

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:

'Lowly faithful, banish fear,

Right onward drive unharmed;

The port, well worth the cruise, is near,

And every wave is charmed.'

DO IT. Here's a link to a publication by AFSC on why WV should expand Medicaid coverage.

WHAT WAS FOR SUPPER? According to the earliest known cookware, it was fish soup.

BACK TO THE AGING THING. It looks like today's adults live longer but are less healthy than recent but older generations.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I keep, and pass, and turn again

Say what you want about the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he gave me an easy topic to blog about during a busy couple of months. For that I'm grateful, anyway.

For the last month or two I've been looking at some of his most influential essays or lectures, but it turns out that what Waldo really wanted was to be a great poet. I'm not sure he hit the mark, but it wasn't for lack of trying. One line from an 1837 Fourth of July poem about his town of Concord during the American Revolution became quite famous, as in "the shot heard round the world."

I can't claim that I've read all his poems but I did find two that I really liked. Today's feature is the poem Brahma, which was published in 1857. It reflects his interest in the spiritual literature of India and was heavily influenced by the Bhagavad Gita. The poem also captures some of the monistic (as in all is One) and pantheistic (as in all is God) themes of Transcendentalism.

Here goes:

Brahma

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

IGNORANCE is alive and well, according to this writer.

MONKEY TALK. Did human speech develop from this kind of primate communication?

ARE WE ALONE? Here's an interesting item on the search for extraterrestrial life.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

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

A newborn bard of the Holy Ghost

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose impact on 19th century American culture was pretty huge. I have a love/hate relationship with old Ralph. Some of his writings are really inspiring, others are totally unintelligible to me, while still others seem kind of idiotic.

At the moment, the focus is on his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which was pretty controversial in its time (and much of which seems to lean to the loopy side to me).

One reason for this was his advice to would-be clergy to disregard the dogmas and rituals of the past and trust only in their own direct experience.

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, `I also am a man.' Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.
 

 I suppose prattle like this sounds inspiring to people with an overly exalted conception of their own internal hiccups, but the asylums and alleys of the world are full of sad and misguided souls who consider themselves to be the newborn bards of the Holy Ghost. It's one thing to oppose unthinking dogmatism but it's another to disregard tradition altogether and to mistake our internal chatter as the voice of God. The capacity for self doubt is a virtue, but the tendency to self-deification is a delusion.

WRONG TURN. Here's a good Gazette editorial on the tragic waste of the Iraq war.

MORAL ANIMALS? Maybe.

TALE OF THE WHALE. Here's a great feature on Melville's Leviathan and its evolution.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A wart and a wen

This time of year is the political equivalent of deer season in West Virginia. During this busy time, this blog has been focusing on the life and work of 19th century American literary giant Ralph Waldo Emerson. At the moment, the focus is on his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which was a bit over the top for his initial audience.

To tell the truth, parts of it are over the top for me. Although I am no pillar of ecclesiastical conformity, I do have a moments of orthodoxy and some of Emerson's glib delusions of spiritual grandeur seem pretty loopy to me.

One such idea that I have always had trouble with is the idea that God dwells within us. Emerson loved that kind of thing, as expressed in statements like this one:

That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decease forever.

 To which I am tempted to reply, we are warts and wens, Ralph. Suck it up.

UNIONS FOR THE ARTSY? Why not?

NEANDERTHALS AND US. Apparently Neanderthal brains were more about things like vision than social networking. I guess this means they weren't big Facebook users.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This high chant from the poet's lips

This is a busy season for yours truly, so rather than scrounge daily for random topics I've been pondering the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Right now, the focus is on his controversial 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which so antagonized his pious Unitarian listeners (strange as it may seem, there were pious Unitarians in those days) that he wasn't invited back for 30 years.

What got him into hot water were comments like these:

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, `I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.'

(Actually, I think he was about as far from what the historical Jesus actually thought or said as his orthodox opponents. Jesus was no doubt many things in his earthy life, but poetic dreamyTranscendentalist probably wasn't one of them.)

Emerson then went on to argue that historical Christianity was based on a huge distortion:

But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, `This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.' The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
 

That pretty much did it, even for Unitarians.

LOOKING BACK. Here's another take on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war.

COOL NEWLY DISCOVERED LIZARDS here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

 

The doors of the temple stand open

The theme here these day is the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the focus at the moment is on his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which stirred up so much controversy that he wasn't invited back for 30 years.

It would be one thing to tick off a bunch of foaming fundamentalists with a little free ranging thought, but Ralph even managed to alienate relatively laid back Unitarians, who were more closely aligned with traditional Christianity then than now.

One thing that got him in trouble was his characteristic assertion that truth is not something once received and thereafter believed but rather something each soul must directly intuit. He believed that the same sources that inspired Jesus and other prophets and seers can inspire us today if we only let it.

If it sounds like he'd been hanging around with and reading about Quakers, he was. He was also learning or intuiting as much as he could about the religious traditions of Asia--so much so that the sounds Buddhist and even Zenlike in his insistence that every person must directly experience insight rather than merely accept some religious tradition:

...the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

That's kind of how a 19th century American might express the Buddha's advice to "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." It also is reminiscent of the teachings often attributed to the Zen patriarch Bodhidharma, who was believed to have spoken of

A special transmission outside the scriptures;
No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the mind of man;
Seeing into one's nature and attaining Buddhahood.

Such ideas are pretty commonplace now. You can find some reference to them in almost any bookstore and in popular culture. But they were a bit over the top back then. They'd still upset quite a few people today.

SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO WOULDN'T LIKE EMERSON, here's an article about the fortunes of fundamentalism in the US and around the world.

WHAT WOULD FREUD SAY? WV legislators have gone gun crazy lately. Would Sigmund say it was castration anxiety or are they just trying to compensate for something?

CAN I HAVE ONE? This NRP story about an Indonesian zoo breeding Komodo dragons has me all excited.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Out of the same spirit

There's an old joke about a Zen master walking up to a hot dog stand and saying "Make me one with everything." I think Ralph Waldo Emerson would take his hot dogs that way too, metaphorically speaking.

I've been blogging lately about Emerson and his ideas and at the moment I'm on his Harvard Divinity School Address. In it, among other things, he embraces a kind of cosmic idealistic monism (as in all is one) and thus seems to suffer from the kind of over optimism that characterizes such world views.

Here he lays it out:

...the world is not the product of manifold power  but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise.

He adopts a position on evil that goes back to St. Augustine and Plato, which views being as such as good and evil as merely the absence of good:

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in different applications, just as the ocean receives different names no the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries;  his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he become less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death.

Let those who can believe it. As far as I can, some of those motes and points can do quite a bit of damage.

10 YEARS OUT. Here's Krugman on the Iraq War anniversary.

WAR ON COAL? Here's another view.

ANIMAL RESURRECTIONS. Given cloning and all, which extinct animals would you bring back?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A man is made Providence to himself

The theme at Goat Rope these days, aside from occasional rants when things get on my last nerve, is the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. At this point, I'm on his Harvard Divinity School Address, which managed to tick off even Unitarians.

As I've mentioned before, Emerson and Thoreau were both forerunners of American Buddhism. In this essay, Emerson expounds a subtle idea of karma whereby people become more like what they invest themselves in. Compassionate people get better at compassion. Greedy people get better at greed. He sees this as working like a law of nature:

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie--for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance--will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own violition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.

To which I can only say, with Hamlet's friend Horatio, so have I heard and do in part believe it. Or I'd like to  anyway.

COAL COUNTIES AND DEATH RATES seem to go hand in hand.

PLEASE CHECK OUT THIS WEBSITE to learn more about Medicaid expansion, whether you can qualify for coverage, and how you can take steps to make sure it happens here.

I CAN HANDLE BATS EATING SPIDERS, but the thought of spiders eating bats kind of grosses me out. Maybe it's a mammalian solidarity thing.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Karma, New England style

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a huge influence in 19th century life and letters in America and beyond. I mean, even Nietzsche liked him.

At the moment, I'm taking a look at his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which was so controversial at the time that he wasn't invited back to that institution for 30 years. In a day or so, posts here will take a look at some of the things he wrote that got him into hot water with even relatively laid back New England Unitarians.

Today, though, the first passage that hit my eye is one that echoes classical Buddhist teachings about karma. Contrary to popular belief, Buddhist views on the subject are pretty subtle. It's not like if you do a good deed you get a Lexis. It's more like if you act nastily, you'll get better and better and being nasty, with all that that entails. And vice versa.  (Emerson, by the way, was an admirer of Indian philosophy and was moved by the limited amount he could read about at the time of Hindu and Buddhist ideas).

Anyhow, here's the passage. I must admit that while Ralph drives me crazy sometimes, I like this one:

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. The laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

Everybody got that?

Note: this post was meant to come out early this morning but there have been internet problem on the farm.

THE DOWNSIDE OF PRIVATIZATION is discussed here.

THE LONG HAUL. Here's a profile of a friend of mine from the Gazette.

THE FUTURE OF UNIONS. Here's a look at the challenges the labor movement is facing and possible ways to deal with it. Suggestion: take a look at the I.W.W.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Try that today

I love Unitarians. The only thing I like more than Unitarians is a good Unitarian joke, which is one reason I've decided to remain a fan of Garrison Keillor. I mention all this because the theme at Goat Rope these days is the life and thought of 19th century Transcendentalist sage Ralph Waldo Emerson.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, New England went through a theological sea change from the days of settlement in the 1600s to the 1800s. Originially, a hard core Calvinistic Puritanism prevailed. Over time however, the theological fever cooled and Unitarianism gained ground. Emerson himself was a former Unitarian minister.

One of his most famous, and notorious essays/lectures was the 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, in which he pulled off a feat that would be hard to replicate today. He gave a talk in which his views were so unorthodox that even many Unitarians couldn't take it--and as a result, he wasn't invited back to talk to his alma mater for 30 years.

(If it was too much for them, imagine what the Baptists would have thought!)

This week, we'll take a look at what set them off.

JUST DO IT. Here's another good article on why WV Governor Tomblin should expand Medicaid.

DEFICIT HYSTERIA is unnecessary, according to Krugman.

POLITICS ON THE BRAIN. I find articles like this one interesting, but think there's a danger in essentializing a contemporary trend. People seeking a genetic basis for our current polarization may be forgetting that this probably isn't an eternal fact of human nature but rather something that changes over time.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I embrace the common

The theme here lately is the work of American Transcendentalis Ralph Waldo Emerson. Today I'm finishing up a look at his 1837 essay/lecture The American Scholar. Part of its appeal lay in its embrace of everyday life and its call for intellectuals to escape from what would come to be called the ivory tower, a sentiment one can often hear expressed nearly 200 years later.

Here he is sounding like a prose version of Walt Whitman:

...I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.

Some of the last lines of this essay are particularly memorable, as Emerson calls for a new American educational system to break with European models:

We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American feeman is alreaded suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.

Instead, he calls for a break with the traditions of the past:

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall no longer be a name for pit, for doubt, for sensual indulgence....A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

Pretty rousing stuff, but I'm not sure the American higher educational system has quite  lived up to Emerson's dreams. That's one aircraft carrier that's not ready for the "Mission Accomplished" banner.

SPEAKING OF "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED," we're coming up on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War.

STILL POPULAR AFTER ALL THESE YEARS. That would be raising the minimum wage.

PASS THE MEAT? Or pass on it?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

There's the rub

The theme at Goat Rope lately is the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with a special focus now on his lecture/essay The American Scholar.

Full disclosure: I'm doing this for several reasons. One, it's kind of a busy time and having a regular theme makes it easier to feed a blog. Two, I'm trying to figure out Emerson and see what there is in his work that makes sense today. 

I must admit that I can read whole pages or even essays of his and have no idea of what he's talking about. But then he'll have some great zingers that are keepers. Here's one of those:

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

That, alas, is the tough part.

 A BLAST FROM THE PAST. Here are some progressive planks from the Republican Party platform...of 1956.

BAD NEWS WAITING TO HAPPEN. Extremist groups on the right are ramping up these days, enraged by both possible gun regulations...and the fact that there's a black man in the White House.

WOULD YOU, COULD YOU EAT AN EYE? No, I say, don't ask me why.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Life is our dictionary

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the work of 19th century American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson, with a current focus on his essay/lecture The American Scholar. The essay didn't make a huge splash at the time but over the years its influence grew and he is now seen as a forerunner of those pragmatists and reformers who wanted to broaden the definition of education and scholarship to include knowledge of practical life.

This passage is typical:

Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town--in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get the tiles and cope-stones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

That sounds lie a precursor to the current support for vocational education, although it is also about how practical life enriches and creates living language.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN. Here's a critique of the Obama administrations approach to the deficit debate.

IN CASE THIS BLOG HAS BEEN TOO MODERATE FOR YOUR TASTES, read this.

NO CLIMATE CHANGE HERE, BOSS, even though an Arctic sea route is probably going to open up later in this century.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED