AncienTrails

The Mountain Summer Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Lab orders. Cancer. Ruby. Blackbird Cafe in Kittredge. Potato cakes. The fantasy homes along Bear Creek between Evergreen and Kittredge. All Stone exterior. All Log exterior. That one with the Waterfall. Bear Creek full yesterday after heavy Rains on Sunday. Coffee. Milk. Seltzer Water. The Shema. Unitary metaphysics. This spinning Planet.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Homes. Of all sorts.

One brief shining: The kind phlebotomist wanted to help me; but, I’d forgotten my lab orders and she couldn’t find any in her computer system, after I’d driven a half an hour to get to her since my doctor’s office happens to be between lab companies this week; she flipped up the soft arm of the phlebotomy chair and I squeezed out, shaking my head at my own error, not bringing my copy of the orders.

Been musing for a while about certain things that cannot be done via computer. Any medical visit that requires puncturing the skin. A physical exam in a doctor’s office. The delivery of physical objects purchased online. A kiss. A handshake. A hug. Driving down the hill and back up again. Flying in an airplane. Travel that involves dining and sleeping. The list could go on.

Too often these days we give the lie to Wordsworth, “The world is too much with us, late and soon…” Instead we settle for the faux experience. Remember Alvin Toffler in his book, The Third Wave? High tech, high touch. Yes. The more we use technology, the more we need in person, face to face, skin to skin. We feel, often without knowing it consciously, with Wordsworth again: “Little we see in Nature that is ours. We have given our hearts away.” With A.I. advancing as it is, we may also find ourselves paraphrasing him: We have given our minds away.

I’m no technoLuddite. Hardly. I have three computers. I’m writing this blog on my computer, expecting you to read it on yours. I spend at least three plus hours every week on Zoom, more some weeks. I no longer read a physical newspaper, relying instead on the digital versions of the NYT and the WP plus other news outlets. My shopping, like most of us who live in the Mountains or in rural America, happens online. My front door, your front door has become a receiving dock.

Yet. The interplay between the online world and the world of physical objects, especially humans and other Animals, Forests and Oceans, Mountains and Lakes has made revisiting the Romantic artists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries a useful corrective.

In the United States Romanticism coincided with pre-Civil War and post-Revolution thought, the period often known as the American Renaissance. The Romantic turn toward the individual, the irrational, the natural produced works like Emerson’s essay, Nature, and Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.

This period of American intellectual and artistic life wanted to discover a non-European, American style in literature, poetry, painting. Melville’s Moby Dick. Painters like Church, Durand, Cropsey, Cole. A fruitful period to rediscover for our current ailment.