• Tag Archives Emerson

  • Timeless Masterpiece Liked

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                               Waning Dark Moon

    “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

    It never occurred to me just how much Emerson and Brad Childress have in common.  The Vikings are always getting ready for this Sunday, not thinking about last Sunday or the Sunday after this one.  This is the only game that counts right now.  This one.  Quarterbacks especially, but all others, too, must have short memories so bad plays won’t affect their next play.  Which is the only play that counts.  Of course, encephalopathy from hitting large, fast moving objects also helps.

    Perhaps Eckhart Tolle has an NFL consulting career ahead of him and a new book:  This Game is the Only Game-Play Here Now.

    Scientists Dissect Coworker To Find Out More About Scientists Fri, Nov 06 2009 This important segment and the following article:   Timeless Masterpiece Liked are on the Onion website.


    📂This entry was posted in Humor 📎and tagged

  • With Apologies to Canada and Mexico

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc            Waning Moon of Winds

    I edited and revised American Identity today.  It needed a paragraph indicating what I believe to be similarities between the ante-bellum USA and our current era.  National identity was weak during the ante-bellum period and is weak now.

    In ante-bellum America the Unitarians William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson made a strong push for American letters.  On the one hand they wanted a break with the European dominance of American literature, painting and scholarship; but more, they wanted American letters, literature rooted in the American experience, painting using American themes and flowing from the genius of American talent and scholarship trained in the new nation and carried out by American academics.

    American identity is weak now for several reasons.  Increasing Mexican immigration has raised a potent challenge to the Anglo-Protestant traditional US culture.  We are now a multiethnic, multiracial society, but our identity has only made tentative steps to say what that means.  We lost a prime enemy in the USSR and now have no one over against whom to identify ourselves.  Since the 1960’s there has been an erosion of trust in the basic institutions of our society:  business, government, the church, education.  Each of these challenges the old ethnic, racial and Anglo-Protestant consensus that underwrote US identity through the 1950’s.

    Like the ante-bellum USA this is a time for a new American letters, a new American literature, a new American painting and sculpture and music, a new American poetry and a new American scholarship, one that reflects the multiethnic, multiracial society we have become.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Humanities Letters Our Land and Home Politics 📎and tagged

  • American Identity: What Is It?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    2  steep rise 30.30 WNW9  wchill -5  Winter

    Full Wolf Moon

    Got my copy of the Mahabarata today, four doorstopper sized books.  You read a long book the same way you read a short one, one page at a time.

    The seed database has most of the seeds entered with planting dates, inside and/or outside.  It will make the process of following the garden this year much easier.  It will also make evaluating the varieties and their production much simpler.  The garden has a straightforward demeanor this time of year.  It resides in the realm of fantasy, hard to even imagine with several inches of snowcover and windchills really cold.   The windchill just changed to -9.

    Tomorrow I’m going to cover a meeting of the MN Senate Energy, Utilities, Technology and Communications Committee. The Sierra Club’s Government Relations person, Michelle Rosier, has a meeting in New Orleans until late in the week.  (Windchill now -10. )  This meeting has an interesting focus: Discussion of anticipated federal stimulus package.  In a state with 5B+ deficit, the conservation should reveal some lines of attack.

    Emerson’s American Scholar contains his usual wise bits and some extraneous thoughts, but I’m half-way through it and he has not gotten to the American scholar yet.  I’m starting here on American identity piece:   American Identity in the Time of Obama.   Emerson’s time set about with clear intention to create an American character, an American identity.  If they could, we can, too.  But first I want to know what they did.

    BYB:  I’m interested in the ex-pat perspective on American identity.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Great Work Myth and Story Writing 📎and tagged

  • Dark Energy

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    67  bar rises 30.17  0mph NNE dew-point 58  sunrises 6:15  sunset 8:19

    Whole Corn Moon

    “We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

    One of the beauties of Emerson is his immersion in the rhythms of the natural world.   Any farmer, any gardener, even any denizen of the farmer’s markets has a visceral sense of the way human activity changes with the seasons, at least in temperate latitudes.  Once the growing season begins, and for a bit before it does, our attention begins to move outside.  At first we watch temperatures, frost dates and the warming of the soil.  Then, we begin to watch for plant emergence, the ephemerals.  Once spring is in full gear with last frost date past, the growing season begins in earnest.  This means we are outside, working.  In this work we express, as Emerson subtly suggests,  our confidence as changers of the world.  We plant corn here and corn grows.  We plant tulips there and color blossoms.

    Then, when the all the plants save the ancient firs and pines have begun to die back and the vegetables have given their harvest, we turn back toward the inside, reading and crafts and puttering in the workshop perhaps, or focusing on our work for pay.  As the nights grow longer, as they do even now, we light our fires and gather in our modern caves, lights on against the dark.

    Still, I part company with Emerson a bit at the end of this quote.  The night, as it grows longer and deeper, heading toward the winter solstice, the heart of mid-winter, encourages creativity.  The metaphor of the day goes from verdant field to fecund womb.  As we slow, pull in our senses and live more in our interior, seeds planted long ago begin to sprout.  The novel we muttered about while weeding the tomatoes begins to demand a place in our lives.  The child we wondered about in the spring begins to insist, pushing us toward family.  The painting influenced by the play of light on brown and withering plants takes on shape and color.

    Hecate. Persephone. Jesus in the tomb.  Osiris scattered among the reeds.  The rebel angel in Pandemonium.  The shadow within our own psyche.  All these are night time, dark energy forces.  Their energy often sublimates when the external world draws us; but when winter or melancholy strikes,  they can draft upward, burst out into full awareness and with their explosive power drive us either toward self-destruction or acts of creation.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Literature Writing 📎and tagged

  • Where We Are Is Where We Will Become Who We Are

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    63  bar rises 29.78  0mph W  dew-point 54  Summer night, cool

    Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

    Travelers and Magicians is a Bhutanese movie, the first one I’ve seen.  It’s theme spoke to the question, “What is your dream for this stage of your life?”  A Bhutanese official, newly appointed to work in a small mountain village, has an opportunity to go to America.  He considers himself modern, hip and wants very much to go.  On the road he meets many travelers, one a monk who tells him a tale of a young man who studied to be a magician.  There is a Canterburyesque flavor to the movie, a pilgrimage story of a sort.

    It reminded me most of Emerson, who spoke of the futility of going to Italy to see beautiful things, when beauty is a notion within each of us.  The young official also meets a beautiful girl on the road, one he learns plans to return to her village to help her aging father.  By the end of the movie it is clear that he will return to the village.

    A strong and persistent strain of my thinking in the last few years has focused on just this notion.  Where we are is where we will become who we are.  This is  true, for me, I believe.  Here in Andover, removed from the urban thrum, the constant action of political and religious life diminished by distance, is where I will become an old man, an elder.

    My dream for this stage of my life is not yet as focused as the other three dreams I mentioned:  revolution, children and writing.  Even so, its outlines seem clear.   As I have until now, I will continue to support and nourish the dreams I have for political change, a healthy nuclear and extended family and writing.  The nesting or embedded nature of these dreams will remain, not get left behind.

    Here are the emerging elements of my dream for this stage.  Kate and I will, together, create a paradigm for optimal living on suburban and exurban lots of 1+ acres.  We will focus our home and energy on supporting creative activity.  Somewhere in the mix, I believe, is Kate’s commitment to medical services for the poor.

    Or not.  I don’t know.  This next phase hasn’t gelled in my thinking.  It may be that I don’t need a dream for this stage, that I’m already living it.


    📂This entry was posted in Cinema and Television Dreams Faith and Spirituality Family 📎and tagged

  • The Movement Attacks the Establishment

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    27  bar rises 30.38  3mph WNW dewpoint 24  Spring

                   Full Moon of Winds 

    “If a man doesn’t delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?” – Sherwood Anderson  (women, too.)

    A good quote for an Easter humanist.  This morning I go into Groveland UU (Unitarian-Universalist) where the conversation will focus either on transcendentalism or on my presentation, Thinking Like a Transcendentalist.  I say either because I’m going to give them a choice, listen to my prepared presentation or have a free form conversation about transcendentalism.

    Transcendentalism’s connection to UU history tore at the fabric of the Unitarian break with Christianity when it emerged.  Unitarian and Universalist problems with Christianity came from the Enlightenment push of reason against the Trinity on the one hand and Calvinist notions of original sin on the other.  This conflict resulted first in the fracture of New England Congregational churches into two camps, one orthodox Christian, the other newly Unitarian.  Around the same time Universalist churches popped up here and there with a message of universal salvation to counter the notion of total depravity offered by staunch Reformed church dogma.

    The transcendentalists were of the opinion that neither the U’s nor the U’s had gone far enough in their challenge to the prevailing religious and commercial establishment.   Terming this solid front of New England rectitude, the Establishment, was an Emersonian pun, in itself an affront to the (false) notion of permanence they claimed.  Against the establishment, Emerson and his merry band of pranksters, whom he called the Transcendentalist Movement, threw charge after charge.  

    Theodore Parker, abolitionist and minister of the 23rd Street Unitarian meeting, championed the new higher criticism of the bible just beginning to cross the Atlantic from its birthplace in Germany.  This criticism placed holy scripture under the light of reasoned analysis checking translation against ancient texts, investigating interpolations of meaning from biased authors, making clear the various contradictions and conundrums the texts created rather than “harmonizing” them as was the practice of the time.

    Got back from this around 1:30 PM.  They chose the conversation about Transcendentalism.  I gave an extemporaneous capsule of the intellectual history behind transcendentalism, its history and affect on the Unitarian church and its longer lasting affect on American philosophy (pragmatism) and American literature during which we discussed the impact of Emerson, Thoreau, Thedore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Orestes Brownson.

    Whitman and Emily Dickinson were our first poets, though far from the last, to observe Emerson’s idea that a poems content should determine its meter and that matter observed in daily life was appropriate for that content.  You can even see the transcendentalist affect in some one as far away from metaphysics as Hemingway, whose stark, realistic prose works hard to recreate the lived experience. 

    A primary aim of the Transcendentalists was to create and stimulate an American as opposed to a European literature and scholarship.  They succeeded with stunning results.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged

  • This Is Your Project Manager Speaking!

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    22  78%  33%  0mph SSW bar29.74  windchill21  Winter

                Waxing Crescent of the  Winter Moon

    (Moon names this year from American Colonists)

    Wide awake at 5AM this morning.  Oh, man.  I really love that.

    Why?  Three things rolling around.  First, I want to improve my use of the inquiry method, so I’m focusing on the questions I’ve created for the Asia tours today.  At 5AM my inquiring mind wanted to know:  what are they?  Oh, brother.  Then, as these things go, another, bigger task, more fun, but more work trundled itself forward:  What ever happened to the influence of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in modern and contemporary art?  In March I have to present a discussion on this topic to the Docent Book Club.  What will I say, my mind wondered?  As if I could think clearly enough at 5AM to solve this riddle.  As I pushed it down to later in the day, when I can read and take notes, the third item leaped up to be noticed:  Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Transcendent Unitarian.  This is also a for March project, capsulizing transcendentalism, Emerson’s role relative to it and his influence on early Unitarianism.

    You might reasonably wonder why these other two projects were on my mind (in my mind?  on top of my mind?) on January 11th, 2008.  On February 6th, I leave for a retreat with my fellow Woolly Mammoths at the Dwelling in the Woods in northern Minnesota.  I leave from there for Hawai’i where I will stay until February 29th.  In my mental world that means I have a choice between finishing the Art and the Emerson projects before I leave for Hawai’i or trying to finish them as I return. 

    My mind keeps a project manager running at all times.  Most of the time it works in the background, following my work, assigning priorities and evaluating progress.  Some times it moves into the foreground, like at 5AM on January 11th.

    OK. OK.  I sleepily ran through the objects:  Jade Mountain, Shiva Nataraja, Gandhara Buddha, Mandala, Ceremonial Gate, Studio of Gratifying Discourse, Korean bronze Buddha, Amitbha Buddha. What were the questions for each one?  I dutiful recalled them.  When I finished, the project manager let go and slipped beneath the surface again, content to work in the background.  I went back to sleep.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged