Emerson disses, but in such a way that those dissed remain included. And he includes himself in both camps of his Ideal, as knower of the Ideal according to himself. And they’re good Ideas and great expressions of them. To express the idea. Choose your best form. He included himself as not quite capable of reaching the ideal expression; and yet he’s also the one speaking from the ideal half. Therefore, Emerson can preach, diss, self-deprecate, while sharing exceptional, poetic, spiritual observations about human life. Study the forms of expression. Excel at multiple forms of expression.
Stand for your own beauty. Achieve ripped perfection. Ninety-percent from the free throw line achieved. Who knows poems? Who writes them? Who commits to the full and open expression of the Seeing, and therefore the form? None of us, he says, except me and my chosen form. Though I wrote poems and though I was a preacher in a church and though I spoke for a living. Emerson like all of us wrote the expressive balance between dream, fear, ability. He definitely told himself, I cannot be a real poet, of the absolute divine form. Therefore, I will have to choose another. But, we know our shortcomings when compared to virtuosos. We know when we can’t hang.
Though we should know our own step, our thought and our action. “We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former.” And so what do we do with this one life? Emerson wants us and himself to be massive, amazing, original. This is his diss and his call to himself: “Theologians think it a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence; and even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience.” Many of us yearn for authentic engagement with others, with thought, with ideas, and with a daily existence that matters to us, to our hearts and minds, and to our people, our families and communities. We expect a genuine in-touch-with-actual-life from poets and teachers, too, and recoil at our national conversation, our national position vis-à-vis actual, peaceful life, a quality of life. We don’t like working for the man when we know the game is rigged, and our true labors are ignored. The President, the insurance industry, and many within the GOP wish to get rid of preexisting condition. If you read my brief bio, you’ll see that this topic has become life or death for me. It’s worth going to war against those people who think about bottom lines and not human lives. I know you desire an authentic life, with your one life. Well, so did Emerson. Which is why is extremely-carefully-crafted words resonate with us today, and why he sold out speaking gigs on the Lyceum circuit back in the day. This shit is real. He, and Thoreau and others, were bohemians pondering, rightly, what it’s all about. Call yourself a Transcendentalist, it doesn’t matter. You know the milkweed and New England waters lived for you.
Emerson continued to articulate his vision of the Grand What-Up. As a rapper, as a public speaker, as a spoken-word preacher curling his lip at traditional society and the crawl to a false religion, and a fake politics. “But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact . . .’ For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torchbearers, but children of the fire.” We are children of the fire, we burn the life energy, we are children of the sun. We fight for this position, this understanding and this action-in-the-world.
Diss and include, criticize, but also himself, encourage, offer hope, drop beats, manifest. And he said to the collected, “the breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative.” In the deepest, strictest, most soulful definition of the term, that meant to represent, the All-Power of subjective Self and the All-Mind, the ninja man representative, the suburban sensei in the most powerful attempt of spirit alive, attempts to live with, grapple with, work and freedom in a context in which he finds himself pushing for the things he asked or, demanded, breathed, summoned. Summon the life you desire! These things happen. And a desire to do the thing well. Exceptionally well. Solid represent, grab the mic and step to the event. We all hear and know. You know it brother mo. My sister Flo and cousin The Big Fat. Hitting’ the beats like no other. To diss. To emcee. MC Emerson. Dr. Dopeness. MC Emerson and Dr. Dopeness.
Can we please, beg God and Allah and the Sun and the Earth and our mother’s hearts, can we please give to the commons, to our common inheritance, our resources, our present, our future, our children – the commonwealth of humanity. Mine is yours and yours is mine and there is no stepping outside of this reality. The Poet, as actually realized, as a living person, as a way of life, as a seeing step, “stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth. The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more.” The poet in all ages, our sages, we believe their visions, is “isolated among his contemporaries, by true and by his art, but with his consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later.” All people, all of us, no matter our identities, “live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. THE MAN IS ONLY HALF HIMSELF, THE OTHER HALF IS HIS EXPRESSION.” The other half is our expression? What should we do with this Vision? It’s an interpretation, he saw this Thing, and expressed it. We can analyze it, mediate upon it, absorb some or all, discard it, but there the vision remains. Expression, and life, body mind and spirit. Well, when I heard this shit at sixteen I said to myself, express your ass off boy, now till the end. Therefore, the now and the beyond.
Now of course the man continues ripping suckah MCs. And for good reason. He trolled those who suck, and they know they suck. But of us, the normal people? If somebody comes with the critique, but that mixed with cold-blooded diss, than the person needs to back it up with, well, excellence and spot-on drops that all know to be true. And not only the idea of it, but the tight, refined, exceptional expression of it. “Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter: but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with nature.” Ow. Hitting hard, but we all know the person who’s reaching but who doesn’t hit. And it’s worse if he or she is mean.
Knowing that we possess one life, and, while here, we know the sun, the moon, the seas, birth, life and death – in short, a list of the miraculous and in our face obvious phenomena which should impress us off our lazy asses and render us absolutely great. Where the greatness lies in knowing these facts, these relationships. So what’s the problem? “But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill.” I mean, right? Emerson believed that Nature (and all that capital N encompasses) should “compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience and its representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.” In short, the Seer, the one who knows and sees, who has opened receiving antennae to the miraculous, and possibly suffers socially for it, but that’s the way it goes. Live in isolation on a lake, and you’ll see and think some shit. Read bunches, study words, and you’ll start to write some shit too, as a form of communication. Or speak your ideas into the camera and post them on YouTube. Ignite viral the schnizzle, and that’s how the story goes.
But he spoke of Nature, but he lived large in Concord, but he was a white man of privilege but and but and but. We could go on, especially in graduate school, and stroke ourselves to death with pointing out these facts, especially when he spoke of men, man, men and men and man. Go it. But, conceptually, spiritually, neurons working with heart, he spoke for himself and his relationship to life and death, and in that way spoke universally. The Universal Word, the All-Mind. Well, his stuck. And therein lies our study. The best place to go with this work, not to call out its privilege, not to mention dead white men. But to honor the soul voice that has reached us, and honor the Seeing that we ourselves see, no matter who we are, which or what identity, wherefrom and whereabouts we roll. We see our best selves, we struggle to survive, and to be happy. And so we know, “every touch should thrill.” I mean, that’s NBA, that’s Jordan bursting on the scene and killing everybody, liking hoops or no. And I could dip the list of a thousand. But we know.
And so this We Know arrives into us, upon us, Mind, and necessitates delivery into the world. Material and actual, and communal, a commonwealth. This the role of Humanity, here the sequence of dreams. And here the alternative song to the power paradigm, the insufferable status quo, the body control and total injustice system. So sing the alternative. In his age, he sang a different song, and for this we admire his bravery, his talent, and his ultimate delivery.
We know there are those who Have It, the Thing. Juice, flow, spirit, genius, and enough insanity to give it a go. Hahahahahahaha! Wouldn’t we like to know.
Step to the front and represent. Emerson was Eminem. He rapidly rapped in front of the people on the emcee circuit. Social media hits like you ain’t never seen! “Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right” – think Eminem’s “Rap God” and “Lucky You.” And, “criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action.” He then compares Homer and Agamemnon, viz. the dedication of life to a certain kind of battle. Blood is blood, struggle be struggle. And, if you’re going to say something publically, and write it down for publication (may you have a great editor), make it dope. Manifest: “The poet dos not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken . . .”
Emerson proceeds in that paragraph to straight-up diss. He claims that no one can hang, all “secondaries and servants” to the poet, and straight-up working the diss-rap-freestyle circle, “as sitters or models in the studio” or “assistants who bring buildings materials to an architect.” Ohhh! Damn, Emerson threw on dudes. Poetry, you see, was “written before time.” Dag State! If you going to dream the thing, do the thing. And if you going to do the thing, say the thing according to your Belief Narrative.
Justify the thing! Sing your thing’s praises! Sing your dance and live your word! It’s such a fucking miracle, and a joke! Look at every single person’s presence! You can hear, touch, see and smell their song, their way, the way to idea, say, be. Dag! Talk smack, America! Do that shit now! Step into your thing China! Rap how you gots to so you can represent on the World Stage! Go, Russia, you sittin’ on all that land, stand, tell ‘em all to fuck off! You the kings and queens of the swag order! Sing an alternate song to the paradigmatic madness, the anxiety voice. And when you do, balance the negativity and evil that exists in the All-Voice, which reflects the All-Mind.
Emerson removes himself from trying to be a formal poet, calling for Whitman agreed, calling for himself agreed, preaching the belief to justify the life lived - which is what you should do singers! - allows himself to write the idea. And he’s correct, so far as he captured the thing that is the thing. Hinted at the thing, shared what seeing saw. “For it is not meters, but a meter-making argument, that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns natures with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.” He’s a Beat! He’s in a punk band! Fucking Sex Pistols. To whom did he preach? Students? Young people? Who got off on what he said? Everybody? All of them and therefore us since? He was so alt-indy. Extra Zero.
Punk band! Three chords kill it! Because we know that “the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.” Bold that. Embolden that. Swallow that and embolden yourself. To stand bold. Bold-ly. Bolded. Making thick and steady ready. Write in bold entirely! Live boldly exclusively. Extra Zero. Ha! Precarious Birch and Extra Zero. “We know the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands. Of course, the value of genius to us is the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds.” This manages a universal, we do not need to bring politics into the utterance, the truth for every sentience. We seek veracity as truth, as it speaks to us in the right moment. He spoke the knowledge that all sides know.
Emerson continues killing it. “Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may be discerned from fools and satins. This day shall be better than my birthday; then I became an animal; now I am invited into the science of the real.” Go, bwai! And why endeavor to sing your voice? Why go to work at all, with them the workers? Who told you about God and 13? Who told you to go to school and learn according to a Certain Plan and why is that Plan Normal? Who said? And if Normal, then the rules of the game reify, and become the Real Thing, and you have to learn the game in order to stay alive within the accorded Paradigm. You have no way out. You have no way out because there is no way out. Now what you gonna do? The vast majority will learn the rules and play their best, give the Algo a mortgage triple what you paid. Win, banks! The system is here already. The important thing is that you Know. Emerson knew, still dreamed a house. As should we. “Here we find ourselves, suddenly, not in a critical speculation, but in a holy place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance, and Unity into Variety.” I read to know lines like these lines.
Emerson prized intellect, poetry and philosophy, as all people who work with thoughts do. And knowing Mind, we understand that there is a power greater than ourselves. In order to tap into this higher power, to experience it once, to know it, to attempt mastery, we must let go. Free fall into the unknown, into the universal, cross the safe line. Doing so, an actual letting go, overcoming the honest fear that faces us if we do or don’t, teaches that, “beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.” Emerson gets jacked on his enthusiastic word tumble, on his ideas, and he mulls and muses, demonstrating that “the poet knows that he speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly,” without reservation, with a release, and “with the intellect inebriated by nectar.”
Reminds me briefly of Thoreau writing about getting crocked on rotting apples found in a late fall orchard. And how is this not a call for Whitman? Did I read somewhere that he had called for Whitman, or that he read Whitman, conscious of his own calling, and hopes, and was a) impressed, b) damn impressed c) on the record impressed, but privately reserved. The next step is to find the answer to that question. And I sure as hell am not going to go there now. Have a command on the back of your own books: “Read Them All!” How is this - tone - not the pitch of this civilization? The command to consume, now, seductive and insistent.
We have all stumbled about in the darkness, small moments and long, frightening ones. From bed to bathroom, or several years through the wilderness. The fear can be exhilarating, once beyond, the peaceful thrill of free-falling temporary when we aimed for permanent. Write, poet! Sing, bard! Act, millennials! Start a band! Hitchhike across the country! Take over Congress! “As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horses’ neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world.” A rush, a high, riding this world, an earth around a sun - “Dad,” the heroin addict said to his dad, “I’ve seen heaven.” Rest in peace, my cousin. “For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.” We labor for the divine, the idea purity, our work towards fulfilling the idea is dirty, is a struggle down here in the clay.
Stoner! One yelled at Emerson. Bohemian! Beat! American anti-! Don’t want to work, want to be a poet. Rockstar! This American Idol. Poetry slam. Move to Brooklyn and make it mom. But Stoner to Square, where lies his hand? Where his spirit? Let us sniff about, learning and analyzing another’s position. “This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration.” Yes, Precarious Birch loves all of these, sings upon them all, rides the white pony if you wanna ride, don’t ride the white horse. White horse. White horse. “All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end the prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theaters, traveling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact.” Poets say the pretty thing, and their position can be right, but they can also sing themselves into an isolated position, one of missing the beat, one of misinterpretation, belligerence, and madness. Where lies the mind swim the wine beats our one heart quickly with one another before making love and walking the white dog in the dog run, Boston. You tried to hold his hand, Precarious, he pondered the situation and knew not right. But knew the poet’s interpretation of Moment, and so he rode that wave, all society be damned. Be damned, Society!
Squares, all. What is your problem, America? Where are the Beats now, truly dropped beyond the Happy Zone? “These are auxiliaries to the centrifuge tendency of a man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up; and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were professionally expressers of Beauty, as painters, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than others won’t to lead a life of pleasure and indulgence; all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of obtaining freedom, an emancipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that advantage they won, by a dissipation and deterioration.” Emerson falls into patrician moralizing, too, as a dropout (covered, trust fund, wife), and knows squat about opium but perhaps something of wine, “the spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not fort to the sorceries of opium or of wine.” Square! Ok, dad. I’ll lay off the sauce because you said so. I’ll disbelieve love during snow storms rolling Charlottesville with witches. I’ll disregard the moon. But we love your Position, your Voice, Mr. Emerson, that we listen to your role, and know that you were a bit of a prude. No piercings on you, bro! And, yes, this prudery would explain your ambiguous feelings about Whitman. But now we have to read Leaves of Grass again. Must confess, when sat down to Read It For Real, many could not get through it. To Find It, he sat. Put it down eventually. Home boy didn’t hold. Home-reader had to work. But that was in our twenties, lying on futon floor. Read it again and see where you take it. All of you. If Republicans would read in the humanities, we might add to the tally.
It is true that a poet, an ascetic, an artist hermit, can sit. Live in one place and Notice, so that visions drop like rainwater and the poet’s job is to carefully collect. But Daddy offers his scolding finger, earnest as hell but know-it-all: “That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come forth to such from every dry known of sere grass, from every pine-stump, and half-imbedded stone, on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the poor and hungry, and such as re of simple taste. If you fill they brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate they jaded senses with wine and French coffee, though shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods.” Of course, that’s not true. Walk into the pinewood, vast wasteland of dry pitch pine, down on Cape Cod, and you’re just wandering around, looking at the pine needles and smelling the dry world, you want your coffee and spliff and tab and mushrooms and exercise and high-protein drink, runners high through that shit, and write it all down, get the shot with your phone, post it and run. We’re all the poets of the wonderland. We’re all rockstars, wonder angels come to take over negative, anxious spirits. Down Narragansett, down Point Judith, they surf in New England in winter. During the arctic cold descending from Canada, from the Circle. Deep into winter, under blankets, not dreaming of another place, not a warmer, not any. For I’m crocked on meth and Benzedrine while midnight rambling with mad radiance in the lonely waste of pinewoods.
And oaks and an elm and maples.
Let us witness the Thing that is the thing, know all elements of Moment, Thought, Being. Infinite links in the causation chain, and we should know them all and tell their story. Emerson names some Bigs (Swedenborg, Pythagoras, for example), and speaks of the witness. They who See. You see, too, that’s the point. You know you do. What you choose to do with the Life Knowing is different, from one person to the next, and yet we always share, we acknowledge, we use code words to speak of love, life and death. Of the Bigs and of us All, any “who introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of a departure from routine, and that here is a new witness.” Think about our own problems with education in the United States, arguments about race, identify, Creation, Evolution, Socialism, Capitalism, Red Sox, Yankees (we all require a Big Brand, soul, body-matter-substance-institution, and action energy spirit), fighting over how to Educate our children and according to which Absolute Worldview, when the truth is all of them, all the world-views and cosmologies, as Ideas, expressions of the Found. Seek and ye shall. There we are, missionaries of our own Vision.
Missionaries of Our Own Vision, all knowing death. What happens after we die? Do you even know that you die? Like, soon? Freaks me out! And yet. Hard full stop there. As proselytizers of the things we see, knowers of community and soul, tradition, family, discomfort, fear, as all of these we breathe. Church people have a fundamental human right to share the vision/version they see and live by - actually live by in a real world. Note Mormons, for example, one cannot deny them ergo - and to teach their very own children this Vision Version. Who commands what should be taught in a classroom marshals political power. Politics determine the majority vision. But as I live my vision, totally and absolutely, as do you, I am darn sure I teach my children that vision-version. How can there be any other way ever? Exactly.
We need to be more tolerant of one another’s version. We urgently require love, for ourselves, our people, and strangers here there and all. Right now the secular version is the dominant version. But it won’t always be.
A fact which should excite us, not frighten. Make sure your voice exists here, deciding on our current sanity. Fight evil, as you define it, with everything you have. If your version includes people, takes care of everyone, offers love and commands respect through its purity, its solid goodness as truth. This perspective is the Actual Where We Are. Hello, Actual, show me the whattup position. We’re listening. No more trash our land, no more pollute minds, no more wonder why but know. And so: “departure from routine, and we all know that here is a new witness. That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world like a ball, in our hands.”
Liberation. On Liberty. Read the those who stepped in with something to say on the subject, any subject. Now listen, you know that’s what it is, with the utterance, stepping into the thing with something to say. With what? With the matter of the day, with political and philosophical positions, with songs, with awareness, and emotion that understands mortality. And so you step into it. The Line. Liberation, for all of us. Marx made a grand attempt, addressing all the while the Age, the Wrong, of his day. As should you all. And it’s a fight to the death, which is why we know our position is right and there’s is wrong. He who would deny automatic equal rights for every living person is wrong. That’s it.
She who would ignore our children’s education and mar their ability to breathe is wrong.
We are all in this together. Emerson made an attempt. Marley dropped his attempt in a unique style, born of its imperial sugar plantation context. Malcolm X threw down hard because he had to. As would you in the similar. Now be similar. Whatchu gonna do? Exactly. You gonna step into it. Maya Angelou made the decision. And she stepped into it. You make the decision to give your voice to all.
Key to understanding Emerson’s position is that he lived as the poet-visionary of his own imagination, the one who sees. And, “but I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use the old largess a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet concerning his art.” It’s a call to himself - and he managed his version - and to others. To us. To me. To you. We are all in this together. And so “art is the path of the creator to his work. He paths, or methods, are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them, not the artist himself for years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The painter, the sculptor, the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, namely, to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly,” which rises as a truth-drop. But also, we have to encourage the things we see, according to our visions, and must do our work according to the hour. Therefore, “in such scenes as each has found exciting to his intellect; and presently feels the new desire. He hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. The he is apprised, with wonder, what herds of demons hem him in.” Emerson calls for the Voice within himself, and he sings from a certain position.
Emerson’s key places for positional expression show us solitude, and the line between conventional-and-original. Wherever that place is - and it can only be explored, defined in the moment, by thousands of artists reaching, trying, braving, expressing. “The poet pours out verses in every solitude. Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would say nothing else but such things.” Would that we could all. The strange magic that arrives occasionally, for every person in their every moment, here and there we’ve experienced the perfect insight, the divine moment, the poet knows that he doesn’t own that magic, that it’s a miracle to him, surprises her, and “the poet knows” that “it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length. Once having tasted this immortal ichor, he cannot have enough of it.” True on that last part, and we barely capture that perfect wave, “What a little of all we know is said!” Yes, we must use this, yes, we dare ourselves to trust this position, to know it for ourselves, yes, we love to hear the word offered.
Damn, it’s a road, though, for all who expressed the song, who lived the poem. Joyce slogged from flat to flat between the wars. Who can maintain for the very single line that expresses divine foundation? Watch us, miracle people. Dear Humanity, watch us all live the song! What do you hear? Freaks me out, and yet . . . And so, exactly . . . So: “Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, ‘It is in me, and shall out.” Motivational speaker now, speaking at a literary festival in Brattleboro, there with his YouTube channel and 8 million subscribers, there Tony Robbins on 90s infomercial and we had no idea what was coming down the technology pipe. You can do it. Send in $500 dollars and you might win a prize. But, busker in a Boston subway, he did that, with a sign, a milk crate, he heard something, and he stood on the Commons busting with the freak. But what he saw borne real, what he saw, and knew, and struggled to formulate in an acceptable way, existed. “Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own: a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.” And, of course, “come he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible.” Though he motivates here, his young students, his paying customers, and though he makes bread in the Lyceum, and though, on the road, playing EG’s Odium, he is also the preacher, he preaches Truth, and that Seeing bears staying power because of its Real.
I mean, when I read this stuff at 21 I shit. Dropped out of school, quit my job, turned in my apartment key (slid it under the door) and hitchhiked across the country. Where was my Bob Marley? Where my Emerson and Thoreau? Where existed that Thing that demonstrated a full life lived, and an edge, an adventure, a brave and crazy quest? Read some master rappers while you’re at the study of the Thing, as “the rich poets as Homer, Chaucer Shakespeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing.”
Most dads will not, but I shall teach my sons this Thing and to find their expression of it. “Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funeral chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy.” And the withdrawn lifestyle enhances Seeing, and the time to express the craft of sharing. You can’t be living the normal Babylonian hustle life if you aim to sport the credible vision handed from the mountain tops. You have got to step out of it, act the cray style and live its essence. “Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange.”
Again the Bohemian, the Rastafarian, the Chinese exiled poet from a temporally-and-properly-ordered dynasty. You hafta do your thing, bro, “the world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season.” He straight-up encourages us to tune-in and drop out! He’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he’s Ken motherfucking Kesey! And now we know, and all of we sing our own reality. Do this work, live this ascetic existence in the cottage or hut or cabin or hotel rent weekly, listening to the muse, and writing sight and sound, soul knowledge. Do this, “and this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not trouble-some, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for they bath and navigation . . . Thou true land-lord! Sea-lord! Air-lord!” And he’s a little excited here, running with multiple “thou” and shouts, but feeling it, inspired. “Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight,” and finally a father I know understands the meaning behind his transition prayers, at dusk, always pausing for a moment’s acknowledgment. Here, he exhorts us to know and live the thing that is the thing.
