Emerson

Tonight my Aunt B, the one from Sedona that we so enjoyed staying with last spring, came to my mom's house. My mom, for the last couple years, has only lived about 40 minutes from me in a town more remote than mine. I see her a handful of times a year, usually, though last time I was up I did interact and try to engage her which I knew she wanted. It was hard, truthfully, and even harder later in the day as my feelings came flooding. Aunt B is visiting her and she went to dinner with us and came by our house tonight. It was great to see her, and it made my mom easier to be around. They are very different women.

Now S is going to sleep and Mikey too and, as usual, I'm cramming for work.

***

I wasn't a good student as an undergrad, not until my last year or year and a half. I had a horrific anxiety disorder then, ocd over which I had no control, and panic attacks, generalized anxiety...I had that whole chapter in the DSM pretty much. For some reason being in school, going to class, even taking the bus to school, shot my anxiety through the ceiling. I have never taken the time to wonder why this was. It got so bad I dropped out; luckily got a medical withdrawal which wiped out two semesters of F's and Unauthorized Incompletes.

There was this wierd self-destruct mechanism at work in my academics. Even in high school, I was a mediocre student until I discovered literature, ended up in an A. P. Brit. Lit. class which really wasn't that tough, earned A's on everything, then failed to do the final research paper and got a C in the course. In college, I'd not attend class for weeks at a time, not buy the textbooks...at least one time I went to the bookstore to find they'd already been sent back...not attend finals; I remember having to look up where a class was so I could drop by in, say, November. It had been so long since I'd been I didn't know the room.

This is all very sad now. I wasn't partying, surfing, skiing, humping, doing whatever a guy my age could do for anti-academic pasttimes. I was just too scared to be on the campus. Too self-destructive to do my own work. Once I was in the library with a bunch of other people from my fraternity 'studying' for finals and I wasn't doing a damned thing. This girl I knew was writing a paper on a Frost poem and needed help. Instead of doing my own work, I helped her write the paper. I remember one line still. She was writing about the Frost poem "Design," about the spider, and I dictated to her 'death, the most disruptive of all human events.' She used that line later in a campus paper article.

Not that it was a great line, but the point is I was imploding, self-hating, doing someone else's work and not caring for my own needs. One day I went back to school and trotted in to the Chair's office (back when I thought chairs were important people in English departments) and told him I wanted to be an English major. Great, he said. He pulled my file and there were the grades: American Drama: F. British Literature: U (just like an F). A stack of those. When he asked me why I had these grades I told him my story, or a little of it, and he said, 'some people jump off buildings, some people walk across the freeway with their eyes closed, you don't go to finals or attend class.' He was right.

From then on I got straight A's. For a year and a half of undergrad, and all through my graduate work until I got some stupid class in rhetorical theory (teaching composition, ironically) my final semester and my depression and senioritis and old need to not be perfect was kicking in. Depression, not anxiety. I got a B there. But I was the oustanding graudate student in English for my year; got a medal from the President and everything. I got a certificate too, and the sad thing is I have no idea where it is, even where my diploma is.

You know, my first major depression hit in June of 90. I had just started graduate school. I finished in May 92. I got all those A's while flailing for my own survival.

But I meant to talk about my undergrad years here. You see, I never read Emerson. There were a lot of people I never read because I wasn't attending my survey courses. I'd squeak by with a C, or worse, fail and retake them for a C. Hence I missed lots of education, in English and elsewhere. I spend plenty of time these days making it up.

I bashed Emerson a bit in my last post. I hadn't read more than a quarter of Nature at the time. I suppose he felt like a self-absorbed party guest yacking by the icechest; there was something bout his tone that I couldn't stand at first meeting. That has changed. Now that I've finished Nature I have to stagger back in awe: here is a philosophic idealism, deeply optimistic, very Platonic, actually quite complex and hypnotically profound. There's plenty of philosophy I haven't read, but this is one of the most remarkable essays I've seen. Maybe in time my opinion will change, but the empirical matter-only ghost that howls in my soul has been hushed for now. Emerson's idealism is so poignant, his stress on the mental phenomenon so persuasive, artistic, seductive...wow. That's about as good as I can come to a response. Wow.

Do his ideas play out in the real world? I don't think it would matter for him as long as they played out for him the individual. That answer I don't have. I've been interested in Thoreau for years, used to teach the first 80 or so pages of Walden, the essay called "Economy," in composition classes. But I never ventured further into American transcendentalism. Sure, it's the Romantic movement in American Literature, though I don't think any British document tops Nature. It has been many years since I read Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Emerson's genius, his ability to take other philosphies and coalesce them into his own, cannot be denied. He could write more clearly, in a linear and exemplified fashion, but then that might undermine his world-view.

Whatever, it's no easy piece but worth the effort. I don't think I could have understood it as a college student; I barely understand it now and I find myself making notes in the margins when he's drawing on Plato, Phillip Freneau, responding to the matter-distrust so prevelant in gnosticism and many Eastern sects, using Descartes, a quasi-Buddhist enlightenment, and something very like postmillenialism. I'm sure I missed the bulk of it, too. But even though his ideas are abstract, they are lovely. I've thought about philosopohic idealism for years, since I found Plato, the belief that mental states are more real than matter, but I haven't seen anyone take it as far as Emerson and tie the whole thing back into the beauty of the woods.

Oddly enough, twenty years back, this was one of my most wicked obsessions, that the things I saw in the outside world were not real and that I'd act on that belief, fail to reach out for a pencil tossed to me, or not grasp a doorknob, and hence be mad, completely broken from the world around me, insane and overwhelmed in my delusional belief. The fact that delusions don't work like that was something I didn't know for a long time. My obsessions felt very real, quite a part of me, at the same time that they felt terrifyingly crazy, or deadly, or catastrophic, for many years, even, taking the widest view of my OCD, for more than two decades. From 18 to 24 or so de-realization (a clinical term for this feeling of unreality) followed me around like a waxing and waning cloud, beaten back only by xanax or radical distraction. It was the horror ridden heart of my ocd long before I'd heard that obsessions weren't madness. Now to be able to listen to Emerson's idealism, drawn from Berkeley and Plato but much richer, a theistic, Nature-based idealism like none I've seen, to breathe in those ideas without terror or fear, without disease, is very moving.

For to see Nature as phenomenal, primarily mental in its construction, yet supporting, sustaining, nurturing, utterly anthrocentric, emanating God and spirit and truth and beauty...what a way to live.

I suppose this post will appeal to the few who might also like Emerson, or maybe the zero since I have few readers anyway and the chances of finding an Emerson fan are slim, but may I suggest you try a paragraph or two from the essay? If Emerson's right, you won't need much philosophical baggage to get to the heart of his idea. Me, I need much more time to work through him. Better yet, get into the woods or near the sea and dream.

I wonder what happened to Transcendentalism, to his own philosophy in his life? Did it sustain him the way traditional faiths have done for so long or did he lose confidence in it? Suppose I'll find out as I continue teaching him. Tomorrow I actually have someone visiting my class (the English chair, hah, though I like the new one) so I hope I can make some coherent sense out of this mystic sea of electric abstraction.

Thanks for listening gang. This was a wierd post, I know, but it's what I needed to say. Back to Faust now that E is out of the way for the moment.

Troy