After Emerson

To watch implies being aware of things around one by perceiving them through the eyes; or in another word, to be a spectator: to look on or observe, or to fix attention upon during a passage of time. The gaze directed with the intention of seeing; the eyesight used with attention, in order to obtain a visual impression and imprint it on the mind, rather than the inattentive fleeting images that flash before the eyes and leave no mental mark. It is to some, the 'incurious concerning persons or miracles' (to quote Emerson), a trivial and microscopic study of the everyday, the common, that which happens on a frequent or infrequent basis. The incurious naturally have no interest, being too caught up in their own world, whilst the curious, watchers among them, are curious but distanced. Nothing that befalls them or another can harm them; all is part of a lesson. A lesson in and being of humanity. The incurious do and the curious watch, and only do to watch better. 
And as they watch they too pass through the whole cycle of experience, and collect what they can from it, storing these treasures for some future reference or musing. The history of man no longer a dull thing, but a wise being that can walk you through the ages, for words too imprint such images. The beginning of Time can be found, with the advent of religion and the sciences, where the Wise will say many wise things – and be revered, raised up for saying them - but will not understand of what they speak.
Their audience, then as of now, will put on 'the foolish face of pride', and pretend to know them – their thoughts and the words in which they were inscribed - but they too won't understand as much as they say or think they do, and will find it difficult to condense or summarize the great thinkers they so admire. The curious will watch and listen as they blather on, and with their gaze might perhaps fix a forced smile upon them, which will say: 'I know you do not know, and you know I know it', but the speaker, who is generally of the incurious breed, will not see it. Their interest lies elsewhere: in the applause or awed faces.
There are also Laws they hold themselves to, which the curious spurn, and that is of consistency. Here, you see, opposites attract. The curious, the watchers, are inconsistent in what they hold to be true, whereas the incurious, the doers, will admit only of consistency, even if new material points that an earlier premise has no grounding. The incurious might contradict their stated position knowingly or unknowingly but they will find a reason for their contradiction; never will they declare their approach was inconsistent. The curious will, and openly. They are not ashamed that from examination or observation their views have changed, and perhaps led them to a different act or set of feelings. They speak in full knowledge of the fact, that what they say on a subject today may be phrased differently the next, or voice a softened or hardened opinion. They live with the awareness that a human being has these fluctuations, according to the mood of the mind, and, sometimes even, the fast times.
Emerson, when musing himself upon this issue, wrote: 'With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall... To be great is to be misunderstood.' The natural world abounds in inconstancies, as does the mind and body of the human being. To ask for, and expect, conformity, in all things, such as dress behaviour, thought etc., goes against nature. To conform makes a mob, and when mobs refuse to tolerate individualism or non-conformity, then historic events like those we look back on or read of may reoccur. No man should violate his own nature, or have it, by rule, violated.
Men have, however, sought this end, and will, despite the plea above to not, continue to do so, though perhaps not in quite the same way as emperors or kings of old. Comparisons will always be made to a past event or age, and even drawn from: the speeches made, the military action that ensued, the treaties or pacts that were agreed or failed. In all of us lives ancient history and the figures in speech or act that embody it. When similar arises their name will be mentioned, their words quoted. Their person a fiction, their words a fable. History has tales and these it tells without ceasing. It presents what was to what is.
Man, curious or incurious, should not seek himself outside himself.

Picture credit: The Watcher, Paul Henry (source: WikiArt).

Excerpt from journal loosely based on and taken from reading of Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Penguin Books, Great Ideas, 2008). Written January 2021.

We Are Not Thinking Frogs

A: What is a philosopher and what is he not?
B: We are not, Nietzsche says, thinking frogs, and I am inclined to agree. We are not some instrument that just records, coolly, objectively. Our thoughts are born from pain, which we as mothers must administer to – nurse them through illness and lavish whatever good thing we can on them. Though of the female gender that again we are not.
A: Why ever not?
B: Woman don't think they waffle. You cannot hold a serious conversation with them. Their brain darts in all different directions.
A: And you can with a man, hold a serious conversation?
B: Certainly. You are with me now.
A: And I a woman!
B: Yes, but I don't think of you as one. I forget you are one.
A: Oh I see...I suppose from you that's a compliment.
B: If you think so...Anyhow, as I was saying what we are not is some puffed-up frog grabbing all the attention – though some philosophers are I daresay exactly this - who with one prick will deflate.
A: I follow, though I'm not sure I agree. (I think one such frog might be sitting in front of me now puffing himself up.)
B: Sorry, did you say something? I was philosophising.
A: Yes. I said could you explain more about this woman business. Why can't a philosopher be a woman, a woman a philosopher?
B: If I must, though I must say you seem quite hung up on this. To Boethius – have you heard of him? - Philosophy was a woman, or at least her appearance was that of the female form when she conversed with him. Well, I say conversed, she sang really, and her maid Music accompanied her. Philosophy as a science, as an art, as one of the Graces even, is represented as feminine, and so it stands to follow that her representatives, or devotees if you prefer, are male. Like Bacchus and his females.
A: But that's the mythology, inspired by ancient civilisations and classical literature; it has nothing to do with philosophy's origins.
B: There is truth in what you say, but it is also an indisputable fact that the greatest most celebrated and still read thinkers have been men. Name me a woman?... You can't can you? Precisely because while they're not unheard of they're not heard of; heard from then airbrushed from history. Women are so very rarely remembered, and those that were said to be philosophers, in my opinion, weren't really that. They are only now considered as such because scholars, historians don't really know in what other camp to place them. They thought, they wrote, they spoke out, therefore they are, for what else can they be, but philosophers. Does that answer your question?
A: It's not really an answer, or a justification, at all, is it? You don't deny they exist, or existed, and yet you deny them a place among the ranks of men.
B: Me? Not me! History. Men have always dominated philosophical discourse. That's just how it was and how some might say it still is. Modern philosophy is, for my taste, too encompassing, which is not to say there is not a place for women, but not all thoughts, all ideas should be termed important thinking that we can learn from. Perhaps you should ask yourself and be asking other women why women don't think more? For how is it my fault that I happen to be male and a philosopher?
A: (Or frog-like.)

Picture credit: Frog, 1931, M C Escher (source: WikiArt)

Written January 2021.

Colmbus Glacialis

The loon came and made my flat 'ring with his wild laughter' shortly after I'd risen from my bed. Though here I disagree with Thoreau's description (in Chapter 12, entitled Brute Neighbours of Walden), for this distinct call sounded more to me like strangled vocal chords. An operatic singer, or a person with pretensions of, warming their vocal chords on a cold morning. I immediately likened it to Florence Jenkins, with its occasional shriek as if she'd been pinched or surprised.

Taken aback as I was by this warbling I had however heard a loon! And courtesy of the radio too. No waiting out in woods or by ponds to capture it. I would have had a long wait had I tried for I reside in Old England, where of woods and ponds though there be plenty of loons there are not. And anyway, loons, judging by Thoreau's noted experience, seem devilish characters, of the classic cartoon variety where their laugh is the last and loudest.

Thoreau's pursuit of the loon has provoked, so it seems, much analysis. The bird symbolises purification and rebirth; it represents what Thoreau is searching for: to reach a unity with nature and likewise separate himself from society. I have to confess I didn't see it quite like that, nor did I probe this passage or any of Walden, really, that deeply. I took this passage at face value, as what Thoreau himself said it was: 'a pretty game... a man against a loon.' No more. Perhaps I've read too many other examples of man outwitted by birds and beasts, and so this didn't strike me as being representative of any deeper meaning. Why does it have to have one?

I wondered then how the war between the red and black ants was dissected, but didn't dare research further, for it would only spoil my remembrance of that section. The battle, as unfolded by Thoreau's masterful prose, had shades of, and was as good as the Iliad in condensed form. Only one who was well-read and knew his history could have written so eloquently, could have drawn you in and pulled you along with the action, the futility and the destructiveness of it all, and yet made you yearn, however rightly or wrongly, for the ant contest not to end, for the words at least to go on.

And go on they do with other matters relating to nature, both man and creature, whilst earlier chapters still echo, particularly that of Sounds with its screech owls that sigh and reply Oh-o-o-o-o that I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!

In his conclusion Thoreau remarks '...how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.' My mind keeps returning to Walden, having read it only once. It took Thoreau a week for a route to be established, it took my mind two. His 'feet wore a path from the door [of his hut] to the pond-side'; my imagination dug a permanent course to Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts.

This path Thoreau could still recall five to six years after he had re-joined civilisation, as if his mind had never left, or a part of his soul had stayed behind.

When time hangs heavy men build, sometimes castles in the air, sometimes huts in woods.

Picture credit: Pond in the Wood, c1496, Albrecht Durer (source: WikiArt).

Written December 2020.

Iron Horse

The Iron Horse made the hills echo with his snort like thunder. The earth shook with his feet, and the fire and smoke he breathed made clouds. A chain of them streamed far behind, and rose so high they concealed the sun and shaded views of urban and suburban life.
The train of cars he pulled hugged the earth as he flew up and back down, then up again, as his master shovelled in fuel to keep him awake and give him the vital heat he needed.
The carriages on some stretches faintly rattled over the rails and emitted a spark or two, as if a blacksmith somewhere were hard at work. Vulcan, the god of fire, making for some warrior fine armour, as fine as that immortalised by some poet long ago.
Such men are sleeping now, in some murkier or meadowy place reliving their days of glory.
The Iron Horse knows them not, only those called 'the sleepers', upon whom he tramples. The men, his master says, who built the railroad and died doing so, worn out from their labours. Each sleeper a man, run over; kept down and level in his bed, so that other men may ride. Blood, sweat and tears. A new lot laid down and run over by the Iron Horse with his steam cloud. In deep snow too, in snow-shoes, as with giant plough he ploughs a furrow, and as he does so lets out a ear-rending neigh.
In his belly fire and in his cars sometimes goods, sometimes passengers, sometimes both. The goods loaded, the passengers ushered in, by men that work the line.
Here, the Iron Horse can stamp and defiantly snort, and show the devil in him; refuse to have more cars hitched to him, to accept yet more goods or passengers.
Here, at rest, he can catch his breath, before his master whips him onwards.
Onwards, onwards...his breath once again panting heavy. The smoke emanating from his nostrils a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, illuminated by the heavens. He has won; he is winning...
His master, too, labours and pants, or occasionally coughs, from it. A harsh, dry sound. And every now and then wipes his brow, slick with perspiration. He was up early this morning to fodder and harness his steed, and the hours are beginning to tell.
Both, the Iron Horse and his master, anticipate, with keenness, a longer period of cooling off, some time of iron slumber.

Picture credit: Train in the Snow, or The Locomotive, 1875, Claude Monet (source: WikiArt).

A reworking of a passage from Waldron by Henry David Thoreau, written December 2020.