Songs of Dissipation: Transcendence, an aside about Romanticism, The Fly, Orgasm Cult.

 

While one gaily sang a song of himself, Ralph Waldo Emerson of course sang a song of being, predating the Mindfulness Movement of later days, the partial resurgence of Contemplative Christianity, and so forth.  Later, Thomas Merton would listen, loosely in attitude, but keen nonetheless due to the nature of his blade, and hear nature, in the birds, the wind, the leaves, and impute this unto God's messaging to him, or perhaps the voice of God, the soft whisper of God's hand moving about the world.

Transcendence a la Emerson may have been an outcropping, an intellectual, partly philosophical divergence from Romanticism, or the imputing of things onto other things, and an attitude, as well.  In Romanticism, men like Wordsworth imputed all of life, love, war, and the body political into a simple walk to an abandoned building by a stream; such was the marked diversion of subject matter, an amplification that increased the magnitude of such simple things in a drastic extent.

William Blake did this somewhat earlier, with "The Fly" a poem from his Songs of Experience, a foil or bookend to the earlier, Songs of Innocence, famously featuring the Lamb and the Tyger, each magnified in terms of Romanticism, and here today, we think of "romance" as love stories, of which so many may have been, but transcending oneself spiritually and intellectually?

Such I would think opens the door for an Orgasm Cult or something in modernity, a kind of chronic dissipation combine of the perpetually aroused.  One could instead, eat not the hard steak of sexual conquest, but drink the milky dew of the sun's kisses on one, perhaps, lest one become desensitized and only susceptible to the very hardest vulgar gestures.

Indeed, another said that we risk and venture so much into understand ease or process, but to understand the being, we get so easily flummoxed as to quickly turn back to the relative safety of our own porches and homesteads.  Merton certainly enumerated an experience of being, and imparted that in his writings, rather than any kind of stereo instructions for the soul, or hardware blueprint of the soul.

Blake himself asks:

what art

could twist the sinews of thy heart?

Indeed, the truth lay somewhere beyond the soul, outside of our own knowing, presently at least, though the body physic continually advances, hence the progressive term "transcendence".  Emerson failed somewhat at just boldly splashing into the waters of the unknown while in the body physical, a commune failing, awash in a kind of "newness" and bent, singularly aimed at just living differently, re-figuring everything, re-jiggering everything, and doing things not particularly markedly different, but intended to be marked post-modern or in that, to have advanced beyond the mistakes.

Such a failed end, for such a "perfect" goal, but transcendence itself in practice is like life itself: more a journey than a destination, a line between several points of permanence, and between the permanence, a floundering for the continual improvement of, dare I say, all things.