Le Grun Heil: plus "wealthy people problems" and if Henry James described intercoursing on a chair.

Its highest point is not bright;

Its lowest point is not dark.

Continuous and unending!, it can not be named;

It returns to non-existence.

It is called the form of that which is without-form;

The image of non-existence.

It is called confusing and indistinct.

Meet it and you do not see its beginning;

Follow it and you do not see its end.

-The Dao De Jing(Dr Bruce R. Linell translation)

 

Tis a flit of nature, I wot, that part of my heart elopes silently into the dismal cardboard reality facade of pine trees.  Oh, the straw and the tassles, scattered pine cones littering randomingly, like the geode feces of my own spirit; perhaps its random, "just there" quality is what endears me to the pines and all.

A bug or something, now and then, and snakes and such, squirrels bored and also starving, beginning to turn the corner between the caring for survival and that great boredom, like nature itself had induced a beer-haze on everything, and then, from the pine sap and the weird shrapnel of pine bark, the smell of coals that says something good this way comes.

In the interest of full disclosure, I used to live inside a pine forest, perpetually at worry of the softwood giants falling onto the house, and surviving one hurricane, we soon made the yard a giant crater.  And of course, we ignore all that until its gone, such as it is amazing what niceties we usually take for granted in our daily prolegomenon of the eternal march towards the afterlife, that blue glow beyond the horizon.

It was Nietzsche reminding the Stoics that anything they did was inherently "natural" by virtue of them not only "being in" nature, but also being part of and participating in nature.  There, within, and a product of, and therefore anything he or she might do is also natural, a product of, hecho de, and all that.  

But the Stoics broke onto some transcendental tangent, something over and above the common, the average, even while they too strove for the average, there were anomalous ones among them who hastened to enjoin even more with nature, to butt-up close and all, get the claw-end right into the grice, such that they were above the average, with their threshold being somewhere in the extreme end of making it a constant worry, even a burden, to be more natural than the common, though the common, again, as Nietzsche pointed out, were in fact, natural, even in the midst of the synthetic and man made: all things in nature were, even in a round-about subtextual way, in fact, natural, and could be none else.

It was Ralph Waldo Emerson the broke forth even more hinting rather loudly at a transcendence in reading the layers of nature, the mildly wealthy intellectual bugaboo, and could be wondered how often he took to nature at all, or observed its precepts beyond his own literature: maybe like a Jane Austen or Henry James character in a carefully tended flower garden on some wealthy estate, where the average young man was not average, but superlative, and supported by hundreds of thousands in capital annually, and a team of quiet subservients that busily saw to the young woman's every need, such that all she had to worry about was what promising young man she would condescend to take to a marriage bed.

If it weren't for the technique of Henry James, I would go full-Marxist against his elitist professional loafers; such was my criticism of The Abyss Also Gazes, professional loafers too elite for their own nation, taking to other environs, where they loaf and sit at outdoor dining establishments in the fine weather and make disguised romantic overtures towards one another.  In the overview, wealthy people with "wealthy people problems", it was, for a class of people who at that time in history, had all the time in the world to read, as if the wealthy themselves were reading about James' ideal of the wealthy, but also it was good fantasy for the rest of us: rich people half-heartedly dipping their toes in the pool of marriage, or sometimes love, and rarely both love and marriage.

I paraphrase, on nature, of the discarded Sandhill acreage, interchangeable with the "English garden", that so much depends on a green truck, corkscrewing on a dirt road to reach the distant pines: and that's life, going to the distant pines, such that the pines always had a relative clearing around them that one could walk, before the foresters came through and inadvertently contaminated the undergrowth, one could prior walk and think, or even Julianne Moore or whatever, her arms spread wide, twirling like a butterfly with the subtlest hint of love in the plans of her impending nuptials: hundreds of thousands in hand, and then hundreds of thousands to be spent on the thing itself, "thirty thousand a year" Henry James would intone, in dollars just before the first of the World Wars.

Enough to buy between 30-60 new cars.

Acres of land were scarcely 20 dollars.

Dana Perino's weight in chicken feed was merely several pennies; a doornail likely cost more.  I observe that today, my own weight in chicken feed might be worth enough to gas up my vehicle--and that's of course, putting the cart way way ahead of the horse, in the old parlance.

Thirty thousand of those dollars?

I would contend sitting there collecting is profoundly and profusely unnatural, attending by lawyers and accountants, good friends with bankers, and all, and somehow they wrung nature into that wash of amazingly idle afternoon chats, their backs straight in Victorian chairs and all, "intercoursing" and so forth.

I relent.  Once I had eighteen thousand a year, hard come by, and I shook my tushy for the sum of some 120,000 people a day, but a lot of that was a computer glitch that pulled the same files over and over, again and again, once every few seconds.

With Henry James, for me, as a somewhat writer bugaboo, it was never about subject matter, "rich people problems", and all, and likewise with Faulkner, though I liked the subject matter usually, twas all about the technique, babies.  Not the "what" but the "how", as I could find the "what" anywhere, but his "how" it was, that was the reason for paying the cost of admission.  Faulkner in a novel about manhood and racism, wrote one sentence that went five pages in the trade paperback printing.  That's the kind of stuff you don't get everywhere, and for a time, there were only edited versions of Faulkner's work available on the market.  That's changed since.