The New England Transcendentalists

Snowdrops

 I'm going to say this: "The New England Transcendentalists of the 1820's and 30's haven't always got on my nerves." The essential view they presented is of a society corrupting the individual. They were the nontrinitarians of the Unitarian Church who gave God his distance from us people but still viewed "him" as the creator. Praised the Individual, had faith in intuition, admired self reliance, they saw the divine in the everyday, sent out the call to poeticize existence.

 Who were these people? I'll  risk excommunication and tell you.  They were a long way from Albert Camus and his Philosophy of the absurd, we're talking the proto-anarchism of Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman et al.. Small, self governing, hunter-gatherers in an industrializing world maybe. New world Schlegels perhaps, precursors to the Epstein Class possibly.

 A delicate Thomas Gray, the only one of twelve children to survive infancy, go ahead tell the colonials about the Curlew tolling the knell of parting day, the distant lowing of herds on the lea, and the ploughman homeward plodding his weary way and then call it "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."

 Mind you Thoreau might have spent two years in the woods staring at a pond, but he'd had praise for John Brown who'd wanted to raise a slave's revolt, he'd raided the armory at Harper's Ferry and he'd been hanged in Charles Town on December 2nd 1859. Thoreau's "Plea for Captain John Brown" made Thoreau a patron saint of the union.

 Two other other points in Thoreau's favor, he was a pencil maker and he'd refused to pay the five dollars Harvard demanded from those of its students who wanted a copy of their diploma. It was on sheepskin vellum. Thoreau's memorable answer was "Let the sheep keep their skin."

The Shadow, Verb-ness and Noun-ness

Wellhead

 Lets go to our symbolic order for a look at Noun-ness and Verb-ness. The first meaning to attach to the lens of our senses as we enter the corridor of language is this sentence: "The Deep Shadow hates being thought of as a noun." The second sentence: "The Deep Shadow knows the soul cannot be a noun for long without dying."

 What is the soul? There are two souls in this analysis. To help us think around this we will use Schlegel's move from being the author of the scandalous Lucinde to speech writing apparatchik for a German Nationalism. The First Schlegel is the Verb Soul, it is in the process of becoming, Schlegel's verb-ness was free as the wind exploring the limits of freedom. The Second Schlegel is the Noun Soul, it had stopped exploring, couldn't handle the answerlessness, it ignored it's shadow, it wanted chains and it attached itself to a notion of the German Volk.

 And Yeah though we walk through the shadow of the valley of death  let us draw comfort from our Jungian Shadow who doesn't leave, never leaves, it lurks, grows fingernails the better to scratch ironic memories of Lucinde into the glass of church windows. 

Kantian Autonomy and Fuller's life as a Verb

I am a verb

 To summarize from the pulpit, don't let yourself get thin by allowing the oligarchic imperatives of corporate existence diddle your mind, instead stay thick, be a traveller through your own Jungian Shadow not someone else's, remember the responsibility of a transcendent creature, accept "answerlessness" and live as a verb. 

 In the end we make our own meaning and as we do so we make our own world so let's join with Baxter and spend happy hours defining and redefining our understanding of the meanings that surround the sound "Heteronomy"which rhymes with Deuteronomy, the final book of the Torah where Moses, having talked with Yahweh, defines Jewish Identity so that the Israelites themselves didn't have to. "Hear, Oh Israel: The Lord our God, The Lord is One." Cleverly of course, after forty years of wandering Moses had made his point and he died before he entered the Promised Land.

 As the opposite of Autonomy, Heteronomy can be thought of as a Promised Land. A land which if ruled by an external force that is not your own unregulated autonomous will, could be a land of milk, sliced white bread and honey.

 Buckminster Fuller had a thing for Geodesic Domes and developing new priorities in thinking. He preferred to think of people as self organizing not other organizing integrities. He decided he wasn't a noun he could walk away from and forget, he was a verb, a going somewhere word and he always would be. Fuller was 87 when he died on July 1st 1983.

The Thick and the Sacred

Wellhead and Pump

 The analogy of "thick" and "thin" starts with an acceptance of the legitimacy of Jung's understanding of the role the "Shadow" plays in our daily interactions with self, with others and with our place in the world. Here we can see the nation as represented by its government as a shadow in our psyche.

 The ideal government offers its People what the Ancient Egyptians called "Ma'at."  Ma'at was the opposite of "Isfet" or chaos, injustice, violence and evil. For three thousand years, Pharaoh's job was to maintain a stable ecology by keeping isfet at bay. Pharaoh, as the Pillars of Ancient Egypt, did this by representing the state as a Jungian shadow of cosmic order, truth and justice which was allowed to float through the psyche of Ancient Egyptians.

In the distinctions we have made between "somewhere" and "anywhere" ma'at would be defined as the preservation of the "Sacred Somewhere" against the "Profane Anywhere." In the somewhere/anywhere understanding the "thin individual" will allow the Shadow of the State to dominate, he will render unto Caesar and in the process he will turn Caesar sacred. The "thick individual" hasn't surrendered his shadow, he is not a cog in a benevolent machine, he is quicker to risk the dangers of reclaiming his own sacred.