Merlin's Magicicadas

One of many 13-year Magicicadas recently heard and spied at Murphysboro State Park

...Blameless master of the games,
King of sport that never shames,
He shall daily joy dispense
Hid in song's sweet influence.
Things more cheerly live and go,
What time the subtle mind
Sings aloud the tune whereto
Their pulses beat,
And march their feet,
And their members are combined...

--(from Merlin (I) by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1846)--

The "daily joy" I find while walking in nearby woods or working in the garden has a beat of its own, a rhythm of life that is so invigorating it cannot be ignored or silenced by fear or dread or "change" of anything that modern society seems intent on smothering us with. The sound of the Magicicada, when many "members are combined" may be annoying to some people, but SAM and I somehow find the "tune whereto their pulses beat" an affirmation of eternity, of periodicity, of inexplicable magic, of life itself. I hope you hear and feel their "song's sweet influence" just as clearly:

A Sunday Leftovers Story

The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word... (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, "The Poet, 1844")

Yesterday morning we visited a church we had never been to before. We've passed by it many times in the past year as we travel back and forth between Tallahassee and Havana and wondered what sort of place it might be. The church website doesn't give much indication of its nature. In fact, it doesn't make much sense. You would think that if some entity is trying to make itself known to the world, it would use some elegance of expression or at least clearly describe its mission or purpose for being. Maybe their Facebook page does a better job. I'm not sure because I don't use that particular social medium. A blog and a Twitter account already occupy too much of my time!

At any rate, upon our visit to the church that offers new hope--what's wrong with the old one, I'd like to know?--we discovered the members of the congregation to be friendly enough (and wonderfully diverse), the sermon enlightening (if a little too emphatically delivered), and the music uplifting. Though we may not be going back, I'm glad that we did make the effort. The whole experience was just what I needed to fine tune a story that I had written very early in the morning. It sharpened the knife, so to speak, that trimmed the fat and carved the roast, I mean the story, to be served up for your dining, I mean reading, pleasure. Please help yourself here in my other kitchen (Big Bend Over Easy in Florida) and enjoy our Sunday leftovers!

A to Z Blogging Challenge: E is for Emerson and Essays



Image of Ralph Waldo Emerson borrowed from this site

What's the first thing that comes to mind with the word "essay"? Ugh! It's that theme paper I had to write in Composition class, the one where I had to make a point and defend it. No wonder essays went the way of horse-drawn carriages. They're kind of fun to read for nostalgia's sake but not consumed on a regular basis by the reading public. It's more relaxing to do stuff like look for Waldo in a picture than try to see things from another Waldo's (Ralph W. Emerson's) perspective. Take a deep breath and think happy thoughts. Don't tax your brain. It is April, you know, and by now we've all had enough of taxes.

Who writes essays anymore? Actors and musicians are idolized, but other arts are ignored. Yes, writing is an art, even the nonfiction kind. The mind of a writer paints in colors imagined by the reader, with brushes assembled hair-by-hair in experience. That experience can be personal and/or gathered from other writers. A written story continues--while adding to--someone else's story, a thread picked up and added to a skein of yarns:

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand.

Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. 

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history...This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time...We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly...

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (First Series), "History," 1841

What are you taxing your brain with or adding to the skein today?

See A to Z Blogging Challenge for links to more "E's" from Challenge sponsors and other writers.

Walking Man--Tis Not, What Once It Was, the World

...Why should of all things man unruled

Such unproportioned dwellings build?

The beasts are by their dens exprest,

And birds contrive an equal nest;

The low-roofed tortoises do dwell

In cases fit of tortoise-shell:

No creature loves an empty space;

Their bodies measure out their place.

But he, superfluously spread,

Demands more room alive than dead;

And in his hollow palace goes

Where winds as he themselves may lose.

What need of all this marble crust

T' impark the wanton mote of dust,

That thinks by breadth the world t' unite

Though the first builders failed in height?...

--from Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House, 1651--

I wonder sometimes why we humans feel like we need bigger and better buildings--or anything else for that matter--when nature provides ample evidence of why living lean is better. The praying mantis I found at Rend Lake merely molts when it begins to grow too large for its exoskeleton. Well, since we have endoskeletons, molting might not work very well for us. Nevertheless, this living-large syndrome seems to have gotten a lot of us (at least Americans) into financial trouble. Maybe we should all emulate the example of this motivated biped, The Walking Man, who relies on the kindness of strangers for most of his needs and rests his head at the end of the day wherever he happens to run out of steam. Or, maybe not.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem what they call the soul's progress, namely, the religious, learned, and civil institutions, as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other, by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, ashamed of what he has, out of new respect for his being. Especially, he hates what he has, if he sees that it is accidental--came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is permanent and living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man is put. "Thy lot or portion of life,' said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it."

--from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance, 1841--

...'Tis not, what it once was, the World,

But a rude heap together hurled;

All negligently overthrown,

Gulfs, deserts, precipices, stone.

Your lesser World contains the same...

--Upon Appleton House--