*Ø* Blogmanac | There was a new consciousness . . . .
C'MON PEOPLE NOW, SMILE ON YOUR BROTHER! -- Cultural Creativity, Pop Culture, Art Culture, Lifestyle, Including
The Cultural Creatives, The Creative Class, The Hippies and Simple Living*
Knowing my penchant for sixties nostalgia, Pip referred me to a website from the University of Virginia where they teach a course on The Psychedelic '60s. Little did he know that what would catch my eye would be the section on 19th Century Precursors! LOL! I was reminded of our strong heritage of thinking Americans who showed us how great we could be . . . how we can transcend the demands of gold rushes and political rhetoric and see through the lies into our hearts and into the truth of life on this planet. We knew, once upon a time, what was right. We learned the lessons of discrimination and liberty and civil rights and how to treat a planet a long time ago! Our leaders today haven't. They're ignoring those lessons and replacing those qualities with something else. Something totally at odds with what Americans want and what Americans have fought for. They have us now fighting only for their greed and tossing us nothing but crumbs. Soon there will be none of those. Has no one stopped to notice?
We're having our very selves stolen from us! Our poetry readings are being canceled for fear of an anti-war sentiment being expressed. Our radio channels are being overtaken by right-wing Christian owners who approve only certain artists and songs for fear a traditional American protest song might be heard. Our textbooks are being revised leaving out the truth for fear we won't look like superheroes. For fear, for fear, for fear! What are they afraid of? What are WE afraid of? And WHY? Isn't our government made up of "civil servants" who work for US? Have we forgotten that America is a democracy that is of the people, by the people and for the people? What has become of us? Perhaps the following history will remind us of who we are as we approach Earth Day 2004 and, goddess help us, Election 2004:
Nature Ralph Waldo Emerson
"THERE WAS A new consciousness." That is how Emerson, writing in 1880, summed up the cultural revolution that defined the most advanced thought and art in the United States in the decades before the Civil War. To many at the
time, Emerson's first book, Nature, was the bible of the movement. It begins by inviting the new generation to leave the past behind, to "enjoy an original relation to the universe." It ends by exhorting the reader to "build your own world." These "new views"--Emerson's preferred term for what others would soon call Transcendentalism--never became a mass cultural or media phenomenon. Most Americans were more interested in the gold in California than the wealth that Emerson said was to be found within, and more interested in building railroads and factories than in creating the newer world he announced as imminent. But as a prophet or popular philosopher Emerson inspired thousands in his time and helped articulate for all time the idea that America is less a place than a process--a becoming new. [Emphasis added. -v]
An Oration Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society Ralph Waldo Emerson
WHEN EMERSON RESIGNED from the ministry to become a prophet of consciousness, he told a friend that his own
"particular parish" was "young people inquiring their way in the world." Speaking on behalf of the generation for whom Emerson's was the voice that found them in the wilderness, Theodore Parker wrote about how his words glowed in the American heavens, "drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great new star, a beauty and a mystery, as it led them along new paths and towards new hopes." Emerson's favorite rhetorical occasion was the college oration. In 1837 he gave "The American Scholar" address at Harvard. Telling the students in his audience that colleges exist "to set the hearts of youth on flame," he called for "the helpful giant to destroy the old or build the new." To the "young men crowding to the barriers for the career," he spoke of "the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire," and called each one of them instead to "plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide." Oliver Wendell Holmes called this speech "America's declaration of cultural independence." [Emphasis added. -v]
Walden; Or, Life in the Woods Henry David Thoreau
SOON AFTER THOREAU graduated from Harvard in 1837, he tuned in to Emerson's voice--and in the mid-1840s became
America's most famous "drop out." When he moved to Walden Pond as a protest against conventional society and as the first citizen of what he calls "the only true America," he disappointed the parents who had scraped and saved to send him to college. When he transformed his two years in the woods into Walden, however, he gave American culture one of its most resonant symbolic gestures. The land he built his cabin on belonged to Emerson, though in his own version of the sixties dictum that you can't trust anyone over thirty Thoreau vehemently denied all debts: "I have lived some thirty years on this planet," he wrote in Walden, "and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose."
Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman
WHITMAN ACKNOWLEDGED THE debt this way: "I was simmering, simmering, and Emerson brought me to a boil." Thoreau wrote Walden, he said, to "wake his neighbors up" by "crowing as lustily as chanticleer in the morning." In Leaves of Grass, Whitman "sounds my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." An exhilarating combination of
mysticism and sexuality, his poetry is a newer testament, a celebration of the kingdom of consciousness that can be found in the soul, in the body, in the "kosmos," and in all the forms of spirit and matter. Whitman urged his listeners to get outside and become "undisguised and naked:" "Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Few in his time even recognized his work as poetry, and on several occasions he was prosecuted for obscenity. This first edition of Leaves of Grass, which Whitman published himself, had almost no sale at all. Between 1855 and his death in 1892, Whitman kept adding poems to new editions of Leaves of Grass, and by the end of his life had acquired a few disciples. But it wasn't until the twentieth century that the literary critical establishment recognized him as one of the great American poets. To such anti-establishment figures as Allen Ginsberg (who 100 years after Leaves of Grass first appeared used the lines about "unscrewing the locks" as the epigraph to Howl) he was even greater as the prophet of cultural revolution.
Aesthetic Papers Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
AS IN THE SIXTIES, the "new consciousness" in America in Emerson's time made itself manifest across the whole range of cultural expression, from social life and religion to art and politics. This volume, for example, contains the first publication of Hawthorne's "Main Street," but it is now best-known for an essay called "Resistance to Civil Government,
by H.D. Thoreau, Esq." In our time the essay is better-known as "Civil Disobedience." In this work Thoreau describes how he went to jail rather than pay taxes to support the Mexican War and the slave system that he felt was the real reason America was fighting in Mexico. Neither the essay nor Thoreau's act of protest attracted much attention among his contemporaries, but it later inspired Mahatma Gandhi, who read it while in jail in South Africa, and through him Martin Luther King. Thoreau's example was also a major inspiration to the anti-war movement of the sixties. "Break the law," Thoreau writes, "Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine." Interested in many forms of radical change, from education to utopian communities, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody herself was an important figure in the cultural revolution of the 1840s and 1850s. Henry James caricatures her as Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century Margaret Fuller
THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT in America has its origins in this period too. Genealogically its central branch--Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and so on--grew out of the Abolitionist Movement, and addressed its efforts to specific political reforms like suffrage. Margaret Fuller was never in that camp. But her Woman in the Nineteenth Century was the first American book devoted to the question of woman's place and rights. It was the final product of Fuller's own participation in the unorganized Transcendentalist movement. Starting from the idea that the divine spirit is in all consciousness, Fuller argues for complete equality between the sexes: "I have believed and intimated that this hope would receive an ampler fruition than ever before in our own land. And it will do so if this land carry out the principles from which sprang our national life. I believe that at present women are the best helpers of one another. Let them think; let them act; till they know what they need."
To paraphrase Ms Fuller in today's terms regarding the craziness we see around us: war on innocent Iraqi people after they've been "liberated" from their tyrannical leader, discrimination against gays and lesbians, denying them the civil rights afforded other human beings under our constitution, and American citizens losing our rights of privacy and liberty for which our own forefathers fought and for which our troops are purportedly fighting today:
SOURCE
``````````
* This is a section heading at my own blog that addresses cultural issues, among other things.
C'MON PEOPLE NOW, SMILE ON YOUR BROTHER! -- Cultural Creativity, Pop Culture, Art Culture, Lifestyle, Including
The Cultural Creatives, The Creative Class, The Hippies and Simple Living*
Knowing my penchant for sixties nostalgia, Pip referred me to a website from the University of Virginia where they teach a course on The Psychedelic '60s. Little did he know that what would catch my eye would be the section on 19th Century Precursors! LOL! I was reminded of our strong heritage of thinking Americans who showed us how great we could be . . . how we can transcend the demands of gold rushes and political rhetoric and see through the lies into our hearts and into the truth of life on this planet. We knew, once upon a time, what was right. We learned the lessons of discrimination and liberty and civil rights and how to treat a planet a long time ago! Our leaders today haven't. They're ignoring those lessons and replacing those qualities with something else. Something totally at odds with what Americans want and what Americans have fought for. They have us now fighting only for their greed and tossing us nothing but crumbs. Soon there will be none of those. Has no one stopped to notice?
We're having our very selves stolen from us! Our poetry readings are being canceled for fear of an anti-war sentiment being expressed. Our radio channels are being overtaken by right-wing Christian owners who approve only certain artists and songs for fear a traditional American protest song might be heard. Our textbooks are being revised leaving out the truth for fear we won't look like superheroes. For fear, for fear, for fear! What are they afraid of? What are WE afraid of? And WHY? Isn't our government made up of "civil servants" who work for US? Have we forgotten that America is a democracy that is of the people, by the people and for the people? What has become of us? Perhaps the following history will remind us of who we are as we approach Earth Day 2004 and, goddess help us, Election 2004:
Nature Ralph Waldo Emerson
"THERE WAS A new consciousness." That is how Emerson, writing in 1880, summed up the cultural revolution that defined the most advanced thought and art in the United States in the decades before the Civil War. To many at the
time, Emerson's first book, Nature, was the bible of the movement. It begins by inviting the new generation to leave the past behind, to "enjoy an original relation to the universe." It ends by exhorting the reader to "build your own world." These "new views"--Emerson's preferred term for what others would soon call Transcendentalism--never became a mass cultural or media phenomenon. Most Americans were more interested in the gold in California than the wealth that Emerson said was to be found within, and more interested in building railroads and factories than in creating the newer world he announced as imminent. But as a prophet or popular philosopher Emerson inspired thousands in his time and helped articulate for all time the idea that America is less a place than a process--a becoming new. [Emphasis added. -v]
An Oration Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society Ralph Waldo Emerson
WHEN EMERSON RESIGNED from the ministry to become a prophet of consciousness, he told a friend that his own
"particular parish" was "young people inquiring their way in the world." Speaking on behalf of the generation for whom Emerson's was the voice that found them in the wilderness, Theodore Parker wrote about how his words glowed in the American heavens, "drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great new star, a beauty and a mystery, as it led them along new paths and towards new hopes." Emerson's favorite rhetorical occasion was the college oration. In 1837 he gave "The American Scholar" address at Harvard. Telling the students in his audience that colleges exist "to set the hearts of youth on flame," he called for "the helpful giant to destroy the old or build the new." To the "young men crowding to the barriers for the career," he spoke of "the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire," and called each one of them instead to "plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide." Oliver Wendell Holmes called this speech "America's declaration of cultural independence." [Emphasis added. -v]
Walden; Or, Life in the Woods Henry David Thoreau
SOON AFTER THOREAU graduated from Harvard in 1837, he tuned in to Emerson's voice--and in the mid-1840s became
America's most famous "drop out." When he moved to Walden Pond as a protest against conventional society and as the first citizen of what he calls "the only true America," he disappointed the parents who had scraped and saved to send him to college. When he transformed his two years in the woods into Walden, however, he gave American culture one of its most resonant symbolic gestures. The land he built his cabin on belonged to Emerson, though in his own version of the sixties dictum that you can't trust anyone over thirty Thoreau vehemently denied all debts: "I have lived some thirty years on this planet," he wrote in Walden, "and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose."
Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman
WHITMAN ACKNOWLEDGED THE debt this way: "I was simmering, simmering, and Emerson brought me to a boil." Thoreau wrote Walden, he said, to "wake his neighbors up" by "crowing as lustily as chanticleer in the morning." In Leaves of Grass, Whitman "sounds my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." An exhilarating combination of
mysticism and sexuality, his poetry is a newer testament, a celebration of the kingdom of consciousness that can be found in the soul, in the body, in the "kosmos," and in all the forms of spirit and matter. Whitman urged his listeners to get outside and become "undisguised and naked:" "Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Few in his time even recognized his work as poetry, and on several occasions he was prosecuted for obscenity. This first edition of Leaves of Grass, which Whitman published himself, had almost no sale at all. Between 1855 and his death in 1892, Whitman kept adding poems to new editions of Leaves of Grass, and by the end of his life had acquired a few disciples. But it wasn't until the twentieth century that the literary critical establishment recognized him as one of the great American poets. To such anti-establishment figures as Allen Ginsberg (who 100 years after Leaves of Grass first appeared used the lines about "unscrewing the locks" as the epigraph to Howl) he was even greater as the prophet of cultural revolution.
Aesthetic Papers Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
AS IN THE SIXTIES, the "new consciousness" in America in Emerson's time made itself manifest across the whole range of cultural expression, from social life and religion to art and politics. This volume, for example, contains the first publication of Hawthorne's "Main Street," but it is now best-known for an essay called "Resistance to Civil Government,
by H.D. Thoreau, Esq." In our time the essay is better-known as "Civil Disobedience." In this work Thoreau describes how he went to jail rather than pay taxes to support the Mexican War and the slave system that he felt was the real reason America was fighting in Mexico. Neither the essay nor Thoreau's act of protest attracted much attention among his contemporaries, but it later inspired Mahatma Gandhi, who read it while in jail in South Africa, and through him Martin Luther King. Thoreau's example was also a major inspiration to the anti-war movement of the sixties. "Break the law," Thoreau writes, "Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine." Interested in many forms of radical change, from education to utopian communities, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody herself was an important figure in the cultural revolution of the 1840s and 1850s. Henry James caricatures her as Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century Margaret Fuller
THE WOMAN'S MOVEMENT in America has its origins in this period too. Genealogically its central branch--Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and so on--grew out of the Abolitionist Movement, and addressed its efforts to specific political reforms like suffrage. Margaret Fuller was never in that camp. But her Woman in the Nineteenth Century was the first American book devoted to the question of woman's place and rights. It was the final product of Fuller's own participation in the unorganized Transcendentalist movement. Starting from the idea that the divine spirit is in all consciousness, Fuller argues for complete equality between the sexes: "I have believed and intimated that this hope would receive an ampler fruition than ever before in our own land. And it will do so if this land carry out the principles from which sprang our national life. I believe that at present women are the best helpers of one another. Let them think; let them act; till they know what they need."
To paraphrase Ms Fuller in today's terms regarding the craziness we see around us: war on innocent Iraqi people after they've been "liberated" from their tyrannical leader, discrimination against gays and lesbians, denying them the civil rights afforded other human beings under our constitution, and American citizens losing our rights of privacy and liberty for which our own forefathers fought and for which our troops are purportedly fighting today:
"Right now THINKERS are the best helpers of one another.
Let them think; let them act; till they know what they need."
SOURCE
``````````
* This is a section heading at my own blog that addresses cultural issues, among other things.
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