compensation

Music: The National: High Violet (2010)

A happy sight is a toad in the garden, which means things that annoy are getting eaten. But a toad in the garden often means worry, because the dog wants to interrogate the toad, and the toad can spray toxins, which could inspire an expensive vet bill. I am charmed by inspired veternarians about as much as I am inspired Volkswagen repairmen. And in this way, Ralph Waldo Emerson's observations creep into my so-called patio-ed life. Polarity.

The Concord Sage penned "Compensation and Self-Reliance," an oration published as a pamphlet (as was common in the nineteenth century), to better clarify his promulgation of "independence." (In his time, Emerson was probably better known as an orator than he was as a writer.) He opens with a rather epic poem (not to my liking), and then says:

EVER SINCE I was a boy I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation; for it seemed to me when very young that on this subject Life was ahead of theology and the people knew more than the preachers taught. The documents too from which the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless variety, and lay always before me, even in sleep; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm and the dwelling-house; the greetings, the relations, the debts and credits, the influence of character, the nature an endowment of all men. It seemed to me also that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action of the Soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition; and so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eternal love, conversing with that which he knows was always and always must be, because it really is now

Emerson goes on to indict a preacher he overheard for assuming justice and right is not now, but in the hereafter. Emerson finds grace in the moment, in the here and now, in the toad in the garden, warts and all that jazz.

I discovered Emerson at that moment in my young life that I knew I could read and comprehend. I was probably in fifth or sixth grade, I think, and I was at a used book store and this little (that is to say, conquerable) book stuck out, "A Revell Inspirational Classic," and my mother bought it for me. I read it in an afternoon and, I recall, didn't understand much of it at all. I came back to the book in high school, and was charmed by Emerson's critique of mainline religion. My junior year in high school "Compensation and Self-Reliance" was very important to me as I left the church. I then had a year-long obsession with Ayn Rand which was, thankfully, crushed out of me my first year of college after a crash-course with Nietzsche's work.

Still, I'm surprised by Ralph Waldo's influence, working like a little motor, beneath my thinking. I was just a while ago sitting on my patio, starting to smoke a cigar, when the toad came and the dog went after it. Emerson's "Compensation" essay popped into my head, and for a moment I was transported back to the basement of my parents' home. I am sitting at a table set up against a window on a concrete floor. The pine-studded wall-frames are made into walls by black plastic. A box fan is set into the west window, and I am sitting next to it smoking cigarettes and reading Emerson and convincing myself I know what the hell he is writing about . . . . I think, at 38, I understand what he is saying now, and I don't necessarily like it.

But at 17 I liked what he was writing very much. I was also fascinated with Joyce. I read Ulysses. Twice, smoking and sitting by that window, the fan sucking out the smoke so that my parents wouldn't notice. (My parents told me, years later, they did indeed notice.)

But now I wonder. It's funny how formative what I've read in my teenage years has been to my current thinking. Emerson appealed to me then because of his strident call for non-conformity; for him, self-reliance meant abandoning dogma, and I was very much about doing that at 17 (I was a teenage goth/debater---hear me roar!). But for "compensation." The toad on the patio inspired me to fetch the book from my collection (I will never part with this book), and skimming I'm reminded he had much to say that critiqued what passes for individualism today. Emerson's conception of the divinity within all of us required compensation, or rather, a recognition of some kind of cosmic dependency on the Other, which in turn required a form of generosity of spirit. Not a reliance, mind you, but rather a recognition that you are not alone, and without others you were not participating in the dynamism of the divine.

It's not lost on me that many of Emerson's most famous orations were delivered in Masonic temples.

I write this with the ramping-up presidential campaign in mind, of course. Today I've been reading about "black liberation theology" and sermons of Jeremiah Wright, which I find quite moving. Emerson had a lot to say about religion and it's political import, and it has more common cause with "black theology" than it does the so-called Tea Party. I don't mean to claim Emerson on the right side of history, but still, his words make me think.