A springtime reckoning of effort and self

Sorrentine Spring 2008

My efforts are often dogged by what Horace once called a mountain in labor and out comes a mouse. I can live with that; I must live with what I have done. Thoughts are more insubstantial, therefore carry the seeds of transcendence. With religious fervor we doggedly follow karmic patterns that we struggle to overcome while something else, the transcendent I mentioned, happens that redeems us from ourselves. 

Out of thoughts arise dreams of paradise dwarfed by the materiality of what actually transpires—the vividness of blue and purple, the Thomas-tangibility of a wood splinter stuck in our thumb, the incontrovertible warmth of the sun on our face, the touch of a lover, the sting of hot pepper, the beauty of daylight striking the eye.

But thoughts, more than the materiality of the senses, can organize the memory of these sense experiences and produce something more than we could ever imagine we are capable of, the transcendence I spoke of, that relieves the monotony of prodigious rodent-producing effort. Salvific grace may not strike in a lifetime but we know it does. We see it in what other men and women before us have done. They labored to accomplish what talent and predilection determined but the power of their creation is not theirs alone as much as what appreciation endows it. 

Pattern is hard to see within the limits of our subjective selves. Poetry, art or music might allow individuals to believe in themselves enough to sally forth into transcendence but even the most energetic believer must reckon with forces outside of himself. Harold Bloom in his tour-de-force Genius, A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, writes:

By "appreciation" I mean something more than "adequate esteem." Need also enters into it, in the particular sense of turning to the genius of others in order to redress a lack in oneself, or finding in genius a stimulus to one's own powers, whatever these may emerge as being.

He further writes:

Appreciation may modulate into love, even as your consciousness of a dead genius augments consciousness itself. Your solitary self's deepest desire is for survival, whether in the here and now, or transcendentally elsewhere. To be augmented by the genius of others is to enhance the possibilities of survival...

Maybe age does bring wisdom. Not wisdom like God's omniscience but more earthbound, more self-bound, we grow to think beyond the categories imposed on thought by our self-limiting efforts. At 71, after 46 years of being a teacher to the still malleable young, Bloom writes with authority about literature and religious ideas. Maybe wisdom is simply awareness of one's approaching death. We can't afford to wait for conditions to be right before expending effort we may soon no longer have. 

To "do" something is to struggle from within "need," a kind of desperation, rushing into what we know well to be mice-like. A mouse contemplated outside our familiar self-deprecation could yet be heroic, grace, the beneficence of human failing transformed by what we might call the divine. We can't live within the memory of what we have done or failed to do. We can't constrain the future by what we see as the past. We must step off the planet of our selves, of our desires, and leap into the unknown.

Maybe this is not so much wisdom as grace, the transcendence of self as we move ineluctably towards the end of all striving, the end of the genius of our experience: death is God finally realized. Back on earth, we take each clod-like step meanly while appreciating the marvel of being able to know earth, being able to feel effort, being able to live beyond what we know to be true. This to me is genius, transcending self.

Posted via email from Duende Arts