Dig It
When you say you like one thing and then say you like another, you’re just doing what great minds have often felt free to do. Didn’t Emerson call a foolish consistency the hobgoblin of little minds?I love Emerson's writing and was thrilled to receive a pewter bust of him for Christmas. Still, at the same time I’m often sore at him, for all kinds of reasons, like changing his wife’s name to something he found more "classical-sounding" , and withdrawing into his books when their little boy Waldo died, leaving the poor wife doubly bereaved. I also feel like "Oh easy for him to look down his long nose at the littler minds, he who never made a bed or picked up after tea!"But that’s how it was to by a gentleman of the comfortable class in the 19th century. They never carried their full chamber pots down the stairs mornings. They never hauled a hundred pounds of boiling water up the stairs for anyone's bath. Invisible and nameless others did that for them.So see? You can admire someone on one level and be mad at him at the same time. (Think marriage, any marriage.)And remember that other famous quote from Emerson’s same century? Give ya five bucks if you recognize who said this one:“Do I contradict myself? Then I contradict myself. I am vast. I contain multitudes."Yup. That was Walt Whitman, whose genial free spirit made stuffier 19th century types almost burst their corset buttons. Word of him even reached quiet Emily Dickinson in her seclusion who said never read his book, but was told it was "disgraceful."But that’s what you have to love about the guy. That maxim "Nothing human is alien to me"? That was Whitman all over. He could sing the praises of a pile of Plague corpses if you caught him in the grip of one of is ecstasies. (Could and did just about. Remember the "beautiful uncut hair of graves"? Remember him happily enriching fthe soil with his own lifeless body?)I admire Whitman very much. I guess I'm more like him than I am like Emerson. One day I would love to visit his house in Camden NJ, but until I get to do that it might be enough to just go outside and dig things the way he did.Hmmm looking outside here. Cloudy right now with a sky that looks like cake batter ladled into the pan. Like dirty snow. Like soiled bed linens. And yet an amazing radiance just at the horizon.Dig it. It's all God asks of us.
