Hyperbole Gone

There’s the soul as it stands today. Where are we at?

We don’t talk of the Over-soul in this country. Waldo left it for us. The Civil War came and we left the Transcendentalists still jagged edges to be smoothed out by the arc of the sphere, tried to call them Modernist, they said “Go to Existential Hell, we’ll be surfing the arc of the sphere till the world smooths you out.”

Smooth enough for me. I’d say let’s Dial it up a notch, but there’s too much pun and not enough understanding.

We’re enamored by Emerson, taken by Margaret and Hank and the Alcotts. We can throw Whitman in too by association, but we left them at Gettysburg. We killed the movement, the start of our Enlightenment; we left it fallow and limp, calling it indescribable, or too individual to be of any good.

Then the two Roman Numeral Wars Came and what’s a Transcendentalist for? Martin reminded us of the power of the American Enlightenment. We rode that dream, then let it crash and burn when complacency seemed better enough.

How’s that sound today? Too individual to be of any good?

Interconnectedness… A web weaving the world together a century and a half after The Over-soul, and History and Nature.

We got lost in the puzzle, for so long, and forgot the poetry. The poem of the act of the mind…