Transcendental Love

From a discussion on a friend's post, Surviving The Twin Flame, at his blog New Earth Light. The early "ultimate love and loss" that Emerson experienced, referred to here, was the passing of his beloved first wife after three years of marriage.

Carl and Heather,

Just wanted to address your comments re the Emerson quote on love. For the sake of general readability, here is that quote again:

"I know how delicious is this cup of love–I existing for you, you existing for me; but it is a child clinging to his toy, an attempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial chamber; to keep the picture alphabet through which our first lessons were prettily conveyed. This early dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our life-play. In the processions of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles, like light proceeding from an orb. It passes from loving one to loving all; and so, this one beautiful soul opens the divine door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls. Thus in our first years are we put in training for a love which knows neither sex, person, nor partiality; but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom.”

Carl, you wrote:

"He sounds scolding toward anyone who holds onto an earlier idealized affection, calling it a child's toy and just a lesson to love everything, which suggests to me a lack of compassion and full integration for the depth of what he experienced. That remains my opinion and sense of it, because I know how hard it can be to grow beyond that first eternal paired peer love that created us. It becomes a joy when we realize our full destiny in human divine consciousness, which more are achieving now."

For my part, I see Emerson's perspective there as being perfectly representative of Transcendentalism. Since he identified himself as a transcendentalist, it is only to be expected that he would express their views. Transcendentalism is a close cousin of cosmic consciousness, and Emerson was held up as one of the examples of
cosmic consciousness in Richard Maurice Bucke's classic, Cosmic Consciousness.

I think it is precisely because Emerson knew the ultimate pangs of love and loss, that he was able to come to the perspective he voiced in that quote. Naturally it took a while for him to get there.

Someone asked a spiritual teacher about soul mates. The teacher said that everyone on the planet is our soul mate. That if we have a moment with the guy selling newspapers on the street, that guy is our soulmate in that moment. He says, "I don't mean to destroy dreams, but to expand them."

Heather, you wrote of Emerson:

"Emerson - from my first reading of what he wrote, I felt that there was a lot of pain there for him..like he hadn't healed from his experience or fully accepted it..we can't replace our twin but we can love others...ultimately we have to heal and forgive from the first separation from our twin..which was very painful."

I feel Emerson did go through the healing over the years, in regard to his lost love. He moved on, he married again, had children, wrote his masterpieces of philosophy and literature. As a Transcendentalist, he exemplified a transcendental view of love, one more in sync with cosmic consciousness, where the love of one expands to embrace all.

Having said all that, I agree that Emerson's tone may be a tad dismissive of romantic love, but like the other spiritual teacher I quoted, he was really about expanding rather than contracting our experience.

Carl replied:

Thanks Jen for the poem and further comments. I like the point that defenders of Cosmic Consciousness hopefully don't mean to destroy dreams but rather expand them. I think everyone should be able to pursue their entry into love without degrading any other, just like the spiritual path itself. Romance works for a lot of people as initiation into higher states of love, and if they continue to hold their personal beloved more closely than the corner guy selling newspapers well, who is anyone to disagree, I certainly don't. Romantics didn't say they don't have a love for everyone, in fact people in personal love usually overflow with love for everything. It's the brokenhearted and superior to that experience who can sound less generous. I almost like Emerson's poem, but then he implies that his lost beloved is only a half-god and he's better off without her. Why isn't everyone a full god, why doesn't he just honestly miss her? He still sounds in denial of hurt and not wholly healed to me.

And I responded:

Hi Carl,

In the poem "Give All To Love" those lines "When half-gods go, the gods arrive" may refer to the realization that the girl he loved was not the right match, since she apparently wasn't that into him:

"But when the surprise,
First vague shadow of surmise
Flits across her bosom young,
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free"

Another meaning may relate to the 'early dream of love' as a half-god.
From what I've read of Emerson, he is opposed to burdening the objects of our love both culturally (he objected to the structure of marriage) and personally, focusing our expectations on them.

Pondering this subject, I am reminded of W.B. Yeats' poem, "Speech After Long Silence," wherein he speaks of "the supreme theme of art and song":

"Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant."

I am sure it is true that it is easier for one who is more advanced in years to resonate with and embrace the Transcendentalist attitude about love. I don't at all agree that bodily decreptitude equals wisdom, and it doesn't seem to me that this is the "supreme theme of art and song," but those are still great lines!

Post-Breakup Pomes

STATIC ON THE LINE

Static on the line
crackling in our last phone talk,
there between us still.


HE IS SLEEPING

Though I shake him,
I cannot wake him,
for he is sleeping.
I sang a song he used to love,
I stroke his face so tenderly,
but silent is he.
Even the leaves of the cypress tree
are still in the breeze.
How can he abandon me,
ignoring my pleas?
Bound together,
he said we were,
forever.
Though I shake him,
I cannot wake him,
for he is sleeping.


NOT YOU

It was a stranger
who called me up
and spoke those words with intent
of dividing you and me.
An impostor, an intruder
in the house of love.
Not you.

The words that stranger spoke,
without hope, or love, or truth--
words of contempt,
hateful, ungrateful--
they did not come from you.
It was a stranger's voice
that spoke to me.
Not yours.

I just wanted you to know
about this person
who called me up,
pretending to be you.
I don't know why
he wants to hurt me
and spit on my heart.
I just take comfort in knowing
he's not and never could be
the one I love,
the one so close to me--
the real you.



THE WINE OF LOVE

Pour more wine for me
and my companions, too,
we're mourning love's brevity,
and, oh Love, I am missing you.

That day beside the river
when you leaned on me, tired one,
I wished to be
your resting-place forever.
So soon, too soon our love was done...

Roaming the field with you at night
I marveled at the beauty of your face,
pale in starlight.
Magical, that time and place...

That night we danced together,
fast and slow,
you too were enamored and entranced,
and now that is gone...

One more glass--enough, just so--
I'll sit here til nightfall,
musing on its ruby glow,
lovely as our love,
before we drank it all.


THE CANDLE

You asked me to hold
a candle for you,
to bring you luck,
to light your way.

Then we parted
and you are gone
from my life,
but in my heart
the candle burns still,
flickering low,
sometimes almost dying out,
but always flaring up again,
high and bright,
that infinitely stubborn, momentary,
immutable love light.


LOVER'S REPORT CARD

Feh! so
Fickle--why did I
Fall for him in the
First place? Why should I give a
Flying
F--ck about that
Flimmer?*


*Fake name
For him


POEM'S PROGRESS

"Poems are never finished,
only abandoned," I told someone today.
So it is with us, confrere--
we've left off writing our love poem
and we'll get back to it,
someday, somehow, somewhere.

PRESCRIPTION

Just
trust

the world in me

My world is the world within me

where all dwell in peace and love.

Where the nightingale's song of desire

wafts through our dreams,

where we are awakened to live those dreams

by the birds of the morning,

where I behold

fields of rich harvest,

green growing forests,

the deer and rabbit treading in safety,

and where cool streams caress our toes.

Here, we know we are citizens

of untold universes,

and we venture forth into them

seeking and experiencing

like the heroes we are.

I am the singer and the song

of this vision,

I am the seeker and the sought,

I am the change I want to see,

I am the world inside of me.

The Primeval Hammering

Do you know what it is to be an artist? To have the Creator at work in you every moment of your life? Perhaps you will argue that the Creator works in every man, and that is very possibly true. But he works in the basement of the house (like a middle-class man who has installed a craftsman's bench in the cellar, while his wife keeps the upper floors in order). A fussy housekeeper rules the upper levels where the world is entertained; but the Creator goes downstairs to work. In the silences when the street-door is closed, the tapping of his hammer may be heard by the listening, receptive one.

The more stir above stairs, the less the primeval hammering can be heard. Most people seal off the cellar of their house at their childhood's close, and the hammering is never heard in them again throughout their life. They have walled off their Creator in the days of their youth, and He who called the universe into being has died in them. Occasionally the walled-in workman, too vital to die, sets fire to gunpowder, blowing up the established order, the parliamentary procedure of the parlor floor.

-excerpt from "God And Puppet" by Irene Orgel

SANTA CRUZ REVISITED

I've seen you immortalized

in a black and white photo,

running, dancing with the waves

in Santa Cruz long ago,

I see you now as you were then,

I see the child still in you, shining through

in your lovely sea-green eyes.

Come with me again to Santa Cruz,

our love resounding with the sea

as we walk upon the shore.

It's time to make new memories

and make the old ones new again,

something we'll never lose.

When clouds darken your sky,

when the world seems untrue,

recapture the rapture

of the sun blessing you,

the sand caressing you,

close your eyes and you'll be there,

one with the seagull's cry.

And then at sundown on the pier

I see and know what's real

in the twilight soft and clear.

The Ferris wheel lights up the sky,

your silence tells me all you feel,

with all my heart I'm here.

I've seen you immortalized

in a black-and-white photo,

running, dancing with the waves

in Santa Cruz long ago,

I see you now as you were then,

I see the child still in you,

shining through

in your lovely sea-green eyes.

Now I See How I See

(Painting by Angela Ferreira, http://www.magicpaintings.com/)

Now I see how I see
is what makes
new world, new me.
Come with me now,
the rules we'll bend,
we'll transcend
and make our own,
hear the tone,
come today, come today,
we'll make our way,
again we'll play
upon the shore,
that joy we thought
we'd feel no more,
we've come so far
yet no distance,
it's been so long
yet all transpired
in an instant,
let us be, running free,
new we, new world,
literally.