Thursday, March 1, 2012

Extremi-tease

The way Emerson refers to "the near, the low, the common" feels, at times, almost unnatural to me. He notes, "It is a sign, is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and feet." This suggests some kind of strange, intimate distance between the self and the things it finds most common. It helps for me to think about this in terms of something concrete, and because I'm at Java Joe's (paid endorsement), this will be my coffee cup. It is simple for me to imagine the cup as an extension of my own "extremity"--my own hand, in that sense of the word. I don't have to think about it to use it; it is rarely in my immediate attention. In this sense, I can understand something common, like this cup, as being an extremity. But later, Emerson says, "show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as it always does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature." I think here he's using the word in a slightly different sense, with extremity meaning: the extreme or terminal point, limit, or part of something. Here is where I become troubled. How can something so close to me, so much a part of the fabric of my general life, be what lies farthest away from me? Wouldn't something imbued with mystery, like wind or the Northern Lights, be farther from me than my coffee cup? Wouldn't those things lie in extremities, while what is near, low, and common lies closer to my core? I recognize that the difference lies in the level of attentiveness we pay something, but it still remains a paradox to me. I'm struggling with the same conflict that Heidegger, Ponge, and Wordsworth left me with.

1 comment:

  1. I really love this observation, Noelle - and I think you're exactly right. "Extremities" suggests both intimacy and distance in the most paradoxical way. On the one hand (oh, dear, sorry), I want to say that in the second example he means that everything in nature (not just the particulars he lists) is a kind of extremity, or outgrowth, of spirit. On the other hand, I do think that Emerson is troubled by a sense that "the near, the low, the common" is always more distant that we would like; that even the most familiar objects are somehow strange to us. I'm thinking particularly of something he says in "Experience":

    "I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition."

    (Note that "unhandsome"!) I'm curious to hear how you see this paradox playing out in the other writers you mentioned.

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