i’VE SEEN A DYING EYE
From the first chapter of Emerson’s Nature, we track the Transparent Eye-ball, a track that begins in daily intercourse with heaven and earth.
Sun and season conduct the tempers of the mind; wild delight set against impertinent grief.
Time now to cross the bare ground, better to convey the electricity of Emerson’s synaptic jumps in perfect exhilaration:
CROSSING THE BARE COMMON
Melville would later take the electrified optics of the transparent eye-ball to sea, lodged inside the head of Ahab, eventually to intercourse with The Candles:
ACHING EYEBALLS
When the lightning comes, Ahab leaves the common ground to become the pure spirit of oblivion, currents of the Universal Being coursing through his broken body:
The aching eyeballs fuse with some unsuffusing thing :
INCOMMUNICABLE RIDDLES
SKY-LICKING PLATFORM
In his blistering critique of human solipsism Straw Dogs, John Gray writes:
Gray quotes Fernando Pessoa, from The Keeper of Flocks:
Of course, Emerson is no stranger to the mystical woods:
COLORS OF THE SPIRIT
Yet Emerson also understands the projections of the Solipsist. The eye cannot escape its I, just as Nature has no within.
And finally, eight lucid lines from the unblinking I of Emily Dickinson, in search of something, as it seemed:
Desperado Philosophy 