Conduct of Life: Session Eleven A
Session Summary - Character
We started the evening by listening to a Paul McCartney song, The Song We Were Singing.How does Emerson define character? He uses the phrase "latent power of presence"; he could be suggesting that action describe us better than words. Is the assumption that all have character? Is character like charisma? Do those who have it know it? Ralph describes character like charisma, a certain elusive magnetism, or mature eccentricity, hard to define. His portrayal of character is the representative man, a hologram or archetype who shows the hidden potential of all. In this essay, it seems that character isn't open to all, its not democratic. Although he describes character as happening unnoticed, he paints it with Promethean tones, similar to a hero myth.
The Character essay is a prose poem in the idealistic form. Character doesn't belong to people. Its an energy, not a personal thing. Its like the holy spirit comes upon you. Its not good or bad, but about passion (daemon). Everyone has a self-truth that is trying to reveal itself in them. We assume character can be formed through reflection on experience. Emerson doesn't intend a process view, but seeks to describe the Platonic ideal of Character. We all speak like this at times--above our mortality. This essay is hard to read because it only describes part of reality. If we stay connected to both our ideals and our humanness we are able to communicate better with others. Emerson never saw anyone that measured up to his ideal of character. He met "the greats" in Europe (Wordsworth, Carlyle, et al) and eventually found them all disappointing. Our own examples of people with character show this as well; we tend to think of fictional or idealized characters. As an example, Lyle shared how, in wanting to understand and move beyond his family's limitations, he wrote his psychiatrist uncle. Urbane, educated, stylish, he seemed an ideal contact point between past and future. But his collective response shattered this ideal.
Emerson was 39 or 40 when he wrote Character. His journal at the time shows an opposite view from the somewhat pompous tone of the essay. He felt himself falling short and unworthy. This expresses the inflation/deflation cycle we all go through. Waldo experiences these in more extreme. But they are both true of him. To listen to both streams, you get a more rounded picture of both Waldo and what he's trying to say. Margaret Fuller critiqued his work, saying it was not grounded . But Emerson was unaware of any contradictions in his work.
Emerson tends towards a Promethean style in his writing, which comes from striving exclusively for ideals. He glosses over how vice is habitual, but doesn't seem to have a lived understanding or concept of sin in his writing. There is no sense of mistrusting your inner voice, and no sense of community. We need each other as a corrective to understanding our processes. Community discernment isn't about right or wrong, but about encouraging each other to honestly attend our own lives. The purpose of flames is to critique each other on the basis of our knowledge of each other. We have a hard time hearing this. We interpret critique as judgmentalism and either completely disregard or giving complete authority to feedback.
As example, Cal shared about how he heard, in his daily meditational writing, to give up his 3-piece pin-stripe suit. He interpreted this to mean he was to give up lawns and take up more painting. We all got duped, partly because we are bored with each other. So no one picked up how Cal has inverted a word to give up status and turned it into getting more status. When we don't listen closely to each other, we get mediocrity. We don't flame each other any more, which is in a way a refusal to feed back our processes to each other. And this contributes partially to the sense of fragmentation we experience.
Paul tends to think the best possible of people, but at the same time knowing its crap. Like reading Emerson from his Journals as well as his Essays, we can interpret each other in this bi-focal perspective. There is something trying to get out of each of our personalities; if we listen closely we can discern it. Most of us sort either for good or bad. We're so familiar with each other's foibles, but not so much with each other's gifts or daemons. We err like Emerson, who doesn't embrace the vice of people.
If Community is the answer to an over-individualistic emphasis in the Character essay, what is the character of this community? Our group, like Emerson, is stuck outside Christ. We are afraid of identifying a Christian message, because of the gnarling, limited way Christianity is represented. But the Judeo/Christian tradition acknowledges a concept of twistedness. Community discernment helps us identify out mixed motives. We needed to move more towards the individual. But the more individual we become, the more we will fragment and fall apart. If we could forgive each other, and see flames not as being right or wrong, but as a perspective on consciousness, we could receive guidance from each other.
The loss in sense of community is because no common vision binds us. For Paul this vision is Christian, symbolized by the cross. This is the ultimate metaphor of God incarnating the whole way into humanity, to the point of dying for what he believed. Paul represents a translated Christian vision to us. Watershed is a place where people are called-out people from the world, seeking character formation, around the representative man, Christ. To eliminate this language from our community is to fragment. The group is quite possibly latently Christian. , but we are in conflict with that right now. Whether we like it or not, we're contained in a larger reality--infused with the Christian story. To use Emerson's words, it is not in us, but we are in it. If this is so, then we're kidding ourselves about not having a vision that binds us. "We always came back to the songs we were singing".
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