Animated spirits remembered

13 Years Ago Today

By Moristotle

[Published originally on October 3, 2009.]

Having found Poet’s Walk gentle and fairly level last Saturday, I took my wife there today—and Siegfried, who was thrilled by the “new book” (as my wife phrased it) of all the unfamiliar scents he could put his quivering nose to. He and I had to walk ahead so that he wouldn’t in his eagerness continually run into her. But once, when we got far enough ahead (only ten or fifteen yards) for him to feel some disquiet apparently, he stopped and sat to wait for her, and in so doing reminded me of Wally’s doing the same on an autumn walk in Duke Forest two or three years ago. (I thought I’d blogged about this, but if I did I couldn’t find the post, unless it was “In the woods,” but the incident isn’t mentioned. I remember now, and mention here, Wally’s animating spirit.)

For Ralph Earle on his 70th Birthday

In Remembrance of Half His Life Ago

By Moristotle

Ralph’s friend Judith Valerie occasioned my writing the poem below. I was on her distribution list when she notified no doubt scores of individuals who love Ralph to please contribute something to the collection she planned to read to him today. Her including me meant a lot, and I thank her for it.


April 4, 1986 – was that Ralph Earle’s first day
as a tech editor at IBM in Cary, North Carolina?
I’d like to think so, like to believe it was,
love it more if it really was the day I met
this extraordinary human being,
my colleague for several years in Cary.

Tired poet

After his outing yesterday at Ayr Mount, Siegfried napped toothfully.

Not dedicated to Waldo

There's a sign a little ways down Poet's Walk.

Write a poem while walking.
Or write it about the walk.
Or while walking write a poem
    about walking.
Write a poem on the trail,
    on the walk, on walking, on "on."

Without pencil or paper,
Take the walk and talk it.
Go on a walk and talk on it, on it.
Talk the poem, talk the walk.
Talk on and on ambiguity, ambiguously.

Moristotle's current masthead photograph features the pond at Poet's Walk (during the summer).

Animated spirits remembered

Having found Poet's Walk gentle and fairly level last Saturday, I took my wife there today—and Siegfried, who was thrilled by the "new book" (as my wife phrased it) of all the unfamiliar scents he could put his quivering nose to. He and I had to walk ahead so that he wouldn't in his eagerness continually run into her. But once, when we got far enough ahead (only ten or fifteen yards) for him to feel some disquiet apparently, he stopped and sat to wait for her, and in so doing reminded me of Wally's doing the same on an autumn walk in Duke Forest two or three years ago. (I thought I'd blogged about this, but if I did I couldn't find the post, unless it was "In the woods," but the incident isn't mentioned. I remember now, and mention here, Wally's animating spirit.)
    Near the end of Poet's Walk (or the beginning, depending on where you start), there's a "reflection pond" so picturesque that I wished I'd brought my camera (and would return with it the next morning):


And also at the end (or the beginning), there's a display with a quotation from Emerson appropriate to my reflections on last week's walk and talk here:


The first two lines appear in Emerson's poem "Threnody,"¹ a meditation on the loss of his animated five-year-old son Waldo to scarlet fever (1842), but the four lines together are from the little poem "Nature," published in his Essays: Second Series (1844):

The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.
[p. 539, Library of America edition
of Emerson's Essays and Lectures]

Again, "the only 'animated spirits' that we have any experience of" are those of Nature, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, seemed to know it already².
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1. P. 120, Library of America edition of Emerson's Collected Poems & Translations.
2. "1841: First series of Essays published in March, and aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, pronounces it a 'strange medly of atheism and false independence'...," p. 1301, Chronology in Library of America edition of Emerson's Essays and Lectures

Animating spirit, first cause

A walk in the gentle woods of Hillsborough, North Carolina yesterday prompted me to revisit what it is about "God" that I don't believe. Not the walk, actually, but the conversation with my good friend Ralph, with whom I walked and talked. Ralph said two things that gave me pause. The first was that he finds it impossible to deny that God exists. While he is as clear as I am that "the Christian God," as he puts it, does not exist, he says that God as the animating spirit of the universe, its first cause, does necessarily exist.
    Should I be reluctant to try to think about these concepts logically? For Ralph also said, commenting on my reading of John Allen Paulos's Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up, "God is beyond argument. We can't get our minds or our logic around God." Perhaps I should be reluctant, but here goes anyway.
    What evidence is there that the universe has an "animating spirit"? The only "animated spirits" that we have any experience of are ourselves and other natural organisms. I see animated spirit everyday in the birds and butterflies and rabbits and fuzzy worms that visit (or live in) our yard. I saw yesterday the toad that jumped out of my mower's way, and I was happy that the little fellow managed it, for I hadn't seen him. But I'm learning from my layman's study of evolutionary biology and neurology that our natural, earthly spirits evolved from the physical materials that lay on our planet's¹ surface and floated in its atmosphere. The jump to an overriding spirit for the universe is a very big jump indeed. My mind balks at the concept. I'm more comfortable in my empathy and sympathy for the fragile spirits around me.

First cause? I was surprised to hear that phrase from Ralph, the "argument from first cause" has been so soundly disposed of by philosophers—and mathematicians, for it happens to be the first of the arguments for God that Paulos discusses in his little book.

If everything has a cause, then God does, too, and there is no first cause. And if something doesn't have a cause, it may as well be the physical world as God or a tortoise. [p. 4]

    And yet, Ralph is sure about the universe's having been caused by an animating spirit. As I put it in the first of my "New Ten Commandments":

Imagine that "God" exists if doing so somehow comforts or inspires you....

I am glad for Ralph that he finds something like comfort or inspiration in his notion of a universal animating spirit (however far beyond his mind and logic).

That first new commandment of mine has a concluding clause, which is actually relevant to the second thing that Ralph said that gave me pause. Ralph says that the Muslim concept of God is superior to the Christian, by virtue of its being less anthropomorphic. He lauds the "peasant women of the Near East" for surrendering themselves to such a God. The very terms Islam and Muslim indicate that surrender. The concluding clause of my new first commandment expresses my contempt for this:

Imagine that "God" exists if doing so somehow comforts or inspires you, but don't fall down and worship it.

I don't think that "Allah" is any more palatable than Yahweh or God the Father. On p. 1 of Thomas Cleary's New Translation of the Qur'an, I find:

[Certain persons] try to deceive God and those who believe, but they only deceive themselves, without being aware. In their hearts is sickness, and God has made them sicker; and in store for them is painful torture, because they have been lying...God mocks them...God took their light and left them in darkness, unseeing; deaf, dumb, and blind, and not returning....

Allah is as personal to Muslims as God the Father is to Christians. And, in my view, Allah, too, is absent.
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1. I don't mean by "our planet" any proprietary ownership, for, as my daughter's Chief Seattle bumper sticker says, "The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth." (I inherited the bumper sticker with the car.)