Alexander Pope

Moral and transmoral visions of human reality are constantly at odds. Where the moralist finds only natural evil and impiety and concomitant sufferings, the transmoralist discerns a delightful spectacle, a aesthetically self-justifying panorama of joy and horror, charity and bloodthirst, egoist and altruist: A masterpiece of black humor and happy absurdity. The moralist hangs every act of nature, god and man in the balance of good and evil. The transmoralist sets his heart and lights—confirms a rare and transcendent weltanschauung—beyond good and evil.

Alexander Pope's dizzying philosophical error is manifest in the first epistle of his famous Essay. Pope here presents the panorama of human folly and titan captiousness in a transmoral vision of perfection and “ORDER” (94); but adulterates his transmoral imaginings with a lukewarm and sophomoric—and completely inappropriate—attempt at theodicy: “To vindicate the ways of God to man” (91). Theodicy is a philosophical instrument appropriate to a moral vision of reality; becoming a ludicrous paradox when superimposed upon the transmoral lens.

The transmoralist, from a poetic height beyond good and evil, perceives the littleness of Man and the absurdity of his argument against the cosmos. This cold, sometimes nearly heartless, vision transcending the dynamics of human contingency, joy and horror and charity and suffering, is an ancient vista well-enjoyed by the master spiritualists of the East. Look to the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna may be understood as expressing the moral view, Krishna the transmoral view, of the overture battlefield spectacle:

Arjuna (overlooking the battlefield, 2.5 etc.): I can find no means to drive away this grief which is drying up my senses...It would be better to live in this world by begging than to live at the cost of the lives of great souls who are my teachers...If they are killed, everything we enjoy will be tainted with blood.

Krishna: (overlooking the battlefield, 2.11 etc.): Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor for the dead...the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and season...Do thou fight for the sake of fighting, without considering happiness or distress, loss or gain, victory or defeat...

Taking a more canny form in Pope, the rhetorical nuances of---“Respecting Man, whatever wrong we call / May, must be right, as relative to all”; “Then say not Man's imperfect, Heaven in fault; / Say rather, Man's as perfect as he ought:”; and “if the great end be human happiness, / Then Nature deviates; and can man do less?”—reflect a transmoral vision of reality. Nature and Heaven take little heed of mankind's happiness: Nature and Heaven lie along the transmoral plane; evidence a transmoral relation to human affairs.

Had Pope called it quits on arguing a transmoral relation between Nature-Heaven and humankind his philosophy of existence would ring nearly sensical. When, however, from this transmoral ground, he asserts the immorality of human resistance to transmoral conceptions of “ORDER” (here we discover the everpresent (everpresent in the ludicrous) Orwellian shadow: CHAOS is ORDER), Pope has mixed categories, has injected a moral effluence into a transmoral spectacle and defiled the purity of his transmoral imagining: “Men [who] would be Angels...[wish] to invert the laws of ORDER, [and sin] against the Eternal Cause.”; All this dread ORDER break—for whom? For thee? / Vile worm!—oh Madness! Pride! Impiety!” (96). 

To belittle the project of human happiness, to set it beyond human hope as in contradiction to the conations of Nature and Heaven, is the poet's delight; whereas to take account of the distress of the human heart in the face of so cryptically ordered a chaos is “Madness! Pride! Impiety!”

These absurdities spring from a fixed conception of the divine. God, when conceived (more scientifically) as the invention (and reinvention and reinvention and reinvention) of the human mind, may be modified as the wisdom of humankind increases. God, in pace with theologizing humankind, is born a child and only after grows wise. 

(One funny fact overlooked by the poet: If "Man's as perfect as he ought," his complaints in the light of the perceived imperfections of Heaven and Nature are perfect as well.)







Works Cited


Bhaktivedanta, A.C. Bhagavad-Gita As It Is. Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc. 1989.

Pope, Alexander. "An Essay On Man." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 90-97. Print.

Montaigne

The notion of the barbaric I would agree springs from an ipsocentric dichotomizing of mankind: The self, and those rare and comforting counterparts sharing in the cultural, political, theological, ideological, aesthetic or sexual (whatever the case may be) sensibilities and biases of the self, are understood to be in some abstract sense superior to the excluded peoples.

Looking to etymology and the rite of Babel: The root of "barbaric" ("barbar") echoes the prima facie nonsensical vocalizations of foreign-speakers speaking a foreign tongue. The myth of Babel may be the purest parable of the 'barbarizing' influence of language: A culture naturally feels an affinity for those who speak its native language; and the innate xenophobia typical of organisms serves to reject as stupid, absurd or uncultured ("barbarbarbarbar") those outlanders who, with their alien and threatening (because unintelligible) noises, make too obscure a music.

Montaigne, with a winking wit, underscores the folly of mankind in its attachment to these ipsocentric notions of superior-self and barbarous-other: "[W]e have no other test of truth and reason than the...opinions and customs of the country we live in. There is always the perfect religion, the perfect government, the perfect and accomplished manner in all things" (1653). It's the silliness and ignorance of mankind that seems to amuse Montaigne: for the fact that for every cultural inherence a vast nation of the "barbarous" horde encroaches on every side; every alien culture is a barbarous one: a chaos of folly and false polarity.

The culture of the U.S. Armed Forces is one I might call more barbarous than my own. Murder, patriotic deceit, anonymous heavy-handedness, Amerocentrism, espionage, collateral damage, interrogation under duress---these are concepts and behaviors so alien to my way of life and thought processes I might easily mistake them for the "barbarbarbarbar"-ing of a barbarian horde.

Montaigne, Michel De. "Of Cannibals." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 1651-1660. Print.

Sunjata

Outlandish superstitions give rise to bizarre behaviors. In the Sunjata the origin of the ritual carrying of the bride in West African culture is described. Sogolon Conde has a twisted foot and the dust of her awkward tread is in some sense objectionable to the wedding party. A bevy of co-wives therefore carry off the bride and escort her in this way to her husband, embroiled in odd diabolis of his own.



In a like spirit one fascinating, if  revolting, ritual practice is the Scottish blackening of bride and groom: A nauseating ceremony where family and friends douse bride and groom in disgusting concoctions---rotten eggs, treacle, feathers and flour--and making as alarming a ruckus as possible parade the happy couple through town in ritual humiliation. While the origins of this bizarre convention are obscured by centuries of cultural metamorphosis, it may once have served as a kind of defensive rite against trows and fairies--mischievous spirits fond of wedding-day kidnappings.

"Sunjata." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 1514-1576. Print.

Basho

Considering Matsuo Basho composed some of his most touching haiku playing pilgrim in the footsteps of the ancient masters, a montage of still images in motion, evocative of difficult journeys and the fleeting tableaux of the traveler, forms a suitable backdrop to a selection of his finer poems. The juxtaposition of images and poetic counterparts offers readers easy entrance to the magic of his words.

The videographer seems to have selected his images and couplings with precisely this purpose in mind: to ease the uninitiated into a deep appreciation of the loveliness and shock of haiku.

Also notable is the melancholy instrument, solitary in the background of image and poem, its plaintive airs possibly suggesting the forlornness and weariness of the traveler. It isn't easy to say whether such a melancholy ambience is appropriate to the spirit of the poet. Likely a Westerner's bias against arduous whimsical pilgrimage on foot played a role in the videographer's selection. If Basho's haiku are best experienced shot through with the melancholy strains of an eerie string instrument---nothing in the excerpt from the Deep North suggests it. Basho's presence on the page has the spirit of absence; the poet divorced, ghostlike, from the poem. (How creativity became such an ego-driven sport in the West is a mystery.)