The ordinary shipping of the mind

 

“But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends us, but also by her influence on the earth. No thinker can afford to overlook the influence of the moon any more than the astronomer can. " The moon gravitates towards the earth, and the earth reciprocally towards the moon." This statement of the astronomer would be bald and meaningless, if it were not in fact a symbolical expression of the value of all lunar influence on man. Even the astronomer admits that " the notion of the moon's influence on ter restrial things was confirmed by her manifest effect upon the ocean," but is not the poet who walks by night conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence, in which the ocean within him over flows its shores and bathes the dry land ?  Has he not his spring-tides and his neap-tides, the former sometimes combining with the winds of heaven to produce those memorable high tides of the calendar which leave their marks for ages, when all Broad Street is submerged, and incalculable damage is done to the ordinary shipping of the mind.”

Thus, Thoreau in a journal entry. I like to think of the three North Atlantic souls – Thoreau, Emerson, and Kierkegaard – all busily keeping their accounts of the ordinary shipping of the mind in their journals. To radically different effects. In September, 1851, Emerson was experiencing the tussle between his transcendental optimism and the Anti-Fugitive Slave act. “The more formidable mischief will only make the more useful servant. – the will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.” There is something quite ominous in that phrase, the more useful servant. Emerson’s notes in his journals were plucked and embedded in his essays, and the book that he was making – The Conduct of Life – was in the shadow of the furies and the hells.

Kierkegaard in 1851 was in the mood to finish with his earlier “fooling” as a heteronym. In September, he wrote in his journal “for indeed, what is eternally certain that what is extraordinary can only succumb in this world.” Continuing this thought of the extraordinary – which for Emerson would be the figure of the poet – he writes: “ For the extraordinary can only exist unconditionally in a purely spiritual condition, suspended in the pure testimony of the spirit, which means – negatively – that all straightforward signs are dialectical or inverted. For the minor premise of being the extraordinary one is to succumb in this world. And what is straightforward humanly speaking is to want to recognize the relation to God from the fact that things go well for a person, that everything succeeds for a person, or if it does not go well, at least there is hope for the next time. But for the extraordinary person there is no such hope. For him, only one thing is certain: his downfall – if he does not go to what, humanly speaking, is his downfall, then neither was he truly an extraordinary person.”

Kierkegaard’s journaling – in 1851 – makes a strange counterpart to Thoreau’s or to Emerson’s – although Thoreau might well recognize that downfalls and high tides, when the ordinary shipping of the mind is disturbed, are kin. What strikes me is that Kierkegaard so takes up the notion of the cross that he negates any idea of blessing. Or, at least, he makes a subtle, folklorish exchange between curses and blessings. The curse, the downfall, is the blessing – that one is “extraordinary.” But both the cursed and the blessed, however you read them, are going to die.

This, though, is not a fair way of interpreting “succumbing to the World” – by this I think Kierkegaard means “winning” in the world, the bourgeois world.

All of these journals are dealing with, filled with, tiptoeing by, weighted down with dialectical or inverted signs. And perhaps this is in the nature of journals – self-examination produces that ghost which reads itself, reads the ectoplasmic trail it has left all in words that no longer fit in the ghost’s mouth. This might be a holy ghost, an “extraordinary” ghost, or it might be the self at floodtide, or it could tussle against the Fugitive slave act. I think of the angel in Wings of Desire, hearing the crowd of voices plotting, waiting, despairing – the journals opened, the roof off: “Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, `What's the news?' as if the old were so bad.”