The Over-Soul: Let Us Hearken Unto It

The Germans, I believe, had a word for it: Über-Pflumpfelmetzerkeit. It literally meant, "over the river and through the woods". In their own cacophonous way, they were attempting to describe the Over-Soul, that most sublime of profundities first described by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher and Transcendentalist. Today, there is a college named for him, as well as a whole line of mid-range furniture, specifically, mattresses, I think. That's what you get for being a radical.

Where have you gone Ralph Waldo Emerson? Our nation turns its lonely "I" to you. Here in America, something's gone awry. We've substituted the Over-Soul, a thing of subtlety and nuance, for overkill, over-size, and overdone. I won't even tell you what the Germans call those things. It ain't pretty. But up, up, and away we've gone with Superman and the supreme celebration of the individual, treading the Over-Soul underfoot. We've gone from Transcendentalism to Condescendentalism.

While we're at it, let's all buy a Hummer and give ourselves blowjobs. For such as it is, we've only transcended the masturbatory. We creep ever-closer to the purely hedonistic "Orgy-Porgy" of Huxley's Brave New World.

Individual liberty and autonomy are absolutely crucial, to be sure. But wheresoever has there ever truly been an island in the universe? Whosoever has confined his act to isolation so that he may dispense with--with certainty--all utilitarian aims?

And though it may be granted that all things, being deconstructed, are nonsense; that all arguments are rendered moot by-and-by and consigned to oblivion; I here lay claim to the resonant wisdom of the ages, to the soundest foundation mankind has known: that a proper relation of the individual to his society is a harmonious striving, though forever imperfect it must be. As to his psychological self, wherein all things lie--bizarre and befuddled the one moment, clear and orderly the next--I leave him to his own inner-light, his own luminant ruminant, saying only: now chew on this; the Over-Soul comes in three mouth-watering flavors. Let us hearken unto it.


© 2005 George Czar