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  • In the "Light Out of the East":Emerson on Self, Subjectivity, and Creativity
  • Susan Dunston

In "Experience" Emerson announces his readiness "to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West" (CW 3:41). Whatever personal manifest destiny the passage expresses, it arises from Emerson's deep affinity for Eastern philosophy. The inscription in Emerson's notebook "Orientalist" is "Ex oriente lux," or "Light out of the east" (1993, 39), and, as Ronald Bosco notes in his introduction to the notebook, Emerson believed that the light of the East "has the power both to nourish otherwise impoverished individuals and nations and to transmute . . . the crime of materialism into wisdom" (1993, 14). His west is far to the east in "the sunbright Mecca of the desert," not Huckleberry Finn's territory, the pioneer's prairie, or the miner's rocky west, and unlike miners, settlers, land speculators, governments, and most Western philosophers, he does "not make" or stake a claim; he "arrive[s] there, and behold[s] what was there already" (CW 3:41). Emerson's approach to the west entails the death or disappearance of "all mean egotism" (CW 1:10) and the open flexibility of a Zen practitioner's mind. The grand sense of entitlement and the mission of proliferation that sent most European Americans west are quite foreign to Emerson's acknowledgment and receptivity. All a miner knows is by penetration into the earth; all [End Page 25] Emerson knows "is reception" (CW 3:48). "I am and I have," he writes, "but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything," as countless westward-bound adventurers have fancied, "I found I did not" (CW 3:48).

The attentive, appreciative reception Emerson practices is the strategy used by the Taoist sage, the Sufi mystic, and the Zen meditator, and the delight he consequently experiences, clapping his "hands in infantine joy" and filled "with the love of the new beauty" (CW 3:41), is the good humor of Chuang Tzu, the ecstasy of Attar and Rumi, the satori of the Zen practitioner. The reception and delight are not complacent, unproductive spectatorship, nor do they signal an erasure of the subject/self. They are the condition and result of the creative work that constitutes the unfolding of human experience and insight. As Emerson knew all too well by the time of "Experience," we must be receptive to what is rather than to what we would prefer, what would be convenient, what we assume, or the fraction of reality that our selective attention happens to register. The "life of truth is cold, and . . . mournful," he writes in "Experience" (CW 3:46), because truth is experienced (received) rather than chosen (begotten). Living in the light of truth requires acknowledging the world's indelible inscription rather than forcibly inscribing or scarring the earth with our ambitions. The world's inscription comes as a "series of surprises" (CW 2:189) unforeseen and sometimes very painful. Remaining "fearlessly available to experience whatever life presents" (Klein 1995, 202) is the challenge Emerson meets in "Experience." Holding to this cold and mournful life of truth, just as ninth-century Chinese poet-hermit Han Shan (who also believed that crass materialism is criminal) kept to Cold Mountain, underwrites the only creative expansion Emerson finds sustainable and ethical, both individually and nationally. For Emerson "expansions" must be "organic" and mutual because "the mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose" (CW 4:46); seer and seen arise mutually.

In the light of the East, Emerson developed a distinctly American version of creative and ethical self-expansion that is both predictive of and a precursor to contemporary American interest in Eastern philosophy. Though clearly attracted to the Eastern philosophical ideas he encountered, he kept to his "own orbit" and wrote his "own books" (CW 1:56). His insights about self, subjectivity, and creativity arose in the context of his personal experience and the American behaviors and commitments that deeply troubled him. His response is a theory-practice of creative expansion born of the silence, stillness, and mindfulness necessary...

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