Thoreau’s essay places autumn in a unique literary setting: geographical, natural, cultural, aesthetic, and ultimately philosophical.

As Thoreau notes in the essay: “The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our own literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry. A great many, who have spent their lives in cities, have never chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this, the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I remember riding with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late for the most brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would not believe that there had been any brighter. He had never heard of this phenomenon before. Not only many in our towns have never witnessed it, but it is scarcely remembered by the majority from year to year.”

Thoreau intends to describe a larger and more meaningful richness to the autumnal phenomenon. He notes the subtle changes in nature begin in late summer, as early as August, which he describes in an essay section he calls “The Purple Grasses.” The section following formally announces autumn: “The Red Maple.” Thoreau makes the point that the leaf itself ripens, not just the fruit overtly changing color. But the season has a deeper truth to convey. We must embrace the aesthetics but embrace, too, the entirety of meaning in the dying leaves. Can we appreciate the lesson of impermanence, a lesson derived from direct observation, not from book reading. Can we come directly to reflect upon the leaves.

“How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.”

Thoreau’s “Autumnal Tints” appears in many book anthologies and in the original Atlantic Magazine: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1862/10/10-60/131953888.pdf

While creativity, spiritual or aesthetic, has always been a male privelege, women have faced the difficulty incorporating solitude into a more complex social role. Historically, men have little difficulty in being solitaries in a crowd; a woman alone in a crowd will often be harassed, criticized, or ostracized. Being a solitary in a crowd is not alienation but an assertion of self, yet this experience can differ radically between men and women. The psychology of creative aloneness is valued differently by class, sexg, and circumstance. How society nurtures men versus women in the processes of socialization and expectations often depends on a sense of control or power. For women, solitude is more often the result of suffering, not a conscious crafting of the use of time and resources.

Wholeness of self is often a men’s experience of privilege that maintains itself even in the midst of psychological or economic vicissitudes. Men maintain self-identification readily, often not from their own strength but from social and gender dominance in society. Women are relegated by society to resolving their experience of differentiation without society’s helpful intervention. Men are identified with reason, rationalism, logic, power, dominance, control, and violence. Women are identified with empathy, caring, emotion, connection, love, sensitivity, and giving. Men are typified as productive, women as reproductive; the stereotypes are reflected in popular definitions, in careers, social roles, and functions within institutions, inevitably suggesting that women’s role is to support men’s activity, not to pursue their own self-identification. These stereotypes affect aspiratants pursuing eremitic goals.

The women who became desert hermits in early Christianity radically broke social convention. Stories relate that some women even disguised themselves as men when going into public places. Some women shamed monks in the street by rebuking the men’s feigned curiosity when they noticed women. The theme of the repentant harlot suggested to women candidates for sisterhood or eremitism that their quest was granted by ecclesiastical authorities as reluctant privelege. The Middle Ages witnessed many women forced into marriage attempting to regain their individual status through refusal and insistence on erimitism (not necessarily nunhood) in a convent as anchorites. The Beguines of the late Middle Ages concluded that successful solitude and simplicity must be pursued outside of the male-dominated institutions of convent and monastery. Their efforts were short-lived, perhaps historically premature, certainly not supported by the institutions of the day.

The prescription of convent and anchorhold had its male adherents but served women more “logically” given the temperament of society. The outstanding women solitariesoftheMiddleAges, from the anonymous sisters of Aelred of Rievaulx to mystics like Juliana of Norwich, carved a space for social autonomy not viable in public places. In modern time, outstanding women solitaries from Sarah Bishop to Orgyan Chokyi, from Emily Bronte to Emily Dickinson, have cultivated solitude in the updated modern sense that also perceives solitude as an opportunity to pursue creativity. Medieval or modern, women attracted to solitude found or formed contemporary ways to incorporate all that solitude bestows as discernment and worldly wisdom.

But always, one notices, as plight, hardship, challenge, rebelliousness against the conventions of the day. As the Buddhist hermitess Orgyan Chokyi put it, the very body of woman is samsara. The words are not an indictment of women but an indictment of society itself. Thus the history of women solitaries is the story of multiple historical phenomena, but especially of hermits and women.

This view of music does not differ substantially in Confucius, who also subordinated music to state authority. Confucius describes music in more useful and artful detail: “Music is the form wherein tones are produced, because it takes its rise from the human heart when the heart is touched by the external world. Therefore when the heart’s chord of sorrow is touched, the sounds produced are sombre and forlorn; when the heart’s chord of satisfaction is touched, the sounds produced are languorous and slow; when the chord of joy is touched, the sounds produced are glowing and expansive; when the chord of anger is touched, the sounds produced are harsh and strong; when the chord of piety is touched, the sounds produced are simple and pure; and when the chord of love is touched, the sounds produced are sweet and gentle. These six kinds of emotion are not spontaneous, but are moods produced by impact from the external world.”

This description is informative but primarily intended to alert authorities to the intractable nature of music not controlled by the state. Emotions have to do with the heart, with private sentiments, necessitating that ancient kings will have “tried therefore to guide the people’s ideals and aspirations by means of li (i.e., music), establish harmony in sounds, regulate conduct by means of governance, and prevent immorality by means of punishments.” Linking music and immorality is a clue to Confucian response to perceived social behavior. Punishments for the wrong kind of music? Yes, continues Confucius: “Music, punishments, and government have a common goal, which is to bring about unity in the people’s hearts and carry out the principles of political order.”

Confucius is then presented as describing the idyllic past — when people were virtuous, weather was pleasant, mountains were beautiful, government was benign, ritual was fruitful, society was orderly, and music reflected this ideal. At the same time, he presents a psychological andncultural interpretation to understandable societal phenomena.

“Man is gifted with blood and breath and a conscious mind, but his feeling of sorrow and happiness and joy and anger depend on circumstances. His definite desires arise from reactions toward the material world. Therefore, when a sombre and depressing type of music prevails, we know the people are distressed and sorrowful. When a languorous, easy type of music with many long drawn-out airs prevails, we know that the people are peaceful and happy. When a strong and forceful type of music prevails, beginning and ending with a full display of sounds, we know that the people are hearty and strong. When a pure, pious and majestic type of music prevails, we know that the people are pious. When a gentle, lucid and quietly progressing type of music prevails, we know that the people are kind and affectionate. When lewd, exciting and upsetting music prevails, we know that the people are immoral.”

“When the soil is poor, things do not grow, and when fishing is not regulated according to the seasons, then fishes and turtles do not mature; when the climate deteriorates, animal and plant life degenerates, and when the world is chaotic, the rituals and music become licentious. We find then a type of music that is rueful without restraint and joyous without calm. . . .Therefore, the superior man tries to create harmony in the human heart by a rediscovery of human nature, and tries to promote music as a means to the perfection of human culture. When such music prevails and the people’s minds are led toward the right ideals and aspirations, we may see the appearance of a great nation.”

“Character is the backbone of our human nature, and music is the flowering of character. The metal, stone, string, and bamboo instruments are the instruments of music. The poem gives expression to our heart, the song gives expression to our voice, and the dance gives expression to our movements. These three arts take their rise from the human soul, and then are given further expression by means of the musical instruments. Therefore, from the depth of sentiment comes the clarity of form and from the strength of the mood comes the spirituality of its atmosphere. This harmony of spirit springs forth from the soul and finds expression or blossoms forth in the form of music. Therefore music is the one thing in which there is no use trying to deceive others or make false pretenses.”

In the end, then, music is for Confucius (and his interpolators) a key feature of public techniques promoting order and control — not unlike the role of music in Plato’s Republic.

Quotations from Yutang translation, Wisdom of Confucius.

But music is only one aspect of Plato’s project of the noble lie, thoroughly presented in Plato’s Republic. In order to control the people comprising a society, a blanket myth or lie must be presented by the authorities in order to convince the masses that certain principles of their control are good, necessary, and true. The lies are noble if they are believed, not so if they must be coerced. The process of control is made subtle and clever, without the need for active intervention or suppression. Authoritarian control is retained without controversy because (goes the lie) things are the way they are by nature — or so the people will believe. (Whether they believe the lie or simply conform defines the “nobility” of the myth.) In the eyes of the leaders, the order of society made noble is preferrable to the order being necessary. It comes to the same thing, though, just easier for the elite.

The noble lie is nicely illustrated in this piece by Existential Comics. The comic (featuring Plato and a hat-wearing Aristotle) goes a step further in identifying one of the mechanisms of the noble lie,namely the creation of “eternals” or “forms” or supposed “universals,” which further project the universe created by the noble lie. At this point, as the comic suggests, anything goes. And recalling the famous quote of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, the Western world has a desperately long way to go to shake off the intrinsic noble lie that dominates its premises, thinking, institutions, and pursuits.

URL: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/612

The succession of yellow flowers in summer is an affirmation of nature, beckoning a visit and a celebration of the moment. Here are yellow flowers directly seen and enjoyed this summer!

The earliest yellow flower to appear is the daffodil, emerging as soon as spring shakes off some of its cold and the sun beckons. Once planted as bulbs, how long will they continue to rise spontaneously in future years? Daffodils appearing in waning snow is a triumphant image! The daffodil was originally called narcissus, associated with the Greek myth that indirectly imputes a vanity to the flower’s will to attractiveness. How else to explain the connection between the ancient story of the young man gazing admiringly gazing at himself in the reflection of a pond and getting his name assigned to a flower! Narcissus (the person) must have been a bother to get along with. Truly, the flower is innocent of human vanities. Alas, the daffodil does not last long. It expends all its effort through a few weeks and just a little more before withering and dying. This sudden decline can be startling.

A rapid successor to daffodil is coltsfoot. When winter snow melts into mud, the tiny coltsfoot appears. Cultivated, coltsfoot grows a little larger, but wild it adapts to limiting circumstances and retains its modesty, a contrast to daffodil. Coltsfoot definitively announces the end of winter and the coming of spring, but does so almost imperceptively to the careless eye.

As coltsfoot wanes, dandelion emerges. Why do householders resent dandelion? The month of May in certain places is designated “No mow May” because those who nurture vast and insipid spaces of mono-cultured grass resent the appearance of dandelions and must be urged to patience. Dandelions are to be celebrated for their assertiveness, especially against the contrivance of those insipid lawns. The robust yellow flower is attractive and spreads vigorously. Matured, the florets turn into wispy white seedheads ready to blow away to discover new grounds, spreading to assure perennial success in the cycle of being.

The next yellow successor is the buttercup, which combines bright yellow petals in cup-shape to attract tiny bees. Or, at least, that seems their purpose. The very name of buttercup has been abused by chauvanistic insult. Bad enough, but the name (and color) is further associated with an animal product as well. The lowly yellow flower is treated with presumptuousness. Perhaps the notorious Narcissus originated the abusive use of the word “buttercup.”

Another yellow flower is the pansy. Pansies appear early in summer. They represent a stereotypical yellow flower, their regularity being a staple of colorful gardens and their hardiness a mark of constancy. Pansies may be too conventional for some exotic tastes but why should nature not be regular and dispense with the exotic? Pansies are quiet, confident, and reassuring.

A series of yellow-buttoned flowers, including the common daisy, switches the emphasis of yellowness from petals to centers or buttons. The expected obverse are flowers that display a dark button or center with brilliant yellow petals, such as Rudbeckia or black-eyed Susan. This year, because of warmer temps, the black-eyed Susan has already appeared, about a month earlier than in the past.

Another brilliant yellow flower is calendula, part of the aster family and further identified as a marigold. Calendula did not reappear this year. Admittedly, calendula can grow large, and orange calendula can look pompous and out of place in a modest garden. Similarly, too, sunflowers can take over the garden’s attention, except the more retiring perennial, which is smaller, simpler, and less colorful than, say, Van Gogh’s magnificent field sunflowers. Smallersunflowers can lack the spontaneity of the wilder, bigger counterparts. The smaller sunflowers is pale and seems to emerge simply out of courage.

A favorite yellow flower is the hardy arnica, with its historical association with health and healing, which lends the flower a certain panache. Arnica are bright, hardy, not too big, and a harbinger of good feeling, ever welcome in garden and beyond.

Finaly, then: mullien, the exotic of all the yellows. Mullien is considered a source of healthful benefit, but most people who use (for example) mullien oil may never have seen a mullien plant. The mullien’s appearance is certainly odd: a dense set of large thick green leaves at its base, called a rosette, from which ascends a branchless vertical pillar or stem of pale green, reaching a height of two meters or six feet! And keeps growing! Then, from atop the stem emerges a crowning spike adorned by small yellow flowers. This strange plant appears only biennially (every second year). Curiously, mullien appeared on the east side of the lot two years ago, and now on the south side. Another trick of mobility (if not birds or bees)! The sudden appearance of mullien, especially growing so quickly, is startling, intimidating, to be begrudged, perhaps, not hailed, given its odd appearance. Even its flowers, growing suddenly from miniaturized to not very full, are startling and not endearing. If nature has its quirks, then mullien is certainly one of them.

Two later-blooming yellow flowers are St. John’s Wort (or Hypericum), and goldenrod. Hypericum have the high honor of being a potent relaxant, but is often only to be seen by the industrious hiker in the depths of pine forests, not in home gardens, although its appearane would make an attractive garden addition. Why be confined to the forest, anyway? Nowadays some authorities want to decry St. John’s Wort as invasive, which only means that in the absence of another plant, this plant accommodates itself in the new space. Invasiveness has an ugly political sense; when nature provides a dwelling place, why exclude it?

Lastly is goldenrod, traditionally maligned as a ragweed or allergent. This is completely in error, and those perpetuating the myth should probably not be listened to as a source on aesthetics, either. Goldenrod appears in very late summer or in the first days of autumn, but as the planet warms, goldenrod makes its appearance far earlier. Slender stalks of six feet high or so emerge without fanfare, then yellow flowers attracting bees and insects follow. Besides their brilliant yellow, their attraction of pollinators is itself a commendation. Goldenrod fills empty spaces with a splendid presence.

Such, then, is yellow summer in one disparate flower garden. All of this flowering illuminated by, of course, the yellow of sunlight, which gives life to all.

Happy yellow summer!

Jakushitsu Genko (1290-1367) lived in the Bingo Province, today’s Okayama Prefecture. He is famous for classic reclusion, for — as editor-compiler Marian Ury puts it – “refusing summonses from both the shogunate and the imperial court.”

In Jakushitsu’s poem “Double Yang,” the poet writes that “Just now a mountain child comes to pluck chrysanthemums – He says to me: ‘Today is Double Yang!’” Notes Ury: ”Alone in his hermitage the poet must be reminded what day it is.”

Here is a reprsentative Jakushitsu poem:

“Living in the Mountains”
I don’t crave fame and profit or care that I’m poor;

Hiding in the depths of the mountains I keep far away the world’s dust;
The year has waned and the skies are cold: who’d be my companion?

The plum blossoms are adorned in moonlight — one branch, new.

Chugan Engetsu (1300-1375) grew up as an “unwanted child,” cared for by a wet nurse and grandmother and given to a temple at age six. He mastered Confucian classics and Buddhism, especially Zen. He wrote a controversial history of Japan suppressed by the imperial court, such that no copy survived. In his poem “Musing on Antiquity at Chin-lu,” Chugan reflects wistfully on the vanity of worldly ambition, all subject to impermanence:

“Musing on Antiquity at Chin-lu”
Its great men pass on without cease,
but the land is uncrushed, ungentled;
The Six Courts have crumbled utterly,
but the mountains and rivers abide.
The ancient sites of royal offices:
merchants’ and fishermen’s dwellings;
The sounds that lingered from precious groves:
woodsmen’s and oxherds’ songs;
The canyons are filled with endless clouds, constantly bearing rain;
On the Great River the winds are calmed, but waves still arise.
The fair beauties of those years — where are they now?
For the traveler from afar, in this vast view,
how much to admire and to mourn!

Another poem, “In the Evening of the Year”:

In the evening of the year, under chilly skies

When the wind is pure and the moon is white

I chant leisurely verses, playing the elegant hermit —
But sitting alone I sigh over dim shapes,

Unable to explain the world’s workings

Except that each life of itself has a limit:
If I can only divert the present moment
I not need to think of the time when this self has ended.

Gakuin Ekatsu (1367-1425)
Gakuin spent nearly a decade touring Zen monasteries in China, and when he returned to Japan lived in an island hermitage where he concentrated on composing poetry and compiling the poetry of the celebrated scholar and Zen master Zekkai Chūshin (1336-1405). Zekkai composed in Chinese, and his influence is reflected in Gakuin’s devoted compilation.

The pervasive attraction of music had long been identified by philosophers. Since the ancient Greek thinker Pythagoras, the earliest Western thinkers identify the sway of music by its affinity with time, sound, and the evocation of emotions. To cultural participants, music is a source of pleasure. Historically, however, this recognition of the power of music has always troubled those who prefered authority.

The philosophers of ancient Greece concur that music has two functions: an educational function in training the child (and the citizen) in spiritual discipline that reflects social conformity. Correctly composed, music served as an adjunct to the process of political integration. Music, furthermore, was a source of military cohesion and allegiance, further promoted by athletics. This theme is especially prominent in Plato.

But between Plato’s Republic and his late and last work Laws, Plato changed. In the Republic the educational function dominates, but in the Laws, Plato has given up on the educational and uplifting role of music to define music as subversive and dangerous. The uplifting element, he avers, is pleasure. “This is intolerable and blasphemous.“ (Jowett translation). Rather than use music to educate and uplift all citizens, as he once advocated,Plato drops the universality of education and restricts the function (and pleasure) of music to the highest class.

In the Laws, Plato states that “A lawgiver may institute melodies which have a natural truth and correctness without any fear of failure. To do this, however, must be the work of God, or of a divine person…. The fairest music is that which delights the best and best educated, and especially that which delights the one man who is pre-eminent in virtue and education.“

Plato had already hinted at this conclusion in the Republic, where music (rightly used) was reserved to warriors and philosopher-kings. Warrior education had the benefit of music supportive of athletics, while literature,essentially tales of warfare, had the benefitof inculcating martial sentiments. But music must be even more tightly controlled, and Laws goes further: “We must take it that the finest music is that which delights the best man, the properly educated, that above all, which pleases the one man who is supreme in goodness and education.”

Plato’s philosophical successor Aristotle essentially concurs. In his Politics, Aristotle concludes about music that: “Since music is a pleasure, and excellence consists in rejoicing and loving and hating rightly, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments, and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions.” Given the anciet Greek context, right judgment consists in the dispositions and actions ofthe ruling class and authorities.

The interpretation of music in the Western world after the ancient Greeks essentially remained the same. Music being originally defined as pleasure meant that the effect of music must continue to be circumscribed. With Christianity, this project could be accomplished because music could be made to serve belief, spirituality, theology, and liturgy. Thus, St. Augustine’s essay “De Musica” (“On Music”) safely assumes the absorption of music into church polity and only writes of music in Pythagorean terms of mathematics.

And while music, like thought in general, embracing more secular modes in early modern times, the notion of subordination to the the interests of the dominate class came to characterize Western music into the modern era. This is the context of baroque and early classical music that is seldom addressed versus the ostensible “pleasure orinciple” which the Greeks early defined. The structure of music presentation and performance was bound by patronage. Most music was performed to entertain patrons: barons, duchesses, princes, and queens, to provide background music (that is, pleasuere) to their breakfast, afternoon, dinner, party, or rest time. J. S. Bach attempted to reconcile these duties with religious-oriented music and to device compositions based on Pythagorean mathematics, but his less talented fellow-composers were more dutiful. Not until Vival (employed as a music teacher) and Beethoven (motivated by a sense of accomplishment to supercede the childhood trauma of his musician-father’s beatings) does music slough off is pragmatic function of entertaining the powerful.

With pop music, commercialism is the underlying motive, and rhythm is the dominant structure, with the lyrics of Eros dominating aethetics. Isn’t every set of lyrics either “woo-woo-woo” or “boo-hoo-hoo”? Pop music is reduced to the soundtrack of driving or exercising.

How to address the trouble with music? At a minimum avoiding the martial tones of many concertos and symphonies, the contrivances of rapid, frenetic, or repetitive phrases. Perhaps investigating the lives of composers in order to deduce their compositional motives and identify with their aesthetic interests. Or shifting to music not beautiful as manipulation but because it eschews emotion in favor of naturalness, impressions of nature rather than assumptions about pleasure. Or, perhaps, pursuit of Zen music and instrumentation. Or ambient music. Or, finally, silence.