The Opaque Air of Consciousness

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth, until he has made his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem, which I confide in as an inspiration!

And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live, opaque, though they seem transparent, and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they may discern from fools and satans.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is his 1844 essay, The Poet is certainly connected to the opaque air of poetry. When we use our innate senses we become the poets we know ourselves to be. It’s no longer necessary to worship what lies above the clouds for it is our own consciousness that reconcile our lives and renovate nature in terms of our awareness of it.

We could look at figures like Christ, Mohammed, Buddha and all the influential figures we worship in our religious beliefs as poets for they steady truth until we sense our own. Churches certainly used a collective ego consciousness to hide some of these truths for control purposes and the individual self gets lost in the word which is a fabrication or fragments of the inspiration that exists within our collective consciousness.

Dominance and control for economically sound religious reasons transforms ego consciousness into a separate entity that dictates inferiority, but the inferiority of nature and the poet are not tarnished by religious principles. Life is not a noise in the pure air of opaque truth; it is an innate sense that clearly understands that religious concepts keep tribes together, provide social structure, and helps insure physical survival.

It is the awareness of self that opens the clouds and breaks the chains so the poet within us all discerns the foolishness, but the necessity of fragmented religious beliefs.