Emerson and Black Holes

Every time I teach Emerson, I'm struck by the difficulty of articulating what it is, exactly, that he's writing about. I mean both the difficulty that I have in articulating it, and the difficulty that he has.

Of course, Emerson himself describes it in "Self-Reliance" as "that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go." By his own definition, he's working with something that is undefinable. It's something intuitive; therefore, it's something that comes before all teaching; therefore, it's something that comes before language; and therefore, it's something that cannot be expressed.

Instead, it's as if Emerson's attempts to define the intuition, what he calls the genius, work like the attempts of scientists to define black holes. No light escapes the black hole, so it cannot be seen, but by tracing the edges, by finding the boundaries of light, we attempt to know the thing we cannot peer into.

Whitman writes, "You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself."