Hi everybody. I love the pine tree as it
does not change its color(spirit) in the wind or in the cold. Let
my spirit learn from it. So please call me Red Pine. Thanks to
Priya Kurian and Stefanie Rixecker for the creation of the list.
I am delighted for the presence of so many wonderful people.
In the former posting, Doug Henwood questioned Roxane
Lalonde's subliminal feeling on landscape. Moreover, he connected
to the "romantic sublime feeling" with precursor of Nazis. He
kindly posted another explanation.
Contrary to his posting, the Holocaust began when we could not
find any sublime in the world. According to my recent reading, the
novelist William Styron and George Orwell, and the social
philosopher Hannah Arendt, in their discussion of the Nazi
systematic murders have each come to the conclusion that evil is
not what one expects: "cruelty, moral pervasion,..but the deepest
evil is precisely that which make it work:its programmed,
single-minded monotonous efficiency, bureaucratic formalism...most
of all, formalism without anima."
Moreover, my reading of Eric Fromm (Escape from Freedom),
Wilhelm Reich(Mass Psychology of Fascism), who testified the
psychodynamic emergence of Nazism, do not support his arguments.
In all, the evil is the "anesthetized heart." Problems has
started when our "iron cage" of bureaucracy made our world a "dead
poet society." We stay asa mindless consumers in the lack of the
quality in the product we use. Drugs, alcohols,
violence, and despair appear in the absence of the sublime.
Only when we feel sick of the ugliness of "rational politics"
(Michael Suzanne) do our eyes open to see the dimensions of beauty
in the world. This sense of beauty is more than subjective
experience. Certainly we experience splendid beauty in the
"climax" ecological community. Didn't Leopold include the beauty
of the eco-system as the criteria in his land ethic?
Let me quote from the Navajo chant:
"With beauty before me, I walk
With beauty behind me, I walk
With beauty above me, I walk
With beauty below me, I walk
Red Pine from Cleveland
