A Piece of Glass

Hello, world! I'm guessing that is how you start such things in the blog world, in the internet world, or maybe in the entire world for that matter. Say hello to everyone you meet, or don't meet, and hope they tune in to your wordy banterings on who knows what the subject of the day turns out to be.

But now that we have our hellos out of the way, I do hope you'll tune in for a little, and after you tune in, I hope you stay around for a little longer than that. And please, please feel free to comment on anything you see...

And now let's get down to it: Emerson. Yes, the guy from a long time ago who wrote a whole bunch of words down and made it sound all poetic and now it's put into humongous anthologies that cost the college student priceless dollars, just so they can read about what he thought about everything. Ok, maybe I paint a skewed picture. Really, I like Emerson a lot. As I was reading "The Poet," I underlined, starred, and "yes-ed!" various aspects of every single page. His prose is like poetry, and how fitting, then, for him to be talking about the poet.

And just so you, the world, knows, I was having a little bit of trouble sifting through this dense body of sonorous language to get at the deeper question: what is an author? Emerson had definitive views, mostly that the poet is the quasi-divine seer. And once sentence there opened my eyes: he says, "the poet turns the world to glass." Ah, that was beautiful. And what is an author anyway? Emerson, as with many others of the Transcendentalist Movement, believed that the poet intuitively found meaning in all things, and then articulated that to the rest of the world who could not see with their eyes.

But please, let me go back to the poet turning the world to glass. Glass... I just used the amazing Google Image Finder to locate pictures of glass. And I forgot all that word encompasses. Clear glass, smoked glass, opaque glass, colored glass. There are the stained glass windows of the orthodox churches, or the precious Opaline glass of the 1800s in France. Glass used for windows and doors, glass used for laboratorial purposes, glass used all the time, everywhere. Glass is there, right around each of us. And yet, the poet, with his words, turns the rest of the world to glass. But as you can see from the numerous types of glass (and I have only listed a few), this can also mean many different things. I think Emerson was saying that the poet turns the world into a clear looking-glass, stripping away any film from the glass, wiping off the smudges and the smears and the fog. He lets us see through, see what we have never seen before. He brings to light the beauty of the world. And lets think about it... or rather, let's look at it. Here are two different pictures, the first artistic glass, and the second is red liquid glass.

Isn't that gorgeous? You see, glass can be seen through. It can be clear. But it can also be breathtakingly beautiful. So a poet does not just make something clear, but he brings to light a thing's beauty. He weaves, fashions, blows (if you will allow me some "glass" talk) the words into form, creating a thing never seen or heard or thought of before. He (or she... please forgive my non-inclusiveness. I just read Emerson and have taken on a few of his writing intricacies... albiet "he" always refers to both sexes) forms it into something the rest of the world does not know. He paints the world in colors, beautifully, artfully. And "the melodies of the poet ascend and leap and pierce into the deeps of infinite time"(Emerson, "The Poet").

Yes, the poet turns the world to glass, a beautiful, intricate, colorful world of glass. A timeless world of glass. Like sea glass, on the waves of the ocean. Ah, but that is an entirely different train of thought...