RWE

Another reason I dig Ralph Waldo Emerson is that he dug up his wife's corpse.

There is dispute over this fact but I prefer to believe it. Because he was a thinker and a searcher and an intense man.

Robert D. Richardson, in his biography on RWE, says there is an entry from Emerson's diary dated a year and two months after his first wife's death that "indicates Emerson dug up his beloved's grave to behold her rotting body." "Here is a man who........... has really and truly death considered, looking at it under the stars, under the stars on a deep dark night."

The man was trying in every way he could to understand death. He was known to have a powerful craving for direct, personal, unmediated experience. He insisted that "one should strive for an original relation to the universe. Not a novel relation, just one's own."

This reminds me of William Blake and Jim Morrison. Going beyond the norm, going beyond what is expected and considered normal, to get to an intense knowing.

I don't find it ghoulish. I don't think he was twisted to do that. He so grieved his wife's death that he was desperately searching for ways to understand it.

The biographer compares what Emerson did to one aspect of Hinduism which involves those who renounce the world and practice asceticism - self denial as a measure of personal and spiritual discipline. Within this discipline are those called Saivite sadhu. One of their rituals is to smear crematory ashes on their body and to carry around human skulls. This is intended to show they are beyond the terror inspired by the transitoriness of the world.

Our rituals towards death are antiseptic and probably rooted in our deep desire to ignore the inevitable.

We probably need more direct, personal, and unmediated experience in every facet of our lives to truly live.