Experience Without A Code

Corpses in the Garden: Knowing what I know about the history of my country, it is often difficult for me to fathom how my fellow countrymen have shaped their views. I have come to believe that they have created a mythical America that is not a real place. The perceived necessity of substituting a fantasy world for the real world suggests there is something terribly wrong with the American psyche===>Charles Sullivan

But Charles, it never was "the real world," and that which is "terribly wrong with the American psyche" is the long-held belief in this fundamentalist fantasy.







"Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all ..."===>Ralph Waldo Emerson






The American individualist, puritanical tradition - of the search for authenticity, for an experience without a code (Barthes), to - in the words of Percy Miller - "confront face to face, the physical universe ... without the intermediacy of ritual, of ceremony," and, he might have added, language - is alive and well ...

Still, let the corpses in our gardens rise. They are trying to tell us something that may make our survival possible.