Wheat Head

"The Corn was Orient and Immortal Wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from Everlasting to Everlasting" (Thomas Traherne, Third Century, 3).

Symbolic of human states, wheat is hard-cased in the natural and civil. Both are chaff. So what is wheat if the forces together required to produce it are chaff and after it is produced it must die? That seems a little dramatic, but it's what seeds do. As itself, wheat was more acceptable than other grains as an altar bread because metaphor likened it to the body of Christ. Wheat, the essence of human life, "bears to a superlative degree both the agricultural and biblical connotations of being sown, fallen, crushed, buried, and then after harvest risen into life-giving bread that is broken and shared." So wheat is the individual.

Symptoms of the natural and civil in wilderness-society disease come from the discards that encase the body of the individual in its outer shells. These shells, which "thinking makes it so," these "mind-forged manacles" contribute to diseases of the wheat-like head scab, or Fusarium head blight, caused by scab-shriveled moldy seed from diseased heads. It sounds like Blake's "Sick Rose." All kinds of mechanisms predict the onset of head scab as well as the insect armyworm which hides around the base of plants during the day, spending the winter as a pupa in the soil. Wear boots? Did vegetation cause the compromise of earth's systems? Or was that its removal? These sorts of natural metaphor, new species tree and wheat, must reclaim their condition.

Following the natural, mutual bodies of external and internal need each other, the physical is indispensable in the production of the internal. Chaff makes wheat, but is cast off, disposed, which rounds out thousands of years of creaking poetry. The revived discard does not occur in nature any more than a reinhabited tortoise shell or the slough of any species, but reviving occurs in art (to compare the resurrection of dust before we see it). "I'm gonna shuffle off that coil, until I'm all unwound," the hardened outer body protects from opposition while seasons and rough weather bake out impurity, squeeze in ripeness in the botanical mimicry of a man. Chaff, the world, is shield and membrane to protect and foster growth with all forces of weather and drought. Vegetation depicts the human internal state.

From grain to tree, Psalm 1 he shall be as a tree. This topography assumes the natural. Outside under stars being flourishes. Such figures consume all writings: Homer, Psalms, Prophets. The fundamental rooting assembled in these legislative topographs swirls around the green tree planted by water. It might correct the thinking that the Good is a book, a night rising to contemplate law, the trouble of empyreal thought. Good is everywhere in the heaven and earth revealed with natural processes, not books. The heavens speak to effect a universal natural drama within, not outside natural forces mediated by day and night. There is no speech nor tongue in which their voice is not heard. Law in this context is a characteristic of the natural, not the human world. The righteous meditation beyond the page is virtue. Human botany applies a vegetative process of growth to the internal world, which allows that human progress is slow, not virtual, not obvious, not immediate. From seed to shoot to bud it blossoms over generations. Call it human photosynthesis.
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Passion for the natural must be sustained because the natural precedes the spiritual. Without the natural there is none. The ancients took spiritual topographies from the natural to describe other worldly places. Future topographies may be like these para-geographies, as one from Dante. There are obvious topographies of the Psalms, Book I (1-46), a spiritual landscape implicit in the ground the narrator walks of plateau and mountain. The Messianic peaks of Psalm 8, 16, 24, tower over the journeys of peril. These can be graphed. The future is and is not a thing like spiritual topography, but there is no futures market. Alternatives are cloudy where no one can see but the participants themselves. We call this succession destiny as a convenience after the fact. Advice given in the cloud is to pay no attention to such ideas, they are for the empyrean below.

We say "build the one," press the fingers of our hands together and bow, in jest, but in building a knowledge of future topography we cannot examine future direct. Taken as an example of everyday life, future is shot through with lights and storms from the outset. Natural phenomena symbolize opposites of the empyrean, confessions, misanthropies, sorrows, misalliances, sickness, desperations, joy, celebration, hope come from the same pen bound together by utterance. Extremes laid side by side typify the empyrean. Natural phenomena symbolize the human who wants to vision a topography of future. This is also the manner in which the immature writer matures, honesty in the face of a catalyzing life makes a narrator emerge like the wheat head whole and hard.

As a kind of glossary, topography of future comprises 1) the under cloud empyrean, 2) the cloud, 3) the heaven. This empryrean comprises two standard deviations of the mean who by accident and birth have suffered and strived, but not enough. The future they aspire is in a cloud into which they cannot see. In the cloud a small fraction of these struggle with 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, and are, compared with the empyrean, superior. They struggle, refine, toughen, working toward emergence under the stars. The few percentages of empyrean in the cloud are fewer in the heaven, but this is never supposed a natural selection of the fit. Heaven's topography has envelopes, pitfalls, winds, accidents and injuries so that mastery cannot be predicted. It is consuming, after that it is nothing. Everything is paid to get it and it is everything once obtained.