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.

Wilderness / Paradise Types

A false order casts wilderness and paradise as opposites. Jung's archetypes of the Shadow and Child are set against each other. The Shadow Archetype is the supposed wilderness, the unconscious where personal identity dissolves. In this image of "wilderness" it is said that "Hansel and Gretel were led into the woods and were trapped. Knights discover dragons, ogres, and thieves in the woods. Robin Hood is at home in the wild. Dragons sail the sea of a watery wilderness." On the other hand the Child Archetype is supposed a pattern of new beginnings, a paradise. "It promises that Paradise can be regained. Child images like the New Year's Babe obviously derive from this archetype. So do the golden ring and the golden ball and most flower and circle related images." The wilderness paradise opposition occurs in the same system that argues creativity is a mask of bi-polar disorder, that if you're really creative you must be a bi-polar mad genius. The cure for Jung's shadow, the supposed wilderness "dark side" of the personality, is socialization, social adjustment (4), an order that regulates, contains wilderness. Socialization thus supposedly cleanses that genius of his refusal to conform, to reject as "irrelevant stimuli" the causes of his disorder. Thus Bonhoeffer can be induced to remain in New York at Union Seminary and not go back to Germany where his intransigence made him go. Geniuses can thus keep their ears with Van Gogh if they cultivate proper order.

Professors and clinicians however, with no experience of the divine Afflatus, but stay completely indoors,  tend to consider as aberration anything outside the norm, hence bi-polar. The wilderness of wood and wild said to oppose paradise flower and child thus resembles the so called bi-polar disposal of genius. But the true shadow of the supposed "dark side" is conformity to this civilization that urges socialization. Call it Civilization and its Discontents.

[Wilderness is freedom from the world. Please refer here to  Bear]

If civilization redefined means deaf from ipod, dumb from ignorance, blind from video, and instinctual freedom is the desire not to kill but to escape civilization's suffocating blanket of electrosmog to breathe or feel the sun and see the stars, then advanced civilization replaced with the virtual is a paradigm shift of imagination to deformation. That takes us from the 19th century to the 21st. That takes us to the alters. You don't want to be without an Iphone.

If we did not live in it we would suppose this fiction, the imagination delimited to a Yahoo search. It was once said to Pennsylvania separatists who did not wear the prophylactic of civilization, "be ye separate." Chaung Tzu has said much the same thing, "free yourself from the world." The decades after the nineteenth century progressively validate this.

End note: Add that the appeal to social media for individual standards, asking friends what breakfast cereal they use in order to choose your own, with all such appeals to groups urged by commercial designs, together with the loss of self-esteem measured in those demographics, argue the loss of individuality reaches epidemic proportion. Thus socialization regulates wilderness the more. But the Bonhoeffer resistance to Hitler, the Mennonite resistance to the world in favor of some other, inner value, is no longer the ethical crisis it was (see for example the section, "Moral Confidence," here). "What would you have done under Hitler?" or "could you sacrifice your life?" is reduced to whether or not you dare disconnect from the electronic Friend mind and its cell, the new false paradigm of wilderness / paradise. Some reckoning is at hand, but it starts out unheroically.