The beautiful and the sublime... Robinson Jeffers

The beautiful Tor House in Carmel, stones quarried by hand by Jeffers...

This past Monday, the group loaded into the vans and headed to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California (south of Monterey) for an in depth look into the life of the revered California poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). Jeffers, an academic child prodigy (by his teens he could read and speak German, French, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek) was the son of a doctoral degree-holding Presbyterian minister who taught Biblical studies extensively at colleges in antebellum America. Jeffers' mother Annie was a direct descendant of Jonathan Edwards, famed Calvinist and Puritan reformer.

In spite of his rigid academic and stringent religious upbringing, Robin found himself at odds with his father's religion and ultimately adopted (although he seems to portray it more as "accepted" or "understood") a personal religion of "Calvinist pantheistic inhumanism" ("inhumanism" being an intentional distinction by Jeffers from the transcendentalist notion of humanism seen throughout the work and philosophies of Emerson and Whitman). Jeffers saw humanity's collective sense of consciousness as the intangible thing that allowed for our unique experience of "beauty and the sublime" while also distancing us hopelessly and terminally from our "true" and more fundamentally animal nature. The hawks soaring overhead his Tor House or the granite rocks on the Carmel cliff shore had, for Jeffers, a closer association with God or oneness or eternity and more to do with truthfulness and authenticity than the other major philosophical schools of thought championed by others in his time.

Jeffers' notion of the holistic ecological framework (pantheism...) of life put him in close touch with the beauty and significance of everything around him. For quite a while, I have grappled with the notion of distinguishing the "beautiful" from the "sublime" (thinking back to my lit crit classes as an undergrad) and I think Jeffers (and the killer Jeffers anthology of poetry I purchased from the Tor House bookstore!) and his Hawk Tower (and a recent excursion to Big Sur) have finally created a palpable image in my head that helps to distinguish one from the other as well as clarifying the importance of "the experience of the sublime" in life. I'm paraphrasing in a major way from the Jeffers anthology:

Beauty: think "maternal"--warmth, sunshine, security, with a profound sense of serenity... e.g. where Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" from Lyrical Ballads might take place:

freakin' beautiful, right?

Another type of beauty... HOME...

Part 2:

Sublimity: think "paternal"--steely, robust, powerful, and a profound sense of what Steinbeck called "a violence just below the surface..." In other words, something breathtaking but also terrifying.

The waves of Big Sur are gorgeous, but they will kill you... 

Jeffers would applaud this family (front center)... you do need to experience the sublime... just at safe distance...

Jeffers seemed to celebrate the idea of living perpetually on the verge of the sublime... so much so that he built his Tor House and Hawk Tower on the edge of a rocky precipice (that leads down to the Carmel seaside). Literally and figuratively, Jeffers "lived on the edge."

By maintaining some proximity to scenes of sublimity, we are reminded of how insignificant we are... an experience which can, in Jeffers' own terminology, unhumanize (lead us away from our individual sense of importance, our ego) us to a degree. 

Much like buddhist monks might reject all material belongings in an attempt to ready themselves for higher states of enlightenment, Jeffers seems to ask us to contemplate and appreciate the smallness of "the self" and the importance of situating ourselves within the world (the "I" to the "we"?). The birds (hawks!) have it right... no contemplation of mortality or meaning, just experience and acceptance.

Jeffers and his poetry were (in spite of early celebration of his work and a front page feature in Time magazine) ultimately eschewed by canon scholars due to his controversial rejection of American military involvement and open criticism of the U.S. in World War II. In addition to his political vociferousness, much of Jeffers' work is dark, brooding, and melancholy (depending how you view his perspective) and it seems likely that because of these "issues" he has been widely ignored outside of California's literary scene (with a few exceptions, of course).

Jeffers' tribute to his wife, quarried all by hand, and a major feat of stonemasonry, is his "Hawk Tower," a massive stone structure (massive when you realize it is hand built!) that is a sublime experience in  itself... from the exterior, it seems almost menacing and powerful in its medieval grandiosity... and once up on the balcony and finally at the nadir of the structure on the roof, it is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying... a perfect (at least for a city dwelling land-lubber like me) lesson in sublimity.

From the beauty of his family home (Tor House) to the sublimity of Hawk Tower, the property is a must-see for literary folk of any ilk... prior to this institute, I had never been exposed to Jeffers and I'm quite glad I did....

While the Steinbeck connection is arguably tenuous (the two men never physically met to my knowledge an they do not really seem to share much in the way of literary structure) in a way, Jeffers was the Steinbeck of Carmel (even though he was not raised in California) and the two men did share a penchant for pantheistic philosophy. As a man steeped in the land (quite literally, having moved tons of granite boulders in his day) Jeffers said that the Carmel coast reminded him of Homer's Ithaca... A fitting scene for a rather epic life. I wonder what Jeffers would say about Carmel today--strolling from expensive boutique to art gallery to upscale restaurant--and what he would have to say about the transformations it has undergone. I imagine he would avert his gaze seaward, out toward oblivion.

The sublime Hawk Tower... 

Quarried by hand from the beach below....