Venturing upon Dizzy Heights

This book assembles lectures and essays on literature (William Wordsworth, Walter Benjamin, Chinese mountain poetry, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Tao Te Ching), art (Paleolithic cave art, Vincent Van Gogh, American landscape painting), and Japanese poetry forms (haiku, haibun, tanka) that were originally presented and published between 2000 and 2007. The essays identify strategies to counter the so-called postmodern condition. Matters of will, ethics, and consciousness are examined in comparative contexts with the aim of formulizing models of enlightened states of being and their aesthetic expressions. This study focuses on Wordsworths rainbow epiphany; Walter Benjamins aura and monad; Chinese mountain poetrys cosmic emptiness; Nietzsches Hyperborean; Paleolithic cave arts transpersonal expression; Van Goghs dizzy heights of natural beauty; American landscape painters depiction of the sublime; haikus absolute metaphor epiphany; and tankas connection between natural beauty and erotic feeling. The collection is a re-examination of Ralph Waldo Emersons fundamental unity between humanity and nature, as well as an examination of often-unmediated affective experience and its expression in this context through literature and art.