Robinson Jeffers was a consistent advocate for the viewpoint he called Inhumanism.
Expounded over the whole of his body of work, Jeffers' conviction was that the evil and degradation wrought by humanity is nothing when compared to the vast, enduring beauty of the world itself. And that these human things were no more than a "transient sickness" that would quickly pass.
This viewpoint is put very explicitly in his poem Carmel Point:
... As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
Clearly Jeffers saw inhumanism as a positive kind of psychology: in becoming more connected to the actual reality of the world, people could be inspired towards calm and confidence, overcoming the worry that comes out of our trivial human concerns.
In the featured quote Shaky Tom realises the same point, although unfortunately it is in retrospect. My ruin was the horror of the human world: to think that the world embraces only human things. Seeing too late the relief he would have found had he thought to look past the tawdry edifices of humanity.
Because the the beauty of the world is often terrible, Inhumanism requires the courage to look unflinchingly at some terrible things. In his poem Rearmament Jeffers describes the build-up to WWII in terms of its awful beauty - the grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass - even as he admits that it may seem monstrous to admire the tragic beauty they build.
But Jeffers' moral courage and his instinct for beauty are always going to prevail:
...The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.
In the end this all comes back to what Jeffers calls the "Divine Superfluousness" of creation, the beauty that extends past limited human conceptions to encompass the sharp and the violent and the deadly.
So that even the devastation of a wildfire immediately brings beauty in the form of birds of prey, descending to gorge themselves on the hapless victims, so that even "the destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than mercy."
P. Julian
10 July 2018
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