Romantic Notions

[lucretius]

I recall in College Station there was a lingerie store called "Romantic Notions"--one of those destined-to-die little local shops with tacky frillyunderthings crowded on bad mannequins around the window, and a bad TV commercial with a woman with some unreconstructed Germanic accent saying, "Do YOU have a ROMANtic NOtion?"

Now I'm knee deep in romantic notions, and no satin and maribou in sight.

Some romantic notions:

• Children are semi-unnatural or hypernatural little elves, wiser than adults, because they have not forgotten the lessons taught to them before they were born.  "Trailing clouds of glory" from their pudgy little infant feet and that.  Innocence is wiser than experience ("which is to say, failure" as Thoreau will remind us).
  
• Solitary and meditative young men, who go off on sometimes self-destructive quests inward.  Right now I'm reading Ethan Brand, where aforementioned SAMYM (or Sam I am for short) goes off in quest of THE UNPARDONABLE SIN.
• Entirely mixed up senses of individuality and the community, where the crippling isolation of young future writers left home with their books sometimes becomes a sense of their horrible sinful outsideness (in Hawthorne) or their righteous self-reliance (in Thoreau) or their utopian hopes for perfect friendship (in Emerson) or sense of monstrous unnaturalness (in Margaret Fuller's autobiography) or longing for orgiastic or metaphysical unity with some All that transcends the messy and unkind All you find out in the world (most of those with a mystical bone in their body--Whitman is a big example).
• Love of a woman (or man, for Whitman) is the ideal quest for beauty leading you to heaven or metaphysical enlightenment--best accomplished if the woman never really liked you (see Dante) or dies (see Poe).  The dichotomy of heaven and earth sometimes leads to fear of contamination via sex or physicality (in Hawthorne or sometimes Eliot) or gets wholly confused or unified (as in Whitman's godlike young men).
• Nature is a mirror, which shines your face back at you (Emerson), though that face might actually be Allah (Rumi) or the same as everyone else's face leading to your death (Poe)
• Truth is beauty, Beauty truth (Keats) which may mean that the symmetrical and consistent and moving theory is always right (see Poe).
• Reason may be something keeping you from the truth. But acceptance of conventionality always is.
  
• God is in pieces; you may be one of them.  This could be alarming or comforting or heretical.
• Truth is Somewhere Else.  You are surrounded by shadows--metaphysical bunny puppets held in front of the divine spotlight.  Or maybe not.  But definitely things are more complicated or simple than you imagine.
• You probably can't handle the truth, but you certainly can't tell it simply.

Now I'm thinking of a store that sells some of these.  Ideally with maribou trim. Or Ideal maribou trim, existing only in a dim reflection of a perfection where collarbones of mannequins are, seen in the light of eternity, bright beyond all telling.