Erdgeist

English, altogether Germanic in its bones and sinews, took on infusions of its father-tongue in further installments. With the psychopomps and psychogogues of the Viennese age, for example, the Anglo-Saxon bastard child adopted (co-opted?) words like schadenfreude and angst, along with secondhand Latin imports like anima and superego. Words like zeitgeist and the rarer zeitnot and zugzwang (and zusammen, for the organische chemists) duly joined the throng. But the not-so-surprising fact is that much of the German remains understandable, and some of it is pretty universal.

Take for example the erdgeist of Paracelsus (he who once said, "All substances are poisons.") Like all the other geists, the erdgeist is a spirit (cf. poltergeist). Whereas the zeitgeist is the prevalent spirit of the time in which it manifests, the erdgeist is the dominant spirit of the place which it represents.

All that went through my mind as I was listening to this song. It's an old song by Jefferson Starship, and it's about Los Angeles in the early 1970s. The lyrics are inspired, the music pounds a hole in your head, and you are left wondering (unless you do a bit of research) why Marconi plays the mamba.

And there are many other examples of the kind of music which summons more of the erdgeist than the zeitgeist. One of my particular favourites is Billy Joel's New York State of Mind, a moving tribute to a man's hometown (and what a hometown it is!) And there was this very old song, which unaccountably brought a tear to my eyes. Liverpool fans will recognize the group – after all, they came up with You'll Never Walk Alone.

That's when I realised: here where I am, there is no real erdgeist. We are culturally adrift, in an empty space. And the moment we sense an evolving erdgeist, we make it silly and commercial, trendy, nifty, flashy – all the things that kill the ephemeral realities of the hidden world.