One important thing I learned writing Avatar Emergency was that the tradition of Descent (Avatar) I reviewed in search of a relay for an electrate identity formation (a collective subject)--a Western equivalent of an encounter with the Absolute-- culminated in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a version native to America. Emerson condensed into his Self-Reliance (Transcendentalism) the entire tradition of communication between god and man, in versions both East and West. The insight was chastening, to some extent, in that the authority I relied on in AE, Nietzsche (the
