[Illustration]
Particles of falling stars, coming to nothing. The air pits them, eating
out the softer parts. Sometimes one strikes the earth or falls flaming
into Lake Michigan with a great hiss and roar. And if the lawless mob
that rules Ireland with its orderly courts and still more orderly minds
will not desist it must be crushed by England. So that to realize the
futility of American men intent upon that virtue to be found in
literature, literature, that is, of the traditional sort as known in
France and Prussia--to realize how each serious American writer in turn
flares up for a moment and fizzles out, burnt out by the air leaving no
literary monument, no Arc de Triomphe behind him, no India subdued--To
realize this it is necessary to go back to the T'ang dynasty where
responsibility rested solely on the heads of the poets--_etc., etc_...
Or better still why not seek in Aleppo or Jerusalem for the strain to
save us.
America is lost. Ah Christ, Ah Christ that night should come so soon.
And the reason is that no American poet, no American man of letters has
taken the responsibility upon his own person. The responsibility for
what? There is the fire. Rush into it. What is literature anyway but
suffering recorded in palpitating syllables? It is the quiet after the
attack. Picking a sliver of bone from his mangled and severed leg he
dipped it in his own gore and wrote an immortal lyric. Richard Cœur de
Lion shot through the chest with an iron bolt wrote the first
English--no, French, poem of importance. What of democratic Chaucer? He
was only a poet but Richard was a man, an adventurer, a king. The half
mad women rush to impregnate themselves against him. And this is
literature. This is the great desirable. Soaked in passion, _baba au
rhum_, the sheer proof of the spirit will do the trick and America will
be King. Up America. Up Cœur de Lion. Up Countess Wynienski the queen
of Ireland.
Polyphemus took first one shape then another but Odysseus, the wise and
crafty, held firm. He did not let go but Polyphemus did. In fact the God
could not exist without Odysseus to oppose him.
Why man, Europe is YEARNING to see something new come out of America.
In a soup of passion they would see a little clam. Let us smile. This
is--
The danger is in forgetting that the good of the past is the same good
of the present. That the power that lived then lives today. That we too
possess it. That true novelty is in good work and that no matter how
good work comes it is good when it possesses power over itself. Europe's
enemy is the past. Our enemy is Europe, a thing unrelated to us in any
way. Our lie that we must fight to the last breathe is that it is
related to us.
We are deceived when they cry that negro music is the only true American
creation. It IS the only true from the European point of view.
Everything is judged from that point of view. But to us it is only new
when we consider it from a traditional vantage. To us it means a
thousand things it can never mean to a European. To us only can it be
said to be alive. With us it integrates with our lives. That is what it
teaches us. What in hell does it matter to us whether it is new or not
when it IS to us. It exists. It is good solely because it is a part of
us. It is good THEREFORE and therefore only is it new. Everything that
is done in Europe is a repetition of the past with a difference.
Everything we do must be a repetition of the past with a difference. I
mean that if negro music is new in an absolute sense---which it is not
by any means, if we are to consider the Ethiopian--the probable
Ethiopian influence in Egypt--then it is new to Europe as it is to
us.
It is not necessary for us to learn from anyone but ourselves--at least
it would be a relief to discover a critic who looked at American work
from the American viewpoint.
We are a young nation and have not had time or opportunity to catch up
with nations that had ten centuries start of us. We still labor under
the handicap of our Puritan lineage....
We shall not be able to plead childhood any longer.
Eric the Red landed in Providence, Long Island, and was put in a cage so
everyone could see him.
This sort of stupidity we have to combat. I am not talking of the mass
of plumbers and carpenters. I am talking of the one thing that is
permanent. Spirits. I am saying that America will screw whom it will
screw and when and how it will screw. And that it will refrain from
screwing when it will and that no amount of infiltration tactics from
"superior civilizations" can possibly make us anything but bastards.
We are only children when we acknowledge ourselves to be children.
Weight of culture, weight of learning, weight of everything such as
abandon in any sense has nothing to do with it. We must first isolate
ourselves. Free ourselves even more than we have. Let us learn the
essentials of the American situation.
We who despise the blackguards in the old sense. We too are free. Free!
We too, with paddles instead of turbines will discover the new world. We
are able. We are kings in our own right.
We care nothing at all for the complacent Concordites? We can look at
that imitative phase with its erudite Holmeses, Thoreaus, and Emersons.
With one word we can damn it: England.
In Patagonia they kick up the skulls of the river men out of the dust
after a flood. In Peru, in Machu Pichu the cyclopean wall on the top of
the Andes remains to rival the pyramids which after all may have been
built of blocks of some plaster stuff of which we have lost the
combination.
I know not a land except ours that has not to some small extent made its
title clear. Translate this into ancient Greek and offer it to Harvard
engraved on copper to be hung in the waterclosets which freshmen use.
And why do they come to naught? these falling stars, etc.
It has been generally supposed that among the peoples of the earth the
age of maturity comes earliest in the tropics and increases gradually as
one goes northward. But in North America this rule has one striking
exception. It is not rare among Esquimau women that they have their
first child at 12 and children born before the mothers were 11 have been
recorded. Point Barrow Alaska 300 miles north of the Arctic circle.
But the early maturity of the Esquimau girls is strictly in accord with
the supposition that the hotter the environment the earlier the
maturity. To all intents and purposes the typical Esquimau lives under
tropical or subtropical conditions. The temperature of the Esquimau
house indoors frequently rises to 90°. When they go out the cold air
does not have a chance to come in contact with the body, except for the
limited area of the face. When an Esquimau is well dressed his two
layers of fur clothing imprison the body heat so effectively that the
air in actual contact with his skin is always at the temperature of a
tropical summer. He carries the climate about with him inside his
clothes.
When an Esquimau comes inside such a house as the one I have been
speaking of he strips off all clothing, immediately on entering, except
his knee breeches, and sits naked from the waist up and from the knees
down. Great streams of perspiration run down the face and body and are
being continually mopped up with handfuls of moss.
The effect of the overheated houses is more direct upon the women than
the men for they remain indoors a large part of the winter.
Otherwise in North America among the Indians as one goes north from
Mexico toward the arctic sea the colder the average temperature of the
air that is in contact with the body through the year, the later the
maturity of the girls. The most northerly of the Atabasca Indians appear
to suffer a great deal from the cold.
The Dog Rib and Yellow Knife Indians are often so poorly clad that they
have to be continually moving, for if they stop for even half an hour at
a time their hands become completely numb.
In the evenings their wigwams are cheerful with a roaring fire but while
one's face is almost scorched with the heat of the roaring flames one's
back has hoar-frost forming upon it. At night the Indians go to sleep
under their blankets covering up their heads and shivering all night.
The average age of maturity of the girls of these tribes is as high or
higher than that of north European whites.
But north from the Slavey and Dog Rib Indians to the Esquimau country
the conditions suddenly change. One comes in contact with a people that
has a system of living almost perfectly adapted to a cold climate, while
the northern Indians have a system almost unbelievably ill adapted to
the conditions in which they live.
In Puritan New England they wrapped the lover and his lass in one
blanket and left them before the dying hearth after the family retired.
There was a name for it which I have forgotten.