Man of Peace at War with the Divided Self

So if Pennsylvania Dutch art is a product of "a spirit of mirth, of play...a love of beauty and a fantastic impulse to embellish" painted furniture, carved wood or Christmas cookies cut "in hundreds of designs," or inlays, embroideries of "glee that only a man at peace with life can relish" (Frederick S. Weiser in The Pennsylvania German Fraktur of The Free Library of Philadelphia, 1976), xv), may we say that the man of peace was at war with the divided self imaged in his alienation from nature? The man of peace at war may be the genius of his muse.

Dominant eighteenth century English-American culture saw nature as a mine, for exploitation, in spite of the phrase in the Declaration of "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," but the lily age of the German peaceniks celebrated nature for itself in behalf of Christ, which today might mean legislating protection for the whale because God loves it, a Pennsylvania Dutch conservation of the biosphere. It was once thought that the first principle of creative art and life among these peculiar people was "the divining of nature" (Stoudt), a beating of swords (words) into plough shares as a shorthand of that paradigm. "Peculiar" is a compliment connoting unworldly, uncommercial. Substitute the sword with the plow, commercial exploitation with conservation, and electric companies will be decommissioning dams in this spirit to restore riparian habitat (Fossil Creek, AZ) when earth enters its final age of peace.

The Pennsylvanians as an antidote to the destruction of nature treasured it so within to foster the underpinnings of a more caring world against the outer division that transformed everything to itself. This liberation came from a people Franklin called brutish, not elegant, who rejected the outer ethic of exploitation and "original sin" of slavery now corrected by presidents. But commissions of an even greater original sin than slavery were and are committed along salmon coasts and prairie, a sin against nature as old as Cotton Mather's infection of new worlds.

Two views of paradise and wilderness occupy the outward surface that begs to be called by these analogies, a corn field resurrection. The literal is thus made symbolic, as in such transformation as Van Gogh makes of field and sky. Alternate, analogous realities come to pass as different poets touch paradise. Blake in Songs, Roethke, The Far Field, slightly demented, Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), T. H. White, The Book of Merlyn, Ted Hughes, Barry Lopez, Aesop celebrate the inhabitants not ourselves. Lopez in Lessons from the Wolverine, from Field Notes, empathizes the living and in Apologia the dead. T. H. White's instructions of the animals to Arthur in Merlyn must emerge from his translation of the 12th century bestiary, The Book of Beasts.

Taken as a premise that to name a thing you must understand it, dream it, meditate it like St. Francis, the naming of animals is not what a government biologist does in thinning wild horse herds and elk to protect cattle. That is imposing a false order on the real, an idea masquerading human good as a care of the wild. Preconditions of wilderness require thoughts free of such hindrance, fatigue, prejudice, greed. The Pennsylvanians had their own image myths of the natural which seem accompaniments to the archetype of the child, viz. paradise, much as the mobile above the crib, the doll and the stuffed animal accompany the child. You can see them in This is the Way I Pass My Time. Ellen J. Gehret. Show towel decorations, The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest. Monroe H. Fabian. This Teaching I Present: Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse Schools. Mary Jane Lederach Hershey. Fraktur Writings and Folk Art Drawings of the Schwenkfelder Library Collection. Dennis K. Moyer.

Paradise and wilderness are mutuals not opposites. Glimpses of these ideas in American Indian notions of natural relation are unbelievably also present in Pennsylvania Dutch art, which include: "tulips and hearts and stars and crowns and angels from peasant art, unicorns from the British arms and eagles from American heraldry" from "birth certificate to tombstone" (Weiser, xv). Hershey says "the predominant designs are taken from nature," with the exception of "the angel and heart motif," and "more variations than one person could imagine, as well as birds of all feather and fancy" (52).

The artists of these were first children and teachers of children, parochial schoolmasters and Mennonites. Christopher Dock began the traceable fraktur tradition in Montgomery County PA. This Teaching I Present: Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse Schools, 1747-1836, says it was "along the Skippack." The full flowering of the art declined after the mid 1830's when a PA public school system began to supersede religious instruction, but this was not the sole means of decline. It is more customary to speak of the decline than of the flowering.


Works Cited

The Adams-Jefferson Letters. Edited by Lester J. Cappon. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
Jacob Boehme. Six Theosophic Points. Translated by John Rolleston Earle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958.
F. George Frederick. Pennsylvania Dutch Cookery.
Mary Jane Lederach Hershey. This Teaching I Present: Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse Schools, 1747-1836. Intercourse, PA: Good Books 2003.
Monroe H. Fabian. The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest. Pennsylvania German Society, 2004.
John Joseph Stoudt. Pennsylvania German Folk Art. Allentown, PA: Pennsylvania German Folklore Society. 1966
John Joseph Stoudt. Jacob Boehme's The Way to Christ, In A New Translation. New York, London: Harper, 1947.
Frederick S. Weiser and Howell J. Heaney. The Pennsylvania German Fraktur. Breingigsville: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1976.
Richard E. Wentz. Editor, Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Spirituality. Sources of American Spirituality Series. New York: Paulist Press, 1993]
Don Yoder. Discovering American Folklife. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books. 2001
Hex Signs (with Thomas E. Graves) Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000.
Pennsylvania Spirituals. Lancaster, PA: Pennsylvania Folklife Society, 1961