The Way Into The Flowering Heart

2011-08-23T08:00:00.001-07:00

Pennsylvania German art embodies a spirit of interior, innerness, or as they have it, an Inwendigkeit that decides everything material and immaterial by imagination. Marriage is an imagination, dress an imagination, praising God is an imagination, raising hands with the mind and with the arms. All things are first and last imagined, whether they be household effects such as chests, linen, plates, fraktur, all celebrate an “uncontaminated good within natural reality” (Stoudt, Pennsylvania German Folk Art, 101).

Detail, silver napkin ring Berks County c. 1880

The lily is the centerpiece of this innerness and transfers its redemption to nature, which it can do because it is not a mere lily but symbolizes Christ. So among architectures of furnished rooms and philosophies of hymns, gardens and kitchens, the praise of Christ makes nature a sacrament that extends to the outward care of earth.

This is implicit or explicit depending on the view. Devotional attitudes of this folk art flowered in Johann Arndt's Paradies Gartlein, the book that would not burn (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 245, and Gerhard Tersteegen's Spiritual Flower Garden of the Inner Soul (Geistliches Blumen-Gärtlein inniger Seelen, 1729, Germantown 1747), which was also sung. Stoudt says “Pennsylvania German folk art is basically spiritual in concept and the motifs and designs used are non-representational expressions of traditional Christian imagery” (vii). Citing Stoudt in defense of the lily is a little like citing Wallace Stevens as a Pennsylvania Dutchman. If Stoudt was correct, but discarded when the underlying faith of his people was lost, then Wallace Stevens was a Berks County farmer in the poetry sophisticate.

Blossoming the Lily

Can they believe such things while the soil of this flowering is affected with flesh? Its primary philosopher was Jacob Boehme. The lily was of the earth. "A fair flower grows out of the rough earth, which is not like the earth but declares by its beauty the power of the earth, and how it is mixed of good and evil; so also is every man, who, out of the animal, wild, earthly nature and quality, is born again so as to become the right image of God." This flower was to the soil what the human was to the animal, an admixture however that strained the relation that the man was also a plant. The image of God in the earth emerged from the animal man as if from a plant: "For those who are a growth of such a kind, and are shooting forth into the fair lily in the kingdom of God and are in process of birth, have we written this book” (Jacob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 4). So "he will blossom like a lily" (Hosea 14.5) making a paradise where none was before.

A flowering heart would connote a flowering mind, which the mystical heart diagrams of Paul Kaym, Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiegel (1680) give as a series of heart-head images engraved by Nicolaus Häublin, who illustrated works for the German followers of Boehme. The lily however, image of nature's redemption, is not drawn as a botanical lily. This lily is an unknown plant, a stylized “use of natural events and objects to describe spiritual conditions." Stoudt said that such collective images that underlay the life of the Pennsylvania Dutch in hymns, flowers, pottery and linens “produced an American decorative art which, with few minor exceptions, is the only indigenous art of its kind in our land” (3).

If you're of this tradition you will be feeling better about yourself even more from the lily in the hymns and gardens being an image from the Song of Songs before its elaboration in the writing of Boehme and in colonial Pennsylvania's Ephrata Cloister. This inner garden flourished in the larger medieval setting as a terrestrial paradise, in German Minnesong and baroque German religious poets (Stoudt, 56). Bernard of Clairvaux and even more obscure Dionysian Neoplatonists contemplated the lily. Transferred to hymnists, these “escaped to illuminated writings, to the decorated chest, and to pottery” (Stoudt, 92). So a four fold progression accounts the Bible, Boehme, hymns and folk art.

The last thing Pennsylvania Germans would want to seem is spiritual, which partly explains the discredit of Stoudt even if the spiritual peasant intellectuals, Conrad Beissel (1691-1768), baker, founder of Ephrata and Boehme, a shoemaker, were peasants. Boehme influenced Milton, Newton and Emerson, they say, and was early translated to English (1647-1661). At the other end of the centuries Wallace Stevens, baptized at his death, reaffirmed his early life in this tradition by delimiting these luminous indicia of the imagination in his The Necessary Angel, a reflowering from his mother's Bible. The hymnals sang of die unfgehende lilie, the opening lily, the lilen-Zweig, the lily twig and wohlriechenden lilen, the fragrant ones (Stoudt, 85, 89, 95). This inescapable Dutch “tulip,” as Stoudt has it, was an “inarticulate belief in [all] the artist’s heart.” (Pennsylvania German Folk Art, 15).

Leaf Meditation Good Friday Rising Early

2011-04-22T04:46:00.000-07:00

Traveling the Inself Border

We cannot deny the inself image in three dimensions. The truest representation is sculpted. A scientist claims to the artist, "you made the leaf, but I discovered it," but the sculptor replies, "you made it too, described it, plucked it, preserved it in glue. It is a construct of your mind and mine." Of course neither one them did, so neither travel to that country.

We must know the leaf inself live. The botanist who presses a leaf must know the leaf live, but image and word are incompatible.

Can word be both text and the image, graffiti over-top? The image cries out to the Branch to be spoken. Word longs to be seen. Fraktur text and image twine. Concrete poems, vispo pretend paper and type. Blake illustrates.

The Speech of Corn.

Twine a poem about a branch, it will not leaf. Tendrils do not speak. The Inself gives speech to the plant. What is the speech of corn? What says aloe? Every thing has breath. Plants breathe light. I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs, a cloud of dew in the midst of harvest.

At Altamira many millennia of horses and bull on had no words, but spoke in rhythm and color. They had no language, nothing written the stones cry in). Breuil says art was an extension of hunt, the worship of life, a celebration. To take a quilt as a word, draw over you a cover.

Quote

Whisperings in the head

a quilt knit in the ear,

square hand-painted, stitched

every night you stretch

or wake in sun.

The eye catches letters,

silver, rose, embroidered

dawns, but one,

though it be flower, rhymes,

now you hear, make out the line.

to quote as if in store

quick light lives

but don't quote it here

the paint is dry

when we meet.

It is not shaped as a quilt in the text but in the mind. The images are figurative not visual. Words become the thing.

These matter when the content is greater than itself, the words' image something more than mundane. Why else make the effort? A loaf is a profound but has not many attempts made. Charles Williams designs the figure of a woman and stretches it over the kingdom of Logres, over all of Europe (see the endpapers of Taliessin Through Logres, Oxford, 1938), like the Cave at Altamira and its bison, except Williams' Europe Logres, Arthur's kingdom, millennial grail, did not exist as the bison, or it did and now only remains express the cave wall, as the bison, Williams' Taliesin.

The Cover

So the Inself concedes the out manifests as leaf, or in human terms, mask, a covering for what exists but cannot be seen. It can't be seen because it is, thought which does not exist in language, but in image. QED? Walking one side of this border, up against it, cross immediately the other side.

Notes

Inself sounds much like Inscape. A true statement about Hopkins is that "seen from one point of view Hopkins' work is some dozen nearly perfect lyrics. Seen from another perspective it is a heterogeneous collection of documents...but within this seemingly chaotic mass we can detect a certain persistent structure." J. Hillis Miller This describes life on the borders.

Take the border between image and word.

The verbal is the interior leaf,

images the internal sense,

the leaf inself of the seen,

the leaf inseen of the self.

The Plant

I live

among you

though you know

me not, but knowledge

came to me found out

of doubt, hear,

see me

stem,

have

come

out

for

now

rise

and

bloom

while

you’re

about.

I could

but now receive

you for I grow nearer

to where my Lord his veins

let flow, He has me

and he will not

let me go.

done

yet

shall

Lord,

has

into

my life

his water

poured

that

bleed

with

him,

for he loves the world.

He loves

the world

with his own shed

blood, he has given me

the way that I should go,

he has taken away

all of my will

and

would

that

scatter these

seeds he

would

sow.

Paradise Art

2011-02-10T10:27:00.001-08:00

Of what does paradise consist, the mountain, dramatic sunsets or the mouse, wee and huge?
Two views of it, the outward, where the thing is surface, and the inward, vested with understanding, a corn field resurrection, a pine tree transformed as Van Gogh makes field and sky alternate, so that if enough people see them they come to pass. Dylan Thomas built a synagoge in an ear of corn (A Refusal to Mourn) a church the size of a snail / With its horns through mist and the castle / Brown as owls, and the heron priested shore (Poem in October). Blake in Songs, Roethke, The Far Field, though demented, Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), T. H. White, The Book of Merlyn, Ted Hughes, Barry Lopez, Aesop patches of these inhabitants the Wolverine, Field Notes, empathy for the biological, and for the dead in Apologia. T. H. White's instructs the animals to Arthur in The Book of Merlyn sprung from his translated 12th century bestiary, The Book of Beasts.

Kafka's last stories are examples of empathy, always an understanding of a thinking being in Eden in the thoughts of one not an enemy of the world, "Report to an Academy," "Investigations of a Dog," "The Burrow," "Josephine the Singer." The Burrow is after all a disquieted householder maintaining his home. In the silence of narration, "my forehead-that unique instrument," perfectly illustrates our day. The ape in "Report" gives its life for ourselves, just as the hunger artist does, different states of self imprisonment. Kafka is prescient about. The ape become a man is now considered by the European Court of Human Rights for treatment the same as people. Cases are pending in Spain and Austria, to keep them "from being tortured" (Michele Stumpe, Great Ape Project International). Kafka's animals understand themselves in the natural but the citizens are confused. "The Village Schoolmaster,"obsesses like a rabbi about the the existence of the being that is not, the giant mole which he suspects is a picture of ourselves. To borrow identity from the natural means to reckon pit pony who went blind in British coal mines an image of ourselves imprisoned by forces we can only feel elsewhere.

You long for paradise and its art, yearn for it but are told it doesn't exist, that its ideas are counterfeit, and its art, your deepest longing, you can't believe. Talk like this a trick. Do believe. When it was in the interest of nineteenth and twentieth century scholars they said they did too, which does not mean they personally thought paradise existed or the extant art of its form.

Were paradise the free speech of what pleases, earth's captives of sense in pleasure gardens, all night TV, three harvests and hot tubs could have private paradises, all the comforts and views. But the art of paradise is not about us. It's about the creatures wild or domesticated that live in a green Thought in a green Shade. Paradise kept with hands brings the natural to the human.

Empathy for the world is empathy for ourselves, our own healing lies in friendship with the burrow. Whatever the creature is, it is ourselves we endanger, call it salmon, coral reef, shark, prairie dog. What isn't endangered is the exotic importation, the rampant catfish of the Mississippi, non native fish in all streams. When we think to preserve the pristine, we think native with profiling, but our own safeguards, whatever they were, our boundaries we surrender to the exotic. The boundaries! This is progress right up until there is no division or all division between us and the natural world. The boundaries, the way we treat nature we treat ourselves, the techniques we use to save it we must use on ourselves, for surely we know, how could we not, that the continuity of folk patterns, which sounds less offensive than to say continuity of nations, the folk patterns are all that hold us on the ground, the root and stalk of families, which, surrendered, will just float away. Kafka's narrators keep talking, for always in the background of their inquiries they seek to find themselves in the other, as though they passed themselves on the street and failed to recognize, which sounds like Borges. It's like they lived in a world surrounded by themselves that they could see but did not know, shadows, simulacrums, puppets, dolls, which look back at them and have the same thoughts they do but neither one knows it. That is what the loss of the wild did to the man, cut him off from himself, so he stumbles in his mind narcotic paralysis but does not see himself is himself, just as this account of it seems not to recognize itself, is called an essay when it is a fiction.

Get over disbelief. The child believes, my Wordsworth says, but the adolescent diminishes, imitates the adult. In the private paradise of their minds they go to pillage the garden. Ask and get a perplexed look. One believes in profit. One believes in success. But if you would look for paradise believe as though it were lost. Find a piece of paradise today. Evening conversations begin, "did you find any paradise today?" Everyone is looking.

Paradise Narrations, the Restoration of Paradise

The assumption here presumes that a desire to restore earth was forming in the minds of artists, the chimney sweep of Blake, before the present crisis, concomitant with the industrial revolution, paralysis- immobilized agency able to effect such remediation that there is likely to be a hundred billion subsidy of the car industry to get a 100 mile a gallon engine. We will have a a 200 mph one. Reinvention, but the paralysis is also metaphorical. Do not sleep past dawn but rise in the night. Thoughts start before four. Creation travails with its problem sons. You could wish they were out of the way, but not if worse were in store. We may go on with daily life, but wonder when the lights go out. Right up to the end shibboleths of the past argue as if they meant something, the doctrines of the false imagination to finish the day sleep another night in evasion and denial.

These amount to a naming of the animals, for to name a thing you must understand its nature, dream of it, meditate it like St. Francis, but not like a government biologist thinning wild horse herds or elk to protect cattle. It is the level of care than makes these things possible, for if you don't care you lose it, masquerading human good as a care of the wild. How Adam took care of the garden, meaning the lives within it, might need some examination, so preconditions of paradise exist, the main one is health; you must think free of hindrance, fatigue, prejudice, greed.
Paradise goes further. Free of the separation which we reckon occurred with the serpent. If we say America is a paradise, as in myth before its discovery, that America is besieged by enemies who call it a colonial fantasy of sexism and racism. It is what you call it. Thinking makes it so. Enemies of paradise destroy forests, prairies and animals, dystopia over utopia, symbols of destruction over innocence that fantasies of paradise invite. It's hard to imagine paradise in an age of experience that denies even while it longs for memories of wholeness it forgot. Was there peace? Rational discourse takes paradise as a waste. Nobody wants the inferno, but there is no succor in the disconnect.

Fraktur and the Secret Furniture of Jerusalem's Chamber. Pennsylvania Dutch Paradise.

2010-12-22T04:44:00.001-08:00

The relation of Pennsylvanians to decoration of tulips, hearts, stars and crowns,

Mennonites turning flowers into bookmarks to bring paradise indoors,

linens, furniture and pottery of communal tulips

that grow from paper to linen and wood,

letters that whirl, signatures in spirals and stipples,

a plain board, cap or or cup of inner spiritual form

from which the outer proceeds,

greater decoration the less.

Believing and Doing

Stoudt's Pennsylvania mystics ally with the Shakers. Thomas Merton's Seeking Paradise: The Spirit of the Shakers (2003) has a view of The Inner Experience. Merton's phrase "images of Paradise" translates this art of making. It is about believing and doing, "the peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it" (Shakers, 85).

Such believing is a stumbling block to visions among the critical classes, the prescient Milton taking dictation of the Holy Spirit each night to compose Paradise Lost, the Shakers, who "believed their furniture was designed by angels--and Blake believed his ideas for poems and engraving came from heavenly spirits" (85). It is a great irony that Blake says his poem entitled Milton was dictated to him (Ruthven, 63). A little of this frustrates a lot of rationalist.

Merton illumines fraktur against "the blindness of 'single vision' which sees only the outward material surface of reality, not its inner spiritual form and the still more spiritual 'force' from which the form proceeds" (74). Shaker "work of the craftsman's hands had to be an embodiment of 'form.' The form had to be an expression of spiritual force. The force sprang directly from the mystery of God through Christ in the Believing artist" (79). The believing artist, given these forms in hand and mind by a spiritual force, God in Christ, would not find illumination outside these beliefs. Merton says Shaker art has "something to do with what Blake called 'the secret furniture of Jerusalem's chamber'" (74), that "a work-a-day bench, cupboard, or table might also and at the same time be furniture in and for heaven" (74). For Merton it is also obvious that "Shaker inspiration was communal...due not to the individual craftsman but to the community spirit and consciousness of the Believers" (76).

Anabaptists like the Shakers practice the communal production of their forms. Merton says Shaker forms were "a better, clearer, more comprehensible expression of their faith than their written theology" (76), which is what Stoudt says of Pennsylvania art, whose theology was a mythology seeing the outer surface through the inner form, the "spiritual force from which the form proceeds" (Merton, 74).

Merton, Shakers, Blake and fraktur celebrate images of the natural fruition of paradise, a renewal of plant and animal that finds human life amid these images as a means of the flowering heart. Frakturs covered with lilies in the shape of a tulip, images of a tulip blooming from a heart, roosters, flower-stars or any field or haystack transformed by the renewing mind, a spider, a fly, a rooster, child, cow, farmer, sky, grass endowed with plain dress by unplain people ornate in their inner lives, "their only advertisement was the work itself" (Merton, 79) in the field, orchard and plant. Spiritual conditions made out of the natural set Pennsylvanians apart. This celebration of life was much opposed to the surrounding English culture whose domination of peoples and empires had commercial motives.

Recapturing this Lily Age might be like trying to live out the prophecies of Blake, meditating mental archetypes, giant forms. But the Lily has as much to do with the artifact as the Elohim have to do with the hex. Nada. Both are round. You can't get the Lily by running counterfeit. The Lily Age is not about nostalgia for a thing that once existed, stone pullers, horseback riders. You have to live it. Paradise is not an external state. It is interior, matching something unseen, mirrored in the seen, connected to an organic field, an image of the Kingdom of God, the ground out of which the Lily grows. Artifacts may be said to leave a trail of crumbs to show the external where it belongs.

To this comparison of fraktur and Shaker add Blake's relation of art and text. Blake's images, his decoration, languished in much the same way as fraktur text, divorced, when his work was neither reproduced nor understood. Even though Weiser says "Fraktur existed for the sake of the texts," and "a few selected images to convey the message," nobody read those texts, much less took them seriously. Weiser says it was because of a "preoccupation with death and religious themes" (xxvii), but such themes abound everywhere in English poetry, so why should it diminish the German? Separated from the text, fraktur decorations resemble Blake's art divorced from his writing. The visual image was accepted before the written.

If we could prove it was something esoteric it would get a following, but how can there be a vision in fraktur when it had multiple authors? But that is the point, it displays collective intelligence. The vision is communal but not as esoteric among its practitioners as Blake among the scholars who spin a theory of imagination out of his evangel Jerusalem. Until Erdman or Frye, critics were affronted at the idea of a coherent system in Blake. Their cousins among Pennsylvania critics are equally affronted at a hidden meaning of fraktur texts. Stoudt started to find it out, but his pietist peasants and Catholic saints got little support for a hidden world in hymns. It affronted scholars also when he claimed a personal transcendentalism for thousands of Pennsylvanians a century before New England. Pennsylvania could have been credited had it come after, but coming before was not allowed. What is a personal transcendentalist? You have the idea and live it instead of talk about it. It sounds like the Hopi elders. [Coming someday, a consideration of German Literary Influences in the American Transcendentalists.]

K. K. Ruthven. Critical Assumptions.
Frederick S. Weiser and Howell J. Heaney. The Pennsylvania German Fraktur. Breingigsville: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1976.

Free Library of Philadelphia’s digital collection of Fraktur.

New England vs. Pennsylvania

2010-11-08T15:28:00.000-08:00

It is no joke that racism and biological extinction lay down like wolves at the door of the Puritan and the English in general. Question more deeply the house and those within if you dare, but for their own reasons the Pennsylvania Dutch were not so afraid. Many had faced their adversary in the old world tortures. Here, in the milder circumstance of Pennsylvania they domesticated nature, invited it indoors, befriended it in their own natures, and while they spoke little of this faith, painted it, embroidered it, sculpted it and threw it on the forge. Thus domesticated, Pennsylvania didn’t produce a Scarlet Letter or spooky stories, but decorated chests and barns.

Concepts of nature thus underlie the two competing American philosophies of the Puritan and Pennsylvania Dutch. What they thought of themselves they thought of nature equivocated as human nature, not the natural world. "World" was a place of temptation, not the eco-sphere. Both philosophies projected an image of themselves outward.

New England puritans, conditioned by their fear, took the view that "the world," meaning nature, would contaminate them. Many such ideas were misapplied by the mind of the believer. The baggage of puritan beliefs was more toxic in the austere climate and soil of New England. Garrisoned against the natural they would have welcomed the Pennsylvania genius inviting nature indoors (as they did a century later in the guise of transcendentalism), had they not feared the unknown that lurked at the clearing's edge. By 1850 transcendentalism made them long for the pond, but two centuries earlier New England believed that the savage Indians, wild men and their own sins were only kept at bay by fear of the soil and cutting back its growth, which helps explain natural demolitions such as clear cutting the forest three and four centuries later. Prevent sin and make a profit. The idea of sin in nature perverted creation in their souls. Against the evil they found in themselves, projected outwardly, they erected a theology of dominion and racial superiority. In a new puritan age today, "this spiritual imagination is impotent, sterile, or dead, is necessarily going to be an era of violence, chaos, destruction, madness, and slaughter" (Merton, Seeking Paradise, 85).

One cannot say the puritan hid his malaise. He legalized it, celebrated it with intellectualism. Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather drew sharp lines. If you disagreed with the governmental/pastoral views you had better be quiet about it. These things are thrown into sharper contrast compared with the milder governmental/pastoral conditions of Pennsylvania, where the English were and still are the majority party. Making literature into sociology tempts an effect of depravity upon nature from Hawthorne, whose "virgin soil as a cemetery" (Scarlet Letter, ), "the pine trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children."

There are any number of such statements to the effect that "to the Puritan, nature was not benign. The wilderness was a place of terror"“ (Broyles), or as William Bradford put it (1620) "a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men." Michael Broyles makes the telling observation that "much of the story [of Pilgrim's Progress] is set in America...it was the metaphorical terrain the believer had to traverse...," which he says to differentiate the kinder nature of Puritan composer William Billings who was opposed to his fellows (The New England Psalm Singer, 1770) also see Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, 25). A great deal more than this has been said of the Puritan fear of those first two centuries.

Divide and conquer is the oldest rule of opposition, Quakers aside, who had more in common with the pacifist PA sects than with those who came to rule in Pennsylvania before the Revolution. These English exploited difference among the Pennsylvania German peace lovers, which admittedly the colony had been founded to pursue. Relations with the "world" were a sticking point for immigrants of the Lily. Some held differing taxonomies of Church and Sect, celebrated to this day as insoluble, that is of the churched vs. the plain. Should they be in love, half in love or not at all? The divided separate but equal existence of Germans alongside the English in American civilization came to an end after the Civil War, for then, though the Dutch were still divided, they were assimilated. Some people think the Amish are the last bastion of the "separated" and that these differences existed even in 1950, that is, speaking German, farming, going barefoot, everything the matriarch, Anna Mack, despised. The Amish may continue to exist in 2050, but assimilation got all the rest.

Compromise
For a long time Pennsylvania Germans sought to show that even if they were German they really did belong. Millard Gladfelter in his Foreword to Pennsylvania German Fraktur demonstrates this view when he refers to the persistent contests among Pennsylvania cultures for retention of custom and language" (ix). His "contests" feature a cultural cold war between the English "on the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers" and the Germans of "outlying countrysides." In the same volume Weiser is at pains to make the Dutch into Americans. He broadens the mandate of Penn's colony into "the much-celebrated openness of the United States...to receive into its midst persons and cultures of widely disparate origin" (xiii). But it was not the United States that welcomed them, but Penn's Quaker Pennsylvania. American is a misnomer here for the English and Puritan, but it has to be, for the English never welcomed the disparate, the range given by Gladfelter from "Negro Spirituals to Pennsylvania German Fraktur" (1x). Quite otherwise, they exploited them. So in order to fit in, assimilate even in the bi-centennial world of 1976 that these volumes commemorate, Weiser constructs a rhetoric that celebrates the whole for its part, the United States for Pennsylvania, but it was only Pennsylvania that welcomed the diverse. Weiser's Introduction of Fraktur is worth attending because he expresses transparently the attitudes and prejudices in the background of paradise art.

There is a perennial defensiveness in Pennsylvania German writing about the survival of its folk culture. "We are richer for it,' says Weiser. Instead of celebrating the dishes and language for themselves, it has to be for "the tolerance of American polity" (xiii), almost apologizing for being. Welcoming the diverse may be what America says of itself today on the Statue of Liberty, but to the extent it is true, the only practical example was among the Pennsylvania Germans in Philadelphia. Then the American rhetoric hatched that all men are created equal. It is a Pennsylvania dream of equality that Weiser celebrates "in styles at variance with the majority" (xiii), not an American one, even if it becomes so, and it was not "the majority," they were at variance with, it was the English! Reading all these continual apologies for their Dutch defensiveness, it isn't that they are false to the fact so much that they apologize for being what they are. Keyser, commenting on the texts of fraktur in his Preface to Hershey's book, doesn't have to add, but does that "none of this little-studied body of folk poetry is fine literature" (8), he could easily have said, "these texts are an invaluable window into the mind of their art."

Borrowings From Betters

Even friends of fraktur feel they must not seem partisan. Weiser says that "with some exceptions, the motifs of Fraktur are simply embellishment and have no esoteric meaning or function beyond the beautification of the piece" (xxvii). Hershey defends fraktur as cultivating the beautiful, "a process that stretches the imagination and pushes the artist toward an appreciation and even a love for things beautiful"(52). Even! Why are such things said? Answer with a question, "Why else would this large body of folk art...have been preserved and so obviously treasured?" It is only the PA Dutch who can doubt their beauty while everyone else celebrates it. After examining a thousand piece of fraktur Hershey says that in some cases the design illustrates the text, but mostly they are "lovely compositions," pretty pictures if you will that "convey religious meaning equally as well as they communicate the value of beauty in everyday life" (56). One feels like drowning in the tepid.

The abstraction of image from text proliferated from fraktur through the other folk art genres of linens, chests, pots, ironwork and barns. This encouraged the divorce of meaning from text, Stoudt's point, that the images derive meaning from the hymns, etc., but that their later abstraction does not sever their prior connection to this origin. Weiser wants the images to be an imitation of the nobility by the middle class, a folk art, of "cultural sinking from the tastes of upper levels of society" (xxviii), not a rising from the unconscious or from the hymns as we know all art truly is. He uses this failing social/political analysis in his Preface to the Pennsylvania German Decorated Chest. It is the omnipresent Dutch apology that they were brutish peasant boors who could do nothing creative but imitate in bastardy their betters.

Keyser says "none of this little-studied body of folk poetry is fine literature" (This Teaching, 8). Who does not quarrel with such a plebian notion of fine? It is an odd determination if this little-studied art is compared with Mozart, but not with Kafka or Borges, who though entirely irrelevant, also apply for "fineness" in vain. Has such a claim of fine been made of other folk art? "Their copies of upper class, from furnishings to portraits, to attire, are frequently grouped together under the name of folk art" (Chest, 13). Weiser's "constant cultural sinking from the tastes of upper levels of society" so that "fine engravings and prints owned by the elite found their country counterpart in the drawings of schoolmasters and itinerants" (Fraktur, xxviii) are an old discredited assumption. He cites the lion and unicorn from British arms and the eagle from American, as borrowings from betters. Everything has context, but it is patently post hoc to say that because they preceded them they caused them. Images have to be allowed their own world outside social milieus. The Dutch eagles are a supreme delight in their interpretations, hardly copies. Do you say Navajo weavers imitated their betters when they wove chief blankets or railroad trains at the behest of traders?

Rationalizing art is a hard road, divorcing text and context the same, which was argued of Blake, whose illuminations were not even "mere embellishment." It would be better for critics to admit they cannot see any connection and consider getting glasses.

Spiritual Transfer

Technology, philosophy and religion promoted assimilation. Early twentieth century transfers of decorative images from chest to barn were a "last flowering" (Yoder, Hex Signs, 3) of this art, but the compromise of Dutch ways is tracked in every activity, from song to speech. "Did any of the now common English choruses originate among the Pennsylvania Dutch and spread, through translation from German to English...? Yoder answers his own question, "the type of spiritual transfer that took place--one might almost call it spiritual osmosis--was from the greater to the lesser body. Anglo-American religious patterns were adopted by the Pennsylvania Dutch, rather than vice versa (Pennsylvania Spirituals, 348). But it wasn't just the permeable membrane of song, it was the stenciling of patterns instead of free-hand painting (Fabian,63), "machine made ware from England [Gaudy Dutch china] resulted in driving out local potteries" (Frederick, 257). "English ideas about furniture finishes, printed birth certificates, and Victorian popular designs, the Pennsylvania Dutch lost interest in the artifacts of earlier generations. In time, the chests, pottery, and pie safes were relegated to the attic or barn" (Hex Signs, 37).

Substitution of English ideas in the Americanization of the Pennsylvania Dutch touched the flower-star and the images on barns transferred from household decorations. These images had a contentious history, but they came from everyday relations with nature, sun, animals, plants. For all the debate of the origin of the hex sign, the twelve pointed star, the image comes from gardens, it is the image of a double tiger day lily, a duplicate of its shape. This is easy or difficult to find in the borders and plots of day lilies. The deeper legacy must involve a use of earth, design of internal landscapes, a spirit of acceptance that permeates mind and spirit, a spiritual force symbolized by the natural.

That these images are taken from nature, from the wilderness as it were, indicates a prejudice against the natural, a fear of it, common in the New England mind, the repression of the natural, the wilderness, although Jung was Swiss.

Spiritual Demise

Stoudt says the images are mandalas, after Jung, but gets no credit for it from Yoder. The images painted on furniture, embroidered on linen, drawn on paper are "a full range of celestial and earthly subjects. Stars and birds, both identifiable and unrecognizable, are seen along with the plump heart..." (Fabian, 58). With the toasting couple, the unicorn, equestrian figures and mermaid Fabian describes techniques, "the unicorn painters of Berks County, for example-also had templates for the major elements of their designs" (62), but "after the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, stenciling is frequently used in lieu of freehand painting. It is obviously used as a time-saving device and as such is one of the heralds of the decline of the traditional arts of rural Pennsylvania" (63)

But the most usual popular treatment rouses superstition before dashing it to the ground. Pennsylvania Dutch Country, (Irwin Richman) invokes amulets and symbols, "askew crosses," scratched into lintels, "almost invisible except to the knowing eye," "symbolism and magic" (53) before taking Yoder's Hex Signs as proof against this voodoo. Having his cake and eating too, the author dances with popular modern hex signs, but allows little if any "iconic meaning to the decorations found on fraktur," the quintessential Pennsylvania German Artifact," with every one of those barn symbols and then some, "flowers, vines, animals and birds...hearts, crowns, angels and compass stars" (56).

Exfoliations of the lily in this spiritual flower garden, "died when the point of view which created them—the faith of Pennsylvania’s radical religious sects—was killed by the advent of religious liberalism” (Stoudt, 24), the introduction of English in schools and the death of home-crafts by the industrial revolution (Stoudt, xviii). Stoudt already rules out a huge segment of the population when he says "sects." But Yoder also allows that the decline of fraktur "can be found in the nineteenth-century disintegration of the folk culture of the Pennsylvania Germans, particularly (1) the disappearance of institutional elements such as the parochial school, which had produced the Vorschrift, (2) the shift to the English language, which brought with it an inevitable loss of German devotional literature as the wellspring of fraktur symbolism, and (3) the decline in the very meaning of baptism, which had produced the Taufschein." The decline of baptism "can be partially attributed to the impact of the revivalist movement, which invaded the Pennsylvania German churches and sects from the world of Anglo-America." It was a complete conquest: "Fraktur was part of the old-style colonial culture, which, especially in the field of religion, was being challenged and reshaped through acculturation with Anglo-American forms" (280). Reshaped through acculturation here means denatured. So the decorative art of the lily, its expression of an inner state, abstracted completely out of its origin, became the so called “prayer acts” of Wentz (24) and the lily was exhausted.

How much a meliorist one wants to be about this is a choice to celebrate the past from the majority point of view of the English or lament the passing of the Dutch? Going from the island to the continent of the majority gives so many rewards but foreordains the peasant inferior to the Ph.D., begs the question of what the rural folk benefits were, if impossible to recapture, when everyone suddenly wishes the garden were back again that has been sacrificed to progress.

What is the meaning of the flowering heart, its iconography and philosophy in itself? Who are the suspects in its demise? Were, as Stoudt argues, whole classes of these people [German-American] transcendentalists one hundred years before Emerson? Where are the studies of that text from the many sources that remain untranslated of the 3151 books and almanacs printed in the German language in America between 1728 and 1830? What devastations wreaked upon these people in the interests of social control need correction?

Afterword - Did You Find Paradise Today?

Told it doesn't exist you long for paradise. When it was in the interest of scholars they believed, not that they personally thought it existed or its art in the mountain sunset or the mouse. Were paradise free speech or whatever pleases, the three harvests and hot tubs of the captives of pleasure could have private paradises too. But the art of paradise is not about us, it's about the creatures that inhabit it, wild or domesticated in a green Shade. Paradise kept with hands brings the natural to the human.

Free of the separation which we reckon occurred when the serpent came to America, myth before discovery, besieged by enemies in a colonial fantasy of sexism and racism so called, thinking makes it so. Serpents destroy forests, prairies and animals, take dystopia over utopia, symbols of destruction over innocence. It's hard to imagine paradise in an age that denies it but longs for memories of wholeness it forgot. Was there peace? Nobody wants Inferno, but nothing succors in the deconstruct.
We get over disbelief. The child believes, but the adolescent diminishes, imitates the adult. In their private paradise they go to pillage the garden. Ask if one believes and get a look. One believes in profit. One believes in success. But look for paradise if you believe it's lost. Find a piece of paradise. Evening conversations would begin, "did you find paradise today?" Everyone would be looking.

This fictive assumption presumes a restoration of earth was forming in the minds of artists with the industrial revolution, the chimney sweep of Blake, that paralysis immobilized agencies able to effect remediation. In reinvention, but the paralysis is also metaphorical, we rise in the night, thoughts start before four AM. So would creation travail with the problem sons. You could wish they were out of the way, but not if worse were in store. We may go on with daily life, right to the end, shibboleths of the past argue, as though they meant something. Doctrines of false imagination finish the day, sleep another night in evasion and deny.

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

The Way Into the Flowering Heart

2010-10-27T06:20:00.001-07:00

This guy moved over here

The Way Into the Flowering Heart II

2010-04-17T07:51:00.001-07:00

A Revelation of Interior Presence

Hymns and folk art transmit the tale of inwendigkeit of the two great proponents, Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) and Johann Arndt (1555-1621). Boehme's Lily Age studied this cultivation. The basics of such thought show symbols on pottery, tools, chests and linens to be a revelation of interior presence. What God had to do with materiality was a crucial question. Boehme said creation revealed itself to itself, "inward illumination was the only basis for spiritual growth." He celebrated internal absolution, inward Baptism and inner union with the divine, and identified entirely different languages of these worlds. Robert Bly cites him in Light Around the Body, "for according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in the inward world....Since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages, and we must be understood also by two languages." He cites the same lines in The Insanity of Empire (13), but these two languages are in doubt and dispute for there is no inner language of thought. Thinking so is another cause of the blindness Bly preoccupies (Part IV).

Criticism of the inner life got both occult and the mundane dismissals. Pennsylvania German elite defended their ideas by saying, "we are a little slow, and perhaps too conservative to be very brilliant." Bly describes Wallace Stevens' family as "upper middle-class German Americans [who] appear to be successful repressors of the dark side" (A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 66). Stevens himself did not resist the flower. When his sister told him their grandparents were "not Pennsylvania Dutch, but...born in Germany," he said, "I am not prepared to accept my sister's statement that my mother's grandparents were born in Germany...I don't know that my mother ever really said it and, if she said any such thing, she could only have said it on the basis of something told her by her mother" (Letters, 416). Presumably this means he thought they were born in Pennsylvania and were Dutch. Stevens argues the hearsay of generations by splitting High German and Pennsylvania Dutch: "My mother's father, John Zeller, was born in Berks County on October 21, 1809," and "my mother spoke Pennsylvania Dutch." This ancestry appears in the blood of his poems from the "Complacencies of the Peignoir" of Sunday mornings to his "weekends...potting things up and bringing them indoors so that the room in which I sit in the evenings now looks like a begonia farm. I have other plants upstairs and down and all over the place" (Letters, 473-4). Have a look at Wallace Stevens, Naturalist in this regard and Wallace Stevens and The Bed of Old John Zeller.

Mundane critics, Bird, Wentz and Weiser force reason against this emotive heart. Bird requotes Weiser that "highly religious texts cannot be taken at face value as if every Dutchmen (sic) spent his life on his knees" (O Noble Heart, 20). Of the higher order of Dutchman Bly says Stevens "followed a pattern that has since become familiar among American artists: he brings the shadow into his art, but makes no changes in the way he lives" (Shadow, 77). This is the same Stevens who said that if "we should meet a monsieur who told us that he was from another world, and if he had in fact all the indicia of divinity, the luminous body, the nimbus, the heraldic stigmata, we should recognize him as above the level of nature but not as above the level of the imagination" (The Necessary Angel, 74). Such words are transformative in themselves.

Facetious asides such as Weiser's about Dutchmen on their knees transmit the English grievance against the Germans that they were uneducated boors. Pennsylvanians reveled in their peasantry even while faulting themselves for lacking education, but the difference between Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in belief and education is guilt. The puritan second and third generations were consumed with it (Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness, 15). If the flowering heart and its sanctified natural existence were denatured by later malaise, Anabaptists anyway shunned public celebration of the inner world. When disbelief became an epidemic among their critics the exfoliations on quilts, chests and hearts unconsciously transmitted struck them as absurd.

The way into the flowering heart

inside the flowering man

is over the inside itself,

inside the new found land.

In this unique view of the natural vegetative man celebrating a flower, the Pennsylvania Dutch were inherent environmentalists of the first order. But Pennsylvania transcendentalism was ignored, thus Thoreau is credited with founding the wilderness movement in his "Huckleberries" (1862) and "Walking" (1851), from which a Puritan Origin of the American wilderness movement is extrapolated. This is like saying The Taliban started the Free Speech Movement. Such misdirection is all dragged from a phrase in Thomas Morton's New English Canaan,(1637), "nature's masterpiece," and from unpublished notes of Edwards in the "beauty of the world." This is more worship at the English chapel as the source of American culture. In the bully phrase borrowed from Deuteronomy, Puritans saw nature as a "vast and howling wilderness." But see How American Sounded here or The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History here. In Jonathan Edwards' three pages in the back of Miller's edition of 1948, The Beauty of the World (unknown until 1948), "images of divine things in the beauty of the world" make the corporeal resemble the spiritual. Bodies, nature, reflect, as in Psalm 19, the planets and sun. The "complicated proportion" of green, white and blue are like the relation of sight, sound and smell which "vibrate" the human organs. These "mutual consents," are resemblances, influences of "lily," waves, woods, plants, flowers and light upon the "holy virtuous soul." So "the more complex a beauty is, the more hidden is it." One "loves life for its natural and reflective resonances of the greater." In this "consists principally the beauty of the world." The manscript however, in the back of Perry Miller's edition, was unpublished until 1948.

Transcendentalism proposes to creation that it reflect the divine. Once every hundred years, English advocates say, Morton in 1650, Edwards in 1750, Thoreau, Emerson in 1850, English Environmentalism comes forth. But “the full blown rose of mystical transcendentalism blossomed in Pennsylvania a full century before New England’s scrawny plant began to bud” (Stoudt, 1966, p. xix)." Scholarship is often merely a sleight of hand Pennsylvanians were transcendentalists en masse one hundred years before the nineteenth century movement in New England: "An awareness of German culture was a recent development in New England when the Transcendental movement began. Unlike New York and Pennsylvania, where large numbers of immigrants from Central Europe had settled in the eighteenth century and German traditions were well known, in New England few could read German until the early nineteenth century. Translations of German literature were not generally available, and uninformed opinions of German culture were largely negative. In the second half of the nineteenth century however the situation began to change...." Howard E. Smither (A History of the Oratorio: The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1979, IV, 430). Vogel's German Literary Influences, but not much else seems to have appeared to illumine the hundred years of Pennsylvania transcendentalism before New England. If we are serious about the transmission of transcendentalism from Boehme to the Puritans we cannot bypass the Germans in Pennsylvania who had long before taken him up, which involves also the translation of William Law and the illustrations that Dionysus Freher reproduced in the four volume Boehme English translation.

Notes

Considerations of the mystical Pennsylvanians include:

Michel de Certeau, Michael B. Smith. The Mystic Fable.
Andrew Weeks. German Mysticism from Hildegard to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Also, Boehme, An Intellectual Biography.James E. Force, John Christian Laursen, Richard Henry Popkin. Milleniarism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture.
Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. The Cambridge History of German Literature.
Hopkins on nature as sacrament . The objects of praise and the tools of praise in Ruskin. Thus inscape as an inwendigkeit. Hopkin's inscape from Duns Scotus, much appreciated by Merton, relates to Tolkien and implicates Blake.

Discussion also here and here of the natural world as sacrament.
On innerness this dissertation by Sigrid Hackenberg.

The true practice of conflict in the eighteenth century, from Beissel to Sauer, was inward, but outwardly measured or expressed.

If we are hindered in the natural by societal measures there is also hinderance in the supernatural by philosophical mysticisms.

Everything depends on the right search term: Puritan Wilderness.

Consider that these are all in quotes:

"Only the most habitually critical students are likely to get what you're talking about when you suggest to them that "wilderness" is not a name like "mountain" or "river" that refers to common features of nature, but a lens through which nature is perceived. Wilderness is, in short, a "socially constructed" idea. Your job is to help them deconstruct it."

This analysis by J. Baird Callicott, Priscilla Solis Ybarra mistakes the part for the whole, the puritan interpretation of wilderness for the biblical one, but so does their source, Roderick Nash. Wilderness and the American Mind (1967/1982), "that wilderness is an important biblical theme, the "antipode," on the spectrum of good, bad, and indifferent places, to the paradisical Garden of Eden.

It would be much more to the point to say these were biblical interpretations. These scholars derive the conservation movement from the puritan's " a vast and roaring wilderness" and William Bradford's "hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men," the opposite of the case. There is disregard of the beauty of the Way in already century old puritan philosophy.

Conclusion

The imagination is the difference between the mind and the hands. On the trail to the interior he moves to translate language, dimension, memory and sense.

It's good pretending that those who walk there have had their tongues cleansed. That's why his back is turned. Maimonides says imagination needs sanctifying, that idols, Dereviannye idoly, brought down in the contrasts of language enacting literature make the mind of this people dull, stop their ears and shut their eyes. The house must be occupied or vagrants, strangers will move in, vandalism, dumping, teenagers, gangs. To prevent unclean spirits it is not necessary to sweep clean and put in order; it is necessary to occupy. Vacancy is an omission whose overthrow is a commission, as the Lindisfarne Gospel (950 A.D.) says, "alla woepeno his zenimeth. . .& reafo his todaelde" (OED). Reafo his todaelde means “plunder his entire house” (Luke 11.22) and thereby set in order.
With this sanctifying and cleansing, but blind to the first state of seeing, led by a symbolic Virgil to a world neither knows, hands begin, mind shapes, brain directs angle and line. How is sanctified light found? This does not require consciousness.

Imagination can make a bird, a plant, a tree without it. Idols manufacture imitations all the time unrelated to what imagination seeks. Language is like marble. Sculptor Michelangelo looks into marble to see David. Words are more difficult. A seraph brings a coal to Homer, the Aeneid, Chinese mountain snow, David's meditations, Satchmo. Imagination translates the great that extends beyond sight. Will must speed faith in praising. How talk to the outer world from the inner when there is no language of thought? Thought made into language assumes it speaks what it thinks, but thought is not languaged. That this occurs after translation is a glaring assumption. The medium of thought is image. Efforts to track this, as perhaps Bach in his Voices of the Turtledoves (2003), devoutly read German sources into English, but neither German nor English bespeak the inner world.

When we see inside something we think it remarkable, as if this were the spirit of the thing. The spirit differs from a literal, say in song, where it sings the spirit of the song, not literally perform the music and words. This breaks the expectation of the literal that surrounds the interpretation of the song. There is no literal score to poetry. It directly speaks the spirit.

Since translation of thought to language is like a performance, a prosody that departs from expected diction and line is prima facie of spirit, but never had a literal version against which to test itself. This is one step closer to the Original, but still not the Original. What Mahalia Jackson sings as the spirit of the song Just a Closer Walk is closer to the experience of the words than the words. This shows the difference of the inside and outside. Louis Armstrong said this song gave The Beatles Let It Be. The Japanese word, kotodama, celebrated by Barry Lopez in his acceptance speech for the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams, signifies that each word has a spiritual interior.

Bible is here continually equivocated for Puritan. According to Nash, the Bible consistently characterizes wilderness as "cursed" land, "the environment of evil," a "kind of hell" on earth. "The Puritan settlers of New England, steeped in the Old Testament biblical worldview, believed they found themselves in such a "wilderness condition" of continental proportions. It was their God-ordained destiny to transform the dismal American wilderness into an earthly paradise, governed according to the Word of God.... "

Callicott and Ybarra say: to hear Nash tell it,

"seventeenth century [Puritan] writing is permeated with the idea of wild country as the environment of evil." Certainly one finds Puritan fear and loathing of wilderness in William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, and many other seventeenth-century Puritan writings, such as Michael Wigglesworth's God's Controversy with New England (1662), and Cotton Mather's Decennium Luctuosum: An History of Remarkable Occurrences in the Long War Which New-England Hath Had with the Indian Salvages (1699). While it would be an exaggeration to claim that a celebration of the American wilderness and its indigenous peoples could be found in Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (1637), one does find there a much more sympathetic portrayal than in its contemporaries."

"Thoreau here opposes Nature to civilization, wildness to culture, and himself to his pious audience. Thoreau, a close associate of Ralph Waldo Emerson is, like Emerson, labelled a Transcendentalist. It's not entirely clear what Transcendentalism was—elements of Platonism, Hinduism, Romanticism, Deism blended together—but it seems pretty clear that it was a far cry from Puritanism.

"This idea that wilderness is a human constuct is all of 15 years old, "the romantic sublime, imported largely from Europe, coupled with a more homegrown celebration of the American Frontier as a domain of individualism."

David Williams. Wilderness Lost: The Religious Origins of the American Mind (1987).

Annette Kolodny. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience (1984) asks rhetorically how the more benign view of the natural world presented by other [the German] European colonists was to be reconciled with "the historical evidence of starvation, poor harvests, and inclement weather."

***
The essence of the flowering heart, in the words of Michael S. Bird, is that "the world of natural and even humanly constructed beauty is never pronounced evil (21). His justification for saying so is that this "would hardly be consistent with the biblical account of creation and the making of 'a world and its things' deemed to be good."

End note

The divisions of in and out, like energy and matter, male and female, mind and body, earth and heaven, activity and rest, age and youth, viewed as opposites, justify all the worst attitudes seen in the separatists where behaviors, dresses, fashions were ruled in or out. These go from hook and eye vs. buttons and zippers to velcro politics, gender, ethnicity, celibacy and tantrism, all politics. In Pennsylvania Dutch imagination a decorative principle becomes an aesthetic of life.

Language In Voices Out

2010-03-31T08:32:00.000-07:00

“What is your aim in Philosophy?” “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (Philosophical Investigations) – Wittgenstein

"Wittgenstein thought that the pursuit of philosophy in its traditional sense is pointless. Philosophers who scoured far and wide for a structured logical form applicable to everything were deluded and wasting their time, much like a fly who constantly tries to escape a transparent bottle by banging against the side. Wittgenstein saw it as his job to show these tenacious philosophers out of the top of the fly-bottle and to see philosophy for what it really is – a futile attempt to find an all-encompassing logical form of thought behind the mess that is ordinary language…"

Thought is the simultaneity of memory, reality, fantasy, being.

The simplest said of the two voices In and Out is that as language cannot simultaneously express wave and particle motion, the wave being both, so is being. Poets want to hallow thought to "a new language," asserted of Beissel's mysticism (by Bach) as much as of Boehme, as much as anyone. Poets want to speak revelations like prophets on their own terms.

Steve McCaffery and Karen Mac Cormack (end of the interview) want their voices to be an "idea, already implicit in Aristotle’s description of the two voices (articulate and inarticulate," [Out and In] that "obtains almost a pataphysical excellence!" There of course is no pataphysical excellence. Pataphysical means a joke, an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem. On the same page Mac Cormack gets pataphysical when she says "Voice is a tangled mythogeme," that "poetry’s primal scene as that of inspiration involves at its base a fundamental “other” voice, a voice speaking through one. This image of the poet as a passive, possessed mouthpiece of an alien voice runs from Plato’s Ion through to Jack Spicer’s poetics of dictation."

There is no language of thought.

Speaking through is not novel to those who do. Calling it alien is more theater than belief. It's not alien if endemic and indigenous from within the speaker's life. Indigenous means of community or ethos, Hopi, Pennsylvania Dutch. Whatever Walt Whitman says comes from his own peculiar mind even if spoken with the reference to the Upanishads. Secondly, a new language does not imply new ideas, facts. Some writers, Barthes, Agamben see the alien voice as the voice of death, "the originary place of negativity" that "...language is a negativity, the unsayable and the ungraspable" (Agamben) and cannot but be negativity unless it never existed. Here they equivocate language for thought, which is unsayable. The argument goes, then, "only if language no longer refers to any voice...is it possible for man to experience a language that is not marked by negativity and death" (Dillon, Politics of Security, 115). But the voiceless verb, the silence of unknowing that passes as world class originality, is not language. There is no language of thought.

There is no language of protons. If the universe is thought, it is not language. The last paragraph of the interview "distinguishes an animal voice (a voice of sonic continuum) from a human voice (a voice of sonic articulation).... The animal voice, Hegel claims, is pure sound, empty and grounded in negativity... every animal finds its voice in its violent death; it expresses itself as a removed self.” Obviously Hegel never left his house if he said that. Every animal finds its voice, not in death, but in praise of life. Sometimes a man speaks with animal voice, body voice, as with moans, cries, but the man is the one removed from the event. Assuming to be proved that he is removed, "intercepting this animal voice of death and subjecting it to articulation, human language, he says, emerges with two decisive characteristics: (1) it retains within it the voice of death; (2) it becomes the voice of consciousness thereby converting negativity into being to me signals a fundamentally poetic quality in Hegel’s thinking, establishing as it does its mythogeme of “voice” on the codification of vowel and consonant as respectively animal and human." (46).

Too many vowels, drugs, diseases, disaffections.

Voice as action is breath.

The death of the author (Barthes) in all this is simple speech. In voice as action these philosophers could write a bestiary of themselves. A bestiary of vowels. To speak as a bear, fly like a bird, leap like a cat, if voice is action, is voice without language or sound. It comes down neither to voice or language but to breath. Everything that has breath. Comic cosmic bestiaries pronounce judgment on linguists and philosophers for slandering the animal to justify their human malaise. However the poet is passively speaking, not in speaking the voice of death, is transfiguring life.

But negativity so converted reverses life. The notion that human language is the voice of death, because derived from the animal symbolizes how far species' extinction translates from the commercial into the philosophical, as if Hegel never walked in the woods. Beyond carnivores, it is not the voice of death in the song bird or elk, it is the voice of the joy of life. Somewhere it says that everything that has breath praises. This is being posted on the phone poles of Nashville and in Chicago. Praise is the song of animal speech, the tongue of life, not death.

The little white spot you can barely see, this IsReads pic dwarfed by the city of Chicago is a picture of praises, written in the bone so large, as it is now under the bone, a parallel dimension, bigger than Chicago.

The Medium of Thought

What are the languages of in and out? There is no language of In. To call thought "language" is a metaphor used only because there is no language of thought. There is no language of anything except language. Thought is cast into language by speech, translated by voice when speech occurs. They used to call this analysis by synthesis. This translation is magnanimous. It assumes the end of the beginning. I speak therefore I think, but thought is not languaged. Its exploration must occur between people after it is translated to language when the presumption occurs that it is language. It is a glaring assumption that I speak what I think. The medium of thought is the image not the words, the loaf of bread, the picture of the loaf of bread, but not the word, bread.

Postulate

Poets fail in their public and private thoughts. We say life is a work. What good is the work if the life cannot live? We say public achievement, action imitated and celebrated, may burn. We say the nature of a poet's death is important as his birth. Then we know what we control. Death is not desired, nor suicide nor any of the diseases, strokes, sicknesses. What is left at the end of a year depends on what theme we follow. All themes merge in each other in memory and thought. Who died young, who of sickness, who of addiction, who was alienated, lost love, found ignominy, prison? The mishaps of necessity gain sympathy. Suffering makes the soul, binding the book, mistake and limitation, art. Suffering is sympathetic when it appears. Put under stress, see what comes out. Art comes out when the farmer's skin cracks. Surgeons do not suffer such defects. But all suffer choices. That one is a doctor another a farmer is luck, maybe destined. Margaret Thatcher however said that after beliefs, thoughts, words, deeds form character, that then character forms destiny. Desperations escape, things turn on their head. Enough food in some places causes obesity. Too little is too much, the atmosphere, autism is up. If only the throat of the world were unloosed as it is of poets from whom this illumination comes. To find a context for our lives we judge theirs.

Words Themselves

"The imagination of kinship." Kinship lasts beyond death. Imagine words themselves, spoken the last moment before waking as a cue, but to figure out what? Navajo matriarchy? The phrase occurs in Karl Magnuson's, The World from Within, in an article "The Utopian Imagination of Aboriginalism," in "Virtual Kinship, Real Estate, and Diaspora Formation," and most importantly in the Poetics of the Feminine and that's it. You know your parents after their deaths and if parents then entire genomes. They exists then in a way not known before, as is said of consciousness. Revisting guest-host codes, reverence of ancestors in patriarchy? Too much dogma. Inquiry into less aware notions of mythogeme, notions of Bataille's death of myth is really anti-myth myth. Some interesting writers attach here, Steve McCaffery's, Prior to meaning: the protosemantic and poetics, who applies Prigogine's physics to poetry, just what Prigogine wanted to do.

Drops
Words are an image of every thought,
sound, sense, taste and color felt,

that swim in an ocean that resembles itself,

drawn up in air to eye and ear

which evaporate and fall from sky.

Seen as drops that were no drops at all,

gathered in buckets, these drops make words.

Art and the Americanization of the Pennsylvania Dutch

2010-03-17T16:22:00.000-07:00

Pennsylvania German art critics want to show that even if they are German they really belong. Millard Gladfelter in his Foreword to Pennsylvania German Fraktur by Frederick S. Weiser calls the cultural war between the English "on the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers" and the Germans of "outlying countrysides" a "contest" for retention of custom and language" (ix). Weiser likewise pains to make the Dutch into Americans by declaiming "the much-celebrated openness of the United States...to receive into its midst persons and cultures of widely disparate origin" (xiii).

But it was not the United States that welcomed them, only Penn's Quaker Pennsylvania. The English never welcomed the disparate. From "Negro Spirituals to Pennsylvania German Fraktur" (Gladfelter, ix) they exploited them. So in order to assimilate even in the bi-centennial world of 1976 these volumes commemorate, Weiser constructs a rhetoric that celebrates the whole for its part, the United States for Pennsylvania. Fraktur's introduction is worth attending for so transparently reflecting the fear and prejudice in the background of its paradise.

"We are richer for it," says Weiser, perennially defending unsuccessful Pennsylvania German survival of its folk culture. Richer means poorer. Instead of celebrating sauerkraut and language for themselves, it has to be for "the tolerance of American polity" (xiii). Welcoming the diverse may be what America says of itself on the Statue of Liberty, but the first example was among the Pennsylvania Germans in Philadelphia. There American rhetoric hatched all men equal, but it is a Pennsylvania dream of equality Weiser celebrates "in styles at variance with the majority" (xiii), not an American one, even if it tries to become so, and it was not "the majority" they were at variance with, it was the English! Continual apologies for Dutchness are not so much false to the fact as apologies for being what they are. Keyser on the texts of fraktur in his Preface to Hershey's book, (ThisTeaching I Present, 2003) says that "none of this little-studied body of folk poetry is fine literature" (8), he could easily have said, "these texts are an invaluable window into the mind of their art."

Borrowings From Betters

Friends of fraktur must not act so. Weiser says "with some exceptions, the motifs of Fraktur are simply embellishment and have no esoteric meaning or function beyond the beautification of the piece" (xxvii). Hershey defends fraktur as cultivating the beautiful, "a process that stretches the imagination and pushes the artist toward an appreciation and even a love for things beautiful" (52). Even! Why are such things said?
It is only the Pennsylvania Dutch who doubt their beauty while everyone else celebrates it. Why else would this large body of folk art...have been preserved and so obviously treasured? It is a trait common to all subjugated groups that they doubt themselves. After examining a thousand pieces of fraktur Hershey says that in some cases the design illustrates the text, but mostly they are "lovely compositions," pretty pictures that "convey religious meaning equally as well as they communicate the value of beauty in everyday life" (56), but there is reason to believe that fraktur is a language flower.

The abstraction of image from text proliferated through other Pennsylvania folk art genres, linens, chests, pots, ironwork and barns. Divorce of meaning did not sever prior connection to its origin. Weiser wants the images to be an imitation of the nobility by the middle class, a folk art, of "cultural sinking from the tastes of upper levels of society" (xxviii), not a rising from the hymns or the unconscious. He applies this failing social/political analysis in his Preface to the Pennsylvania German Decorated Chest. It is the omnipresent Dutch apology that peasant doors could do little but open in bastardy to their betters.

Keyser says, "none of this little-studied body of folk poetry is fine literature" (This Teaching, 8). What notion of fine? Should this little-studied art be compared with Mozart, but not with Kafka or Borges, who though entirely irrelevant, equally apply for "fine" in vain. "Their copies of upper class, from furnishings to portraits, to attire, are frequently grouped together under the name of folk art" (Chest, 13). Has such a claim been made of other folk art? Weiser's "constant cultural sinking from the tastes of upper levels of society" so that "fine engravings and prints owned by the elite found their country counterpart in the drawings of schoolmasters and itinerants" (Fraktur, xxviii) pass sociology but fail art. He cites the lion and unicorn from British arms and the eagle from the American as borrowings from betters, but it is patently post hoc to say that because they preceded them they caused them. Images have to be allowed their own world outside social milieus. Schimmels's Dutch eagles are a supreme delight in their interpretations, hardly copies. Do you say Navajo weavers imitated their betters when they wove chief blankets or railroad trains at the behest of traders?

Rationalizing art is a hard road divorcing text and context the same, which was argued of Blake, whose illuminations were not even "mere embellishment." It would be better for critics to admit they cannot see any connection and get glasses.

Spiritual Transfer

Technology, philosophy and religion sped Pennsylvania assimilation. Early twentieth century transfers of decorative images from chest to barn were a so-called "last flowering" (Yoder, Hex Signs, 3). But the Dutch assimilation of English ways is tracked in every activity, from song to speech. "Did any of the now common English choruses originate among the Pennsylvania Dutch and spread, through translation from German to English...? Yoder answers his own question. No! "The type of spiritual transfer that took place--one might almost call it spiritual osmosis--was from the greater to the lesser body. Anglo-American religious patterns were adopted by the Pennsylvania Dutch, rather than vice versa (Yoder, Pennsylvania Spirituals, 348). But it wasn't just the permeable membrane of song, it was the stenciling instead of free-hand painting (Fabian, The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest, 63), "machine made ware from England [Gaudy Dutch china] resulted in driving out local potteries" (Frederick, Pennsylvania Dutch Cookery, 257). "English ideas about furniture finishes, printed birth certificates, and Victorian popular designs, the Pennsylvania Dutch lost interest in the artifacts of earlier generations. In time, the chests, pottery, and pie safes were relegated to the attic or barn" (Yoder, Hex Signs, 37).

Substitution of English ideas in the Americanization of the Pennsylvania Dutch reduced the household decorations of flower-stars to barns. Images with a contentious history, they came from everyday relations with nature, sun, animals, plants. For all the debate of the origin of the twelve pointed star hex, the image comes from a double tiger day lily, a duplicate of its shape. This is easy or difficult to find in flower borders. The design of internal landscapes is a deeper legacy in the spirit of acceptance that permeates mind and spirit, a spiritual force symbolized by the natural.

Spiritual Demise

Stoudt says the images are mandalas, but gets no credit for it from Yoder. The images painted on furniture, embroidered on linen, drawn on paper are "a full range of celestial and earthly subjects. Stars and birds, both identifiable and unrecognizable, are seen along with the plump heart..." (Fabian, 58). With the toasting couple, the unicorn, equestrian figures and mermaid, Fabian describes techniques, "the unicorn painters of Berks County, for example-also had templates for the major elements of their designs" (62), but "after the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, stenciling is frequently used in lieu of freehand painting. It is obviously used as a time-saving device and as such is one of the heralds of the decline of the traditional arts of rural Pennsylvania" (63)

The popularity of its demise rouses superstition before dashing it to the ground. Pennsylvania Dutch Country, (Irwin Richman) invokes amulets and symbols, "askew crosses," scratched into lintels, "almost invisible except to the knowing eye," "symbolism and magic" (53) before taking Yoder's Hex Signs as proof against voodoo. Having his cake and eating too, the author dances with the hex, but allows little if any "iconic meaning to the decorations found on fraktur," the quintessential Pennsylvania German Artifact," "...flowers, vines, animals and birds...hearts, crowns, angels and compass stars" (56).

Exfoliations of flower in the spiritual lily "died when the point of view which created them—the faith of Pennsylvania’s radical religious sects—was killed by the advent of religious liberalism” (Stoudt, 24), the introduction of English in schools and the death of home-crafts by the industrial revolution (Stoudt, xviii). Stoudt already rules out a huge segment of the population when he says "sects." But Yoder also proves the decline of fraktur "found in the nineteenth-century disintegration of the folk culture of the Pennsylvania Germans, particularly (1) the disappearance of institutional elements such as the parochial school, which had produced the Vorschrift, (2) the shift to the English language, which brought with it an inevitable loss of German devotional literature as the wellspring of fraktur symbolism, and (3) the decline in the very meaning of baptism, which had produced the Taufschein." The decline of baptism "can be partially attributed to the impact of the revivalist movement, which invaded the Pennsylvania German churches and sects from the world of Anglo-America." It was a complete conquest: "Fraktur was part of the old-style colonial culture, which, especially in the field of religion, was being challenged and reshaped through acculturation with Anglo-American forms" (280). Acculturate, assimilate! Reshaped through acculturation here means denatured. So the decorative art of the lily abstracted became the so called “prayer acts” of Wentz (24) and the lily was exhausted.

However much a meliorist wants to avoid choice, to celebrate the Pennsylvania past from the majority point of view of the English or lament the passing of the Dutch foreordains the peasant to be inferior to the Ph.D. It also begs the question of what rural folk benefits were, if impossible to recapture, especially when everyone now suddenly wishes the garden were back again. What is the meaning of the flowering heart iconography in itself? Who are the suspects in its demise? Were, as Stoudt argues, whole classes of these people [German-American] transcendentalists one hundred years before Emerson? Where are the studies of that text from the many sources that remain untranslated of the 3151 books and almanacs printed in the German language in America between 1728 and 1830? What devastations wreaked upon these people in the interests of social control?

If you are thinking of founding a new race, culture or way of life these issues need your thinking. If you are waiting for alien salvation from space these issues need your thinking. Or maybe you just have the hunger to be neutered common to western affluent democratic (read tyrannies cultural) societies who promote uniformity in the name of diversity, the English and their quislings (religion and science) are exemplary in their instructions.

Reviews

2009-09-23T08:08:00.000-07:00

A review of Michael S. Bird, O Noble Heart O Edel Herz: Fraktur and Spirituality in Pennsylvania German Folk Art (2002). Goodreads
A review of Chronicon Ephratense (1786) Goodreads

The Way Into the Flowering Heart in Blake

2009-04-04T15:00:00.001-07:00

These are the angels Blake saw. Think of them as flying nudes. He saw them in trees and shrubbery as a child, couldn't be convinced otherwise. Now he is famous for his doors of perception among drug users helped with mescaline, but he lived without drugs, being completely determined to live in this world while in that other. Blake invented the doors of perception that Aldous Huxley sought at his death by mescaline. The list is long of those who seek these doors in and since the 20th century. Just take a little yage! But for Blake the doors were open all the time to the way into the flowering heart. They were open for Milton and for Donne who can doubt, who never said a word about perception. The Hebrew poets were singing of it while the Babylonians were getting high in West Virginia, "going out and coming in from this day forth and even for ever more."

Plain and austere as any Mennonite, Blake took seriously his denomination of being. He would be labeled a dissenter and sectarian if any group fit. There are none. Efforts to degrade him into known categories and paradigms don't work, past or present. He is no more a tantracist than a mescaline user.To think he speaks for any other party is to reduce him to the commonplace as is done when Coleridge's pipe is celebrated more than his mountain climb (see Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, 81-84).

Lately they try to divorce Blake's wife from him, who was especially devoted to him, in effort to put them asunder and have Blake for themselves.Critics need pepper to blind the eye so no one can see the fraud they perpetuate. This peppery criticism makes for instant reputation. Another problem, Blake is a Christian.

There has been a revolution of the tools of thought and access to Blake's life. Thus the incomprehensibility of books about him begins to pass. Most of these are written in the complex sentences of scholars in apposition. Now, if you sit down in a chair before the Princeton Editions or the Blake Archives and look at the pictures, you pretty quick understand Blake's religion is the simple, complicated, ecstatic, nonconformist, charismatic, prophetic, biblical kind. Art is his gospel fruit and he turns theosophy on its head. He says God is man, not man is God.

Read in context with the contemporary George Whitfield he agrees with nothing and everything. Critics once tried to enter his life through his work, but it is easy to enter his work through his life. In the end if he says some mad thing, which he will do, his life proves his work serious, discipline proves him sound. In his own time his "pleasing, mild disposition" was said to be the only thing that kept him from being put in an institution. Mad poets, now celebrated, threatened conformity. He is still being made over. His mind must be ruled to save him from himself! Such notions always overwhelm martyr and visionary. Monastics, Moravians, Mennonites, Quakers, Dunkers are ready to sacrifice the outer world for the in.

Blake Is A Christian

Blake's life confronts the inner/outer world. From Pilgrim's Progress, melancholy poems about The Grave, Michelangelo's notion of creation, Milton's ditto and on, it's folly not to see Blake in the center of this context, with his own take on every Biblical idea of outer versus inner, world versus spirit. "Free yourself from the world," says also Chuang Tzu.The experience of the spirit world, especially the biblical part of it libeled as hopeless fundamentalism in prophecies of "end times" is not what it seems. One sentence from Yeats is better than whole books. Even spiritualized as Yeats is when he says that for Blake "Christ was his symbolic name for the imagination" (xvii), this partial truth is better than whole lies from the moths of instruction. So when Yeats seems to have his way with finding and losing his life, he makes a greater statement. He says that Blake "came to look upon poetry and art as a language for the utterance of conceptions, which, however beautiful, were none the less thought out more for their visionary truth than for their beauty. The change made him a greater poet and a greater artist; for 'He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it'" (xvii). Surveyed with an open eye only the hugest figures have celebrated that Name above every name that Yeats names.

Myrrh

Blake as a Christian is a stumbling block, but so is his marriage to and love of Kate. He would understand that myrrh drips from the handles of the lock. Who among the poets had a wife who sustained a lifelong relation of devotion, who not only took care and gave life and continuity to the poet, but who did his work, his printing and who was his sole model and consort? This dream eluded Yeats. Blake and Catharine used to take 40 mile walks together in the countryside. Aesthetes say Catharine got old and Blake was threadbare and dirty. He was a printer. They lived spare, were not thought to be the people they were. Not worldly at all. Is there one other who had his riches? Emily Dickinson. Kate was his sole model and consort! She was beautiful. Whatever you think Blake was about it hugely concerned the sensual, the sexual, the female in the same way this preoccupied Joyce. Whatever it is we're after in the life of Blake takes to task in us our essential eroticism and identity. Yeats deeply desired in a companion what Blake had, so he would know its value when he says that with Kate, Blake had a "love that knew no limit and a friendship that knew no flaw" (xx).

Burn the Dross

Great oddities occur after Blake is dead. Frederick Tatham disposed of his poetic estate, burned piles of things, but everybody else has had their day with the objectionable. Blake himself burned a lot of dross. The same flame draws the Many Moth (critics). In some ways Blake was better off in obscurity. Moths obscure the light of his work with tantric, alchemic occultisms. The sensational critical environment is so extreme that Yeats hits a kind of center when he says that Blake displays a profound sanity because he never "pronounced himself to be chosen and set apart alone among men" (xii), rightly seeing megalomania as a common modern disease The problem with Tatham's taste is that he was a convinced Irvingite, given to all those abuses of the spiritual, and as biographer Bentley says, he was convinced by the sect that Blake's inspiration was infernal. Young C.S. Lewis, "shown up a long stairway [of Yeats] lined with rather wicked pictures by Blake--all devils and monsters" (Letters. ed, by W. H. Lewis. Geoffrey Bles 1966, 57). So Tatham burned everything he did not later sell of "blocks, plates, drawings and MMS (Bentley Jr., 446). The rumors of what this estate consisted of are better left unseen because with Blake whatever shards torn from the carcass are most often magnified to the loss of the whole, whether it be his so-called empire or presumed philosophies filtered through a thousand critics who pull him asunder.

Munich in the Head

No matter what the parties and parochialisms, all have had their Blake, the latest being tantric sex, prolonging ecstasy forced upon Blake by way of Count Zinzendorf, making Blake's relation with his wife over into what only those alleging authors can know from their own, as Marsha Keith Schuchard has confessed. So if we cannot know what and why Mrs. Blake cried, since it has been done to Schuchard, namely all of it was not done to Kate. Blake lived in perpetual ecstasy. How do we know? Get married yourself and find out. The train of logic is that Blake read Swedenborg and Swedenborg emerged from Count Zinzendorf''s cult so dictated to, but not the way Milton and Blake were dictated to. The small can never comprehend the great, the self muse of the front brain cannot comprehend the Holy Spirit. As to Zinzendorf, it was known long before in Pennsylvania who he was when he decided that all the sects, Mennonites, Reformed could fit into the great arms of his faith. The Count was willing. Read Muhlenberg on Zinzendorf before concluding.

Tantric alchemy and tantricism together remind of John Dee and Edward Kelley, proving how much the spirit world lust wants to get in your pants. Whether to suppress orgasm and recycle eternal energy, maybe never die, the spirit told Kelley to tell Dee to send Jane, Dee's wife, to his bed. Count Zinzendorf wanted to be there too. If grad students and profs take the Munich from the side of their head, their delusion of wisdom, they dress up Blake and Kate in doll clothes, make them Ken and Barbie so they will reflect the very reality those students and profs know. Blake is a Christian not in words but in the life. Unless you live it the words mean nothing.

3.

Pray

We can be healthily skeptical of people who greet one another and ask, "is that Michael or Gabriel?" As if they commonly appeared in bookstores. If anybody can be believed that Gabriel sat for his portrait, as Blake is said to have told Thomas Phillips while having his portrait done, Blake might: "he waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun, and beckoning to me, moved the universe (Davis, 121). Among many monastic devotees of the inner world, Blake is alone. Sake of argument grants that his chief hero, Los the imagination, is tarnished as he enters the doors of perception. It is Blake's psychological allegory of the Fall.

So Blake found a Way Into the Flowering Heart where you can live every day, or just those days when you are not high. Be temporal and eternal.

Blake turns over the cart, thinks what has been done to the essence of truth is its assassin. Blake turns angels into devils to say that. If there's a hero of literature it's Blake. He takes the top of the head of the reader off partly because his extreme thought sometimes derives from even extremer, say Swedenborg, but mostly because Blake does not suffer fools. Support for many radical views found in his politics and poetics prove Blake a Christian the same way as Edwin Muir, translator of Kafka. After every devotion to Nietzsche and psychological difficulties, terrors of psycho-analysis, which he says stemmed from his fundamentalist upbringing and a forced religious experience when he was 14, he says, "I realized, that quite without knowing it, I was a Christian." (An Autobiography. Seabury, 1968. 168, 247).
Blake forgets to be corrosive when he and his wife kneel and pray to the Holy Spirit for inspiration. (William Blake. A New Kind of Man. Michael Davis. 1977, 155). Imagine what critics do when he reincarnates Milton, as outside the rationalist experience as Milton's insistence that the Holy Ghost dictated Paradise Lost to him each night in entirety, which he told to his daughter the next day. So much of what passes for understanding by critics is amoral black and white. They are the very fundamentalists they themselves should flee. The artistic case has even more contradiction than the general human. To withstand the contradictions of Blake's opposite states without compromising the portrait he gives of himself as a Christian is often too much for critical funds. They must make him fit their idea of rationality and art, which they have been doing anyway everywhere, completely absurd.

Prophet

Talk about straining out a gnat to swallow a camel! A lot of Blake's biography derives from Tatham whose reports give Blake a pietistic tincture, reporting practices of prayer that indicate he is the opposite of a free thinker. The same Tatham burned and disposed much of Blake's literary remains. It did not meet his approval. Just so, critics continue to seek a Blake they can comfortably digest, but his rampant evangelicism is not to their taste. Blake is a prophet in the biblical vein. He says and does things as unprecedented as the biblical prophets.

A comparison for fraktur art and the way into the flowering heart in Blake stems not only from the art, but from the faith. As Stoudt says (Pennsylvania German Folk Art, 24) it is only when a species of disbelief took hold in the minds of the Pennsylvania faithful, what he calls liberalism, that their art failed. And that art under digital magnification continues to amaze, as we hope to show. So what of their faith? There are so many ex-fundamentalists with delicate sensibilities, but good upbringings, that many readers of Blake and Fraktur are impaired by their previous lives. Without naming names of our contemporary literary peers (at least not yet), this case affects Blake, who is celebrated for his "corrosive" art in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but only because critics pretend Blake is not a Christian.

What the Redeemed Do

Blake is rather more than merely a Christian in name. He is one in his art, poetry and life, easiest to see in the art maybe, but in his poetry it is more dramatic. Critics gloss over these passages even as they explain them away, as Yeats does in his Introduction (Poems of William Blake), but there it still is, for example in Jerusalem where Blake invites, "I hope the reader will be with me wholly one in Jesus our Lord who is the God and Lord to whom the Ancients look'd and saw his day afar off with trembling & amazement." That alone goes further than allowed by the modern editor. Sorry Blake, "that isn't quite right for us." But Blake published himself and said what he would. Of course the subjects of his art are wholly biblical in every way, Job, notwithstanding the erosion that occurs from disinformation. If it sounds like this is a conspiracy to deny Blake his own faith, it is his critics who have denied their own.

In his personal life the reports of Blake and his wife are supernaturally scandalous, which information comes from Linnell. Of the application of fundamentalist attitudes to the poets however, witness the psychological dissection of Hopkins, who if he were what anthropologists used to call a "salvage" would have his own museum of reconstructions. Here he is a degenerate, there a fascist, any and all things where the good is remade into stereotypical evil that gets young peppery guys published. The essence of the fundamentalist attitude is celebrated "outward ceremony," Wayne Dwyer selling his 20,000 books and moving to Maui to follow the Tao, just what Oprah would like, an easy grasp of the profound. Blake says that the eternal body of man is the imagination and that to be a Christian is to be an artist, a poet/painter/musician/architect, and that that is the only preoccupation of the mind, gained over life and work, not in ease. Then we can know who the Christians are, not that art makes them so, it is just what the redeemed do.

Eternity Within

Another way to demolish art and artist, Blake in particular, is to acknowledge his Christ, but claim him simply confused. Do not forget what they did to Orpheus, tore him limb from limb. So they call Blake's "a system so arcane, so embroiled in its own solipsistic mythology, that it is a resounding failure." "I will fit my small mind into his" should be the quest of these seekers of eternity in their dreams. Blake and his companions Milton and Hopkins lived it in the day. "Are you eternal?" You could ask the critics this, but they won't like it. George Richmond went walking with Blake, "feeling as if he were walking with the prophet Isaiah" (Davis, 154).

The smart people of the world want to ask, "was Jesus Christ a Christian?" But "all men are in eternity... though it appears Without, it is Within in your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow." So get on with your undressing. Should you never read to perceive another word of the flowering heart, know that this inwendigkeit is also the way peasant ancestors put into their art.

4. The Most Profound Speakers of English

We are flat out of examples of the One Man who keeps cropping up in Blake's visions. When you wrap your arms around a man you are going to get a multitudinious contradiction. Adam Kadmon is not real! Billy Blake is going to be imperfect. Our secularists have gotten way too comfortable in shrinking a Christian down to a buffoon with the morals and prejudices of corruption. There is no need to compare him with an animal. The dog is noble. The wolf is noble. It is the man.

As we see Christians in art as writers, they are latitudinarians not Luthers. Blake says Luther kept whores. How modern of him. Christians are like Jonathan Swift. When his yahoo rains refuse down upon the narrator standing under a tree, that is what a christian would say in art. The broadness of a christian cannot be managed. Donne was a christian when he wrote the Songs and Sonnets. Later he says, "so they would read me throughout, and look upon me altogether...let all the world know all the sins of my youth, and of mine age too, and I would not doubt but God should receive more glory, and the world more benefit, than if I had never sinned ("On Prayer, Repentance, and the Mercy of God." Sermons. Ed by Edmund Fuller, 1964, 160).

So many of the most profound speakers of English own that language of faith. The only recourse of their enemy, another Christian idea, is to make it seem like there are hardly any Christian poets in English. There is hardly anything else. Wallace Stevens was a Christian! A forgiving bunch, they allow Dimmesdale back in the pulpit after a suitable time because "the gift of God is without repentence." Blake's specie of Christian, and remember that his works were burned by just those same specie, is still a page in Marriage where Palmer says "I think the whole page...would at once exclude the work from every drawing room table in England" (The Stranger From Paradise, 409).

Who comes off worse in the pantheon of life, David, Solomon or Blake? It is hard to put asunder what their beliefs join together. It doesn't matter what outlandish thing Blake may have said or done; at root he belongs. Christians say, "by their fruits you will know them." Their chief supporting actor, Paul, began his career by making them betray themselves under threat of death. That was before, not after? There are all these escape clauses. Kill the body but don't mess the mind.

We Kneel Down and Pray

Linnell said he "found it hard to get the great mystic into their little thimble" (Stranger, 409). George Richmond, the youngest of the Ancients [a group who gathered respectfully around Blake at his end], an aspiring artist, in all naivete asked Blake one day what to do when: a) he wanted to know the will of God b) wanted to know whether to take care of his aged mother or fight in the French resistance or c) what to do when he was out of artistic gas: "To his astonishment, Blake turned to his wife suddenly and said: "It is just so with us, is it not, for weeks together, when the visions forsake us? What do we do then, Kate?" "We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake" (Stranger, 403).

Dissenters speak the language of Enthusiasm, Bentley says, (365) citing Linnell, "The mind that rejects the true Prophet...generally follows the Beast also for the Beast & False-Prophet are always found together." Such notions of the prophetic are intimately biblical. They mean that "Blake claimed the possession of some powers only in a greater degree that all men possessed and which they undervalued in themselves & lost through love of sordid pursuits--pride, vanity, & the unrighteous mammon" (367). Yeats would come right out of his grave to get these powers. Think of the comfort that would give theosophists who in their work merely imitate the Christian! Try as he may Yeats cannot. We will visit him there soon. Stay tuned.Try as he would, to get "the power,"Yeats invented visions out of intellect. If you yourself see fleas in the spirit, as Blake, that is, originally perceive the unknown, be democratic and share the wealth with the poor!

Infallibility

All men are equal, what! Tatham, burned the plates (Blake merely gouged them). This very tainted source, says when Blake thought he had the Seeing fixed "before his mind's Eye...that while he copied the vision (as he called it) upon his plate or canvas, he could not Err; & that error & defect could only arise from the departure or inaccurate delineation of this unsubstantial scene" (371). Blake's claim to infallibility in something nobody can confirm smacks of Enthusiasm. Enthusiasts must be taken for what they are. Bentley says "the testimony about Blake's madness among contemporaries who did not know him is close to unanimous" (379). Among those who knew him, at least prior to 1820, the case was only somewhat better.

Bentley gives an understanding that the grounds of his mad reputation were based on the observation that Blake's spiritual world was in form disconcertingly like the material outer world (380). Would we expect it to be different? Such "resemblances" (see Wallace Stevens' Necessary Angel, "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet," 61) are necessary to recognize the form being seen. It is always the case in these philosophies, occult or other, that reflections of order occur for the purpose of recognition, that the Other is not hiding so much as hid by the viewer's blindness, as Linnell means about "sordid pursuits" that blind.

Draw Aside the Curtain

Evidence that after 1820 Blake became serene occurs in his Virgil woodcuts, his taking a glass of porter (393) and the conviviality of his circle, especially Edward Calvert, Samuel Palmer, George Richmond and Frederick Tatham (401). The woodcuts receive approval from all comers. Samuel Palmer, at the time said, "There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul, and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are like all that wonderful artist's works the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain" (392). This flesh curtain is much at issue with Blake.

Never take what others say somebody said without compelling reason. That means what Varley or Crabb Robinson say Blake said is not much admissible as fact. Quote what Blake wrote. But Linnell is worthier. Is that because Varley is an astrologer and says Blake has Mercury square Mars which gives depth of mind! What about Blake's seances with the Visionary Heads? Blake, starved for company was adopted by a handful of young men who came to his house after 1820 and cultivated him. He told them he could see into the you know what, so Varley got him at a table and Blake drew heads like Edward I, etc. Then Blake drew the visionary head of a flea. That's the high art of spoof. Varley's too serious and is being mocked with a straight face. He says Blake said the flea was originally created large but had to be shrunk because it was too great a predator. It's a good thing Donne didn't hear about it! The sensationalisms of literature should be read as fiction. Shall Gulliver be turned into Hakluyt? He has, but look at the Colonials! Blake knew who Christians were, not that art made them, it is what the redeemed do. That was the inwendigkeit Anabaptists put in their art.

If you are new to Blake go here.

Postscript

"Nearly all of us have felt, at least in childhood, that if we imagine that a thing is so, it therefore either is so or can be made to become so. All of us have to learn that this almost never happens, or happens only in very limited ways; but the visionary, like the child, continues to believe that it always ought to happen. We are so possessed with the idea of the duty of acceptance that we are inclined to forget our mental birthright, and prudent and sensible people encourage us in this. This is why Blake is so full of aphorisms like "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." Such wisdom is based on the fact that imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept" (Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 27).

I was studying Blake and made a living off his Tyger. It produced four paychecks. Thinking to calve a Blake comic, I got copies of the slides of Jerusalem before cellphones, but the cost of production outran. They are reproduced here in black and white. Imagine Blake street-bound in newsprint of lurid colors! Ignorance is a kind of grace and Enthusiasm its naivete.

Fraktur Is A Species of Language Flower

2009-03-09T10:53:00.000-07:00

Fraktur is a species of language flower, but according to Weiser, "...one basic fact must be underscored in studying these documents--the illumination was auxiliary to the text" ("Piety and Protocol in Folk Art," 1). However, it can be shown that such illuminations emerge from the text. Consider Plate 60 of Hershey's This Teaching, "Ihr Kinder Wolt ihr Lieben," ("O Children Who Are Loving"). The design is attributed to schoolmaster Jacob Gottschall (1793), but the text, "O Children" is a hymn of Christopher Dock's, himself a schoolteacher. One intention of Pennsylvania Fraktur was to teach the alphabet to children, but here the letter strokes mimic the design of the flowers in the composition, making it a kind of Calligrammes, a hand drawn vispo, a flower of hand and mind. It was presented as a reward to a student, Anna Kampffer in 1793. We paint the drawing with words.

A vine, a "stem" of tulips germinates from a globe/seed in the right corner. This spreads up and to the left. Another bloom of this "plant," slightly unconnected and larger, blooms down from the top left as though rooted in air, coextensive, but separate from the vine. The second larger bloom mimics the colors and shapes of the capitals of the title, Ihr Kinder in rose, blue and gold stripes, as though the letters were flowers or the flowers letters.The upstroke of the blue I combines with the down stroke of the rose h, making three letters out of two, an elision designed. The larger blooms have smaller dark stems, unrooted, air borne. A current of air lifts the "letter petal" leaves, from right to left which "bloom" in two large four-chambered blossoms, penetrated by segments of the unattached vine. Through each center of the four chambers (circles) of the flower, covered by a cross hatched red and gold diamond, runs Hershey's "checkerboard."

so ubt was freude worth...

Erquicken Hertz und muth

[The practice of joy...
quickens hearts and minds.]

Several phonetic cognates sound like English.The immediate short lines and rhymes are felt in translation said aloud. The vine that springs from the seed at the lower right flows across the top of the page, which seed, translates as, "Be with us, on all our ways / Dear God with thy blessing." That is, the blessing rises in the vine. The title words Ihr Kinder, underlined in gold, resemble the block style of Dock's fraktur. These intersect the center of the page and divide the text below from its flower above, as if a flower of the text rises from the word garden. Language flowers teach children to identify petal letters. The writing of the text below in thirteen long cursive lines, is identified in stanzas only by numerals 1 to 5, set in a hand so small the students must have known the hymn by heart.

A child art, the colors, floral designs intend to attract the eye. At least among Mennonites fraktur was child art, designed for children, sometimes executed by children with its colors and floral designs intended for the child's eye. Before we defame it as not high art we should remember our literary master William Blake and fear his reproving. The first study of it was by H. C. Mercer, "The Survival of the Medieval Art of Illuminated Writing Among Pennsylvania Germans." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 36 (1898): No. 156, 423-432.

That paradise accompanies the child is the point of paradise art, to decorate the new with hope. Pennyslvania German art is an art of paradise reckoned from the child archetype. Fraktur Vorschrift were given to school children as a reward for good performance. The teacher would make a flower as a bookmark or a watercolor according to ever more elaborate systems of ornament. Verses of the Bible turn the letters of words into flowers. The message was, "here is a picture of paradise." These days we give them greenbacks. Such symbols emerged from a life view that fostered them, that implied a millennium ready to lie down with the lion and lamb, now forsworn for Pop. Their notion of paradise fostered a fantastic idealism of decoration on linen, furniture, pottery, barns. They planted equally fantastic gardens if they moved to the city, covered their windowsills with violets. "We have heard how Christopher Dock prodded his pupils with such drawings. If he did not originate the practice, he is evidence that it was in use at an early date, for Dock wrote in 1750. These tiny scraps of paper with birds, tulips, other flowers and occasionally other subjects survive by the dozens" (Weiser, xx). In the greater tradition it had wider applications. Most of this communal body was unsigned, but it was repeated again and again in images that migrated from paper to linen (show towels) to wood (decorated chests).

There are individual characteristics of fraktur artists. Dock uses block designs, initial capital letters filled with swirls and stipples, as Hershey puts it (59f ). He includes an alphabet and numbers in German and in English, with some scripture translated to English, a bilingualism that mostly ended with him. Sometimes he runs a banner through the illuminated title or above it. His students imitate these features, establishing a style which grows more ornate in later examples. Borders marked by whirls also under gird the initial letter in descending spirals, a common feature of Pennsylvania signatures.

Fraktur also occurs in baptismal certificates called Taufschien, mostly printed, but the most notable are freehand letters of reward and instruction, vorschrift, given to children. Until Hershey's Teaching (2003) there were few good reproductions. In a similar manner Blake's watercolors were hidden from public eye, although inferior reproductions existed. The essentially different genres of Taufschien and vorschrift, which divide art from text mirror the divided demographics of the Pennsylvania German,. Ninety per cent were "churched" so called, that is, the Lutheran and Reformed Taufschien. Ten per cent were Mennonite and Anabaptist vorschrift. The "churched" assumed proprietary status over the whole by their majority status, but the social/political acts of Mennonites often outweighed them, which sibling rivalry impacts all discussion.

Free Library of Philadelphia’s digital collection of Fraktur.

New England vs. Pennsylvania / Apologizing for Art in the Americanization of the Pennsylvania Dutch

2009-03-09T10:52:00.001-07:00

The Tree Is the Goat

Remember when new England was founded, as opposed to old or any number of Englands, it was a variety singled out from the strands of religion minus the other qualities of the Renaissance. New England left behind class, status, court, stage, literature for severity and plainness. It was closer to the medieval. For two hundred years after its founding New England worried that its literature didn't compete with the old. Step child English affiliates still worry about that. This sense of competition and narrow outlook contribute much to its chauvinism, isolation and infertility. The spiritual did not renew the physical but was argued contaminated by it. Actually the reverse is the case, the spiritual contaminates the physical. This is true in every take of the gospels. Uncontaminated nature does not mean clean land fills, it means uncontaminated by mind.

The Puritans transferred the sin in themselves, in their minds, to the forest, as if they could drive it away from them into the wilderness on the back of some Old Testament goat. The goat however was the forest itself, mowed lest the sins found their way back. A scapegoat is no good unless forever lost. The tree as goat was cut. Then their sins could no longer hide as predators in the darkness, as if the predator were outside themselves, as if their fears were anywhere but in themselves. This thinking subsequently fueled all American botanical and biological extinctions. That the fear of sins transferred to the outer world is still going on is in some respects quite unbelievable.

The believer misapplied the precept that the world would contaminate, equivocating the world as physical nature. This was all the more toxic in the austere soil of New England. Garrisoned against the natural they did not dream of welcoming nature indoors as did the genius Pennsylvanians, until two centuries in the guise of transcendentalism. By 1850 transcendentalism had them all wishing for the tree and the pond, but earlier, the new English believed savage Indians and wild men (their own sins) hid at the clearing's edge, kept at bay only by cutting back the growth. How this differs from the defoliations of Agent Orange in Vietnam is not at all. It is the logical extension of clear cutting the forest and exterminating the buffalo. Sin prevented hid evil and made a profit at the same time. Souls were perverted by this greed and fearing, so they erected a theology of dominion and racial superiority. The new puritan age of greed today produces in the rich and super rich where a "spiritual imagination... impotent, sterile, or dead, is necessarily going to be an era of violence, chaos, destruction, madness, and slaughter (Merton, Seeking Paradise, 85).

So racism, extermination and extinction lay down like wolf cubs at the Puritan door. Romulus and Remus embodied all the worst qualities of the new English. Question these sucklings if you dare. The Pennsylvania Dutch who survived the nihilistic and legalistic adversaries of Holland and Switzerland, did not dare. But in place of the old world tortures, in mild Pennsylvania they domesticated the natural, invited it in, befriended it in their own natures, painted it, sculpted it and threw it on the forge. Pennsylvania didn’t produce any Scarlet Letters, but decorated chests and barns.

The Puritan celebrated this malaise intellectually. Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather drew sharp boundaries of governmental/pastoral views. Literature as sociology tempted a depravity of nature out of Hawthorne, what he called "virgin soil as a cemetery" (The Scarlet Letter, I ), "the pine trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children." "To the Puritan, nature was not benign. The wilderness was a place of terror"“ (Broyles), or as William Bradford put it (1620) "a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men." Michael Broyles makes the telling observation that "much of the story [of Pilgrim's Progress] is set in America...it was the metaphorical terrain the believer had to traverse...," which he says to differentiate the gentler nature of Puritan composer William Billings (The New England Psalm Singer, 1770. Also see Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, 25). A great deal more has been said of the Puritan seed time fear of those first two centuries that produced our harvest of extinction.

Divide and conquer is the rule of any occupation, basic English exploited differences among the Pennsylvania Germans that Penn's colony had been founded to set free. Relations with the "world" however were a sticking point for immigrants of the Lily too. They divided into Church and Sect, churched vs. plain. But the separate but unequal existence of Germans alongside the English in American civilization ended after the Civil War when the Dutch bought the farm, that is, gave up and began to assimilate. Some people think the Amish the last bastion of the "separate" and that these differences existed up till 1950 in speaking German, farming, going barefoot. The Amish may continue to exist in 2050, but assimilation got the rest.

Read the rest of this here.

Compromise

Pennsylvania Germans want to show they really belong. Millard Gladfelter in his Foreword to Pennsylvania German Fraktur calls the cultural war between the English "on the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers" and among the Germans of "outlying countrysides." a "contest" for retention of custom and language" (ix). Assimilate or die looks better in a velvet mask. Weiser pains to make the Dutch into Americans by declaiming "the much-celebrated openness of the United States...to receive into its midst persons and cultures of widely disparate origin" (xiii). But it was not the United States that welcomed them, it was Penn's Quaker Pennsylvania. The English never welcomed the disparate. From "Negro Spirituals to Pennsylvania German Fraktur" (Gladfelter,1x) they exploited them. So in order to assimilate even in the bi-centennial world of 1976 these volumes commemorate, Weiser constructs a rhetoric that celebrates the whole for its part, the United States for Pennsylvania. Fraktur's Introduction is worth attending for so transparently reflecting the prejudice in the background of its paradise art.

"We are richer for it,' says Weiser, defending w the fragmented survival of Pennsylvania German folk culture. Instead of celebrating sauerkraut and language for themselves, it has to be for "the tolerance of American polity" (xiii). Welcoming the diverse may be what America says of itself on the Statue of Liberty, but it was exploitation among the Pennsylvania Germans of Philadelphia where American rhetoric hatched the all men are equal notion. It was a Pennsylvania dream of equality Weiser celebrates "in styles at variance with the majority" (xiii), but it was not "the majority" they were at variance with, it was to the English they continually apologized for their Dutchness, what they were. Keyser, on the texts of fraktur in his Preface to Hershey's book (ThisTeaching I Present, 2003), says that "none of this little-studied body of folk poetry is fine literature" (8), he could easily have said, "these texts are an invaluable window into the mind of their art."

Borrowings From Betters

Friends of fraktur should not act partisan. Weiser says that "with some exceptions, the motifs of Fraktur are simply embellishment and have no esoteric meaning or function beyond the beautification of the piece" (xxvii). Hershey defends fraktur as cultivating the beautiful, "a process that stretches the imagination and pushes the artist toward an appreciation and even a love for things beautiful" (52). Even! It is only the PA Dutch who can doubt their beauty while everyone else celebrates it. "Why else would this large body of folk art...have been preserved and so obviously treasured?" All subjugated groups doubt themselves. After examining a thousand pieces of fraktur Hershey says that in some cases the design illustrates the text, but mostly they are "lovely compositions," pretty pictures that "convey religious meaning equally as well as they communicate the value of beauty in everyday life" (56).

Abstraction of image from text proliferated also in other PA German folk art genres of linens, chests, pots, ironwork and barns. Divorcing meaning from text did not however sever the connection. Weiser wants the images to be an imitation of the nobility by the middle class, a folk art, a "cultural sinking from the tastes of upper levels of society" (xxviii), not a rising from the hymns or from the unconscious. The Preface to the Pennsylvania German Decorated Chest applies this failing social/political analysis. It is the omnipresent Dutch apology that peasant boors could do little but open in bastardy to their betters.

Keyser: "none of this little-studied body of folk poetry is fine literature" (This Teaching, 8). Should this little-studied art be compared with Mozart, but not Kafka or Borges, though entirely irrelevant, but who also apply for "fineness" in vain. "Their copies of upper class, from furnishings to portraits, to attire, are frequently grouped together under the name of folk art" (Chest, 13). Weiser's "constant cultural sinking from the tastes of upper levels of society" so that "fine engravings and prints owned by the elite found their country counterpart in the drawings of schoolmasters and itinerants" (Fraktur, xxviii) pass sociology but fail art. He cites the lion and unicorn from British arms and the eagle from the American as borrowings from betters, but it is patently post hoc to say that because they preceded them they caused them. Images exist outside social milieus. Schimmels's Dutch eagles are a supreme delight in their interpretations, hardly copies. Do you say Navajo weavers imitated their betters, the traders, when they wove chief blankets or railroad trains at their behest?

Divorcing text and context is a hard road, much argued of Blake, whose illuminations were not even "mere embellishment." It would be better for critics to admit they cannot see any connection and get glasses.

Spiritual Transfer

Technology, philosophy and religion provoked assimilation. Early twentieth century transfers from chest to barn were a so-called "last flowering" (Yoder, Hex Signs, 3). But the assimilation of Dutch ways tracks in every activity from song to speech. "Did any of the now common English choruses originate among the Pennsylvania Dutch and spread, through translation from German to English...? Yoder answers his own question. No! "The type of spiritual transfer that took place--one might almost call it spiritual osmosis--was from the greater to the lesser body. Anglo-American religious patterns were adopted by the Pennsylvania Dutch, rather than vice versa (Pennsylvania Spirituals, 348). But it wasn't just the permeable membrane of song, it was the stenciling instead of free-hand painting (Fabian, 63), "machine made ware from England [Gaudy Dutch china] resulted in driving out local potteries" (Frederick, 257). "English ideas about furniture finishes, printed birth certificates, and Victorian popular designs, the Pennsylvania Dutch lost interest in the artifacts of earlier generations. In time, the chests, pottery, and pie safes were relegated to the attic or barn" (Hex Signs, 37).

Substitution of English conventions reduced the flower-star. For all the debate of the origin of the twelve pointed star hex, the image comes from a double tiger day lily, a duplicate of its shape, easy or difficult to find in flower borders. A deeper legacy involves internal landscapes in a spirit of acceptance in mind and spirit, a spiritual force symbolized by the natural.

Spiritual Demise

Stoudt says the images are mandalas, but gets no credit from Yoder. The images painted on furniture, embroidered on linen, drawn on paper are "a full range of celestial and earthly subjects. Stars and birds, both identifiable and unrecognizable, are seen along with the plump heart..." (Fabian, 58). With the toasting couple, the unicorn, equestrian figures and mermaid, Fabian describes techniques, "the unicorn painters of Berks County, for example-also had templates for the major elements of their designs" (62), but "after the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, stenciling is frequently used in lieu of freehand painting. It is obviously used as a time-saving device and as such is one of the heralds of the decline of the traditional arts of rural Pennsylvania" (63)

Exfoliations of the spiritual lily "died when the point of view which created them—the faith of Pennsylvania’s radical religious sects—was killed by the advent of religious liberalism” (Stoudt, 24), the introduction of English in schools and the death of home-crafts by the industrial revolution (Stoudt, xviii). Stoudt rules out a huge segment of the population when he says "sects." Yoder alows the decline of fraktur "found in the nineteenth-century disintegration of the folk culture of the Pennsylvania Germans, particularly
(1) the disappearance of institutional elements such as the parochial school, which had produced the Vorschrift,
(2) the shift to the English language, which brought with it an inevitable loss of German devotional literature as the wellspring of fraktur symbolism, and
(3) the decline in the very meaning of baptism, which had produced the Taufschein." The decline of baptism "can be partially attributed to the impact of the revivalist movement, which invaded the Pennsylvania German churches and sects from the world of Anglo-America."

It was a complete conquest: "Fraktur was part of the old-style colonial culture, which, especially in the field of religion, was being challenged and reshaped through acculturation with Anglo-American forms" (280). Acculturate, assimilate! Reshaped through acculturation here means denatured. So the decorative art of the lily abstracted became the so called “prayer acts” of Wentz (24) and the lily was exhausted.

However much a meliorist wants to celebrate the Pennsylvania past from the majority point of view or lament the passing of the Dutch, the peasant is ordained to be inferior to the Ph.D. This begs the question as to what rural folk benefits were. But what if someone wishes the garden back again? What is the meaning of the flowering heart iconography in itself? Who are the suspects in its demise? Were whole classes of these people [German-American] transcendentalists one hundred years before Emerson? Where are the studies of that text from the many sources that remain untranslated of the 3151 books and almanacs printed in the German language in America between 1728 and 1830? These mark the limits of social control and assimilation to the English and to the modern.

Cited

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
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

Man of Peace at War with the Divided Self

2009-03-09T10:47:00.001-07:00

Substitute the sword with the plow, commercial exploitation with conservation, and electric companies will be decommissioning dams to restore riparian habitat (Fossil Creek, AZ) when earth enters its final age of peace. The lily age of the German peaceniks celebrated nature for itself on 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). To a beating of swords (words) into plowshares as a shorthand of that paradigm, "peculiar" is a compliment connoting unworldly, uncommercial.

The Pennsylvanian antidote to the destruction of nature fostered 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, inelegant, who rejected the outer ethic of exploitation and "original sin" of slavery now corrected by presidents. But commissions of an even greater sin than slavery along salmon coasts and prairie were a sin against nature as old as Cotton Mather's infection of new worlds.

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 embroideries of "glee that only a man at peace with life can relish" (Weiser, xv), we say that the man of peace was at war with the divided self imaged in 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." Two views of paradise and wilderness occupy the outward surface that begs to be called by analogy, a corn field resurrection. The literal is made symbolic in such transformations as Van Gogh makes of field and sky. Alternate 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 meditate it like St. Francis. Naming the animals is not what a government biologist does in thinning wild horse herds and elk to protect cattle, imposing a false, human, 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

Mary Jane Lederach Hershey. This Teaching I Present: Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse Schools, 1747-1836. Intercourse, PA: Good Books 2003.
John Joseph Stoudt. Pennsylvania German Folk Art. Allentown, PA: Pennsylvania German Folklore Society. 1966
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

Images of Paradise of the Pennsylvania Germans: Antidote to the Fall

2008-07-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

The short list to their paradise is obvious, "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," "more variations than one person could imagine, as well as birds of all feather and fancy" (52). The chief artists were children and teachers of children, parochial schoolmasters, Mennonites. Mennonite Christopher Dock began the traceable fraktur tradition along the Skippack in Montgomery County as This Teaching I Present: Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse Schools, 1747-1836, attests.The full flowering of this art ended in the mid 1830's when Pennsylvania decreed its public school system superseding religious instruction.

Fraktur Vorschrift were given to school children to reward good performance: you have done well, here is a picture of paradise. "We have heard how Christopher Dock prodded his pupils with such drawings. If he did not originate the practice, he is evidence that it was in use at an early date, for Dock wrote in 1750. These tiny scraps of paper with birds, tulips, other flowers and occasionally other subjects survive by the dozens" (Weiser, xx). In the greater tradition it had wider applications. It begs the question of individuality because little of this body was signed. It was communal, repeated again and again in images that migrated from paper to linen (show towels) to wood (decorated chests).

There are individual characteristics in various fraktur artists. Dock's are characterized by blocked designs, initial capital letters filled with swirls and stipples, as Hershey puts it (59f ). He includes an alphabet and numbers, in German and in English, with some scripture translated to English, bilingualism that mostly ended with him. Sometimes he runs a banner through the illuminated title or above it. His students imitate these features, establishing this style which is not as ornate as later examples. Borders are marked by whirls which also under gird the initial letter in descending spirals, another feature of Pennsylvania German signatures.

Blake's Illuminations

Images of birds, flowers, angels, crowns from "a prototype in the mother country" (Weiser xxvii) beg comparison with Blake's illuminations whose "decorations" also suffered in obscurity because they were neither adequately reproduced nor understood from his private system of vision. Any similar rejection of the relation of art and text stands out. Weiser says no matter what their beauty of illustration that "Fraktur existed for the sake of the texts" (xxvii), an especially Protestant dependence "on the text and a few selected images to convey the message," (xxviii) hidden from understanding because of a "preoccupation with death and religious themes." You sense here a defensiveness in the critic, such themes are omnipresent in English poetry. The decorations of fraktur have been treated as an end in themselves much as Blake's poetry had been elevated above its images. Fraktur texts are now ignored as much as his illuminations were.

Multiple fraktur had multiple authors, but critics cannot find a system of thought in fraktur texts or have not stepped back far enough to see it. Blake's system was not perceived as a unity comprehended in his visions. It is still difficult for critics to affirm the literal Jesus found everywhere in Jerusalem and not make the reference over into a theory of imagination cut off from the literal. Until Erdman or Frye, critics were affronted at system in Blake. How could the critical cousins swallow then an esoteric unity in fraktur texts? Stoudt started out to find such, but the discredited world view of pietists allowed little credence to the notion of a world in hymns of verse. Opponents argue that multiple authorship from disparate sources further prevents this, but any point about a unity of texts depends anyway on a communal not individual expression of unity, on Pennsylvania Germans manifesting personal transcendentalism maybe, and a celebration of nature in their hymns and art well in advance of the birth of these ideas in New England. [Coming here, consideration of German Literary Influences in the American Transcendentalists.]

So what 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, Christmas cookies cut "in hundreds of designs," inlays, embroideries with "the play and 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)? The man of peace was at war with his divided self? The man of peace at war may be the genius of his muse.

Shaker Analogy

Images of Paradise imply a heavenly art translated to earth, as among the Shakers where "the peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it" (Thomas Merton, 85). The key is "capable of believing," prescient Milton taking dictation from the Holy Spirit to write Paradise Lost, or as Merton says, "Shakers believed their furniture was designed by angels--and Blake believed his ideas for poems and engraving came from heavenly spirits" (85). Merton likens the Shakers to Blake's protests "at the blindness of 'single vision' which saw only the outward and material surface of reality, not its inner and spiritual 'form and the still more spiritual 'force' from which the form proceeds" (74).

Merton's Shaker approaches the Pennsylvania Dutch mind: "the work of the craftsman's hands had to be an embodiment of 'form.' The form had to be an expression of spiritual force. The force sprang directly from the mystery of God through Christ in the Believing artist" (79). Merton says Shaker art has "something to do with what Blake called 'the secret furniture of Jerusalem's chamber'" (74), that "a work-a-day bench, cupboard, or table might also and at the same time be furniture in and for heaven" (74). It is obvious for Merton that "Shaker inspiration was communal...due not to the individual craftsman but to the community spirit and consciousness of the Believers" (76). Indeed that the Shaker forms were "a better, clearer, more comprehensible expression of their faith than their written theology" (76). This mythology sees the outward material surface through an inner spiritual form and still more the "spiritual force from which the form proceeds" (74).

Renewing Mind

So we make the case that Pennsylvania Dutch images of paradise celebrate the natural fruition and birth of plant and animal, find for the human a place amid these images, called here the way into the flowering heart, frakturs covered with lilies in the shape of a tulip, images of a tulip blooming from a heart, a rooster as a celebration, a flower-star and any field or haystack transformed by this renewing mind. The spider, the fly, the rooster, the child, and why not the cow, the farmer, the sky, the grass show plain dressed and unplain people, Gothic or not, ornate in their inner lives, "their only advertisement was the work itself" (Merton, 79), field, orchard and plant. Dutch celebration of life was by all means opposed to the surrounding English cultures whose domination of peoples and empires were commercial enterprises. Spiritual conditions made out of the natural set Pennsylvanians apart.

Recapturing the Lily Age might be like trying to live out the prophecies of Blake. It is all inside the mind's archetypes, giant forms to meditate. The Lily has as much to do with artifact as the seraphim with the hex. Nothing. Both are round. You can't get to the Lily by turning it into a counterfeit. It is not about nostalgia however for a thing that once existed, for stone pullers, horseback riders. A proper understanding of paradise requires the concession that it is not an external state. Paradise is interior, matching something we can't see, mirrored in what we can, connected to an organic field called the Kingdom of God, meaning the ground out of which the Lily grows which is completely within. Field, sky, sun and lovely plant in this world proceed on vegetative time, as a tree planted by rivers of water. Artifacts may be said to leave a trail of crumbs for the external mind , give it an illusion that it belongs. A pewter pitcher of nineteen hundred may be a clue.

Dominant English culture however saw nature as a mine, an exploitation, but the lily age celebrated nature for itself in behalf of Christ, a different kind of utility, as though legislating protection for the whale because God loves it. Were the salvation of nature so desired this might be forgiven by secularists. The Pennsylvania Dutch paradigm of the conservation of the biosphere is actual. It was once thought that the first principle of creative art and life among these peculiar people was "the divining of nature" which resembled the beating of swords 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 to restore riparian habitat (Fossil Creek, AZ) when earth enters its final age of peace.

It is not toohard to accept the Pennsylvanians as an antidote to the destruction of nature, treasuring it so within to foster the underpinnings of a more caring world against the outer one that transforms everything to itself. The irony upon the elegant is that liberation comes from a people Franklin called brutish, who rejected the outer ethic of exploitation and "original sin" of slavery that is now the stuff of presidents. Commissions of an even greater original sin than slavery rebound along demolished salmon coasts in the demolition of buffalo and prairie, a sin against nature as old as Cotton Mather's infection of new worlds

New England vs. Pennsylvania
Concepts of nature and the world thus underlie the two competing American philosophies of the Puritan and Pennsylvania Dutch. What they thought of themselves they thought of nature, equivocated as human nature not the natural world. "World" was likewise a place of temptation, not the eco-sphere. Both projected an image of themselves outward.

New England puritans conditioned by their fear took the view that "the world," meaning nature, would contaminate them. Many such ideas were misapplied by the mind of the believer. The baggage of puritan beliefs was more toxic unloaded in the austere climate and soil of New England. Garrisoned against the natural they would have welcomed the Pennsylvania genius inviting nature indoors, as they did a century later in the guise of transcendentalism, had they not feared the unknown that lurked at the clearing's edge. By 1850 transcendentalism made them long for the pond, but two centuries earlier New England believed that the savage Indians, wild men and their own sins were only kept at bay by fear of the soil and its growth, which explains natural demolitions such as clear cutting the forest three and four centuries later. Prevent sin and make a profit.The idea of sin in nature perverted creation in their souls. Against the evil they found in themselves, projected outward and wolfishly portrayed, they erected a theology of dominion and racial superiority. In a new puritan age, "this spiritual imagination is impotent, sterile, or dead, is necessarily going to be an era of violence, chaos, destruction, madness, and slaughter (Merton, Seeking Paradise, 85).

It is no joke that racism and biological extinction lay like wolves at the door of the Puritan and the English in general. Question more deeply the house and those within if you dare, but for their own reasons the Dutch were not so afraid. Many had faced their adversary in the old world tortures. Here, in the milder circumstance of Pennsylvania they domesticated nature, invited it indoors, befriended it in their own natures, and while they spoke little of this faith, painted it, embroidered it, sculpted it and threw it on the forge. Thus domesticated, Pennsylvania didn’t produce a Scarlet Letter or spooky stories, but decorated chests and barns.

One cannot say the puritan hid his malaise. He legalized it, celebrated it with intellectualism. Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather drew sharp lines. If you disagreed with the governmental/pastoral views you had better be quiet about it. These things are thrown into sharper contrast compared with the milder governmental/pastoral conditions of Pennsylvania, where the English were and still are the majority party. Making literature into sociology tempts the effects of depravity upon nature from Hawthorne, "virgin soil as a cemetery" (Scarlet Letter, ), "the pine trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children"( ).

There are any number of statements to the effect that "to the Puritan, nature was not benign. The wilderness was a place of terror"“ (Broyles), or as William Bradford put it (1620) "a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men." Michael Broyles makes the telling observation that "much of the story [of Pilgrim's Progress] is set in America...it was the metaphorical terrain the believer had to traverse...,' which he says to differentiate the kinder nature of Puritan composer William Billings, opposed to his fellows (The New England Psalm Singer, 1770) see Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, 25). A great deal more than this has been said of the Puritan fear of those first two centuries.

Divide and conquer is the oldest rule of opposition. Quakers aside, they had more in common with the pacifist sects that with those who came to rule in Pennsylvania before the Revolution. These English exploited difference among the Pennsylvania German peace lovers, what admittedly the colony had been founded to pursue. Relations with the "world" were a sticking point for immigrants of the Lily who held differing taxonomies of Church and Sect, celebrated to this day as insoluble, the churched vs. the plain. Should they be in love, half in love or not at all? The divided separate but equal existence of Germans alongside the English in American civilization came to an end after the Civil War, for even though the Dutch were still divided they were assimilated. Some people think the Amish are the last bastion of the "separated" and that these differences existed even in 1950, that is, speaking German, farming, going barefoot, everything the matriarch, Anna Mack, despised, and the Amish may exist in 2050, but assimilation got all the rest.

Compromise
For a long time Pennsylvania Germans sought to show that even if they were German they really did belong. Millard Gladfelter in his Foreword to Pennsylvania German Fraktur demonstrates this view when he refers to the persistent contests among cultures for retention of custom and language" (ix). His "contests" are a cultural cold war between the English "on the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers" and the Germans of "outlying countrysides." In the same volume Weiser is at pains to make the Dutch American. He broadens the mandate of Penn's colony into "the much-celebrated openness of the United States...to receive into its midst persons and cultures of widely disparate origin" (xiii). But it was not the United States that did so but Penn's Quaker Pennsylvania. American is a misnomer here for the English and Puritan, but it has to be, for the English never welcomed the disparate, the range given by Gladfelter from "Negro Spirituals to Pennsylvania German Fraktur" (1x). Quite otherwise, they exploited them. So in order to fit in, assimilate even in the bi-centennial world of 1976 that these volumes commemorate, Weiser constructs a rhetoric that celebrates the whole for its part, the United States for Pennsylvania, but it was only Pennsylvania that welcomed the diverse. Weiser's Introduction of Fraktur is worth attending because he expresses transparently the attitudes and prejudices in the background of paradise art.

There is a perennial defensiveness in Pennsylvania German writing about the survival of its folk culture. "We are richer for it,' says Weiser. Instead of celebrating the dishes and language for themselves, it has to be for "the tolerance of American polity" (xiii), almost apologizing for being. Welcoming the diverse may be what America says of itself today on the Statue of Liberty, but to the extent it is true, the only practical example was among the Pennsylvania Germans in Philadelphia when the American rhetoric hatched that all men are created equal. It is a Pennsylvania dream of equality that Weiser celebrates "in styles at variance with the majority" (xiii), not an American one, even if it becomes so, and it was not "the majority," it was the English! Reading all these continual apologies for their Dutch defensiveness, it isn't that they are false to the fact, so much that they apologize for being what they are. Keyser, commenting on the texts of fraktur in his Preface to Hershey's book, doesn't have to add that "none of this little-studied body of folk poetry is fine literature" (8), he could easily have said, "these texts are an invaluable window into the mind of their art."

Borrowings From Betters

Even friends of fraktur feel they must not seem partisan. Weiser says that "with some exceptions, the motifs of Fraktur are simply embellishment and have no esoteric meaning or function beyond the beautification of the piece" (xxvii). Hershey defends fraktur as cultivating the beautiful, "a process that stretches the imagination and pushes the artist toward an appreciation and even a love for things beautiful"(52). Even! Why are such things said? Answer with a question, "Why else would this large body of folk art...have been preserved and so obviously treasured?" It is only the Dutch who can doubt their beauty while everyone else celebrates it. After examining a thousand piece of fraktur Hershey says that in some cases the design illustrates the text, but mostly they are "lovely compositions," pretty pictures if you will that "convey religious meaning equally as well as they communicate the value of beauty in everyday life" (56). One feels like a frog in the tepid.

The abstraction of image from text proliferated from fraktur through the other folk art genres of linens, chests, pots, ironwork and barns. This encouraged the divorce of meaning from text, Stoudt's point, that the images derive meaning from the hymns, etc., but their later abstraction does not sever connection to origin. Weiser wants the images to be an imitation of the nobility by the middle class, folk art, a"cultural sinking from the tastes of upper levels of society" (xxviii), not a rising from the unconscious or from the hymns. He uses this failing social/political analysis in his Preface to the Pennsylvania German Decorated Chest, an omnipresent Dutch defensiveness that the brutish boors peasants can do nothing creative but imitate in bastardy their betters.

Keyser says "none of this little-studied body of folk poetry is fine literature" (This Teaching, 8), an odd determination if it is little-studied and the designation of "fine" means Mozart, but not Kafka or Borges who though entirely irrelevant also apply for "fineness" in vain. Has such a claim been made of other folk art? "Their copies of upper class, from furnishings to portraits, to attire, are frequently grouped together under the name of folk art" (Chest, 13). Weiser's "constant cultural sinking from the tastes of upper levels of society" so that "fine engravings and prints owned by the elite found their country counterpart in the drawings of schoolmasters and itinerants" (Fraktur, xxviii) are an old discredited assumption. He cites the lion and unicorn from British arms and the eagle from American, as borrowings from betters. Everything has context, but it is patently post hoc to say that because they preceded them they caused them. Images have to be allowed their own world outside social milieus. The Dutch eagles are a supreme delight in their interpretations, hardly copies. Do you say Navajo weavers imitated their betters when they wove chief blankets or railroad trains at the behest of traders?

Rationalizing art is a hard road divorcing text and context the same, which was argued of Blake, whose illuminations were "mere embellishment." It would be better for critics to admit they cannot see any connection and consider the impediments to their seeing.

Spiritual Transfer

Technology, philosophy and religion promoted assimilation. Early twentieth century transfers of decorative images from chest to barn were a "last flowering" (Yoder, Hex Signs, 3) of this art, but the compromise of Dutch ways is tracked in every activity, from song to speech. "Did any of the now common English choruses originate among the Pennsylvania Dutch and spread, through translation from German to English...? Yoder answers his own question, "the type of spiritual transfer that took place--one might almost call it spiritual osmosis--was from the greater to the lesser body. Anglo-American religious patterns were adopted by the Pennsylvania Dutch, rather than vice versa (Pennsylvania Spirituals, 348). But it wasn't just the permeable membrane of song, it was the stenciling of patterns instead of free-hand painting (Fabian,63), "machine made ware from England [Gaudy Dutch china] resulted in driving out local potteries" (Frederick, 257). "English ideas about furniture finishes, printed birth certificates, and Victorian popular designs, the Pennsylvania Dutch lost interest in the artifacts of earlier generations. In time, the chests, pottery, and pie safes were relegated to the attic or barn" (Hex Signs, 37).

Substitution of English ideas in the Americanization of the Pennsylvania Dutch touched the flower-star and the images on barns transferred from household decorations. These images had a contentious history, but they came from everyday relations with nature, sun, animals, plants. For all the debate of the origin of the hex sign, the twelve pointed star, the image comes from gardens, it is the image of a double tiger day lily, a duplicate of its shape. This is easy or difficult to find in the borders and plots of day lilies. The deeper legacy must involve a use of earth, design of internal landscapes, a spirit of acceptance that permeates mind and spirit, a spiritual force symbolized by the natural.

Spiritual Demise

Stoudt says the images are mandalas, after Jung, but gets no credit for it from Yoder. The images painted on furniture, embroidered on linen, drawn on paper are "a full range of celestial and earthly subjects. Stars and birds, both identifiable and unrecognizable, are seen along with the plump heart..." (Fabian, 58). With the toasting couple, the unicorn, equestrian figures and mermaid Fabian describes techniques, "the unicorn painters of Berks County, for example-also had templates for the major elements of their designs" (62), but "after the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, stenciling is frequently used in lieu of freehand painting. It is obviously used as a time-saving device and as such is one of the heralds of the decline of the traditional arts of rural Pennsylvania" (63)

But the most usual popular treatment rouses superstition before dashing it to the ground. Pennsylvania Dutch Country, (Irwin Richman) invokes amulets and symbols, "askew crosses," scratched into lintels, "almost invisible except to the knowing eye," "symbolism and magic" (53) before taking Yoder's Hex Signs as proof against this voodoo. Having his cake and eating too, the author dances with popular modern hex signs, but allows little if any "iconic meaning to the decorations found on fraktur," the quintessential Pennsylvania German Artifact," with every one of those barn symbols and then some, "flowers, vines, animals and birds...hearts, crowns, angels and compass stars" (56).

Exfoliations of the lily in this spiritual flower garden, "died when the point of view which created them—the faith of Pennsylvania’s radical religious sects—was killed by the advent of religious liberalism” (Stoudt, 24), the introduction of English in schools and the death of home-crafts by the industrial revolution (Stoudt, xviii). Stoudt already rules out a huge segment of the population when he says "sects." But Yoder also allows that the decline of fraktur "can be found in the nineteenth-century disintegration of the folk culture of the Pennsylvania Germans, particularly (1) the disappearance of institutional elements such as the parochial school, which had produced the Vorschrift, (2) the shift to the English language, which brought with it an inevitable loss of German devotional literature as the wellspring of fraktur symbolism, and (3) the decline in the very meaning of baptism, which had produced the Taufschein." The decline of baptism "can be partially attributed to the impact of the revivalist movement, which invaded the Pennsylvania German churches and sects from the world of Anglo-America." It was a complete conquest: "Fraktur was part of the old-style colonial culture, which, especially in the field of religion, was being challenged and reshaped through acculturation with Anglo-American forms" (280). Reshaped through acculturation here means denatured. So the decorative art of the lily, its expression of an inner state, abstracted completely out of its origin, became the so called “prayer acts” of Wentz (24) and the lily was exhausted.

How much a meliorist one wants to be about this is a choice to celebrate the past from the majority point of view of the English or lament the passing of the Dutch? Going from the island to the continent of the majority gives so many rewards but foreordains the peasant inferior to the Ph.d., begs the question of what the rural folk benefits were, if impossible to recapture, when everyone suddenly wishes the garden were back again that has been sacrificed to progress.

What is the meaning of the flowering heart, its iconography and philosophy in itself? Who are the suspects in its demise? Were, as Stoudt argues, whole classes of these people [German-American] transcendentalists one hundred years before Emerson? Where are the studies of that text from the many sources that remain untranslated of the 3151 books and almanacs printed in the German language in America between 1728 and 1830? What devastations wreaked upon these people in the interests of social control need correction?

The Lily

According to Stoudt, the Pennsylvania Dutch desire to transfigure the world is the substance of its imagination and symbolism. Borrowing from frequent biblical metaphors, images on chests, fraktur, embroidered linen, china, ironwork were symbols of Christ, the branch, the corn of wheat, the pelican sanctifying natural existence by symbolic presence. With the tulip/lily as the principal image of this art, creation was a manifestation of God: "the earth is the Lord's," a divine aspect of the natural, "it was good." Because they were redeemed nature was too. Through these symbols they saw their lives in natural context. Personified as grass and flower, tree by the stream, such a view would become an antidote to botanical and biological demolition. But it is not a literal tulip on show towels, quilts and chests even if it looks like one. This lily is from hymns and gardens, an image from the Song of Songs before elaboration in the writings of Boehme (1575-1623) and subsequent celebration in German works of colonial Pennsylvania transported there by the Ephrata Cloister. The hymnals sang of die unfgehende lilie, the opening lily, the lilen-Zweig, the lily twig and the wohlriechenden lilen, the fragrant ones (Stoudt, 85, 89, 95). So the Pennsylvania Dutch imagination of the eighteenth century had its “lily age,” where the images from hymns and gardens conferred on artifacts an internal state. Generations that seemed to shun demonstration, thinking outward celebration worldly, were silent about this inner world even while they went about day to day in faith contemplating the flower of an “uncontaminated good within natural reality.” (Stoudt, 101).

The lily was an image of uncontaminated nature among the Pennsylvania Dutch, a physical flower transferred to spiritual life, renewing the physical by association. The Puritans went the other way, the physical contaminated the spiritual. Uncontaminated does not mean clean land fills, it means uncontaminated by the inner spiritual world. In the context of total depravity, the Puritans transferred sin from themselves to the dark forest that hid the predator. It was a motive for cutting the trees, but Pennsylvanians took nature as a manifestation of their inner redemption. The most accessible example of their belief occurs in Boehme: "as a fair flower grows out of the rough earth, which is not like the earth but declares by its beauty the power of the earth, and how it is mixed of good and evil; so also is every man, who, out of the animal, wild, earthly nature and quality, is born again so as to become the right image of God. For those who are a growth of such a kind, and are shooting forth into the fair lily in the kingdom of God and are in process of birth, have we written this book .” (Jacob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 4)

The flower that emerges from this soil is like the image of God that emerges from the animal man, pietistic outcomes hard to obtain, the silence of devotion, the acceptance of suffering, the union with God, the union of this inmost birth, consummation of their heart’s desire imaged in “the blossoming of the lily.” Its rejection was always disguised in apparent acceptance, saying one thing and doing another among adversaries who spoke of the glory of God and destroyed his handiwork. Christ was that lily that grew from their hearts where the believer compounded a paradise. The destruction of the earth, clothed in progress, and a hardheartedness against the poor were, in other words, merely the rejection of Christ.

Many realizations of their identity were hidden in hymns that transmit Boehme and Arndt to the linens, “lost in obscure German books which no one reads today” (Stoudt, 92). It helps even less if we have to go all the way back to Jacob Boehme to understand how Pennsylvania German folk art had a textual origin for organic shapes created by generations. It was always the English grievance against the Dutch that they were uneducated. Germans reveled in it to some degree, boasted they were peasants, resisted learning even while faulting themselves for not having it. So Boehme was their perfect master, a shoemaker with visions, “one of the most remarkable untrained minds” (Rufus Jones, preface to Stoudt’s tr. vii). The shoemaker was like the baker (Beissel) who founded Ephrata. There was room for farmers and peasants of all kinds in the Dutch artifact of original thought, even if Boehme influenced Milton, Newton and Emerson and had his writings early translated to English (1647-1661).

The celebration of the garden within, this terrestrial paradise, was also present in in medieval Catholic writers from celebrations of love in the German Minnesong and baroque German religious poets (Stoudt, 56) to Bernard of Clairvaux and in Dionysian Neoplatonism. But how did the lily get onto the linens and into the chests? The train of descent seems to be that the image in Boehme transferred to the hymnists and “escaped to illuminated writings, to the decorated chest, and to pottery” (92). So a four fold progression accounts Bible, Boehme, hymns, folk art or, starting from the end result, “Pennsylvania German folk art is basically spiritual in concept and the motifs and designs used are non-representational expressions of traditional Christian imagery” (Stoudt, vii). All this is merely to say this art is wholly religious and that its symbols are intellectual conceptions of its faith.

If it is a lily why does it look like a tulip? Because the lily is not from nature but from art, that is to say, it is not drawn to look like a real flower but represents an internal state, an internal flower, a flowering heart. Of course it’s not a lily either, that is, it is a symbol of the internal. A fourfold discernment is traced by critics, philosophy, hymns, gardens and kitchen, and then in household effects. It is a course in interior design, the most quintessential Dutch practice. In actuality the flower is a series of devotional attitudes and states of mind. That being the case, while they name the lily they perhaps do not best describe it, which honor may fall to Johann Arndt in his Wahres Christenthum. Stoudt documents the lily in its folk representations, but we would want to find out its origin in folk life outside of Boehme.

Access to this occurs in their folk art: frakturs, embroideries, chests. The inescapable Dutch “tulip” that looks like a tulip, indeed we would say it is a tulip, is Christ (Stoudt, 106). heavily medieval in this praise in the “inarticulate belief in the artist’s heart” (Stoudt, 15). Critics have been pretty quiet about this iconic mind filled with decorations and gardens, a “use of natural events and objects to describe spiritual conditions” (Stoudt, 100), interpreted with hymns and flowers, stars, lilies and roses on pottery and linens. The lily “dominates the poetry and the literature; tulips appear rarely in verbal form.” These collective biblical images underlay their minds with faith. But the mind is not separate from the body or from the emotions. The Pennsylvania Dutch “produced an American decorative art which, with few minor exceptions, is the only indigenous art of its kind in our land”(Stoudt, 3).

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

Summary

Paradise may be reconstructed after the discovery of harm from the dominion of a science, commerce and art inspired for profit. But it is also science, commerce and art that explores paradise.

The lily in the garden is the tulip grown from the heart.
We may say that the mind is to its surroundings and upbringing as folk art is to its tradition. If Pennsylvania German folk art receives its meaning from the literary tradition which accompanies it, the mind also received meaning from its surrounding culture, portrayed not only in the artifacts and also in the family literary tradition of the Pennsylvania German, the Bible, German medieval and Pietistic hymnody and Pennsylvania German hymnals. They say art was not favored in Mennonite families. That’s how they were “plain.” But even that prejudice is disproved by the “tulips” and their celebration of the Pennsylvania Dutch way into the flowering heart.

Afterword - Did You Find Paradise Today?

Told it doesn't exist you long for paradise. When it was in the interest of scholars they believed, not that they personally thought it existed or its art in the mountain sunset or the mouse. Were paradise free speech or whatever pleases, the three harvests and hot tubs of the captives of pleasure could have private paradises too. But the art of paradise is not about us, it's about the creatures that inhabit it, wild or domesticated in a green Shade. Paradise kept with hands brings the natural to the human.

Free of the separation which we reckon occurred when the serpent came to America, myth before discovery, besieged by enemies in a colonial fantasy of sexism and racism so called, thinking makes it so. Serpents destroy forests, prairies and animals, take dystopia over utopia, symbols of destruction over innocence. It's hard to imagine paradise in an age that denies it but longs for memories of wholeness it forgot. Was there peace? Nobody wants Inferno, but nothing succors in the deconstruct.
We get over disbelief. The child believes, but the adolescent diminishes, imitates the adult. In their private paradise they go to pillage the garden. Ask if one believes and get a look. One believes in profit. One believes in success. But look for paradise if you believe it's lost. Find a piece of paradise. Evening conversations would begin, "did you find paradise today?" Everyone would be looking.

This fictive assumption presumes a restoration of earth was forming in the minds of artists with the industrial revolution, the chimney sweep of Blake, that paralysis immobilized agencies able to effect remediation. In reinvention, but the paralysis is also metaphorical, we rise in the night, thoughts start before four AM. So would creation travail with the problem sons. You could wish they were out of the way, but not if worse were in store. We may go on with daily life, right to the end, shibboleths of the past argue, as though they meant something. Doctrines of false imagination finish the day, sleep another night in evasion and deny.

The Way Out of The Flowering Heart:: The Alien Voice

2007-12-11T08:01:00.013-08:00

Words are an image of every thought,
sound and sense, taste and color felt.

They swim in an ocean that resembles itself,

drawn up in air to eye and ear

then evaporate and fall from sky.

Seen as drops that were no such at all,

gathered in buckets, these drops make words.

“What is your aim in Philosophy?”
“To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (Philosophical Investigations) – Wittgenstein

"Wittgenstein thought that the pursuit of philosophy in its traditional sense is pointless. Philosophers who scoured far and wide for a structured logical form applicable to everything were deluded and wasting their time, much like a fly who constantly tries to escape a transparent bottle by banging against the side. Wittgenstein saw it as his job to show these tenacious philosophers out of the top of the fly-bottle and to see philosophy for what it really is – a futile attempt to find an all-encompassing logical form of thought behind the mess that is ordinary language…."

The Alien Voice

There is a lot said of the two voices of the In and Out, the simplest being that language cannot simultaneously express wave and particle motion. If the wave is both so is thought. Poets want to hallow "a new language," asserted of Beissel's mysticism (by Bach) as much as of Boehme. Poets want to speak revelations like prophets. Steve McCaffery and Karen Mac Cormack (end of the interview) want their voices to be an "idea, already implicit in Aristotle’s description of the two voices (articulate and inarticulate) [which] obtains almost a pataphysical excellence!" Pataphysical means imaginary, an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem. Language and thought are one of these. On the same page Mac Cormack gets pataphysical, says "Voice is a tangled mythogeme," and "poetry’s primal scene as that of inspiration involves at its base a fundamental “other” voice, a voice speaking through one. This image of the poet as a passive, possessed mouthpiece of an alien voice runs from Plato’s Ion through to Jack Spicer’s poetics of dictation."

Speaking this way is not novel to those who do. Calling the other alien however is more theater than belief. It's not alien if it is endemic and indigenous, meaning from within the speaker's life. Indigenous means also of community and ethos, Hopi or Pennsylvania Dutch. Whatever Walt Whitman says comes from his own peculiarly driven mind even if is spoken with the voice of the Upanishads. A new language does not imply new ideas or facts, but some writers, Barthes, Agamben, see the alien voice as the voice of death, "the originary place of negativity" and that "...language is a negativity, the unsayable and the ungraspable" (Agamben) and cannot but be negativity unless it never existed. The thought goes then that "only if language no longer refers to any voice...is it possible for man to experience a language that is not marked by negativity and death" (Dillon, Politics of Security, 115). But the voiceless verb, the silence of unknowing that passes as world class originality is suicidal, because thought is Simultaneous Memory, Reality, Fantasy, Being.

There is no language of protons. The universe is thought, not language. Thought is not language. Is language thought? The last paragraph of the interview "distinguishes an animal voice (a voice of sonic continuum) from a human voice (a voice of sonic articulation).... The animal voice, Hegel claims, is pure sound, empty and grounded in negativity... every animal finds its voice in its violent death; it expresses itself as a removed self.” How could Hegel ever have left his house to say this? Every animal finds its voice in praise of life. Sometimes the man speaks with animal voice, body voice, as with moans, cries, but the man is the one removed from the natural. Assuming to be proved that he is removed, "By intercepting this animal voice of death and subjecting it to articulation, human language, he [Hegel] says, emerges with two decisive characteristics: (1) it retains within it the voice of death; (2) it becomes the voice of consciousness thereby converting negativity into being. To me signals a fundamentally poetic quality in Hegel’s thinking, establishing as it does its mythogeme of “voice” on the codification of vowel and consonant as respectively animal and human." (46). Too many vowels, drugs, disease, or disaffections?

Being, not being, language, thought, the death of the author (Barthes) in all this is simple speech. To speak as a bear, fly like a bird, leap like a cat is voice as action. These philosophers could write a bestiary of themselves. A bestiary of vowels comes down neither to voice or language but to breath. Everything that has breath. Comic cosmic bestiaries produced by linguists and philosophers slander the animal to justify human malaise. However the poet is passive in speaking, it is not in speaking the voice of death, but transfiguring life.

Negativity so converted reverses life. The notion that human language is the voice of death because derived from the animal symbolizes how species' extinction translates from the philosophical into the commercial, as if Hegel never walked in the woods. Beyond carnivores, it is not the voice of death in the song bird or elk, it is the voice of life. Everthing that has breath praises. This is being posted on the phone poles of Nashville. Praise is the song of animal speech.

The reason I like this IsReads pic, a little white spot dwarfed by the city of Chicago, is it is a picture of the present. But everything will praise so large, as it is now small, a parallel dimension called the kingdom of God, big then as Chicago is now bigger than it.

The Medium of Thought

What are the languages of the in and out? There is no language of In. To call thought "language" is a metaphor used only because there is no language of thought. Thought is cast into language by speech, translated by voice when speech occurs. This translation is magnanimous. It assumes the end of the beginning. I speak therefore I think. Thought is not languaged. Its exploration must occur between people after it is translated to language when the presumption occurs that it is language. It is a glaring assumption that I speak what I think. The medium of thought is the image.

Postulate

What good is work if the life cannot live? Poets fail in their public and private thoughts. We say life is a work. We say public achievement, action imitated and celebrated, may burn. We say the nature of a poet's death is important as his birth. Then we know what we control. Death is not desired, not suicide or any of diseases, strokes, sicknesses. What is left at the end of a year depends on what theme we follow. All themes merge in each other in memory and thought. Who died young, who of sickness, who of addiction, who was alienated, lost love, found ignominy, prison? The mishaps of necessity gain sympathy.

Suffering makes the soul, binding the book, mistake and limitation art. Suffering is sympathetic when it appears Necessary. Put under stress, see what comes out. Art comes when the farmer's skin cracks. Surgeons do not suffer such defects, but all suffer choices. One is doctor, another, a farmer is luck, maybe destined. Desperations escape, things turn on their head. Enough food in some places causes obesity. Too little is too much, the atmosphere, autism is up. If only were the throat of the world unloosed. It is of poets this illumination comes. To find a context for our lives we judge theirs.

Words Themselves

Imagine words themselves, spoken the last moment before waking as a cue, to figure out what?
Navajo matriarchy? The imagination of kinship. The phrase occurs in Karl Magnuson's, The World from Within, in an article "The Utopian Imagination of Aboriginalism," in "Virtual Kinship, Real Estate, and Diaspora Formation" and most importantly in the Poetics of the Feminine and that's it.
There is increasing consciousness that kinship lasts materially beyond death. It is said that you know your parents after their deaths and if parents then entire genomes. Is this another case where the thing exists in a way not known before, as is said of consciousness or is it revisting the guest-host codes, reverence of ancestors in patriarchy?Does it take the inquiry into less aware notions of mythogeme, of notions of Bataille's death of myth which is really birth of anti-myth, new myth? The good news is some interesting writers are attracted here, Steve McCaffery's, Prior to meaning: the protosemantic and poetics , who applies Prigogine's physics to poetry, just what Prigogine wanted to do.

This piece was subtitled the alien voice, but it is not. Likewise in Human Botany there is a piece called Alien Knowing and Unknowing, but it too is not and neither is the Space Counterfeit Messiah alien of A Poetical Reading. The dramatic, romantic modern needs new language or old and more honest found to talk of the human.

India and the Pennsylvania Dutch

2007-12-11T08:01:00.009-08:00

Versions of Milkweed

The assumptions that justify assimilation come into question. Not only because of the loss of identity through the creation of a group mind in the media, but because the pressures toward globalization promise to denature every nationality. This was done to the Pennsylvania Dutch. We do not need to pose further erosion of identity that would occur from contact with alien civilizations beyond earth's, but that analogy makes plain that what happened to every other colonial or conquered people would happen there.

But there's no need to go to the future when past and present assimilations are so fertile. The Pennsylvania Dutch illustrate the past, and the Modern illustrates the present. Majority scholars and quislings want exceptions to this rule of this loss of identity, but it stands in the same relation today as those Indians taken back to Elizabeth's court to be displayed as trophies, followed by their enslavement at Jamestown. The majority always takes captive and subverts native identity, appoints from among them native governors, just as the Romans did their quislings, while it swallows them whole. Jonah, Jonah, the ship is the world! It is not pretty put this way. At all costs the majority must make things seem better than they are, but as Sartre might have said, resistance is existence in the will to know.

Assimilation was never a good idea, no matter what propagandists said, especially as it was forced in subtle and unsubtle ways. Never anything but the theft of heritage, that underbelly had the prime minister of Australia apologize for it even as Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Canada's native peoples for "forcing their children to attend state-funded schools aimed at assimilating them" (Bob Gillies, AP, June 12, 2008). More than an apology is due the Hopi and Navajo children sent to "Indian schools" in Phoenix, where roads are yet named Indian School. These travesties are somehow more obvious than the same things, yet worse, wreaked upon the Pennsylvania Dutch in the nineteenth century. Take away the language, assimilate to the body politic whole. Ben Franklin feared the "dark faces" among the Dutch in his racism, which was an English invention.

So far there has been no attempt to see the Pennsylvania Dutch as an oppressed co-opted people subject to surrender their ethnic identity, but that is commonly observed among the peoples of India in relation to the British. It is only a matter of degree. David Weaver-Zercher gives a good summery of the cultural war between the English and the Dutch (The Amish in the American Imagination, 2001). The Germans were defensive and conceded the doltish nature they were charged with. "It was not that Pennsylvania Germans but were brutish by nature," the Pennsylvania German Society said, but "they were too busy conquering the elements to support higher education, fine arts and other cultural endeavors" (Weaver-Zercher, 28). It was entirely rhetorical, understood against the history of English colonies subverting identity. I heard it myself from my own family.

Stoudt in his preface cites many causes in the demise of the Dutch, but at root was the belief that to fit in was good. To belong, to homogenize was necessary and desirable. The apology for speaking German was that "it in no way distorts their Americanism" (Pennsylvania German Folk Art, xvi), not the other way round, that speaking English does distort the Pennsylvania Dutch. Colonial powers find benign rule in their interest to encourage commercial exploitation.

Loss of identity is the damage done by the British/American propaganda machine to all subgroups. If only they could "absorb" the Taliban! Call it "slow disintegration" or "slow absorption," "slow strangulation" (Stoudt xvii), "the Pennsylvania German soon began to view his own culture as outworn and outmoded" (xvii). It was the loss of the language and the culture composed of practices, beliefs and doctrines different from the English. Many writers cite the loss of German devotional ways "as English hymns and devotional literature supplanted the traditional literature, as spiritual vitality degenerated into camp-meeting hallelujahs" (xviii), plus of course the grand Industrial Revolution. In all this however Stoudt makes a judgment that the ones who really defined the Dutch were the sects and not the Churched who assimilated more easily. This has probably caused him to be given short shrift in the 75% majority Church Dutch church culture. When he says "most of the German settlers...were religious refugees" (xvi) that is inaccurate, only the sects were. It is easy to take the part for the whole. Most of the peculiarities of sects, "left-wing, radical Protestant groups," (xvi) were dimmed by the camp-meeting hallelujahs... "apocalyptic ideas dimmed when the 'lily age' seemed further and further away" (xviii).

2. Colonial Rule in India

Nowhere is the velvet glove more off than England's occupation of India. This mirrors the Pennsylvania Dutch, American Indian, Welsh and Irish. Majority history controls the field, forces the popular mind to take its history as romance.

In terms of getting along with the Originals (Indians) without calling them child of the devil as the English Puritans did, compare the English in New England to the Pennsylvania Dutch in Pennsylvania. The Dutch seem visionary in the context of Utopian states of the golden ages the English harnessed to the new world: harmony with nature, gentle breezes, three harvests.

The English projected a Golden Age onto the land and native peoples that they were themselves foreigners to. This Gold was more brutal the further it strayed from European ethnicity. As bad as British occupation was in Ireland, where Swift's fictional/realistic Irish peasants model his yahoos, it was not so supercharged with racism as in India where the English cultural machine was in full review. Not unlike the cultural war in the homeland of the Welsh, and Irish, British oppression occurred in greatest force in India. Épater la Bengali. This cultural war continues against the Hispanic.

Colonial rule in India demanded that "Britain needed a class of intellectuals meek and docile in their attitude towards the British, but full of hatred towards their fellow citizens. It was thus important to emphasize the negative aspects of the Indian tradition, and obliterate or obscure the positive." If there were no negative aspects, invent them. These were standard procedures. Likewise, the Pennsylvania German was called stubborn and thickheaded so much that they called themselves so, internalizing the prejudice against them. "Indians were to be taught that they were a deeply conservative and fatalist people - genetically predisposed to irrational superstitions and mystic belief systems" (British Education in India). The educated native remnant was to think and speak like the conqueror and reinterpret itself as English. These quisling substitutes did the teaching.

The particulars of German speech and habits cited by Weygandt in Red Hills (1929) match the Indian "intellectuals meek and docile." They were people "doing what they did in the days before the Mexican War, interpreted without sympathy it means that the 'Dumb Dutch' do not know that the world moves."

It is a worn witticism in Pennsylvania that we still vote for Andrew Jackson in Berks. This saying, interpreted with sympathy for us, means that things change so slowly in the heart of the Red Hills that people are doing there what they did in the days before the Mexican War. Interpreted without sympathy for us it means that the "Dumb Dutch" do not know that the world moves. A libel, some of us declare the last interpretation, a half libel others. There are those among us who will admit it has in it a modicum of truth, if it be taken, of course, figuratively. In any event it serves to point out that we Pennsylvania Dutch are the most conservative people in America. We still approve strongly of all Andrew Jacksons, of their works and of their ways (5).

In the analogy between India and Pennsylvania the so-called Dutch hex signs match the Indian irrational superstition. Sectarian pietism matches mystic belief systems, although the argumentative will want to say these occurred at different times, hence must not be true, and that the Germans were the colonists not the English. False argument and rhetoric continues until the lights go out.

British rhetoric said that India "had no concept of nation, national feelings or a history," which argument applies to the division of the Dutch between Church and Sect, as if, to reduce it to most common denominator, hex signs and plain dress were their markers of culture, as Yoder says (Hex Signs). Such rhetoric declared of India that "if they had any culture, it had been brought to them by invaders - that they themselves lacked the creative energy to achieve anything by themselves" (British Ed). This writes large the trivialization and peasantization of Dutch culture that centuries of folklore societies and universities foster.

In India and Pennsylvania however "the British, on the other hand epitomized modernity - they were the harbingers of all that was rational and scientific in the world." Escape from their ethnic mental prison for the young was the same for the Navajo and Pennsylvania Germans as much as it was for the Indian, identify with the British and repeat the idea of their superiority verbatim in the minds of young who receive instruction, and learn their language. In India the British created a class of quislings, as Macaulay says (1835, cited in this source), 'to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.'" [see British Education in India]

These native English-Indians were the vanguard of cultural domination. Their role in India resembled the church groups in Pennsylvania, Lutheran and Reformed, who, much to the disagreement of their own historians that this happened, sold themselves for social acceptance to the English. The quisling Pennsylvania German class, speaking for the colonial powers, characterized the native German in burlesque, as a caricature of itself. Yoder says that as Dutch plain folk endangered German identity as a class because as they got plainer and legislated their plain dress to further their Dutch identity, as church folk painted hex signs on their barns to preserve their compromised ethnicity, Plain sects painted them off (Hex Signs, 39). All backwards.

English Against the Welsh, German, Navajo

English rule insinuated shame where their language wasn’t spoken, like the dual street signs in Wales with the Cymraeg crossed out. English fear of German dominance in PA was a chief motive there behind English Only, if that phrase sounds familiar, but English domination could not have occurred without the deconstruction of Pennsylvania German culture and language. This deconstruction took many forms. Peasantry, including folk art, was denigrated as ignorance.

You can take political and social prisoners without walls if you denature ethnicity and language, for instance, put all the Navajo children in "Indian schools," where they are forced to speak English. You say the Americans did that, not the English, but that is the point. The English transferred all their social control systems to the Americas. There the majority leaders were English and quisling English. These mind games occurred between the English and every ethnic and racial group in America, the American Indian first, the German second, the Hispanic the latest.

English parody of the German began with turning religious self-denial into an inferiority complex, the so-called dark faces and incomprehensible tongues that antagonized Franklin. These were made to symbolize the backward peasant mind. Franklin’s prejudice gets barely a footnote in his illustrious life, as though it were merely a stigma against farmers. This prejudice existed before 1730, when Pennsylvania had passed two acts to regulate immigration, requiring an oath of allegiance to George I, the taking of names, occupations and points of origin of immigrants in the famous ship lists. The number of immigrants was exaggerated, but even the exaggerations were doubled to make Franklin’s point. His cronies insisted around 1750 that Pennsylvania was being overrun. Various Presbyterian and Anglican clergy influenced by Franklin hatched a scheme called the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge and the English Language among the German Emigrants in Pennsylvania (1753). Its purpose was to domesticate the either 60 or 100 thousand “foreigners,” and “strangers,” who were “speaking a different language from the English colony’ (Charles H. Glatfelter. Pastors and People, II. Samuel Chandler, quoted 309).

Quislings

It was always the view of the formal churches, Lutheran and Reformed, that true wisdom came from their hierarchy and authority, not from the people. This vested authority they cozened to the British. Church formalists reasoned that the populace was “utterly ignorant” and “in danger of sinking deeper and deeper every day into these deplorable circumstances, as being almost entirely destitute of instructors, and unacquainted with our language” (Smith, in Glatfelter, 309).

Such talk masked deeper political and social motives, especially that the Germans “shall turn our trade out of its proper channel by their connections, and perhaps at last give some of our Colonies laws and language” (Smith, in Glatfelter, 310). Such rhetoric stemmed from Franklin’s ideas and politics. Franklin’s explicit view was that the “Palatine Boors” should “swarm into our Settlements” (Letter 1751) “of the most ignorant Stupid Sort (Franklin, [1753] (1961: IV, 483–484). This imputed ignorance and stupidity were reason for thinking the Germans would subject themselves to “Credulity” and “Knavery,” meaning influence by the French. That Pennsylvania would become a “colony of aliens” provoked fear that they “will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion" (IV, 24.[confirm page #] Franklin's wit betrays the racism of his understanding. (The letter of May 9, 1753 to Peter Collinson.)

So Franklin made alliance with “Lutheran, some Reformed, and the rest Englishmen” who were offended by the many undisciplined populist sects of Mennonites and Dunkers because they opposed the Churched views on infant baptism, war and serving in the militia, let alone paying the war tax. The ill-fated Michael Schlatter was appointed Supervisor of these “schools” of correction in the German settlements, but was mightily opposed by the Germantown printer Christopher Saur. Schlatter funded a rival press supporting his views against Saur. Since the school plan was merely to anglicize Germans and maybe to get German votes to fund military salaries for preachers and schoolmasters, Saur argued that the Anglicizers “had the least regard for the uninformed Germans of Pennsylvania, to actually convert them; or whether the establishing of the Free-schools, is not rather to serve as a foundation upon which to establish the thralldom of the Germans” (in Glatfelter, 319).

In addition to language, religion and war were also vehicles of English prejudice, as Franklin mocked the German mind, habit and skin color. If the goal was to make them “good protestants, join the militia, speak English,” the means was backward. In the end the free school movement lasted but ten years. Schlatter resigned and joined the British Army as a chaplain!

Saur said that turning everyday people to English speech had as its motive a social overturning of German society, like Mennonite arguments against contact with outsiders, for “German children learn to speak English according to English fashions; and parents have a great deal of trouble to get such foolish whims out of their heads” (Glatfelter, 320). The English attempt to steal ethnicity with language was not a religious or altruist but “a political affair” (Glatfelter, 321), as Muhlenberg, who initially supported the plan, later said. Franklin's fear that too many Germans would destabilize the colony show the fears of a xenophobe, but with inevitably greater fallout than that. Yoder says

the disappearance of the parochial school and the shift to the English language especially caused the loss of “the mystical and theosophical symbolism of Rose and Tulip and Lilly of Jacob Boehme and his medieval sources.” This impacted every folk form from fraktur to design, “the entire nineteenth century disintegration of the folk culture of the Pennsylvania Germans” (?, 280).

However you define it, it is not easy to make the invisible visible. To view nature as uncontaminated, whether within or without, contradicts the essence of puritan thought, total depravity, and Calvinist and American fundamentalism. It contradicts materialism too and is most contrary to what is taught in the schools about these Pennsylvania people. If they viewed nature as uncontaminated they were the first environmentalists. Though the flowering heart was gone by the Civil War, with remnants lasting a half century, it is still easy to love their torn flower. As a product of cultural endgame, indoctrinated with English poetry, puritanism and dominion politics, every prejudice the Pennsylvanians internalized might be taken as fact, which tells in fact that it is not.

English Theological Nature

As a natural expression of the will to empire English culture invented a theology to include the destruction of the natural with the cultural; both were allied against the Germans not only for control, but also out of habit. The English did it without thinking. This domination values of this system of English authorities and their thinkers transferred from its specific English origin to the more general "white" politics of later times, But to claim cultural dominion as their own would expose them as its authors, so dominion was cast as a wider cultural custom belonging to all the new white world settler groups, but it was only English politics and theology transferred entire to the now dominant American culture, an English Only beyond language. Take heart you ethnic white people, you are not all inherent racists.

The English Invented American Racism

The American Revolution was won by the English who invented American racism, a further extension of English empire. Boehme and the PA Dutch were a different cup of tea from the reigning English philosophy of the Puritan. Erudite Jefferson sounds like Franklin on the imperfections of the Germans when he worries about the Jews' so called inferior moral philosophy. Jefferson, with nothing better to do, razored out the words of Jesus, “cutting verse by verse out of the printed book” and made his own gospel of 46 pages (The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 384). Expunging the so-called Platonized corruptions from the text did not however result in his own perfection; attention to the details of the Law would have remedied his failure in the “minute enumeration of duties” (Adams-Jefferson, 383) he blames the Jews for keeping. The English did not understand the natural goodness the Germans posited. If you boil it down to a sound bite, what you get from the Pennsylvania Dutch is more acceptance than rejection, for rejection had already been theirs in Holland and Germany.

Homogenators Now

The argument that the demise of Pennsylvania German culture was a function of social controls foisted on them by the English, with subtle and not so subtle social mechanisms, is not favored by writers such as Don Yoder, the best contemporary. The epilogue of his Pennsylvania German Broadside (312) takes its assumption that such losses are to be expected and are good and desirable in order to make American homogene, the Americanization of sorting out the idiosyncrasy of subgroups so they can be homogeneous, interchangeable parts of American citizens held together by a general glue such as economy, human rights, commercialism and language.

This is the implicit destiny of all migrant groups then and seen as a good by homogenators now. Once a sub culture is denatured, subverted from its peculiarity, identity shorn, it is more apt to social control. What was done to the immigrant group to make it generalized and "American" is now done to all of America to make it global. The argument is that this is progress and not loss. That this occurs concomitantly with the standard of diversity, that many are one, only shows how the opposite things are from the truth. The more diverse we get the more the same we get.

Blacks, Germans, Hispanics, Indians, once they lose their languages and folkways will be the same interchangeable widget the English first desired to control.

This phenomenon where the cure becomes the disease is common enough in psychology where the patient is named for the disease and the side effects of medications given for the cure become the new symptoms and cause. A further implication is that we are our own worst enemies in an environment or economy where, if we stop spending for consumer goods we will go into depression, but if we spend we will individually go broke. This pretends that acclimation to gas prices if done in an unpatterned way prevents societal/governmental pain because the sudden shock of a major price rise would change behavior and cause true change. Applied to culture and subcultures this denaturing and denuding destroys the uniqueness of whatever is addressed, wilderness, humanity, botany, wildlife, culture.

Not that the Germans did not reject themselves. The seeds of division were the stuff of social control, although the more formal churches were quicker to identify with the colonial English powers, witness the tortured Schlatter. Folklorist Don Yoder sees division as a function of religion, not politics, that the "sectarians withdrew from worldly matters; in fact the word "worldly" among them had a negative connotation" (The Pennsylvania German Broadside, 170). No kidding! He says this as though worldliness were not a huge Biblical problem. That Lutheran and Reformed groups should be "both church members and citizens" was the point of tension for the whole he says:

"because of this radical division, this cultural gulf between the plain sectarians and their more worldly neighbors in the Lutheran and Reformed churches, the Pennsylvania Dutch population has never been able to unite on any major political or cultural question" (Broadsides, 171).

But we look at it differently as though there were a war of attrition and survival being waged, and like any war of this kind, quisling substitutes infiltrate the native, naive body politic to disestablish it. All kinds of pretty humanistic labels change this not. We're doing it for your own good, you see, making you learn, dragging you kicking and screaming into the 21st century and into the texting world. Such "liberation and emancipation" mask dark motives. These motives are not likely to be confessed. Instead, their uncovering will be resisted. Do you want to perpetuate your cultural ignorance? the Dutch seemed to ask themselves.

But this insecurity was forced from the outside.Yoder laments the failure of Zinzendorf's attempt in 1742 to join all the churches under his headship. He calls an "ecumenical project" what was a naked power grab clothed in religious images and words (Broadsides, 175). The sectarians were as suspicious of him as Sauer was of Franklin's effort to establish English schools for the Germans.

Yoder allows the loss of German individuality came just about the time of all others: "in the twentieth century Pennsylvania Dutch religion changed radically. The churches themselves became group oriented. Following the American penchant for joinerism...(175), but he admits that "all of these institutions came in from the English world of Anglo-American denominationalism" (175). Revivalism, Boy Scouts, Christian Endeavor and like species, with premillenialism were introduced from the English. With this came demythology of the Dutch status. Yoder says (210) that efforts of scholars to show how the former beliefs were superstition: "a common conceit of scholarship at the time" (1908), in this case referring to the Himmelsbrief, or so called Heaven-letter, a species of pow-wow that is the never ending delight of Dutch sycophants, like today's equivalent of the chain letter, is a deranged take on sympathetic magic derived from Boehme and his theory of Correspondence. This began late (1820), but is an example of a much wider practice of disestablishing all the Dutch beliefs and ways with a few oddities, so that, thoroughly anglicized, their culture seems to have been discredited and abandoned.

Sect or Insect

The designation of 10 % or 25% of the Pennsylvania Dutch population as sect does not endear them to any sensibility. The connotations are difficult. Those who control history are in charge, the majority Dutch, as Yoder finally calls them (Broadsides, 87) deny prejudice, say this was the designation from the beginning.

There is prejudice of the Church groups against the plain sects. To be fair there is a rejection of the Churched by the sects as doctrinally weak and worldly, who substitute world wisdom for biblical. But majority prejudice rules, so Church groups went against anyone who opposed the standard historical line they offered. The Churched after all did not suffer in the old world as the plain sects did. Their claim that they came like the sects to gain freedom to worship in America is bogus. It comes with the old assumptions of power from the state to enforce their way, how else explain the short shrift their best historians Henke and Harbaugh give for the founding of the first Reformed church in PA, in Skippack, c. 1727? This we continue to research here.

This animus does not seem to be returned by the plain sects against the churched, just rejected as what they consider false doctrine, viz. infant baptism, worldliness. Yoder revisits this again and again with"this radical division, this cultural gulf" (Broadsides, 171), even attributing to plain sects part cause in "the demise of the hex sign...when they purchase a farm with hex signs, the signs are one of the first things to disappear...part of their aesthetic of plainess" (Hex, 39). This troubles him because he attributes the images on barns as a last vestige of the culture, but the plain people would surely retort that the image is within, and that it is none.

This Shaker-like austerity does not quite claim "that their furniture was originally designed in heaven, and that the patterns have been transmitted to them by angels," as Thomas Merton says of Shakers. But Merton, already a monastic, sees what he himself has a capacity to know and likens the Shakers to Blake's interiors, invoking "Edenic innocence" (Paradise, 79), that "work was to be perfect, and a certain relative perfection was by all means within reach: the thing made had to be precisely what it was supposed to be. It had, so to speak, to fulfill its own vocation." (78-9). This seems to me to have been the unspoken aesthetic of ten generations of Pennsylvania Germans. To further the point, "the American was a new being who had nothing to do with the world of European complexity and iniquity" (84).

Yoder says "Pennsylvania Dutch culture is still evolving, and the modern hex signs can be seen as new outgrowths of the older folk art trends that were brought from Europe and transplanted.... (Hex Signs, vii). That culture is more than co-opted. Yoder says "this colonial ethnic group evolved into one of the most colorful and most original cultures on the East Coast." When you are all done with these denatured platitudes put on the lights and post a sign on the container. Einstein's brain, except in science fiction, is not evolving. Latin is a dead language with little embarrassment to Rome.

There are remnants of colonialism in the 60% unemployment rate on the Navajo reservation and the Pennsylvania suburbs made from farms. Yoder speaks for the point of view that all is well among those who "formed one people with a culture united except for religion" (Hex, 2). One people how? Subjugated cultures continue to exist, but they are artificially controlled. He says sociologists divided the Dutch into church and plain but he knows that was done from the very beginning before 1730 by Boehm and all the churched and furthered by Mittelberger, et al. Church and Plain means worldly vs. austere and could well suit the opposition of mass manufacture vs. hand. Mass culture dictates it will absorb you. The Church faction was absorbed and assimilated and as a reward got the tourist trade. The Plain groups, Plain and Plainer in dress and speech got islanded and compromised by the pressure of the malleable whole.

Ben Franklin Lives

Slow strangulation was also a function of the propaganda machine. Prejudice is learned not observed, says Gordon Allport, and all the more easily taught therefore, especially when the people teaching it are quislings of that group. Yoder perpetuates the stereotype in Broadsides, chooses his examples strangely, that "European travelers, especially those of German background and education, who visited the Dutch Country in the nineteenth century, often sneered at what they considered the 'ignorance' and limited viewpoint of the Pennsylvania Dutch" (Broadsides, 15f). What is the point anyway? Travelers is plural but he gives only one example, "the most pointed" that proves the negative which he himself calls "damaging and very biased." But he quotes at length about books on "dreaming and witchcraft" [superstition] (17), the "corrupt dialect." His second example, not a traveler, but a scholar, damns with the faint praise, "they were not as ignorant as has sometimes been stated...granting that the aims of many of them, especially in the rural districts, were very narrow, nevertheless" (17). The weight of this stereotype, repeated ad infinitum over centuries, continues in the present. Its justification, for it will be justified, is that they are just repeating what was said. Ben Franklin lives.

The way sociologists work, there is something noxious in the immersion of every member of a class into ethnic/language identity. Not troubling with exceptions, everything is the rule, as if all of "them" were homogeneous. This mindlessness curses for instance David L. Valuska and Christian B. Keller's Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg (2004) who cite Steven M. Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land for the same repetitions. Only after constant repetition does an underlying point of view, an ax that grinds appear in a combination of defensiveness that hides behind scholarly fact/myths, as if apologizing for damn, dumb Dutch and explicitly repeating 18th and 19the century prejudices is for all. This negative is supported by various societies and publishers who foster it, who think it attracts the market they target, as though none of them survived Ben Franklin's worst day.

Pennsylvania Myth

Self-loathing is a deep contradiction that goes beyond Pennsylvania mythology of the simple, dumb German peasant. It is salable for being so widely repeated. Pennsylvania Dutch Stuff by Earl F. Robacker (1944) is as good as the current folklore even if so old. He says "the Pennsylvania Dutch of yesterday were a simple folk and came of peasant ancestry long ago" (1) which could no doubt be said of anyone.

If a twelfth of Americans were Dutch in 1775 there is a roughly greater percent of Hispanics today. Hispanics are the new Dutch. The crux is always that they are "colonists of non-British extraction" (Stoudt, xv). Chauvinism is strong, but the stakes are greatest for the loser.

We Have Added to the World Pennsylvania

Draw then if you will a circle around Pennsylvania as if it were Virginia where the poet John Donne tried to emigrate. He declares, "but who ere saw, though nature can work so, / That pearl, or gold, or corn in man did grow. / We have added to the world Virginia." We have added to the world Pennsylvania he could later have said. The newest creature of that new world, whose virtue likened it to the golden age, was a metaphorical Virginian, a voyager under the Protection (Chas. Wms.) settling the ground of Christ (136) for Donne. What benign interactions among peoples this would suggest! What a wonder this new age!

Works Cited

Thomas Merton. Seeking Paradise: The Spirit of the Shakers. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003.

John Joseph Stoudt. Pennsylvania German Folk Art. 1966.

Frederick S. Weiser in The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest by Monroe H. Fabian. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd.

J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.

Cornelius Weygandt. The Red Hills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1929

Don Yoder; Thomas E. Graves. Hex Signs. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000

Don Yoder. The Pennsylvania German Broadside. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.

English Only

2007-12-11T08:01:00.007-08:00

From the point of view of the Anglo everybody is anglicized, the melting pot rules. Do not think to perpetuate old or other world customs without questions about whether you are really American. This is as old as the hills. Surely evidence exists for this in ancient Greece. Speak Greek or die. So the PA German is a forerunner of the Hispanic. Pennsylvania Germans spoke German in some cases into the 20th century. Even as late as the World Wars it was in the interest of the United States to negatively stereotype Germans; profiling and prejudice had existed from Franklin on. There were many shades of opinion. In 1794 a group of German immigrants asked for the translation of some laws into German. This petition was rejected by Frederick Muhlenberg saying, "the faster the Germans become Americans, the better it will be" (the "Muhlenberg Vote"). Becoming an American meant speaking English.

Different churches made different adaptations. Mennonites held on the longer to German, "church" people, Reformed and Lutheran, anglicized more early. Old First Reformed Church of Philadelphia indicates that "throughout the eighteenth century, services were conducted in German and the majority of records were kept in German...in 1819 church officials began keeping minutes and financial records in English. For a time, English and German were used alternately in services, but after 1830 English was used exclusively in worship and in most records. As late as the 1850s, however, many reports from domestic missionaries were written in German."

German sources of Pennsylvania Dutch and Mennonite thinking extended into the 20th century even if it seems hard to believe. The problem is exemplified in the wrestlings over language in the life of Mennonite Bishop Andrew Mack (1836-1917). The lateness of his German was a product of his age and place especially. He was a youth in the beginning of the free school movement(c. 1835) and “in the community where his family grew up the Pennsylvania German language was so generally spoken that no one who remained in that section at the time learned to speak the English fluently” (Noah Mack, 11). But “another cause for him not attempting to learn English [was personal] his deep sense of correct speech and definiteness of expression. In himself he had developed well the real German” (Mack,12).

From 1880 to 1900 a kind of “realism” conditioned a notion among these Pennsylvanians that English speech was pretense, something you were not. Speak English, submit to fancy dress and thence an idea outside the communion followed by reluctance to submit to the fellowship at all. Fancy language, fancy thought: “in the mind of the older people in the church, English was considered almost a synonym for pride,” Noah Mack writes. “So it was the opposition to the English language sixty years ago [from the time of his writing in 1939] was so strong in the plain churches and others too” (Mack, 11).

For Andrew Mack, forty four in 1880, learning English well required some sacrifice for he had a ministry, a family, a trade and a farm, especially learning it well enough to suit his own standards. Noah seems a little severe with his father in this respect, taking the view that learning English is a moral thing. Maybe it was for Noah. [Andrew Mack] “seemingly would not muster courage to attempt to use a language which he knew he could use but very poorly to begin with. In the five years above referred to, Father Mack and the rest of the family could have gotten a good start in the English language but sentiment from without and fear from within prevented all of the family from thinking about such a thing as talking English to the family.” (12).

Cornelius Weygandt confirms the wide span of these German habits: “old ways, however, in household economy, in family government, in allegiance to church and political party, did persist among us longer than in almost any part of the country. Down to 1900 the standards and the ways of living were about what they had been for a century. We were still largely a farming people, with nearly all the old-country crafts demanded by a farming people descending from father to son among artisans who were also something of artists” (Weygandt, 5-6.

As Noah observes, all his father’s speaking “reading and meditations were in German’ (Mack, 4). “In preaching Bro. Mack used the scriptural German language well, which the German people enjoyed to hear much better than the Pennsylvania German’ (Mack, 7). Andrew's younger brother Henry shows what difference 18 years would make, for he spoke and wrote English fluently from the start. It’s not as though Andrew did not see the need to speak English, for he early sent his oldest son Noah to a school where everyone did so. While“he never lamented much, but it was noticeable that he much regretted the fact that in many places his services were no more practicable nor desirable because of the German barring him from being understood” (Mack).

The expectations of speaking and understanding German continued. Writing in 1939, the German undertow remains so strong that Noah Mack, who spoke English his entire life, lapses into incomprehensibility when he speaks of the dialect problem: “At a time the remark was made in the home; had we begun to talk English when there was one member of the family who could talk it and who taught it in school, who was in the home yet at the time; then father you could talk English too now. For he was only about forty years old when he sent his oldest son [Noah] to the English school” (Mack,

Noah gives his father’s response in untranslated form, assuming his readers understand it: “Yah over the Leut hette ghsawt, seht overmowl der Hochmuth, der Mack un sei Buva schwetza Englisch (11). [Yes, but the people said, 'look again at the attitude (that's too colloquial, but you get the point), Mack and his boy are talking / talk English.' Courtesy of Joseph Salmons.] Prior to 1900 no Pennsylvania Dutch native did not speak or understand some species of the German. A surprising percentage still then used it only, making them in Weygandt’s terms, “the most conservative people in America” (5), meaning that “people are doing there what they did in the days before the Mexican War” (5).

The Intellectual German

It seems odd that Franklin was able to convince his followers of the doltish image of the German when more and more modern scholars follow the lead of Stoudt and argue "there were German Americans in greater numbers than the English-speaking literati who were responsible for the development of a form of American romanticism known as transcendentalism" (Wentz, 25). The notion is that New England got its transplanted German romanticism a century after Pennsylvania got it native, but that the Dutch variety is "folk transcendentalism" not elitism.

The so called cultural inertia of Andrew Mack’s locale did not prevent his intelligence from profound opportunities to develop his gifts. It is decidedly of an individual kind. We can track his reading and thinking to some extent. His niece, Anna Bechtel Mack, brother Henry’s daughter, dearly wanted to emerge from the pejorative idea of this ethnic shadow, but when she lived with Andrew and Elizabeth Mack in 1886 and 1887 after her mother had died, she was deeply impressed with her uncle’s study habits and demeanor, remembers that “each day, after the noon meal, he would retire to the room where he had a roll-top desk, get out his Bible to study and read for an hour before he went back to the farm work” (BFF, 6). We might think this a recombinant Thoreau.

Throughout the time he served as bishop, Andrew Mack was also a farmer. Of these study habits, Noah Mack says that “his main reading book was the Bible,” that “he had presented to him Starks German commentary which had come down the years from one generation of ministers and bishops to another. He however made little use of it” (3). That he made little use of the commentary further reveals his methods. Even though “all his reading and meditations were in German,” insight came from the text and not from criticism of it making up his mind: “He was heard to say, ‘when scriptures are deep and difficult to interpret then commentators are cloudy and express themselves in many words and ofttimes have no clear interpretation and are undecided as to the real meaning of the Word’” (3). “His conviction was rather that commentaries are not of much help to those [for] whom preaching was primarily by the power of the Holy Ghost and who depended on the Spirit for interpretation and for revelation.”

An aid in this original form of study was Buchner’s concordance. “He made much use of his concordance in finding references in searching the scriptures bearing on the subject upon which he was meditating.” No doubt there were other books in his possession such as otherwise might occur in Mennonite libraries as we have seen, Wahren Christenthem. Die Wandelnde Seele, Pilgrim’s Progress, any of Henry Funk’s three works, The Imitation of Christ, various songbooks and Psalters (Alderfer, 8).

This kind of meditation and reflection, producing the knowledge from the inside not the outside was an early habit. Andrew Mack had apprenticed for “two to three years” as a carpenter with his uncle in cabinet making as a youth, working especially in the preparation of sashes and doors for houses built the next year. Son Noah says that he “followed it a few years but when he had a family, a small farm and the ministry he no longer followed the trade” (2). His habit then was what it was when he came in later from the fields for lunch. “He would carry a little pocket testament while at work and would refer to the Scriptures at spare moments” (3). These days this would mark him a fanatic, but then one could read and think without deconstruction.

Such habits give a sense of his mental acuity. He had a simple folk education, not in the Latin and Greek, but to the eighth grade, enhanced by his father, Jesse Moyer Mack, who “had taught during the transition period from the old subscription school to the free school system.” The workmanship of his sermons and letters evidenced the “deep sense of correct speech and definiteness of expression” (11) A test of this is his letters which show him a good writer and compassionate thinker. This seems important for the verbal facility it implies. We infer an intelligence which communicated itself well in everything he did, from seeking out “the benefit of the instruction of a well gifted and qualified teacher who taught in one of the public schools” (1), to his “developed vocal music in which he had a great delight and taught several singing classes which prepared him to be chorister for a number of years in the Hereford congregation, where he worshipped and served all his life time” (1). All the Mack brothers were musicians, singers and teachers of music.

He used the principle of induction to teach: “He would read his text, rarely mentioning the theme of his mind or subject upon which he was going to speak but generally those who could follow him would clearly understand at the close what his theme was.” “He possessed a distinct sense of definiteness” that measured his intellect. “He would not preach on any scripture or theme on which he had not a clear vision.” Thus, “his sermons were mostly textual.” “Papers with notes and references might be found about his place of meditation and study but he was not known to take any notes or outline along into the pulpit.” We of course know that such habits of the particular and definite are always the sign of a fine mind.

Why were “early European and American Mennonites (until recent years)…generally free of any doctrine of a millennium,” Wenger asks, (459), especially since millennialism with its counterpart of the tribulation was so much talk in the other Protestant denominations? Twentieth century North America saw dispensationalism spread into Mennonite churches through evangelical literature and conferences, Bible colleges and seminaries, but was not well established among the Old Mennonites.On non speculative matters Andrew Mack formed early conclusions. With all this he had a life long reputation for diplomacy and social and religious innovation. He advocated and practiced foot washing, missions and Sunday Schools well in advance of his own congregations, but waited until for signs of readiness before introducing these practices.

Of Dispensations and the Anglo Revivalist Theology

Although the Pennsylvania German and Mennonites generally held to a thousand period of peace, called chiliasm, the idea was a passive until the English theologian John Darby (d.1882) systemically defined it as a millennial reign. Mennonites considered much of this eschatology speculative, probably because they had an overwhelming vocation to live in the present. John Bechtel’s pondering such timetables or the lack of them in The Wandering Soul illustrates this retro Mennonite take on future things. It tells much about him and them. But then Mennonites often placed themselves outside the boundaries of popular thought, they did so with slavery and infant baptism, with social welfare and separation from the world, with nonresistance. Darby’s ideas of a rapture, tribulation and millennium began to be accepted in America in the 1880’s and 1890’s, but Old Mennonites resisted them(204,51,204)"Bishop Andrew Mack, ordained by John Bechtel we recall, a chief Mennonite, was a careful scholar who felt that difficult subjects could not be much elucidated by commentators. His means of inquiry were “reflection, meditation, study, self examination, prayer, and depending “on the Spirit for interpretation and for revelation” (Noah Mack, ).He would not promulgate a notion of the intellect he had not himself proved on its own merits. “He would not decide for himself nor for any other before he had found the answer himself to the satisfaction of his own mind,” says his son Noah. And again, “he would not reject nor accept before the question involved was cleared up in his own mind.”
Mack pondered the millennial doctrine all of his life, but “in his later years he once remarked in reference to this disputed question, "I am too old now I cannot get the points together to think it through. This was the last known word that he expressed on this question, but this was his rule in general.” Noah seems a little defensive for the sake of his father just because by the time he is writing, there was much more pressure to conform to the dispensational view.

Twentieth century dispensationalism made deep inroads in North American Mennonite churches through non-Mennonite literature and prophetic conferences, and through non-Mennonite Bible colleges and seminaries, leading to considerable dissension and controversy. Today relatively few Mennonite scholars espouse dispensationalism and it is advocated mainly by teachers and preachers who received their theological training in non-Mennonite schools. Ewert, David. "Dispensationalism." Canadian Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1989. Mennonite Historical Society of Canada. Retrieved 6 Oct 2005.

As late as 1933 the Rules and Discipline of the Franconia Conference urged that leaders “not speculate on unfulfilled prophecy as the doctrine of the Millennium” (Wenger 431). Why were “early European and American Mennonites (until recent years)…generally free of any doctrine of a millennium” (Wenger, 459)? Especially since this view with its counterparts of the tribulation etc. are the substance of so much talk in all other Protestant denominations. Shall we blame inertia, that the millennium was only invented so late, or is it that the Mennonites value, as Ruth says, less talk and more action.

Behind the times, behind the times, the languages, the doctrines, but not the heart and the life. Acknowledgments:

Many thanks to Isaac R. Horst for his provision of translations of the 49 Andrew Mack letters in the Mensch collection.

Joel Alderfer. “Several Documents Relating To Early Franconia Conference Mennonites.” Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania, Newsletter supplement, July 1984.
J. Paul Graybill, Ira D. Landis, J. Paul Sauder. Noah H. Mack His Life and Times, 1861-1948 Scottdale, PA.
">Noah H. Mack.
Andrew Stauffer Mack
1939)Written at the request of John D. Leatherman. Photocopy of ms. in the Goshen College Library.
The Letters of Andrew Mack excerpted from the Jacob B. Mensch Letter Collection in the Mennonite Heritage Center. Translated by Isaac R. Horst
J. C. Wenger.
History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference<. Scottdale, Pa.: Mennonite Publishing House, 1985. ">Cornelius Weygandt. The Red Hills Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929.
Anna Elizabeth Reiff Young.
Best Foot Forward. Manuscript biography of Anna Mack Reiff (1982).

Culture War II

2007-12-11T08:01:00.005-08:00

A Case in Point

German sources of Pennsylvania Dutch thinking survived into the 20th century. The dilemma facing Mennonite Bishop Andrew Mack (1836-1917) illustrates this. His son, Noah Mack, says, all his father’s speaking “reading and meditations were in German” (Mack, 4). “In preaching Bro. Mack used the scriptural German language well, which the German people enjoyed to hear much better than the Pennsylvania German’ (Mack, 7). But the lateness of the Bishop’s non-English usage sticks out, especially since it limited his outreach, a product of his age and place, age because he was a youth in the beginning of the free school movement and place because “in the community where his family grew up the Pennsylvania German language was so generally spoken than no one who remained in that section at the time learned to speak the English fluently” (Mack, 11). More personal motives also occur, for “another cause for him not attempting to learn English was his deep sense of correct speech and definiteness of expression. In himself he had developed well the real German” (Mack, 12).

Andrew’s younger brother Henry Mack shows what a difference 18 years would make. Henry spoke and wrote English fluently from the start. It’s not as though Andrew Mack did not see the need for English, he early sent his oldest son Noah to a school where everyone spoke English: “he never lamented much, but it was noticeable that he much regretted the fact that in many places his services were no more practicable nor desirable because of the German barring him from being understood.”

Expectations of speaking and understanding German among these people were very strong. The German undertow is so strong that it overwhelms Noah writing in 1939, who spoke English his entire life. His English writing is generally clear, at least until the point where he speaks of this dialect problem. Then he lapses into incomprehension: “At a time the remark was made in the home; had we begun to talk English when there was one member of the family who could talk it and who taught it in school, who was in the home yet at the time; then father you could talk English too now. For he was only about forty years old when he sent his oldest son [Noah] to the English school.” Noah gives his father’s response to the question of speaking English in untranslated form, assuming his readers understand it: “Yah over the Leut hette ghsawt, seht overmowl der Hochmuth, der Mack un sei Buva schwetza Englisch” (11) [Yes, but the people said, 'look again at the attitude, Mack and his boy are talking / talk English.'] (courtesy of Joseph Salmons) Prior to 1900 it would perhaps be impossible to find a Pennsylvania Dutch native who did not speak and understand some species of the German. A surprising percentage still used only German, making them in Weygandt’s terms, “the most conservative people in America” (5), meaning that “people are doing there what they did in the days before the Mexican War” (5).

Speaking English was also complicated by religion. Even from 1880 to 1900 the pull of the German was strong. “In the mind of the older people in the church, English was considered almost a synonym for pride,” Noah Mack writes. “So it was the opposition to the English language sixty years ago [from his time of writing, 1939] was so strong in the plain churches and others too” (Mack, 11). That is, Mennonite “realism” conditioned the notion that speaking English was a pretense, because it was pretending to be something you were not. First a brother might speak English, but then came fancy dress, maybe an idea outside his own culture, followed also by reluctance to submit to the fellowship. Fancy language makes for fancy thought. The contradictions and conflicts of their identity were complex and widespread.

For Andrew Mack, already forty four in 1880, with a ministry, a family, a trade and a farm, learning English would have required sacrificing something else dear, especially learning it well enough to suit his own high standards. Noah seems a little severe with his father in this respect, taking the view that learning English is a moral good, which means that it was that for Noah. [Andrew Mack] “seemingly would not muster courage to attempt to use a language which he knew he could use but very poorly to begin with. In the five years above referred to, Father Mack and the rest of the family could have gotten a good start in the English language but sentiment from without and fear from within prevented all of the family from thinking about such a thing as talking English to the family...” (12).

3. Example from the Next Generation

Allegations that the English invented racism and spread it as a virus to other white new world immigrant groups, superceding their belief systems of acceptance of the stranger, true of many Pennsylvania groups, are the product of long meditation upon paradoxes expressed by native informants, to speak the sociology of it.

This understanding was a long time forming against the myriad sources of disbelief opposing such a proposition, for certainly no such idea was ever expressly uttered or implied from the sources. The opposite was the case. English was seen as the culture of choice, implying that all of art, education and desirable sophistication was English and the native German of no repute was to be rejected. Such statements and judgments were taken at face value for the longest time, but ultimately did not explain the mass of data and artifacts collected. Questions arose from the investigations then as to why such contradictory feelings existed that rejected their own past even while they could not outlive it, yet felt that they were culturally inferior. Anyone who has lived in American cultures besides the English sees this habit in full bloom in alcoholism among Indians and historic insecurity in many forms among hispanics and blacks. Truly the only exit from this oppression is confrontation even if it comes late.

The Prejudice Against the Body
Let it be said withal that English defamations of Indians, Germans and Irish were more famously a personification of the English themselves. Psychological pictures of Indians and wild men represented the Puritan fear that they sought to keep from entering outposts and towns. Such self prejudice was transferred to the Pennsylvania Dutch. Caricature, parody and shame, before the offer of assimilation, converted Dutch shame into a lingering symbol, alleged upon both their speech and physiognomy, to indict the universal peasant identified with New England’s dark nature.

If you were a German peasant you were ridiculed as being short, powerful and close to the ground. As the “realistic” Dutch subject might say, “short legs and powerful thighs are better for digging with shovels.” Humpty Dumpty would have nothing on this perfect peasant, round and stupid. The chain of association made short thighs and brutish body stand for a brutish mind. The Pennsylvania German mind, all along the target of the cultural war, was thus degraded by association with physiognomy. Short thighs equaled a short brain! The Dutchman was not supplied with cardinal virtues, but shamed with retrograde stubbornness, pride and separateness, irritating, petty and just plain thick headed, symbolized by fiction as late as 1942 inthe house frau, die Mem, the rough skinned ignorant universal farmer’s wife.

Apple in the Attic

Such an image of brutishness among an indefinite number occurs in Apple in the Attic: A Pennsylvania Legend, pervasive as late as 1942. Its heroine Emma is so dominated and peasantized she doesn’t even know she is pregnant as she compounds her fears with superstition. Apple in the Attic briefs the whole pantheon of stereotypes against the Pennsylvania German from the angry brutish husbands to the ugly broken skin and calloused hands of the wife.

It reads right out our informant’s feelings against Dutch language, customs and people, the product of the English/German cultural war. The only difference is that Elizabeth and her mother Anna were together in the front ranks striving for the rights and equality of women against these forces, even if they missed the greater English domination. In the novel Emma’s child Flora was the exact person Elizabeth abhorred being, “brought up on pap as a baby, soon graduated to sauerkraut and pretzels” (134). So while the novel panders stereotypes, and Emma in her attic of seclusion justifies them, they have nothing whatever to do with the real person. This Elizabeth, not of Her German Garden, a would be physician, never spoke a word in dialect, even if her mother understood it and her grandfather. A notable exception in this effort to overthrow English stereotypes was her mother’s stepmother, for grandfather Henry had remarried after his first wife died. The second wife was everything a stepmother is feared to be. Anna, the only daughter and the oldest, bore the brunt of government. We can hear it in Emma’s words above, “stop your vashing to change again zem didies” (122), but that’s more than taking the part for the whole.

Die mem had two more sons with Grandfather Henry after that who, while they achieved the peasant anatomy, being a little stout as she would say, were really smart and highly principled men, Philip Mack the millionaire, Harvey Mack, fulfilling his Mennonite vocation as an ambulance driver in WWI and afterward in the reconstruction of France.

This was replayed countless times across Pennsylvania before 1942, from the doll Flora wanted (165) to the Mother who is even more desperate to give it to her, a replica of Anna, to the hands, “tools of a farmer’s wife…these were not a woman’s hands, for they were too gross to be gentle” (144). Anna had had but one doll in childhood, given by her deceased mother, but showered dolls upon her daughters and when they were grown persisted as a folk doll artist, making doll clothes galore and giving many shows. Elizabeth, early a confirmed realist, naturally cared little for them.

Though temporarily vexed by her circumstances Anna still inherited the innate nobility of her Mack forebearers, those uncontentious gracious musicians and teachers, a side of the Pennsylvania German that English prejudice ignored from Franklin forward. If fleeing the farm was the message of the English, Anna got it and left. People have been reluctant to much admit this ethnic prejudice, but were victims of it, all the while internalizing it more.

It’s easy today to be facetious about such attitudes. Elizabeth’s own defense against the imposed peasant stereotypes and norms was caustic humor. Her approach-avoidance of folk life and folk art was like to her ambivalence the stereotyped uneducated Mennonite. She called herself “a mashed potato baby,” made it a negative myth of childhood that her people were all peasants with stubby fingers, thick thighs and heavy accents. This English loathing was translated in sayings like, “mashed potatoes were a substitute for mother’s milk for Pennsylvania Germans.”
“They called me chubby baby.”
“My legs were slightly uneven making me a little clumsy.”
“I wasn’t muscular.”
“I was a mashed potato baby.”
>She had a surgeon’s hands and mind but denied it: “I have peasant hands, short stubby fingers.”

The prejudice was not all learned; some was experienced in high school after WW I, vaguely suspect of being Germanic, she felt implicated in the lingering prejudice of supposed 5th column movements, further efforts to destablize the republic, as well as by the failure of Mennonites to baptize infants as all her friends had been done.

So even if the men of the Mack family were tall and finely tuned as they were, she charged them with shortness. "Henry had suits made to order. He was long from the waist to the knee, had heavy thighs." But Henry was a lousy farmer. “They weren’t athletes." Her nephew and his family were the only athletes she had heard of. She did not live to see her great nephew Andrew compete in the USTA Super Nationals. She also included her other grandfather in this indictment, defendant Jacob L. and his son, Howard, her father, storekeepers, “stocky, thick.” None of this was applied much however to the women, except herself.
“My family never had any growth spurts.”
“It’s an ethnic thing,” she maintained.
"I have a peasant body."
As though she foresaw this concern over the vexation of the body and wanted to further document it, she wrote, “my grandparents were farmers, but both my mother and my father had moved from Berks County to the city before they married in 1906. I was born in Philadelphia and attended Philadelphia schools, but I can claim all the virtues as well as the shortcomings of the Pennsylvania Dutch. One writer says ‘they have their admirable features including frugality, tenacity and an extraordinary sense of community, but they can be irritating, petty and just plain thick headed as most of their neighbors will testify at length.
At the end of that talk she gave at Strathaven High School in 1991 the virtues and shortcomings were still in conflict. She said, “as times have changed, we have stopped feeling inferior because of our peasant ancestry.” But that is the point, for they did not.

Her facetious boasting of opposites is doubtless another sign of intelligence, for she made English prejudice a joke, crowed that her people had been peasants born of peasants before Charlemagne. Teasing, she would look down the nose to see if one believed it. Of course, aping the peasant has been good business for artists since the Impressionists who went native, but even in poverty, even in the country, on the farm, artists have no doubt who the true aristocrats are, that is themselves, those who see, hear and think things the plebeian can't, the immense world of delight compassed by the senses five.So her insistent claim to peasant hood was always a high class put on, yet insisted upon to the end. Sure, her grandfather, Henry Mack, did a tour on the farm, but her mother Anna escaped and this daughter never milked a cow.

Reconcile the Paradox
If you reconcile these paradoxes you have the case in point, the last Dutchman of nine generations of vested folk identity and an artist trained and meticulous who negates both. That almost makes her more interesting than if she had affirmed both. Of course she denies this in interesting ways because her folk nature and the credentials of eye and mind persist.

We can undeniably generalize this as an identity conflict and take it that such contradiction results from the shame and prejudice directed against us all when we are living contradictions and affirmations of ourselves, our families and our physical and mental beings. But if we are going to excavate the folk identity beneath the layers of prejudice we can’t entirely believe the reports given us. The task is to work through the details, which, when framed properly in context, give opportunity to reconstruct the life that was, leaving us better able to solve the life that is.

So as la ast Dutchman in a family of only Dutchmen for nine generations, agonized by stories of farm drudgery, poverty and cultural isolation, this past conflicted strongly with her ideals. She believed it preempted her from becoming a physician. She knew Latin and read literature, but feared the lingering effects of the Pennsylvania ethos. Conflicted by her perception of every positive and negative trait of her Pennsylvania Dutch identity, she was a born artist. These contradictions preoccupied her in a speech at a local high school. She wrote in a draft that “the human urge to create something beautiful has always given the world artists, composers, musicians, architects, furniture makers, dress designers and a long list of others who have spent their lives in the pursuit of beauty.Not the Pennsylvania Dutch! Their harsh existence kept them busy supplying the needs of family and community without much thought for beauty

Such contradictions are a prime element of the “Dutch,' who above all else have always and only been preoccupied with beauty as a concern of everything she did. Graduating high school at 15 She immediately entered the Moore Institute of Design for Women, this born genius, but fond of boasting the opposite: “I was realistic enough to realize I wasn’t a genius, only a medium talent. On the piano I could only play hymns for Sunday school.” At the end of her life she even declared, “I’m very thankful to be realistic. I tell people I’m dying of cancer." The doctors at this stage were as suspicious of the cancer as the analysis is of these beginnings. Three months following the diagnosis of the most inoperable and untreatable pancreatic cancer, already spread extensively to the liver, no symptoms had appeared at all. The doctors wanted more tests, but she would give none. It took twice over this span for her to succumb.

She maintained contradictorily that she had been born of a long line of peasants. But her maternal grandfather’s family, the Macks were teachers from before the beginning of the free school movement in Pennsylvania, and also pastors and musicians for generations, even-minded and thoughtful people. Her maternal grandmother Elizabeth Bechtel likewise inherited books inscribed by family members of four generations of Mennonite pastors, from at least the 1780’s.

Her grandfather Henry Mack was a school teacher, as was his brother Peter Mack from 1860-1870, before becoming a pastor. Peter, and Andrew Mack, the oldest brother, were Lutheran and Mennonite clergy respectively. Her great uncle Andrew Mack, a cabinet maker, was the most significant leader and diplomat for 19th century Mennonites. All three of these brothers left their thoughts in written form. Bishop Andrew Mack left 49 letters, 1870-1906, courtesy of the Jacob Mensch collection. Peter left a diary, kept from 1870 until his premature death in 1878. Henry kept detailed ledgers of his activities from the age of 21, 1875 until 1900 and also compiled the Record of Tombstone Inscriptions / Old Mennonite Cemetery of the Hereford Congregation of Mennonites (1934) an invaluable preservation of the identity of these early settlers.

The musical aptitude of her background further contridictss the boast of peasantry. Grandfather Henry was a “chorister and musical director in many [Mennonite] churches in this part of the state” (obituary). He and his brother Andrew Mack, the Mennonite bishop, had been choristers since 1860 (Wenger, 120). Likewise, Peter Mack was “an accomplished musician.” Her own brother, Howard, assistant VP of Bell, was a devoted lifelong chorister who married the daughter of the Philadelphia architect, Edwin A. Yeo. A cousin by marriage, Anthony J. Loudis, graduated Juilliard in 1928 in piano and composition, took advanced degrees at Columbia and was chairman of the University of Delaware music department. Another cousin, Noah K. Mack, M. B. E., physician graduate of Hahnemann Medical School in 1937, was a Mennonite medical missionary in Tanzania for 14 years before becoming the sole doc of Morgantown, Pa. Her sister was a groundbreaking author with a graduate degree, chairman of home economics education of the Wilmington school district. Her mother was a tailor, dress designer and a woman of great independence of character, a Mennonite Mary Shelley instilling the rights of women in her daughters. Surrounded by excellence and thoughts of beauty of every kind, her people were not even pretend peasants.

So these lives and their response to prejudice may be like the parable of a Henry James story, mysterious if explained. Or it be a case of the mystery of coincidence like the supposed Shakespearean authorship of Psalm 46 translated in the King James Version. Yes, evidence can be cited, parallels in the Sonnets and the Plays can support this translation of the psalm, leaving a signature if you count 46 words from beginning and end. But these supposed facts belie the most obvious one that in every English translation before the King James Version this supposed “code” was just a word or two from being sprung. So is the peasant, artist, intellectual in denial a representative of her people, an even greater mystery put that way, a metaphor of her life, with a basement and attic filled with facts extracted as inferences on the floors between.

Works Cited

Mildred Jordan. Apple in the Attic. A Pennsylvania Legend. NY: Knopf, 1942.
Peter Mack. Cited in Souvenir History of Zion Lutheran Church 1753-1893.
John Joseph Stoudt.Pennsylvania German Folk Art Allentown, PA: Schlechter’s
1966.

Frederick S. Weiser in The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest by Monroe H. Fabian. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd.

J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.

Cornelius Weygandt. The Red Hills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1929.

The Loss of German Devotional Ways

2007-12-11T08:01:00.001-08:00

The relation of Pennsylvania Germans to decoration greater than tulips, hearts, stars and crowns, or Mennonites turning flowers into bookmarks to bring paradise indoors, or linens, furniture and pottery of communal tulips that migrate from paper to linen to wood, or even letters filled with swirls and stipples that whirl under signatures in descending spirals has as much to do with the absence of these things as with their presence, the plainness of a board, the cut of a lapel, whether cap or bonnet or hat, Christmas cookies at play and glee, but in a life capable of belief, an inner spiritual form and force from which the outward material surface of reality proceeds, the greater decoration is the less.

"Are there also men who are not conscious of possessing a higher spirit than brutes, and yet maintain, that they can keep their minds in a good state of rest in this life?" This question is in one of the books. Plain folk wear black suit and dress, but what do they hide? Is it something you can't see anyway or is it just covered up, wood handled tools hid in a rough brown cabinet , embroidered linens in trunks on metal trolleys, pottery in wardrobes, unknown, unsigned hand painted china, hand made dress? They hide the higher spirit and pretend.

moved to here

The Library of Elisabeth Bechtel

2007-12-11T08:00:00.012-08:00

This has been revised, consolidated with the Loss of German Devotional Ways, here

THE GLORY OF HER WIT

2007-12-11T08:00:00.007-08:00

Please see http://annaelizabethreiffyoung.blogspot.com/ here