12.----Language In Voices Out

 Language  In Voices Out

“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, Université de Orléans, France “An Interview with Karen Mac Cormack and Steve McCaffery” (by Antoine Cazé), 28–47) 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.(now defunct except in this pic below.

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 exist 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

"We are richer for it," says Weiser, perennially defending the demise of Pennsylvania German 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 where American rhetoric hatched all men equal. It was a Pennsylvania dream of equality. Weiser celebrates "styles at variance with the majority" (xiii), but it is not an American majority; it was not "the majority" they were at variance with, it was the English! Continual apologies for Deutschness 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 says that "none of this little-studied body of folk poetry is fine literature" (This Teaching I Present, 2003, 8). He could easily have said, "these texts are an invaluable window into the mind of their art."

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). As if he never heard of English domination. Weiser likewise pains to make the Deutsch 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 welcome the disparate [except now that there are whole sections of Muslim London!]. From "Negro Spirituals to Pennsylvania German Fraktur" (Gladfelter, ix) they exploited them. 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.

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 must 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 colonial 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 the lily 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 Deutsch 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 German-Americans 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 attention. If you are waiting for alien salvation from space these issues need your thinking. Or maybe you just have the hunger to be a common neuter of western affluent democratic (read cultural tyranny) societies who promote uniformity in the name of diversity, the English and their quislings (religion and science) exemplary.

13. The Way Out of The Flowering Heart

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

that swim in an ocean that resembles itself,

drawn up in air to eye and ear

that 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…"

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

There is a lot said of the two voices In and Out. Inner and outer, the most simple saying, like language cannot simultaneously express wave and particle motion. If the wave is both so is the being. Poets want to hallow thought by resort to "a new language," asserted of Beissel's mysticism (by Bach) as much as of Boehme. 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) [and] obtains almost a pataphysical excellence!" Pataphysical means imaginary, an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem. On the same page Mac Cormack gets pataphysical, 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."

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, meaning from within the speaker's life. Indigenous means the same but more of community or ethos, Hopi or the Pennsylvania Dutch. WhateverWalt Whitman says comes from his own peculiarly driven mind even if spoken with the voice of the Upanishads. 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" and "...language is a negativity, the unsayable and the ungraspable" (Agamben) and cannot but be negativity unless it never existed. The thought 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 to the rest seems suicidal.

Is language pure thought? There is no language of protons. The universe is thought, but it is not language. Thought itself 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.” You think Hegel ever left his house? Mayhap 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. Assuming to be proved that he is removed, "By 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, disease, or disaffections?

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 without language or sound. In voice as action these philosophers could write a bestiary of themselves. A bestiary of vowels. It comes down neither to voice or language but to breath. Everything that has breath. Comic cosmic bestiaries pronounce linguists and philosophers slandering the animal to justify a 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 species' extinction translates from the commercial into the philosophical, as if Hegel never left his house to walk 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. Praise is the song of animal speech, the tongue of life not death.

The reason I like this IsReads pic, a little white spot you can barely see, dwarfed by the city of Chicago, is because it is a picture of when everything will praise, written then in the bone so large, as it is now is in the under bone, 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.

9. The Way Into the Flowering Heart in Blake

Milton descended into Blake's left foot! (Davis, 105). Blake wrote of the psychological dimensions of the fall of Adam that he allegorized to the thought of Boehme. Opinions beyond recourse made those who knew him call him mad, which is  given substance in records of his conversation in Ellis and Yeats in The Works of William Blake, I, the memoirs. But if there is much impetuous expression in Blake he has to be taken seriously for the body of backward engravings in a small hand he made for public sale. This is compulsion beyond. If some many of his scurrilous works had not been burned by this executor the situation would be worse.

Think of the angels Blake saw 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 that druggies armed with mescaline, travel with to the other world, but he lived without drugs, completely determined to live in this world while in that other. Blake invented the Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley tried to enter at his death with mescaline. The list is long of those who knock these doors with yage! But for Blake the doors to the flowering heart were open all the time. They were open for Milton and for Donne, 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 as any Mennonite, Blake took  his denomination of being seriously, would be labeled a dissenter and sectarian if any group fit. Efforts to degrade him into known categories and paradigms  past or present don't work, . 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, who was especially devoted to him, from 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 for all this, is 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 can 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, but 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 inner.

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).

 

2.

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.

4. Fraktur Is A Species of Language Flower

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. 

 Other links

Apologizing for Art in the Americanization of the Pennsylvania Dutch

The Tree Is the Goat

When new England was founded 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 and literature with severity.  It was closer to the medieval. Two hundred years after its founding New England still worried that its literature did not compete with the old. Step child English-American affiliates still worry about that. Its narrow outlook contributes much to chauvinism, isolation and infertility. The spiritual did not renew the physical in this new world, but was argued contaminated by it when actually the reverse is the case, the spiritual contaminates the physical. Uncontaminated nature does not mean clean land fills, it means uncontaminated by mind. The Puritans transferred their view of themselves, their sin to the forest, as if they could drive it away on the back of some Old Testament goat. The goat however was the forest itself, mowed lest sins found their way back. A scapegoat is no good unless forever lost. The tree as goat was cut so that sin could no longer hide as a predator in the darkness, as if the predator were outside  as if their fears were anywhere but in themselves. This thinking has fueled all American botanical and biological depravations. That the fear of sins transferred to the outer world is still going on is in some respects quite unbelievable.

Misapplying the precept that the world would contaminate, the believer equivocated the world as physical nature not its culture. This was all the more toxic in the austere soil of New England. Garrisoned against the natural the British did not dream of welcoming nature indoors until two centuries later 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,  only kept at bay only by cutting back the growth. How this differs from the defoliations of Agent Orange in Vietnam is not at all. Clear cutting the forest and exterminating the buffalo is its logical extension. The prevention of sin could hide evil and make a profit at the same time. Souls perverted by this greed and fearing erected a theology of dominion and racial superiority. The new puritan age of greed today produces a "spiritual imagination... impotent, sterile, or dead, [it] is necessarily going to be an era of violence, chaos, destruction, madness, and slaughter (Merton, Seeking Paradise, 85).

The Puritan celebrated this malaise intellectually. Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather drew sharp boundaries of  governmental/pastoral views. Literature as sociology tempted a depravity 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." As Michael Broyles says, "much of the story [of Pilgrim's Progress] is set in America...it was the metaphorical terrain the believer had to traverse...," which he  differentiates from 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 of fear that these first two centuries produced in the harvest of our extinction.
Question them if you dare. 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, but the Pennsylvania Dutch who survived the nihilistic and legalistic adversaries of Holland and Switzerland did not  dare. In place of the old world tortures, Pennsylvanians domesticated the natural, befriended it in their own natures, painted it, sculpted it and threw it on the forge. Pennsylvania didn’t produce any Scarlet Letters, only decorated chests and barns.

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 ended after the Civil War when the Dutch bought the farm, that is, gave up and began to assimilate "American" civilization. Some people think the Amish a 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.

Compromise Borrowings From Betters

Pennsylvania Germans wanted to show they really belonged. 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 velvet.  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. In order to 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. Fraktur's Introduction is worth attending for so transparently reflecting the prejudice of its paradise art. "We are richer for it,' says Weiser, defending 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 in Pennsylvania where American rhetoric hatched that all men are equal. 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 the English they continually apologized to for their Dutchness. Commenting on the texts of fraktur in a Preface to Hershey's book (ThisTeaching I Present, 2003), Keyser 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."

Friends of fraktur must 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 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 image from text did not however sever the connection. Weiser wants the images to be an imitation by the middle class of the nobility,  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, who else should also apply for "fineness" in vain? Stevens, Poe?  "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 connections 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...? No! 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 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 convention 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). This decline rouses superstition before dashing the tradition 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 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 allows 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. What then were the rural folk benefits? What if someone wishes the garden back again,  the flowering heart iconography? Whole classes of German-Americans were 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 that fostered assimilation to the English.

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