Speak Global Only

 Everything must be anglicized for English rulers. Melting pot rules. English becomes Global. In ancient Greece speak Greek or die. When in Paris if you don't speak good French shut up. The PA Dutch is a forerunner of the Hispanic. They spoke German in some cases into the 20th century. Even as late as the World Wars when Washington negatively stereotyped Germans. Profiling and prejudice had existed from before Franklin. In 1794 a group of German immigrants asked for the translation of some laws into German, which petition was rejected by Frederick Muhlenberg (the English surrogate) saying, "the faster the Germans become Americans, the better it will be" (the "Muhlenberg Vote"). Becoming American meant speaking English.

Different churches made different adaptations. Mennonites held on to German longer than "church,"  Reformed and Lutheran, who anglicized 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 continued into the 20th century even if it seems hard to believe. This is exemplified in the wrestling over language for Mennonite Bishop Andrew Mack (1836-1917). The lateness of his German was a product of his age and place. 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 there was a presumption among these groups that English speech was pretense,  unspiritual. Speak English, submit to fancy dress and ideas and rebellion would follow. 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 to suit his own standards would be a sacrifice for he had a ministry, a family, a trade and a farm. His son Noah takes the view that learning English is a moral thing. Maybe it was for Noah, but [his father] “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 relates the span of German habit: “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 proves what difference 18 years would make, for he spoke and wrote English fluently from the start. Andrew sent his oldest son Noah to an English school. 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).

 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,” (meaning that “people are doing there what they did in the days before the Mexican War” (5).


The Intellectual German

 Franklin was able to convict the doltish German, but 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, and that the Dutch variety was "folk transcendentalism" not elitism.

The cultural inertia of Andrew Mack’s locale did not prevent his intelligence from profound opportunities to develop his gifts 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 this idea of the pejorative ethnic shadow, but when she lived with Andrew and Elizabeth Mack back 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).

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).

England, India and the Pennsylvania Dutch. American New World Models of Colonization in British India.

Colonial Rule in India

What was done in India was done before in America. C. S. Lewis does not hide in his history of the literature of the 16th century that "we became to America what the  Huns had been to us" (15).  Nineteenth century British romanticism glorified its untroubled acquiescence in imperialism (16) according to Lewis, but it was not acquiescence, it was racist and bloodthirsty. America and its supposed sea passage to India empowered that  transfer of avarice from all of Europe via Britain to America. British hegemony responsible for this avarice then transferred responsibility for its racism en masse to every immigrant group upon which the English had practiced and continued to do so. Avarice is too kind a word. In American history the victim has become the tyrant, hiding once again the bloodthirsty British reign. If you are an Irish or German or Hispanic or Black or whatever American, you are now responsible for sponsoring English Overlord America, the Master of War, with nine hundred military bases worldwide. Does it sound like you live in ancient Rome?

Nowhere is the velvet glove more off than in England's occupation of India. This mirrors the Pennsylvania Dutch, American Indian, Welsh and Irish oppressions. Majority history controls the field, forces the popular mind to take its history as romance. That is how it turns its soldier victims into "heroes." 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 Pennsylvania Germans seem visionary in comparison, as if they belong in the golden ages the English harnessed to the new world: harmony with nature, gentle breezes, three harvests.

The English projected this Golden Age onto the land and native peoples they were themselves  foreigners to in order to further their control. 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 are mocked in his yahoos, it was not so supercharged with racism as in India where the English cultural machine was in full view.  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. Its own people, 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." Pennsylvania Germans were called 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" (Weygandt, 5).

Change is the stalking horse for this prejudice. Get the indigene to internalize the prejudice against him. In the analogy between India and Pennsylvania the so-called Dutch hex signs match the Indian irrational superstition. Sectarian pietism, the many religions of Pennsylvania, match 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, Yoder says (Hex Signs) hex signs and plain dress were their markers of culture. 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). Fabian's Decorated Chest says of Pennsylvanians, "Borrows from their betters." India writes large the trivialization and peasantization of Dutch culture that centuries of folklore societies and universities foster.

In India and Pennsylvania however, supposedly, "the British, on the other hand epitomized modernity - they were the harbingers of all that was rational and scientific in the world." Capture in this ethnic mental prison for the young was the same for the Navajo and Pennsylvania Germans as much as it was for the subcontinent Indian. The British had their own people repeat the idea of British superiority verbatim in the minds of young who received instruction, and were made to learn English. 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. Again, their role in India resembled church groups in Pennsylvania, Lutheran and Reformed, who, much to the disagreement of their own historians that this even 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 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 behind the English Only  of that time. If that phrase sounds familiar, 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 steal 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 where the majority leaders were English and quisling English. And still are. 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 their 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 prostituted itself 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 (things that immigrants are really good for, and as cannon fodder). 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 to support 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, mind, habit and skin color, religion and war were also vehicles of English prejudice. 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. Mennonites argued 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 defined, it is not easy to see the invisible. To view nature as uncontaminated 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 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 or more, 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 its 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 English authorities and their thinkers transferred from the specific English origins to the more general "white" politics of later times. This protective coloring covers them.  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 inherent racists.

The English Invented American Racism

The American Revolution was won by the English who invented American racism as a further extension of  empire.  Boehme and the PA Dutch were a different cup of tea from the reigning English philosophy of the Puritan. Erudite Jefferson sounds like the xenophobe Franklin on the imperfections of the Germans when he worries about the Jews' so called inferior moral philosophy. Jefferson, with nothing better to do, had 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 removal of his own imperfection; attention to the details of the Law would have remedied this failure in the “minute enumeration of duties” (Adams-Jefferson, 383) that 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 implicit destiny of all migrant groups then is seen as a good by homogenators now. More social control. 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. This is hogwash that 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 -bipolar! 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 anointed Schlatter, who came to bring peace to the German Reformed churches, but became a stalking horse for the English only movement of that time and a chaplain to the British. Folklorist Don Yoder sees division as a function of religion, not politics, blames the sectarians who "withdrew from worldly matters; in fact the word "worldly" among them had a negative connotation" (The Pennsylvania German Broadside, 170). No kidding! It has had a negative connotation since Babylon, since Ur, since Chuang Tzu! Yoder 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. Rather, it isas though there were a war of attrition were being waged, and like any war of this kind, quisling substitutes infiltrate the 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, digital imprint 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 garb and words (Broadsides, 175). The sectarians were as suspicious of Zinzendorf 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 were introduced, with premillenialism, 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, 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 magnification of a few superstitious 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 anybody. 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 because they were seen as doctrinally weak and worldly, who substituted 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. They were not chained or burnt or drowned. 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 its way, how else explain the short shrift the best Reformed 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, infant baptism, for example, and worldliness. Yoder revisits this again and again with talk of "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 the hex is none.

This Shaker-like austerity of the sects 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" (Seeking 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. Here's one I happen to know. To further the general deceit about the American, "the American was a new being who had nothing to do with the world of European complexity and iniquity" (Paradise, 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). But you could better say that my allegories of Ooks are an outgrowth of old folk art trends, set ablaze, maybe. 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. The Pennsylvania Dutch were arrested.

These are more remnants of old colonialism, the 60% unemployment rate on the Navajo reservation, for instance, and the Pennsylvania suburbs made from farms. New colonialism is the digital age replacing life with screens. 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 conqueror. 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). You can get so many quotes like this from academic and religious functionaries on Charlie Rose you'll need a Heimlich. 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 immersion of every member of a class into an ethnic/language identity by sociologists is noxious. 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 curses. Only after constant repetition does an underlying point of view grind the ax and 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 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 peasant. But 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 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.

 Visions of Milkweed

The assumptions that justify assimilation come into question. The loss of identity through the creation of a group mind in the media causes pressures toward globalization to denature every nationality. This was done to the Dutch, so we need not pose further erosion of identity that would occur from contact with alien civilization, but that analogy makes plain that what happened to every other colonial or conquered people would happen here.

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  Modern synthetic culture illustrates the present. Majority scholars and quislings want exceptions to this loss of identity, but traditional culture stands in the same relation today as those Indians taken back to Queen 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. It was never anything but the theft of heritage, that underbelly which the prime minister of Australia apologized for, 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 among scholars 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 summary 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 culture composed of  beliefs and doctrines different from the British. 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" (Yoder, 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 so easily. This has probably caused him to be given short shrift in the 75% majority Dutch churched culture. "Most of the German settlers...were [not] religious refugees" (xvi). 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).

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 have said later. The newest creature of that new world, whose virtue likened it to the golden age, a metaphorical Virginian, a voyager under the Protection (Chas. Wms.) settling the ground of Christ (136), would then have been for Donne the Pennsylvania Dutch. What benign interactions among peoples this would suggest! What a wonder this new age!

"It is plain from the letter of Pastorius of March 7th, 1684, that the Dutch and German immigrants who founded Germantown expected to receive their grant along a navigable stream, to have a little province of their own, free from the sway of It is plain the English, or, as Penn described it," a new Franckenland." Pennypacker, "Bebber's Township and the Dutch Patroons,"2

 

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.

14. Voice, Language, Thought

  Voice, Language, Thought

 The universe is thought, not language.  Thought has no language. Is there a 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." (McCaffery 46). Too many vowels, drugs, disease, or disaffections? There is no language of protons.

  Voice

There is a lot said of the two voices of 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." BUT IT IS NOT SPEAKING THROUGH, IT IS SPEAKING WITH.

These writers mean by alien any heterology requiring a breaking apart, part and parcel of the new world of strangelets meant to make Earth into a neutron star. No, Bataille, Heidegger, Derrida and Nietzsche do not reveal their plans in this. Per-yaps (sic) they do not know, if they can be allowed this ignorance, since philosophy with science has been and is so directed by the alien heterology itself that posits a world where only the inorganic will hold sway, if inorganic means spirit. I don't know it it does. By this light the breaking of dimensions underway at CERN will induce the greatest modern act of deconstruction, the end of the world. No less that Hawking believes a vacuum to suck. Any consideration of these ideas must therefore be lardered with neologism, solecisms, and outright mockeries of these notions, even while acknowledging that what went before was mere preparation for this grand synthesis. Don't you want a whole not-earth? The Hegelian model still prevails until it is consumed. This of course all assumes, and won't mind saying so, that Messiah will not dash them to pieces, even as they know He will, but it won't change them after they have absorbed the beast into themselves. "Let favor be shown to the wicked yet will he not learn...when Thy hand is lifted they will not see" (Isaiah 26. 10-11). Then it will be true that that the beast will cry out with the language of negativity. At this moment however all the beasts are full of praise.

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.

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.


“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…."

There are two languages one of words, one of images, except that in a third the words hide illusions of words in the first, and in the forth the images are symbols of something else entirely.

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

That swim in an ocean that resembles itself,

drawn up in air to eye and ear

to evaporate and fall from sky.

Seen as drops what were none at all,

gathered in buckets, these drops make words.