The Flower of the Golden Age. Mythic Flowers

How distinguish larkspur, narcissus, amaranth and apple from vitex, aconite and fennel as fine herbs? Larkspur with death of Ajax, narcissus by the lesson of that name, amaranth the heavenly flower of Milton, and apple blossoms at all weddings. So appealing, but not just Ajax, Taliesin, Aneirin and Siegfried shed their blood on flowers.  And not just weddings in the celestial  gather in the heaven violets and the rose of Sharon and lay them beneath the shining blossoms that fall.  Who would think it so preoccupied, the apple blossom and generic blood?  But more amaranth Lies Bleeding, stretches all bejeweled, /  I watch the fields that purple with their blood, / incarnate flowers quicker turn to red. How compare the thyrsus fennel of Promethus, the aconite spit of Cerberus or the Chaste tree vitex of Hera's chastity with these and more? Some myths come real  that stand for the flower of the mind or heart, temporal, eternal,

 Added on to the Greek virtue of this was fine living in Scottsdale. That's what they call the Vale of Arcady and Tempe now.  New world discoverers have also added golf to it, which compares nicely to the English and Spanish who found the gold lying on the ground the size of a walnut, with its head as big as a child. The horror and defamation of the child, the encephalitic head, the greed of the prospector, the implicit decapitation from the natural all sum up what the golden age in America became while it was pretended that Virgil read Isaiah right into his Fourth Eclogue, “The Golden Age Return.”  

Spiritual pleading turned physical with a Midas touch. In The Golden Age Return the ram changes the color into a rainbow fleece,  grapes are rubies and corn gold, which  of course is the world that later turned to  tin. The new dirt of the garden that grew these counterfeits was politics spread thick. Not manure, gold and politics don’t fertilize anything, they petrify, useful for preserving the status ego. Golden age decoration like the competition for praise of the lady among Elizabethans, where beauty's opposites ended in the black wires that grew on Shakespeare's  lady’s head (Sonnet 130) oppose the Revelation of St. John.

Virgil and his upstarts took home  the flower of the golden age of gain and entertainment, facetiousness and mockery,  made over with selling points like the love place, a locus amoenus, good weather, benign nature, but these did not put on virtue. The grape was ruby and the green gold a thousand years later, further gilded up, got developers like Sannazaro to dress up lords and ladies dress as shepherds and shepherdesses and pretend the rustic age.Like the people of Scottsdale sitting on the boards of charities.

History has contracted a fever from this romance. Earlier and later science did too. Pliny’s Natural History said a gorse bush could bear gold.  He prefabed a gold mine from the root of the plant so its leaf ash could be sieved for gold. Metabolic gold was no more superstitious than recent science saying there is an arsenic based bacteria. The NASA trade of arsenic for phosphate in DNA strands is very like Pliny saying the plant transpired gold. It is not far from Pliny to Peter Martyr who said  in 1515 that he could pick up pieces of gold from the ground that compared with a nut or a fruit, as big as a walnut, and the biggest as big as an orange. Of course neither was it far for scientists to speculate they had found a model of alien life at Mono Lake, especially since all along the whole scientific establishment had been seeking to contact extra terrestrials.

Not to detract from legitimate extremophiles, the gorse bush does not discredit the garden club, but its coarse fantasy that reality is a matter of belief has science endlessly congratulating itself over both its mistakes and their corrections which denigrating philosophy as mere belief lacking empirical logic. Percival Lowell found canals on Mars and mathematical perturbations in the orbit of Neptune leading to the discovery of Pluto from a Shinto trance in Japan! (See Occult Japan).  Pluto was made and unmade a planet by democratic vote, and may be headed back to planetary status with the New Horizons photo of a whale on Pluto, while scientists make the same self congratulatory noises with their mouths and seek grants just the way Raleigh sought his El Dorado gold:

"There came an old man bringing with him two pebble stones of gold weighing an ounce…who when he saw our men marvel at the bigness thereof, he made signs that they were but small and of no value in respect of some that he had seen. And taking in his hand four stones the least whereof was as big as a walnut, and the biggest as big as an orange, he said that there was found pieces so big in his country…Beside this old man, there came also divers other, bringing with them pebble stones, gold weighing x. or xii. Drams: And feared not to confess that in the place where they gathered that gold, there were found sometime ) Stones of gold as big as the head of a child .”  (Peter Martyr, The Third Book of the First Decade of the Ocean, tr. By Richard Eden, ed. by Edward Arber, 1885, 74).]

If  nuggets are like walnuts and oranges that implies a tree, a gold tree that might be found in earth, in addition to the gold plant Pliny found. But this is not the gold tree found in a man, subject for another time. The fact is that  “beautiful colors instead of flowers, round stones of golden earth instead of fruits and thin plates instead of leaves” are not so important as the botanical metaphor that encourages the vegetable gold.

"They lay that the roote of the golden tree extendeth to the center of the earth and there taketh norifhement of increafe. For the deaper that they dygge, they fynd the trunkes therof to be fo muche the greater as farre as they maye folowe it for abundaunce of water fpringing in the montaines. Of the braunches of this tree, they fynde fumme as fmaule as a threde, and other as bygge as a mannes fynger accordynge to the largeneffe or flraightneffe of the ryftes and clyftes. They haue fumetimes chaunced vpon hole caues fufteyned and borne vp as it were with golden pyllars: And this in the wayes by the whiche the branches afcende: The whiche beynge fylled with the fubflaunce of the truncke creapynge from beneath, the branche maketh it felfe waye by whiche it maye paffe owte. It is oftentymes diuided by encounterynge with fum kynde of harde ftone. Yet is it in other clyftes nooriffhed by the exhalations and vertue of the roote. But now perhappes yowe will afke me what plentie of golde is brought from thenfe. The Third Decade,. Martyr, 173

They haue founde by experience, that the vayne of golde is a lyuinge tree: And that the fame by all wayes that it fpreadeth and fpringeth from the roote by the fofte pores and paffages of the yearth, putteth foorth branches euen vnto the vppermoft part of the earth, and ceafeth not vntyl it difcouer it felfe vnto the open ayer: At whiche time, it fheweth foorth certaine bewtifull colours in the fteede of floures, rounde ftones of golden earth in the fteede of frutes, and thynne plates in fteede of leaues…

[They have found by experience, that the vein of gold is a living tree and that the same by all ways that spreads and springs from the root by the soft pores and passages of the earth, puts forth branches even into the uppermost part of the earth, and ceases not until it discover it self into the open air. At which time it shows forth certain beautiful colors instead of flowers, round stones of golden earth instead of fruits and thin plates instead of leaves.]

Stones of gold as big as the head of a child (The First Decade, 74)

This idea abstracted from the gold, the age and the plant common to the fairy tale discovers romance. Romance became history just as space travel became geography and so on. They believed their science as much as we do ours. Look at the gold spread in shining bits over the grass! And look in the parking lots!


Renaissance Vegetable Klondike

 Was it the pastoral or the gold they found?  Eternity for the Greek is long. What to do? If we could just get in one of those gardens and pluck we’d never have to work again. You feel excitement at the scheme. The Roman court and garden naturalized its heavenly gold to begin the third millennium of its restoration. Biringuccio (1540) said “in some places of Hungry…pure gold springs out of the earth in the likeness of small herbs.”

That is, that in fum places of Hungarie at certeyne tymes of the yeare, pure golde fpryngeth owte of the earthe in the lykenefle of fmaule herbes, wrethed and twyned lyke fmaule ftalkes of hoppes, about the byggenefle of a pack threade, and foure fyngers in length or fume a handfulL As concernynge which thynge, Plinie alfo in the. xxxiii. [thirty-third] boke of his naturall hyflorie, wryteth the lyke to haue chaunced in Dalmatia in his tyme. The which (if it bee trewe) fuerly the hufbande men of thefe fieldes mall reape heauenly and not earthly frutes, fent them of god from heauen, and browght furth of nature withowt theyr trauayle or arte. A grace doubtleffe moft efpecial, fyth that in fo great a quantitie of earth graunted to the poflefllon of men, in maner onely this is thought woorthy fo hygh a priuileage. But what mall I fay of that wherof Albertus Magnus wryteth in his booke of minerals, affirmynge that he hath feene golde engendered in a deade mans heade : And that the fame beinge founde by chaunce in dyggynge, and perceaued by the weyght and coloure to conteyne fum rainerall fubflaunce, was proued by experience to holde a portion of fine golde mixte with fmaule fande. And in deede his woordes feeme to found to none other fence but only that this precious inetall was engender[e]d there by the great difpofition of the place and ftronge influence of heauen : The which fuerlie is a thynge hardely to be beleued. Yet confyderynge th[e]autoritie of fo greate a clerke, with the force of the fuperiour caufes and the maruelous poure of nature, I had rather gyue fayth hereto then raflhely to contemne the iudgement of fo greate a clarke. 364

[Translated: In some places of Hungary at certain times of the year, pure gold springs out of the earth in the likeness of small herbs, wreathed and twined like small stalks of hops, about the bigness of a pack thread, and four fingers in length or some a handful.. As concerning which thing Pliny also in the xxxiii book of his natural history, writes the like to have chanced in Dalmatia in his time. The which (if it be true) surely the husband mn of these fields mall reap heavenly and not earthly fruits, sent them of god from heaven, and brought forth of nature without their travail or art.” Biringuccio (1540)] There is a modern edition (1990) by Smith Gnudi.

Attributed to Pliny, this myth held that “these fields shall reap heavenly and earthly fruits mixed up  mortal and immortal together. It made a vegetable Klondike of the golden age. They loved repeating each other, whether small herbs, gold trees or gorse.

To Biringuccio, "Wherfor, the diligent fearchers of mines, willing by a certeyne fimilitude declare howe the mynes are placed in the mountaynes, haue figured a greate tree full of branches planted in the myddefle of the bafe of a mountayne, frome the whyche are diriued dyuers and many bouwes and branches, fum greate and fum fmaule, muche like vnto verye trees that are in owlde woddes."  (356 Pyrotechnia)

He could mean for all intents and purposes The Hobbit's Misty Mountains. All legendary places and golden states pick gold from such trees even if they are mines. The nuggets “as big as a walnut…as big as an orange” reported by Arbor in 1515 in England, and added to Virgil, Homer and Hesiod, were as easily discovered in the new world as dot.com bubbles in latter day pyramid America and airbrush mortgages. 

To justify his own tale Raleigh tells another heard of the Inca to compare with  the perfect metal garden he would find in Guiana. Just as Biringuccio quotes Pliny about the gold likeness of small herbs, Raleigh cites Lopez to prove El Dorado, as if it were a simple matter of belief, “but read the report of Francisco Lopez and others, it will seem more than credible.” What credible? Lopez says “they say, the Incas had a garden of pleasure in an island near Puna, where they went to recreate themselves, when they would take the air of the sea, which had all kinds of garden-herbs, flowers, and trees of gold and silver.” They knew Virgil too.

 This was nothing to what the emperor of Guiana had: "All the vessels of his house, table, and kitchen, were of gold and silver, and the meanest of silver and copper for strength and hardness of metal. He had in his wardrobe hollow statues of gold which seemed giants, and the figures in proportion and bigness of all the beasts, birds, trees, and herbs, that the earth bringeth forth; and of all the fishes that the sea or waters of his kingdom breedeth. He had also ropes, budgets, chests, and troughs of gold and silver, heaps of billets of gold, that seemed wood marked out to burn. Finally, there was nothing in his country whereof he had not the counterfeit in gold.

  When an age begins with the discovery of Utopia (1516) poetic travel is a major  occupation. Even if gold is denigrated in Utopia, used in chamber pots and to bind criminals, that was only a mock contempt. By the time of Eastward Hoe (1605) the adventurer bound for Virginia takes the gold chamber pots and chains and adds to them rubies and diamonds from the shore. It’s enough to confuse Raleigh on his way to the gallows, that Pilgrimage

 towards the land of heaven;
Over the silver mountains,
Where spring the nectar fountains…

Then the blessed paths we`ll travel,
Strowed with rubies thick as gravel;
Ceilings of diamonds, sapphire floors,
High walls of coral and pearly bowers.

Poetry, discovery, earth, Virginia, Guiana, the golden age or heaven, “pearly bowers,” trees turn pearl?  Joined in the pastoral to make the temporal eternal, as real as Roman empire, the virtue of the golden age would “buy of them the pearles of earth, and sell to them the pearles of heaven (A True Declaration of Virginia (1610). By the end of the day Abraham Cowley was echoing the sentiments of Sir Thomas More, “call in more Spaniards to remove the rest.” (“America: Phoebus Speaks.” (De Plantis, V) because the lust for gold made itself felt so strongly, whether in Guiana or Virginia, that John Smith said “there was no talk, no hope, no work but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold” (General History of Virginia, 1624).

 But the golden age was forfeit long before. Spenser saw it transfer virtue to counterfeit grapes: in his Bower of Bliss (1590):  “as the Rubine, laughing sweetly red, / some like fair emeralds, not yet well ripened…and them amongst, some were of burnish’t gold, / So made by art, to beautify the rest” (FQ, II, xii, 54-5).

The green gold ivy there is double ivy disguised as gold and gold as ivy: “that wight, who did not well advised it view, / Would surely deem it to be ivy true" (61).  Spenser does to Virgil what Shakespeare did to the Petrarch, give a lie to the lie. Virgil and Plutarch seem in danger of believing the naivete of their poems. Spenser’s garden is an artistry of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue where waving corn-crops shall to golden grow. In this trap for sense, mock nature the living, who have no business there, enter the golden garden, but see only the fake grape, the pleasure of the world. This is so because this world cannot see into the next which the golden age prefigures. Spenser gives these counterfeiters their due, finishes them off, which we have waited a thousand years for. They are turned to hogs, “now turned into figures hideous, / According to their minds like monstrous” (85). So travelers and got their comeuppance.

 The walnuts on the ground, the leaves are deception. Spenser makes the fruit of gold poison.Tantalus invoked, reaches up his hand from the stream, but even if he got the fruit the joke is it’s gold and worthless. Here among all the floral gold the fruit resides as a damsel of the fountain, paradise, golden age and every association in one. She looses her hair “which flowing long and thick, her cloth’d around, / and the ivory in golden mantle gowned” (FQ II, xii, 67). Virgil reversed, but not a pear you can eat.

 Decorative effects of nature thrived. Poets were more nuts than explorers. The “silver-sanded shore,” myrrh-breathing Zephyr,” (Drayton), “nothing that bears a life but brings a treasure” (Fletcher). Cowley translates Pindar, “jewels for their fruit they bear.” The “enameled meadows” express the eternal to the temporal. Virgil brought the golden age to Rome and Waller took it to Bermuda, “the Hesperian garden.”

Of course the lamp was light, all along the sense of the gold, but as light was misunderstood for color and color for gold, virtue continued its fall. Only briefly is the vegetable restored in Marvell’s Bermudas:

He hangs in shades the Orange bright,

Like golden Lamps in a green Night.

And does in the Pomegranates close,

Jewels more rich than Ormus shows.

This did not defeat the plenteous explorations, but the course correction gets high finish in Milton, who sums the entire tradition in his vegetable gold: “the tree of life, /High eminent, blooming Ambrosial Fruit / of vegetable Gold” (PL IV, 218-9), the pliant form and vitality taken back from the metal hardness and greed. Milton calls the artifice that characterized Roman and renaissance pleasure gold a “nice art.” The pretense that art improves nature is gone. Nice art is a human exacting, restraining, ordering of nature into unflattering “curious knots.” opposes  “nature boon.” Earlier the phrase “if Art could tell” shows the impossibility of ordering a description of the garden in the first place. That is, Milton takes art out of the natural setting and puts it back in the poet, or rather, Milton puts the flower of the golden age back in the ground. Once again beyond imitation, breezes are not perfumed with incense, ambergris or myrrh, but with “odorous Gums and Balm.” The vegetable gold and “Golden Rind” are simply natural, unlike the gold apples, walnuts or ivy. 

So the Golden Age and pleasure, the pastoral and fine weather, gold, blessed, fortunate, immortals are  frozen in space and time. The dead yellow hedge. Even these extremes of the garden begged to be outdone, as might be said of Huysmans’ poison flowers and cannibal plants, (in Against the Grain) that they form a reverse golden age that gets you first. Nobody in literature seems to have noticed until recently that the natural world was being systemically killed off.  Weren’t we all prospering?

If this synthesis of botany and geology, vegetable plant and mineral gold, could make art better than nature, more beautiful, you didn’t need actually need nature any more, so the notion that art imitates life was reversed, instead nature, improved by art, exactly the premise of biologists manipulating the genome, was supplied with those deficiencies obvious to human greed. Cloning of geology and botany into the imaginative landscape of the golden age made a nature as deficient in the natural as the human was of virtue, the prerequisite of the golden age in the first place.  It was a precursor of the modern artificial heart. They’d at least get rich in the fantasy. This joke is the same as late night  TV on politics, but with a bite, for in the corruption of nature it takes a human.

Nobody could be blamed for looking for a silver lining in all this. What it was really about? As a metaphor of alchemy, the suppleness of green joined with the incorruptibility of the gold was an inherent paradox, but sunlight stood behind the metaphor  of the gold, to which all the attributes of gold attached. Light was the pristine sense of gold, the incorruptibility of the sun. So the alchemic green gold of poets was really sun on a leaf.

Green and gold  had developed together in Rome, but beyond the celebration of gold as a toy of the rich lay a yearning for immortality. Poetry again corrupted philosophy and cross fertilized with texts of a pristine Eden where the relation of plant and light stood for the relation human and divine. This older metaphor of gold as light transcends the younger literal gold flower, but they joined where the outward sense transformed by its mineral met the inward sense of the human made eternal by gold. That was photosynthesis, transformed by light beyond expectation or precedent.

As an idea of immortality The golden age unexplained by the Greeks was trivialized  by the Romans with little notion of this.  The quest for immortality sometimes caused grief, especially when some powerful person’s plan in the history of religion was crossed, So what was the picture of the outer gold nature of the Romans compared to the inner aspects in the biblical prophets of mineral transformation and the human photosynthesis?

Whether the gold lay behind them in the golden age or ahead in future millennia, there was never a sense in classical writers as in biblical prophets that it existed in the present.

According to Hesiod To get to the Golden Age you had to either die at the end of the first Golden race of men or in the Trojan War. Pindar allowed you could get there by living the three mythical Pythagorean lives. Greek Menelaus’ virtue as the son in law of Zeus, was a whimsical Orphic exemption allowing him immortality because he married Helen,  but virtuous lives in Pythagoras involved chastity and self control maybe too great a price to pay.  

Gold nature abstracted, divided from its source, sucked the essence of nature and transferred it elsewhere, opposing the process of incarnation in photosynthesis where energy stored in the thing did not divide from that source.

Works Cited

Arber, Edward (ed.). The First Three English Books on America. Birmingham, 1885.

There came a owld man bringynge with him two pybble flones of goulde weighinge an vnce, defyrynge them to gyue him a bell for the fame who when he fawe oure men maruell at the byggenes therof, he made fignes that they were but fmaule and of no value in refpecte of fume that he had feene. And takynge in his hande foure ftones the leaft wherof was as bygge as a walnut, and the byggefl as bygge as an orange, …Befyde this owld man, there came alfo dyuers other, brynginge with them pypple ftones of gold weighing, x. or. xii. drammes : And feared not to confefle, that in the place where they gathered that golde, there were found fumtyme ftones of gold as bygge as the heade of a child.

New England vs. Pennsylvania

The case of the denigration of all peoples by the English empire is documented in Pennsylvania to greater and lesser extent for all peoples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Borrowings From Betters

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

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

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

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

Spiritual Transfer

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

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

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

Spiritual Demise

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

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

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

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

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

Afterword - Did You Find Paradise Today?

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

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

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


Works Cited

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

11. Pennsylvania Dutch Paradise

Pennsylvania Dutch Paradise

There are glimpses of American Indian notions of natural relation in the Pennsylvania Dutch sectarian, the Mennonite view of the world. Whether this can be proved from their words remains to be seen, but in their art we take as a given that it is already proved. From habit we cite three current works:

Ellen J. Gehret. This is the Way I Pass My Time, on show towel decorations,
Mary Jane Lederach Hershey. This Teaching I Present: Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse Schools.
Monroe H. Fabian. The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest.

Fraktur is a species of language flower assumed impossible, "...one basic fact must be underscored in studying these documents--the illumination was auxiliary to the text" (Weiser, "Piety and Protocol in Folk Art," 1). Such divorces need understanding. We want a closer relation of illustration and text.

Fraktur occurs in baptismal certificates called Taufschien, mostly printed, and 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 until the Princeton editions and the Blake Archive, although inferior reproductions existed. The essentially different genres of Taufschien and vorschrift, with the division of art from text, also mirror the divided demographics of the Pennsylvania German, 90% "churched" so called, Lutheran and Reformed, 10% Mennonite and Anabaptist. The "churched" have assumed proprietary status over the whole by their majority status, but are often outweighed by the social/political acts of the Mennonites. This sibling rivalry impacts all discussion. There are yet no online illuminated fraktur as there are with Blake.

Pennsylvania Fraktur art taught the alphabet to children, but when the actual letter strokes mimic the same strokes in the designs of flowers in the composition, this teaching becomes a kind of Calligrammes or a species of a hand drawn vispo, a flower of the hand and mind. Letters, alphabets, numerals, the colors and shapes in Plate 60 of Hershey's This Teaching, "Ihr Kinder Wolt ihr Lieben," ("O Children Who Are Loving") are woven to attract the child, now the adult, to contemplate the text with the art. This particular design is attributed to Jacob Gottschall (1793). The text, "O Children" is a hymn of Christopher Dock's, appropriately addressed to children, he a schoolteacher. At least among Mennonites fraktur was child art, designed for children, sometimes executed by children, colors and floral designs intended for the child's eye. How could it be high art, made by teachers and their students? It is folk art, famously so, but the involvement of children parallels Blake who is our literary schoolmaster. We paint the drawing with words.

A vine, a "stem" of tulips germinates from a globe/seed in the right hand corner, 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. This 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, which elision seems designed. The larger blooms have smaller dark stems, air borne, unrooted. A current of air lifts through the "letter petal" leaves, from right to left. It "blooms" 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, 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 not felt in translation.This verse is not a slogan from twentieth century wars. The vine that springs from the seed at the lower right flows across the top of the page, which seed, translated, says, "Be with us, on all our ways / Dear God with thy blessing," which blessing, rises in the vine. The title words Ihr Kinder, underlined in gold, resemble the block style of Dock's fraktur, intersect the center of the page, divide the text below from its flower above, as if a flower of the text rises from the word garden. Language flowers teach the children to identify petal letters. The writing of the text below occurs in thirteen long cursive lines, its stanzas identified 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.

Language In Voices Out

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? Ken Morrison's The Solidarity of Kin (2002), "Toward a History of Intimate Encounters" traces the offer of kinship to the other.
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.

Cleaning the Augean Imagination

In PTSD, involuntary consciousness breaks in upon dreams. Smells, memories, fears occur. The example that comes to mind is Arthur Rimbaud who divides his life into the before and after over the “hope of recovering the key to his lost innocence” (Henry Miller). So to quote Rimbaud: “if my spirit were always wide-awake…I would not have given in to degenerate instincts, to a forgotten epoch.” Henry Miller says of this, “what it was that sealed his vision, and thereby brought about his doom, no one knows-and probably no one ever will know.” We don't want to know, that's certain, but in the epidemic abuses of the pizzaites we see them, among others, both ritual and occult. Whatever it was intensified over time. All our lives can be filled with such events, maybe not all, but the events and their memories are neutralized by selection, amnesia, drugs. In other words Rimbaud gave himself up to debauchery and every vice just to forget the pain of lost innocence. He made himself monstrous. He made himself a comprachicoes, who change the appearance of human beings by mutilating children. Rimbaud's soul was mutilated inexpertly we may say because in the end his making monstrous doesn’t take and he turns to faith. (Henry Miller, “When Do Angels Cease to Resemble themselves? A Study of Rimbaud." New Directions 9, 39).

There are many likenesses of psychological disfigurement in the comprachicoes' physical mutilations. They removed the memory of dislocated joints with a drug, a stultifying powder, an anesthetic escape, so that the mind's ability to recall the depravities imposed on it was deadened, and if remembered was compartmentalized or remembered with an anesthetic so the meaning of the pain was masked with forgetfulness. Hence the stunting of the spine, burning the face, incisions, manipulations and restraints. Consciousness however reconstructs and reconnects the pain with its meaning by removing the bandage of inoculated, anesthetic memory. Then the pain of realization begins. This happens over a lifetime and is different from the immediate trauma of the assault and its consequent memories as treated with propranolol. This drug is said to pose an identity dilemma because our memories make us what we are and their removal prevents learning from our mistakes. If the comprachicoes could have administered propranolol they could have gone on mutilating and maiming forever, like the mandarin who is taken to another planet to be tortured for eternity in exchange for peace on earth. This peace would be at the price of no memory of our sufferings or knowledge of the Mandarin's. So the knowledge of our sufferings make us whole in this view. At least they make us compassionate.

King Augeas owned more cattle than anybody in Greece. Thousands of cows and goats stabled there each night. There was a stink. Hercules turned the rivers into the stables to clean them, but this is not about cattle, stables or manure, but imagination. So these things in the Augean stables, to simply clean them? Isn’t their memory their existence? Doesn’t taking away  memory take away life? But living with stink is a problem when consciousness comes.Consider whether Hercules loosing the rivers into the stables is a disinfectant of the making monstrous, a cleansing of memory among the unfeeling. That is, take a view through metaphor that wind is greater than water, whether he wind of consciousness is greater than the water of memory and identification of the pain. This can be known on mountaintops where wind is strong, but the level of the pain, at sea level, even humidity swallows up. Darkness, humidity are forces similar to the belly of a fish which make a Jonah. Staying away from the beach won’t help. You can get to be forty and start to wake  to these forces. Swallowed by a fish, wake up in the belly cradle and earth. At 70 the belly light dawns in the dark.

The trouble for the man is himself and the forces. He doesn’t come without a past even if he doesn’t know it. He doesn’t come without a present even if he doesn’t feel it. His blindness is a mask. If it weren’t for friends along the way, women especially who save his life, he wouldn’t survive. He doesn’t want to give account of the women though, he wants to account the forces. He wants to take out after them but that means he has to face himself. All the unmentionable dark is shot with rays, lots of rays, but the light doesn’t blind him. The dark does. Even in darkness light dawns for the upright, says the Psalm. He learns to be compassionate because of the dark, the affliction, the pain that lines the tiled hallways of the asylum's cement floors where all these sufferings and afflictions lie. This is an image from the past. He comes out of the grave clothes of his amnesia shorn, unshorn with the memory of his sins. They are his sins unless you say the innocent are the oppressed and what is done to the kindreds, the strange fruits of their tortures, beatings, is the fault of an enemy. So he looked into the dark and it was getting light. The illuminant began to fill every corner of the hallway in his belly. The sufferings and afflictions were all still there, but they had lost mass, like oxygenated rivers diverted into their midst. Cleaning the Augean Imagination, this river is not like some aging Huxley or Loren Eiseley reimagining evolution, floating on his back between canyons of rock. He walks down the center of the hall like he did the first time. What did the boy see then? They could not touch him. They had to wait for that. That hadn’t happened yet.

 The results of the finished work of the comprachicoes are all along both sides of the hall, misshapen, drooling. Funny it has no smell. That was from all the disinfectant. There is no lack of disinfectant among the unfeeling. Then of course there were all the drugs pumped into the skin. That was before drugs were so common. All the pains took them. Palsy took him drugs. Rage took Valium. Lust had a range of pharmacopoeia. Hatred must have eaten some. Sicknesses all. Diseases all. Rampant in the hall. Covered when the Lord entered that hall long before and found a species of Noah and Jonah. A hall more like a tunnel of misery. My sin was there that I resurrect here. My sins were theirs. The enemies inoculate you with pain. Redemption is not cleansing like a nuclear flash, or a flood. It feels more like a plant growing.The fish is their life. Life is their fish. Moses floated early. How far is it to where he kicks the rock. He hit the rock with his stick. He hit the rock! The rock has a sense of humor about Him even at the time He puts Moses to bed in Egypt. We go down to get his body in a few years the way we go down to get our memory of the dirty hallway with its stretchers and wheelchairs. What was it like in Noah’s childhood? Playing with too much water. Jonah, playing at the wharf with pelicans for pets would come home with shells in a bag.

 If water is the symbol of pain then there are different sizes of vessel in which the volume of water collects. That does not indicate the pain is greater, it just means it is felt more because of the larger vessel. The water from a kitchen spigot is nothing compared to a thunder storm on the mountain, when the runs off the mountain and collects in the vessel. The vessel feels the more than when a slicker laid on the ground. Jonah was this kind of  runoff. He had to be sunk to make an impression.

5. The Way Into the Flowering Heart II. A Revelation of Interior Presence

A Revelation of Interior Presence

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

*takes the inauthenticity and blindness of the contemporary unreflective mode of existence and appeals to a turning inward, a cultivation of the depths of subjectivity in an effort to gain a superior concept of experience. (Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption.)

The inner life got both occult and the mundane dismissals. Pennsylvania German elite defended their ideas by saying, "we are a little slow, and perhaps too conservative to be very brilliant." Robert Bly presumes to describe his better, Wallace Stevens, and his Pennsylvania German family as "upper middle-class German Americans [who] appear to be successful repressors of the dark side" (A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 66). Bly received supports and grants for such criticism. He was made the darling, Stevens however did not resist the flower. When his sister told him their grandparents were "not Pennsylvania Dutch, but...born in Germany," he said, "I am not prepared to accept my sister's statement that my mother's grandparents were born in Germany...I don't know that my mother ever really said it and, if she said any such thing, she could only have said it on the basis of something told her by her mother" (Letters, 416). Presumably this means he thought they were born in Pennsylvania and were "Dutch." What that is of course begins the telling of many tales which at base are of the flowering heart. Stevens argues the hearsay of generations by splitting High German and Pennsylvania Dutch: "My mother's father, John Zeller, was born in Berks County on October 21, 1809," and "my mother spoke Pennsylvania Dutch." This ancestry appears in the blood of his poems from "Complacencies of the Peignoir" of Sunday mornings to his "weekends...potting things up and bringing them indoors so that the room in which I sit in the evenings now looks like a begonia farm. I have other plants upstairs and down and all over the place" (Letters, 473-4). Have a look at Wallace Stevens, Naturalist in this regard and Wallace Stevens and The Bed of Old John Zeller and then at his late in life baptism that was squelched by the establishment that it contradicted. Bly might approve a Sufi dance, but no baptism except the pagan ministers who baptize the wind, which is what happened to flowering heart, it 2-ply, 4-ply doubled and blew up in the world until everybody thought they'd gotten one. But we came to wonder at the naivete in believing that the bursting stalk above the eyes takes root into the brain and waves the life of the waving world into the heart again. That's not what happened, not what was meant at all. To the contrary, we lost a third part of the atmosphere (Banquet of God).

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

Facetious asides such as Weiser's about Dutchmen on their knees communicate the English grievance against the Germans, that they were uneducated boors, but really they were visionary transcendentalists a century (1730) before New England. Pennsylvanians reveled in their peasantry even while faulting themselves for lacking education, but the difference between Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in belief and education is guilt. The puritan second and third generations were consumed with it (Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness, 15). If the flowering heart and its sanctified natural presence were denatured by this later malaise, Anabaptists had long before shunned public celebration of the inner word world. When disbelief became an epidemic among their critics the exfoliations on quilts, chests and hearts stopped, struck down as absurd as

The way into the flowering heart

inside the flowering man

is over the inside itself,

inside the new found land.

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

Transcendentalism proposes to creation that it reflect the divine. Once every hundred years, English advocates claim it: Morton, in 1650, Edwards, in 1750, Thoreau, Emerson, in 1850, as founders of English Environmentalism. But “the full blown rose of mystical transcendentalism blossomed in Pennsylvania a full century before New England’s scrawny plant began to bud” (Stoudt, 1966, p. xix)." Scholarship is often merely sleight of hand. Pennsylvanians were transcendentalists en masse a hundred years before the nineteenth century movement in New England:

"An awareness of German culture was a recent development in New England when the Transcendental movement began. Unlike New York and Pennsylvania, where large numbers of immigrants from Central Europe had settled in the eighteenth century and German traditions were well known, in New England few could read German until the early nineteenth century. Translations of German literature were not generally available, and uninformed opinions of German culture were largely negative. In the second half of the nineteenth century however the situation began to change...." Howard E. Smither (A History of the Oratorio: The Oratorio in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1979, IV, 430).  

Vogel's German Literary Influences, but not much else seems to have appeared to illumine the hundred years of Pennsylvania transcendentalism before New England. If we are serious about the transmission of transcendentalism from Boehme to the Puritans we cannot bypass the Germans in Pennsylvania who had long before taken him up, stitched him into their quilts, which involves also the translation of William Law and the illustrations that Dionysus Freher reproduced in the four volume Boehme English translation.

Considerations of the mystical Pennsylvanians include:

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

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

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

If we are hindered in the natural by societal measures of the Pennsylvania German there is also hindrance in the supernatural by philosophical mysticisms.

Everything depends on the right search term: Puritan Wilderness.

Consider that these are all in quotes:

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

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

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

Conclusion

Looking For Work

The imagination is the difference between the mind and the hands. The trail to the interior translates language, dimension, memory and sense.

This figure, Looking For Work, pretends that those who walk there have had their tongues cleansed. That's why his back is turned. Maimonides says the imagination needs to be sanctified, that  idols, Dereviannye idoly, set up in the contrasts of language enacting literature  make the mind of this people dull, stop their ears and shut their eyes.  The house must be occupied or vagrants and strangers will move in with vandalism, dumping, teenagers, gangs. To prevent unclean spirits it is not necessary to sweep clean and put in order; it is necessary to occupy. Vacancy is an omission whose overthrow is a commission, as the Lindisfarne Gospel (950 A.D.) says, "alla woepeno his zenimeth. . .& reafo his todaelde" (OED). Reafo his todaelde means “plunder his entire house” (Luke 11.22) and thereby set in order.
With this sanctifying and cleansing, hands begin, mind shapes, brain directs angle and line. How is sanctified light found? This does not require consciousness.

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

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

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

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

Callicott and Ybarra say: to hear Nash tell it,

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

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

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

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

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

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

End note

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