SLSL Intro "It Had to Do with Language"

Sat Nov 2 12:00:25 CST 2002

SLSL Intro "It Had to Do with Language" 

Dave Monroe wrote: 

>From Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The
  Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970
  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002 [1999]), Ch. 1,
  "Introduction: Culture, Counterculture, and Postwar
  America," pp. 1-20 ...

"A more cosmopolitan America was coming into being,
  a good deal more open to social differences yet
  resistant to political dissent and social criticism.

  Outsider groups such as blacks, women, and Jews,
even
  working-class and rural Americans, having seen
  something of the world, were not about to return to
  the kitchen, the ghetto, or the emneial jobs to
which
  they had been confined." (p. 3)

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A more cosmopolitan American? Yes! That's
Signification of the highest order. For when one
thinks of the cosmopolitan American isn't it
Jefferson, Franklin, The James family, Henry Adams, 
the greatest philosopher American cosmopolitanism ever
produced--Santayana that come to mind? What world did
these new American cosmopolitans (not expatriates in
France, not poets born on the mighty Mississippi
become Anglican Lords in a self-imposed Wasteland of
European decadence) see? One thinks of the great
ladies of English letters publishing under names like
George or Jane crafting perfect fictions in and about
the drawing room, of the Brontes, of Virginia Woolf's
fictional sister of Shakespeare barred from the
libraries strolling over the lawns of Cambridge, her
busy little head full of Bloomsbury cosmopolitanisms,
of Irishmen hold up a cracked looking glass to a
broken  battered crumbling tower of overflowing
cosmopolitan intellect, of countless men and women,
boys and girls, their stories and tales colonized,
their gods, like Enzian's, caged by a foreign language
and it's religious symbols, and erased by an alien
alphabet.  
But Morris Dickstein is talking about Invisible men
and women fleeing the farm and coming to the great
cities in the North. The Great Migration actually gets
started during W.W.I. But it was W.W.II and the train,
the sleeping car porters,  that brought the people
North. Fleeing Jim Crow and a dead end  world, they
came to a still segregated North where the found
defense jobs. Union jobs. And they wrote. And they
were read. But they were not cosmopolitan really. They
were as American as apple pie, baseball, slavery, the
M&D line, and Peterson NJ. 

Americans have never been cosmopolitan.  It's greatest
works of literature were not begged, borrowed or
stolen from the great works of Europe. America
practiced a self reliance. 

>From Essays: First Series (1841)
Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a time in every man's education when he
arrives at the conviction
that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;
that he must take himself for
better, for worse, as his portion; that though the
wide universe is full of
good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but
through his toil
bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him
to till.

So Pynchon was to discover that a poet must look in
his own heart and write, must write from his own
experiences. 

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron
string. Accept the place the
divine providence has found for you, the society of
your contemporaries, the
connection of events. 

Reading one's contemporaries, a rising tide of new
American authors, black and Jewish voices, female
voices, Jazzy voices, strange and exciting voices. 

Under One's Nose, Under the Rose and A Leaf of Grass

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright;
he dares not say 'I
think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is
ashamed before the blade
of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my
window make no
reference to former roses or to better ones; they are
for what they are; they
exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There
is simply the rose; it is
perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a
leaf-bud has burst, its
whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no
more; in the leafless root
there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it
satisfies nature, in all moments
alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not
live in the present, but
with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of
the riches that surround
him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot
be happy and strong
until he too lives with nature in the present, above
time. 

Look low and high and all around you. 

"Books are top be called for, and supplied, on the
  assumption that the process of reading is not a half
sleep,
  but in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's
struggle;
  that the reader is to do something for himself, must
be on
  the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed
the
  poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the
text
  furnishes the hints, the clue, the start or
framework." 
     --Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong
intellects dare not yet hear
God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know
not what David, or
Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a
price on a few texts, on
a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote
the sentences of
grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the
men of talents and
character they chance to see, - painfully recollecting
the exact words they
spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of
view which those had
who uttered these sayings, they understand them, and
are willing to let the
words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good
when occasion
comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as
easy for the strong man to
be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we
have new perception,
we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded
treasures as old
rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be
as sweet as the
murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn. 

A mobility that needs only to be On The Road looking
for a America. 

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of
man, nor is his genius
admonished to stay at home, to put itself in
communication with the internal
ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the
urns of other men. We
must go alone. I like the silent church before the
service begins, better than
any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the
persons look, begirt
each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us
always sit. Why should we
assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father,
or child, because they sit
around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?
All men have my
blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt
their petulance or folly,
even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your
isolation must not be
mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation.
It is for want of self-culture that the superstition
of Travelling, whose idols
are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for
all educated Americans.
They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in
the imagination did so
by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the
earth

It is for want of self-culture that the superstition
of Travelling, whose idols
are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for
all educated Americans.
They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in
the imagination did so
by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the
earth. In manly hours, we
feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller;
the wise man stays at
home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any
occasion call him from his
house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, and
shall make men sensible
by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the
missionary of wisdom
and virtue, and visits cities and men like a
sovereign, and not like an
interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation
of the globe, for the
purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that
the man is first
domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of
finding somewhat
greater than he knows.

But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper
unsoundness affecting
the whole intellectual action. The intellect is
vagabond, and our system of
education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when
our bodies are forced
to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but
the travelling of the
mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our
shelves are garnished with
foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our
faculties, lean, and follow
the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts
wherever they have
flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist
sought his model. It was an
application of his own thought to the thing to be done
and the conditions to
be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the
Gothic model? Beauty,
convenience, grandeur of thought, and quaint
expression are as near to us as
to any, and if the American artist will study with
hope and love the precise
thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the
soil, the length of the
day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of
the government, he will
create a house in which all these will find themselves
fitted, and taste and
sentiment will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you
can present every
moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's
cultivation; but of the
adopted talent of another, you have only an
extemporaneous, half
possession. That which each can do best, none but his
Maker can teach him.
No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person
has exhibited it. Where
is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where
is the master who
could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or
Bacon, or Newton? Every
great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is
precisely that part he
could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the
study of
Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you
cannot hope too much
or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an
utterance brave and
grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or
trowel of the Egyptians, or
the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all
these. Not possibly will the
soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven
tongue, deign to repeat
itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say,
surely you can reply to
them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the
tongue are two organs of
one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of
thy life, obey thy heart,
and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm

Do see as well: 
Areopagitica
A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing
To The Parliament Of England
by John Milton

This is true liberty, when free-born men, Having to
advise the public, may speak free, Which he who can,
and will, deserves high praise; Who neither can, nor
will, may hold his peace: What can be juster in a
state than this?

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