Re; Pynchon: "It's about work"...

[alice wellintown]

Black History, Haiti ....work ....Dignity and Education

C.L.R.  James, who, when a prisoner on Elis Island wrote a book about
Moby-Dick, mariners, and renegades, and castaways, sez, History really
moves when the traditionally most civilized section of the population
joins as coequals with those without whose labor society could not
exist for a day.

That "most civilized" section, New England, where, as Monroe noted in
his post, slavery was practiced, never imagined Andrew Jackson or
Frederick Douglass or Haiti or C.L.R James. They did not think of work
as labor for the non-wealthy members of their puritan experiment. That
lagacy, not a Puritan Legacy, and not an Enlightenment legacy, is a
marraige of both and the land where slavery had been practiced as long
as men lived on it.


Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves,
fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces;
but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and
glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his
fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate
manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains
intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest
anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety
itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings
against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is
not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which
has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that
wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all
hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute!
The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our
divine equality!

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades, and castaways, I shall
hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark...then against all
mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which
hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out
in it, thou great democratic God!...Thou who didst pick up Andrew
Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who
didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty,
earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the
kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick



Frederick Douglass sez,

While I have no sympathy with those who affect to despise labor, even
the humblest forms of it, and hold that whatever is needed to be done,
it is honorable to do; it is nevertheless plain that no people, white
or black, can, in any country, continue long respected, who are
confined to mere menial service for which but little intelligence or
skill are required, and for which but the smallest wages are paid or
received, especially if the laborer does not make an effort to rise
above that condition. While the employment, as waiters at hotels and
on steamboats and railroads is perfectly proper and entirely
honorable, in the circumstances which now surround the colored people,
no one variety of the American people can afford to be known only as
waiters and domestic servants. While I say this, I fully believe in
the dignity of all needful labor. All honest effort to better human
conditions is entitled to respect. I have met at Poland Springs in the
State of Maine and at the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and other
places, as well as at the late World’s Columbian Exposition at
Chicago, many young white ladies and gentlemen who were truly such,
students and teachers in High Schools and Seminaries, gladly serving
as waiters during their vacation, and doing so with no sense of being
in any degree degraded or embarassed by such service. But this would
not have been the case with them if society by any law or custom, had
decided that this service should be for such persons, their vocation
in life. Daniel Webster used to say that New Hampshire was a good
state to emigrate from. So I say of menial service. It is a good
condition to separate from just as soon as one can find any other
calling which is more remunerative and more elevating in its tendency.
It is not the labor that degrades, but the want of spirit to rise
above it.

Exclusive service or exclusive mastery is not good for the moral or
mental health of any class. Pride and insolence will certainly be
developed in the one class and weakness and servility in the other.
The colored people to be respected must furnish their due proportion
to each class. They must not be all masters or all servants. They must
command as well as be commanded. However much I may regret that it was
my lot to have been a slave, I shall never regret that I was once a
common laborer; a servant, if you please so to term it. But I felt
myself as much a man then as I feel myself a man now; for I had an
ambition above my calling and I was determined then, as I have been
ever since, to use every means in my power to rise to a higher plane
of service just as soon and as fast as that could be possible.

My philosophy of work is, that a man is worked upon by that upon which
he works. Some work requires more muscle than it does mind. That work
which requires the most thought, skill and ingenuity will receive the
highest commendation and will otherwise do most for the worker. Things
which can be done simply with the exertion of muscle and with little
or no exertion of the intellect will develop the muscle, but dwarf the
mind.

Long ago it was asked, "How can he get wisdom who holdeth the plow and
whose talk is of oxen."

The school which we are about to establish here is, if I understand
its object, intended to teach the colored youth who shall avail
themselves of it, the use of both mind and body. It is to educate the
hand as well as the brain; to teach men to work as well as to think,
and to think as well as to work. It is to teach them to join thought
with work, and thus to get the very best results of both thought and
work. In my opinion there is no useful thing that a man can do that
can not be better done by an educated man than by an uneducated man.

In the old slave times colored people were expected to work without
thinking. They were commanded to do as they were told. They were to be
hands; only hands, not head. Thought was the prerogative only of the
master. Obedience was the duty of the slave. I in my innocence once
told my old master that I thought a certain way of doing some work I
had in hand the best way to do it. He promptly demanded, "Who gave you
a right to think?" I might have answered in the language of Robert
Bums,

"Were I designed your lordling’s slave,

By Nature’s law designed,

Why was an independent thought

E’er placed in my mind?"

But I had not then read Robert Bums. Burns had high ideas of the
dignity of simple manhood. In respect of the dignity of man we may
well exclaim with the great Shakespeare concerning him: "What a piece
of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In
form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an
angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world; the
paragon of animals!" Yet, if man be benighted, this glowing
description of his power and dignity is merely a "glittering
generality" an empty tumult of words without any support of facts.

In his natural condition, however, man is only potentially great. As a
mere physical being he does not take high rank, even among the beasts
of the field. He is not so fleet as a horse or a hound or so strong as
an ox or a mule. His true dignity is not to be sought in his arms or
in his legs, but in his head. Here is the seat and source of all that
is of especially great or practical importance in him. There is no
fire in the flint and steel, but it is friction that causes it to
flash, flame and burn and give light where all else may be darkness.
There is music in the violin, but the touch of the master is needed to
fill the air and the soul with the concord of sweet sounds. There is
power in the human mind, but education is needed for its development.
As man is the highest on earth it follows that the vocation of the
scholar is among the highest known to man. It is to teach and induce
man’s potential and latent greatness. It is to discover and develop
the noblest, highest and best that is in him. In view of this fact no
man whose business it is to teach should ever allow himself to feel
that his mission is mean, inferior or circumscribed. In my estimation
neither politics nor religion present to us a calling higher than this
primary business of unfolding and strengthening the powers of the
human soul. It is a permanent vocation. Some men know the value of
education by having it. I know its value by not having it. It is a
want that begins with the beginning of human existence, and continues
through all the journey of human life. Of all the creatures that live
and move and have their being on this green earth, man at his birth is
the most helpless and the most in need of instruction. He does not
even know how to seek his food. His little life is menaced on every
hand. The very elements conspire against him. The cattle upon a
thousand hills; the wolves and bears of the forest; all come into the
world better equipped for life than does man. From first to last his
existence depends upon instruction.

Yet this little helpless weakling, whose life can be put out as we put
out the flame of a candle, with a breath, is the lord of creation,
though in his beginning he is only potentially this lord, with
education he is the commander of armies; the builder of cities; the
tamer of wild beasts; the navigator of unknown seas, the discoverer of
unknown islands, capes and continents, and the founder of great
empires and capable of limitless civilization.

But if man is without education although with all his latent
possibility attaching to him he is, as I have said, but a pitiable
object; a giant in body but a pigmy in intellect, and at best but half
a man. Without education he lives within the narrow, dark and grimy
walls of ignorance. He is a poor prisoner without hope. The little
light that he gets comes to him as through dark corridors and grated
windows. The sights and sounds that reach him, so significant and full
of meaning to the well trained mind, are to him of dim and shadowy
importance. He sees, but does not perceive. He hears, but does not
understand. The silent and majestic heavens fretted with stars, so
inspiring and uplifting, so sublime and glorious to the souls of other
men, bear no message to him. They suggest to him no idea of the
wonderful world in which we live, or of the harmony of this great
universe, and hence, impart to him no happiness.

Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and
liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious
light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free. To deny
education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human
nature. It is easy to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful
pursuit of happiness and to defeat the very end of their being. They
can neither honor themselves nor their Creator. Than this, no greater
wrong can be inflicted; and, on the other hand, no greater benefit can
be bestowed upon a long benighted people, than giving to them, as we
are here earnestly this day endeavoring to do, the means of an
education. It is aimed to make them skilled work-men, useful
mechanics, workers in wood, leather, tin and iron.




On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 3:14 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> yalequotations    "If work was a good thing the rich would have it all and not let you do it." - Elmore Leonard, U.S. novelist, 1925– "Split Images" ch. 1
>
>
>
>