CHAPTER XIV

Particles of falling stars, coming to nothing. The air pits them, eating out the softer parts. Sometimes one strikes the earth or falls flaming into Lake Michigan with a great hiss and roar. And if the lawless mob that rules Ireland with its orderly courts and still more orderly minds will not desist it must be crushed by England. So that to realize the futility of American men intent upon that virtue to be found in literature, literature, that is, of the traditional sort as known in France and Prussia--to realize how each serious American writer in turn flares up for a moment and fizzles out, burnt out by the air leaving no literary monument, no Arc de Triomphe behind him, no India subdued--To realize this it is necessary to go back to the T'ang dynasty where responsibility rested solely on the heads of the poets--_etc., etc_... Or better still why not seek in Aleppo or Jerusalem for the strain to save us.

America is lost. Ah Christ, Ah Christ that night should come so soon.

And the reason is that no American poet, no American man of letters has taken the responsibility upon his own person. The responsibility for what? There is the fire. Rush into it. What is literature anyway but suffering recorded in palpitating syllables? It is the quiet after the attack. Picking a sliver of bone from his mangled and severed leg he dipped it in his own gore and wrote an immortal lyric. Richard Cœur de Lion shot through the chest with an iron bolt wrote the first English--no, French, poem of importance. What of democratic Chaucer? He was only a poet but Richard was a man, an adventurer, a king. The half mad women rush to impregnate themselves against him. And this is literature. This is the great desirable. Soaked in passion, _baba au rhum_, the sheer proof of the spirit will do the trick and America will be King. Up America. Up Cœur de Lion. Up Countess Wynienski the queen of Ireland.

Polyphemus took first one shape then another but Odysseus, the wise and crafty, held firm. He did not let go but Polyphemus did. In fact the God could not exist without Odysseus to oppose him.

Why man, Europe is YEARNING to see something new come out of America.

In a soup of passion they would see a little clam. Let us smile. This is--

The danger is in forgetting that the good of the past is the same good of the present. That the power that lived then lives today. That we too possess it. That true novelty is in good work and that no matter how good work comes it is good when it possesses power over itself. Europe's enemy is the past. Our enemy is Europe, a thing unrelated to us in any way. Our lie that we must fight to the last breathe is that it is related to us.

We are deceived when they cry that negro music is the only true American creation. It IS the only true from the European point of view. Everything is judged from that point of view. But to us it is only new when we consider it from a traditional vantage. To us it means a thousand things it can never mean to a European. To us only can it be said to be alive. With us it integrates with our lives. That is what it teaches us. What in hell does it matter to us whether it is new or not when it IS to us. It exists. It is good solely because it is a part of us. It is good THEREFORE and therefore only is it new. Everything that is done in Europe is a repetition of the past with a difference. Everything we do must be a repetition of the past with a difference. I mean that if negro music is new in an absolute sense---which it is not by any means, if we are to consider the Ethiopian--the probable Ethiopian influence in Egypt--then it is new to Europe as it is to us.

It is not necessary for us to learn from anyone but ourselves--at least it would be a relief to discover a critic who looked at American work from the American viewpoint.

We are a young nation and have not had time or opportunity to catch up with nations that had ten centuries start of us. We still labor under the handicap of our Puritan lineage....

We shall not be able to plead childhood any longer.

Eric the Red landed in Providence, Long Island, and was put in a cage so everyone could see him.

This sort of stupidity we have to combat. I am not talking of the mass of plumbers and carpenters. I am talking of the one thing that is permanent. Spirits. I am saying that America will screw whom it will screw and when and how it will screw. And that it will refrain from screwing when it will and that no amount of infiltration tactics from "superior civilizations" can possibly make us anything but bastards.

We are only children when we acknowledge ourselves to be children. Weight of culture, weight of learning, weight of everything such as abandon in any sense has nothing to do with it. We must first isolate ourselves. Free ourselves even more than we have. Let us learn the essentials of the American situation.

We who despise the blackguards in the old sense. We too are free. Free! We too, with paddles instead of turbines will discover the new world. We are able. We are kings in our own right.

We care nothing at all for the complacent Concordites? We can look at that imitative phase with its erudite Holmeses, Thoreaus, and Emersons. With one word we can damn it: England.

In Patagonia they kick up the skulls of the river men out of the dust after a flood. In Peru, in Machu Pichu the cyclopean wall on the top of the Andes remains to rival the pyramids which after all may have been built of blocks of some plaster stuff of which we have lost the combination.

I know not a land except ours that has not to some small extent made its title clear. Translate this into ancient Greek and offer it to Harvard engraved on copper to be hung in the waterclosets which freshmen use.

And why do they come to naught? these falling stars, etc.

It has been generally supposed that among the peoples of the earth the age of maturity comes earliest in the tropics and increases gradually as one goes northward. But in North America this rule has one striking exception. It is not rare among Esquimau women that they have their first child at 12 and children born before the mothers were 11 have been recorded. Point Barrow Alaska 300 miles north of the Arctic circle.

But the early maturity of the Esquimau girls is strictly in accord with the supposition that the hotter the environment the earlier the maturity. To all intents and purposes the typical Esquimau lives under tropical or subtropical conditions. The temperature of the Esquimau house indoors frequently rises to 90°. When they go out the cold air does not have a chance to come in contact with the body, except for the limited area of the face. When an Esquimau is well dressed his two layers of fur clothing imprison the body heat so effectively that the air in actual contact with his skin is always at the temperature of a tropical summer. He carries the climate about with him inside his clothes.

When an Esquimau comes inside such a house as the one I have been speaking of he strips off all clothing, immediately on entering, except his knee breeches, and sits naked from the waist up and from the knees down. Great streams of perspiration run down the face and body and are being continually mopped up with handfuls of moss.

The effect of the overheated houses is more direct upon the women than the men for they remain indoors a large part of the winter.

Otherwise in North America among the Indians as one goes north from Mexico toward the arctic sea the colder the average temperature of the air that is in contact with the body through the year, the later the maturity of the girls. The most northerly of the Atabasca Indians appear to suffer a great deal from the cold.

The Dog Rib and Yellow Knife Indians are often so poorly clad that they have to be continually moving, for if they stop for even half an hour at a time their hands become completely numb.

In the evenings their wigwams are cheerful with a roaring fire but while one's face is almost scorched with the heat of the roaring flames one's back has hoar-frost forming upon it. At night the Indians go to sleep under their blankets covering up their heads and shivering all night. The average age of maturity of the girls of these tribes is as high or higher than that of north European whites.

But north from the Slavey and Dog Rib Indians to the Esquimau country the conditions suddenly change. One comes in contact with a people that has a system of living almost perfectly adapted to a cold climate, while the northern Indians have a system almost unbelievably ill adapted to the conditions in which they live.

In Puritan New England they wrapped the lover and his lass in one blanket and left them before the dying hearth after the family retired. There was a name for it which I have forgotten.