/lit/ - Literature

>>13836381
Ribeiro sees the first wave of this expansion as a mercantilist invasion made possible by significant advances in ocean navigation and in firearms. As we have noted, the West invented few of the technics and implements of either. What it did do was to gather to itself the inventions of others and extend them to fuller realizations and ever more ingenious applications. Why it did this lies beyond Ribeiro's concerns but not ours. With the spectacle before us of the invasion of a new world by a whole civilization, we are led as by a dowser's wand beneath politics, technics, and economics to the world of the spirit. And the spirit of the West is to be found in the history of that religion to which all Europe subscribed.

Christianity, as we have seen, had a unique orientation to the world, an orientation that emphasized the capacity of rational thought to render Christians lords of all earthly creation. In the age of exploration Christians of all nationalities and persuasions were united in a conception of the earth as a divinely created thing, there for the enjoyment, instruction, and profit of man. Though the nearest derivation of this view seems to be Augustine, who viewed the world as of no intrinsic interest, its ultimate derivation is Old Testament scripture as rendered through Christian exegetes. There, in the deeply incised record of a new monotheism turning away from the worship of the natural world toward the adoration of a god so otherworldly that his name could not even be written down, is the beginning of the superimposed sacred history.

Max Weber, for one, traces the West's gradual, inexorable elimina tion of the magical or numinous from the world to the influence of the Old Testament, and he finds enormous entailments to Christianity's developed view of the world as neutral and even empty of all spirit life. To Weber this view resulted in the conception of the world as an open field for such human activity as might be pleasing to a god infinitely removed from it. Here human ingenuity and restless creativity might enjoy almost limitless freedom, governed only by the increasingly qualified stricture that such behavior not work unnecessary hardships on fellow Christians. Such a nonsacramental world, bereft of spirit, its gods and sacred groves and megaliths reduced to euhemeristic ciphers, or else banished to devilish realms, could pose no resistance to those intensive investigations of nature that ultimately resulted in the West's celebrated ability to expand.

>>13830401
In his bean field he writes that in his hoeing he "disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens," bringing to the light of his scrutiny their implements of war and hunting and husbandry. In winter we find him cutting a hole in the pond ice and gazing through it into the silent, secret world beneath where magical pickerel held themselves still as shadows. And in a more didactic passage, he urges us to settle ourselves, not like the restless settlers of his day, but as a people who would grow roots in the earth, wedging our feet downward through the slush of opinion and appearance "till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality. . . ."

For Thoreau, such a reality seemed more and more to be somehow connected to the Indian, though in his Walden days he only ruminates at the edges of the connection, remarking here and there that mythology might be the record of a primitive, original relationship with nature. In his journal he writes, "I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that nature with which I am acquainted. Mythology comes nearest to it of any." But perhaps myth could only arise from contact with the unfathomed, unfathomable wilderness, and with his fellow countrymen all about him laying feverish waste to the wilderness, where might such a profound confrontation take place? We need the tonic of the wilderness, he writes, we need to witness "our own limits transgressed and some life pasturing freely where we never wander." Well to the west of where Thoreau sat, Americans were determining that there should be no limits, no wilderness left unfathomed.

Seeking the ground of such a confrontation, Thoreau left Concord, tame enough territory after all, and journeyed up into Maine in 1846, again in 1853, and for the last time in 1857. During this period the purity and profundity of his quest was revealed, as Philip Gura has pointed out, for in Maine Thoreau found that the speculators, the fur traders, and timber miners had long preceded him and that any confrontation with the old New World was difficult to come by. In The Maine Woods he records his dismay at the messy, chewed-up landscape he encountered, and his even greater dismay at the degraded aboriginals he observed living a fringe existence in their cheerless slum dwellings. On his second trip he went deeper in with a Penobscot guide who whistled a marching song of the frontier instead of chanting the images of mythology. But he went back yet again, convinced his quest could be realized somewhere in the Maine interior, if only he could penetrate it far enough. By now he was sure that his earlier intimations had been leading in the right direction, that what he had been seeking was an aboriginal relationship to the universe.

>>13803367
Here are the timber miners who came out with the railroads after cutting as much as four million board-feet a year in the North Woods. Shattered hulks move along the skid roads and bull teams slog along while skid greasers pour from their rancid cans; locomotives three and four abreast haul redwood sections. Dwarfish figures are posed astride the ruins of primeval trees or beside heaps of slaughtered game or atop mountain crags that offer perspectives almost none of them could grasp.

Here are the silenced, solemn faces of the "hostiles" who vainly opposed all this: Sitting Bull, Satanta in his soldier's uniform with epaulets, Lone Wolf and Dull Knife in a photographer's studio.

Here are the soldiers, white and black, who fought the tribes for the possession of Indian territory: overstuffed generals in beards, buttons, and braid; lounging officers at Fort Ellis, Montana Territory, their coats open, their trousers saggy and boots dirty, the obligatory hound at the bottom of the steps of their quarters.

And here are the hostiles and soldiers together under the wide flaps of the treaty tent at Fort Laramie in 1868, the Indians in blankets and buffalo robes, their braids wrapped in weasel fur; the soldiers on their camp stools with William Tecumseh Sherman in their midst, his burning eyes fixed on those he had determined to destroy, treaty or no.

Here is a photograph that appears to epitomize the whole process, for it is of a literal land race: high noon, April 22, 1889, and the blurred forms of 10,000 whites racing off the starting line and into another section of "permanent Indian territory." This is Oklahoma, the devastated soil of which would in a mere three decades be visible on the East Coast in dense red dust clouds that rolled out into the Atlantic.

Here near the end of the westward rush is a photograph of a little man in a yard, surrounded by what appears to be chips and flakes of an indeterminate nature; they are actually buffalo bones, and the wellknown and much-lamented destruction of this animal is as concise a way of understanding what was done to America as we are likely to find, for the dates and numbers of this destruction are at once finite and suggestive.

>>13786991
Creation is a work of cosmic destruction in these texts, often taking the form of a violent victory of the male gods over their female adversaries, who here exhibit that terrible face that is but one of the aspects of the Great Mother. Thus in a myth widely spread through the region, the firmament of heaven and the foundation of earth are formed of the dismembered carcass of Tiamat, the primal goddess, defeated in battle by Lord Marduk: he smashes her skull, splits her body like an oyster, and the obedient winds whisk her blood away. Little wonder that the earth was eventually perceived as hostile with such a murderous conception of it.

The triumph of the male gods guarantees the relegation of the formerly dominant goddesses to the roles of thwarted adversaries, marplots, or supernumerary helpers. We find that the mother goddess of the herd animals, Ninhursaga, becomes the demoness of the stony grounds that ring the arable soil of civilization. In a lament her own daughter asks,

". . . to whom should I compare her?/ To the bitch that has no motherly compassion. . . ."

Even in agricultural myths where originally the goddesses had been preeminent, they are now debased, as, for instance, in Sumerian mythology where the male god, Enlil, is credited with the gift of the primal tool (the pickax) for field work and construction. Thus he is made responsible for both agriculture and the culture of the city. Significantly, perhaps, Enlil's pastoralist origin is revealed by his epithetical title: the Shepherd. Sumerian mythology, so influential for the traditions of the Israelites, also shows the male god, Enki, as directly responsible for the fertility of field and farm, and it is he who guards the implements of agriculture. Only after he has called the cultivated fields into being does Enki assign the goddess Ashnan charge of them.

Buried in these awesome texts like evidence of archaic encampments beneath city walls are signs of that earlier, more harmonious agricultural way alluded to above. And within these faint vestiges, which form the deepest substratum, is to be found evidence of longings for that still older (oldest?) presedentary freedom, of that radically integrated spiritual existence of Paleolithic cultures. Thus in the greatest epic of the Near East, the epic of Gilgamesh, which Theodore Gaster has called the area's Iliad and Odyssey, we find the presedentary Paleolithic substratum in the figure of Enkidu; the fall of this man from a state of natural harmony; the debased woman as agent of the fall; and the rise of the hero of consciousness-the fully aware doer of deeds-quester, explorer, and at last tragic exemplar of mortal limitations.

>>13783653
Both the efforts of these various groups at regeneration and the Church's persecution of them
toward that same end span the period from the beginning of the Crusades to the flood tide of
exploration. Throughout this long period the Church became ever more hysterical in its accusations
and its punishments of paganism, thaumaturgy, and witchcraft and in its attempts at massive sexual
repression, until finally it sought to purge and renew Christendom in the fires of the Inquisition, a
tragic perversion of a primeval busk.

At issue during these centuries was the shape and content of the psychic geography of the West. In
the same way that civilized men had cleared the earth, pruned back the forests, planted villages,
towns, and cities, so had Christianity stripped its world of magic and mystery, and of the possibility
of spiritual renewal through itself. In cutting down the sacred trees in the mystic groves, in building
its sanctuaries on the rubble of chthonic shrines, and in branding all vestiges of ancient mythic
practices vain, impious superstition, the Church had effectively removed divinity from its world. But
its victory here was Pyrrhic, for it had rendered its people alienated sojourners in a spiritually barren
world where the only outlet for the urge to life was the restless drive onward, what Norman 0. Brown
has called the desire to become. Eventually this drive would leave the religion itself behind.

Meanwhile, the old pagan practices died hard, so rooted are they in our nature. This was
especially so in the European outback where women and men were still daily entangled in the
immemorial, ahistorical cycles of budding, molting, mating, and harvest. So one thinks that in some
intuitive way Margaret Murray was right when she argued that an ancient fertility cult underlay the
witchcraft persecutions. There must have been at least some rude, residual attempt to keep close to
the ancient vision of the way things are, though it was probably never the organized effort complete
with covens that Murray claimed it was. There is too much archeological evidence of animal fertility
images to imagine that such deeply rooted beliefs died easily, and there are too many reports of
medieval dances that appear to be associated with animals and fertility to dismiss all of them as
fabrications or hallucinations. Such a suspicion gains further ballast from such stray bits of evidence
as a seventh-century injunction that reads:

If anyone at the Kalends of January goes about as a stag or a bull; that is, making himself into a
wild animal, and putting on the heads of beasts; those who in such wise transform themselves into
the appearance of a wild animal, penance for three years because it is devilish.


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>>13782980
The prohibitions announced at Sinai against imagery and idolatry (Deuteronomy 4:15-40) are a necessary part of such a governing bias. There are two reasons for these prohibitions. First, images are fated to be representational to some extent, and so, whether bull, sun ray, stone, star, or ear of corn, connected to that cyclical nature the god himself was so infinitely removed from and was now commanding his people to live beyond. As Pedersen writes:

.". . . when the God was detached from the life of nature, and his relation to it consisted only in the creator's display of power, then the psychic strength was removed from nature, it became merely an instrument for the creator, a means for him to display his power. Then it would be absurd to seek divine life and holy strength in the things of this world. And if idols were formed in the shape of animals or men, it could only be understood as a ridiculous attempt to degrade the creator by ascribing to the limitations of creation that power which He alone possessed."

All images, he rightly concludes, are the fit objects of destruction because they are aimed at dishonoring Yahweh.

The second reason for the antiimage prohibitions is that traditionally images had been associated with shrines, which are in turn attached to specific localities. Here were people on the march; no attachment then was possible to the land, such as it was, and none was tolerated. Even Sinai (Horeb), the place of the grand theophany, was forgotten as a specific place, and the Promised Land toward which the god was turning the people's wilderness-weary eyes, was not to be revered for itself but only as a constant reminder of one portion of the bargain here sworn to.

>>13781604
Creation is a work of cosmic destruction in these texts, often taking the form of a violent victory of the male gods over their female adversaries, who here exhibit that terrible face that is but one of the aspects of the Great Mother. Thus in a myth widely spread through the region, the firmament of heaven and the foundation of earth are formed of the dismembered carcass of Tiamat, the primal goddess, defeated in battle by Lord Marduk: he smashes her skull, splits her body like an oyster, and the obedient winds whisk her blood away. Little wonder that the earth was eventually perceived as hostile with such a murderous conception of it.

The triumph of the male gods guarantees the relegation of the formerly dominant goddesses to the roles of thwarted adversaries, marplots, or supernumerary helpers. We find that the mother goddess of the herd animals, Ninhursaga, becomes the demoness of the stony grounds that ring the arable soil of civilization. In a lament her own daughter asks,

". . . to whom should I compare her?/ To the bitch that has no motherly compassion. . . ."

Even in agricultural myths where originally the goddesses had been preeminent, they are now debased, as, for instance, in Sumerian mythology where the male god, Enlil, is credited with the gift of the primal tool (the pickax) for field work and construction. Thus he is made responsible for both agriculture and the culture of the city. Significantly, perhaps, Enlil's pastoralist origin is revealed by his epithetical title: the Shepherd. Sumerian mythology, so influential for the traditions of the Israelites, also shows the male god, Enki, as directly responsible for the fertility of field and farm, and it is he who guards the implements of agriculture. Only after he has called the cultivated fields into being does Enki assign the goddess Ashnan charge of them.

Buried in these awesome texts like evidence of archaic encampments beneath city walls are signs of that earlier, more harmonious agricultural way alluded to above. And within these faint vestiges, which form the deepest substratum, is to be found evidence of longings for that still older (oldest?) presedentary freedom, of that radically integrated spiritual existence of Paleolithic cultures. Thus in the greatest epic of the Near East, the epic of Gilgamesh, which Theodore Gaster has called the area's Iliad and Odyssey, we find the presedentary Paleolithic substratum in the figure of Enkidu; the fall of this man from a state of natural harmony; the debased woman as agent of the fall; and the rise of the hero of consciousness-the fully aware doer of deeds-quester, explorer, and at last tragic exemplar of mortal limitations.

>>13782573
Through the starving time, through all the cruel deprivations, they must often have asked themselves what they were doing here. And the answer to fall back on was to be found in that great Reformation of which this perilous and forlorn little migration was to them the latest and most significant act. For within the monstrous cathedral of European Christendom another revitalization movement had been sparked off by the rapt internal attentions of a German heresiarch. The idea was to go back, to return to the primitive vigor of the early Church, to that glimmering moment before the building of the cathedral and the institution of its far-flung offices when the Church existed only within the hearts of the convinced. They wanted to strip away the layers of applique, the pomp and vestments, to come again to what even they could call the primitive, naked sources. Perhaps, tucked away inside this noble effort, was the deathless wish for revelation in their time and lives, for a new age of miracles in which the indwelling spirit might surge through and lift them as it had the Apostles gathered in the house at Jerusalem in the wake of the Ascension.

If so, the Reformation was a failure, and it is lamentable to reflect on how much of Protestantism was merely a reaction to Catholicism, having so little blood and fiber of its own. Luther, hounded by his opposition, was as viciously set against the millennial sects and their attempts to chant and storm their ways through to revelation as were his persecutors. The movement's other great figure, Calvin, was as authoritarian as any caricatured pope, expounding the meaning of the scriptures in a light, careful voice from his Geneva pulpit while students from all over Europe took notes and then submitted them to the Master for inspection and correction.

Still, there were those who heroically or tragically-which is it?persisted in trying to go back, and of these they who took the struggle to this northeastern coast were the most earnest. They constituted, as their voluble historian Cotton Mather said, the very marrow of that generation of godly men that from the very beginning of the Reformation had been most desirous of closing with what they took to be the law of Christ and the spirit of primitive Christianity. That first age was the "Golden Age," Mather wrote, and to "return unto That, will make a Man a Protestant, and, I may add, a Puritan." So here it was once again in a somewhat different guise: Christianity's commitment to its own history, dooming even these radical dissenters to the defeat of their much desired ends.

>>13782583
In 1837 the new nation's insatiable lust for land finally produced a financial panic that spread back from the western frontier to the population centers of the East. The previous year had been the biggest yet in land sales, and an extent of territory the size of New England had passed into the control of the speculators. Now there was a crash that revealed not merely the enormous economic inflation of the times but their spiritual bankruptcy as well. Yet, surveying this scene, Horace Greeley could produce a remarkably characteristic solution: Move On: Go West. And those who could go did so, leaving those who could not stranded on their farms and in their little towns with outsized grid plans that would remain unrealized. Succeeding generations in this region would reap the crop of bitterness, frustration, and xenophobia that lurks there still -people, as the Midwesterner Glenway Wescott observed, born where they do not like to live.

The others went on. They bridged the great river and entered the grasslands that stretched all the way to the big mountains: tall grass prairies to the east, short grass plains westward, and beyond that the tough bunch grasses of the semidesert. This was the territory that had been described by Major Stephen Long as an uninhabitable desert. But closer experience revealed that the same blue-stem sod grass that grew in the rich lands of Illinois was to be found stretching west across the Mississippi. Henry Nash Smith has charted with clarity and grace the course of American thinking about this transMississippi region, and what is most striking is the evidence of the sudden realization that there were no limits to what could be done to America: that the advancing, driven people need not put up with any permanent barriers to their civilization or remain forever uneasy about the specter of the trackless West with its wild people. All of this too could be claimed for civilization. Within a very few years of the appearance on the charts of the "Great American Desert," men were planning the penetration of it by railroads.

Sometimes the rumors of western wealth seemed substantiated, as happened with the California gold strike at the end of the 1840s. These rumors quickened to fantastic life the old golden dream of the New World. As they ebbed, they left the West littered with haunted, stubble-cheeked prospectors, "eternals" seeking out lost lodes, rumors of Moctezuma's treasure, fabulous veins overlooked in earlier rushes, or caches of stolen jewels taken from explorers and settlers by marauding Indians. Pathetic scavengers, these, moping through a gigantic, glittering landscape and seeing nothing of it except the next horizon.

To begin with the violence was turned inward, and in this Paul showed the way; later he would be invoked for the outer-directed violence of the Inquisition. Fanatic persecutor of Christians, struck down on the road to Damascus, he turned then to persecuting himself. Acts ends something in the New Testament, and Romans begins something else. For even though the figure of Paul is increasingly important in the latter passages of Acts, yet when Paul speaks in his own voice for the first time we hear the anguish of a being who has learned to despise part of himself; who would teach others to equate conversion with a kind of ongoing self-slaughter. Here begins in New Testament scripture the fatal divorce between body and soul, between nature and religion, that has come to seem the very essence of the faith (Romans 6:6, 12-13, 19; 7:18-25; 8:12-13).

In passages such as these the great advocate effectively reinterprets the message of the Messiah. All that persecutory violence now turned inward, Paul preaches to the fledgling churches and to those who would later read his words and be guided by them -Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian, Clement, Porphyry, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine-of the prison house of the body, of the fatal, earthy attractiveness of women, and of the high, solitary virtues of continence and mortification.

And since Paul is next in importance in the New Testament only to Jesus himself, it seems not happenstance that an early and crucial manifestation of violence-as-regeneration took an internalized form in the mortified lives and legends of the Desert Fathers. This eremetical movement, which began in the third century with Anthony, is a kind of prism through which we can see how Paul and his followers raised to higher powers those antinature tendencies already noted in ancient Judaism and reinforced by the mystery cults of the later years of the Roman empire.

>>13778894
During this century of the final clearing of America there were certain individuals and even a few groups who regarded the spectacle with sadness and even disgust. Were it not for these solitary lights it would be more difficult for us to comprehend what had been done and why, for in that gap between what they stood for and what the majority was practicing, the issues and motives stand out in relief. I think here of Ralph Waldo Emerson, of John Wesley Powell, and of John Muir who quite literally jerked himself out of the stale bed of his father's Presbyterianism to become a kind of mystic and an effective voice of conservation. I think mostly of Thoreau whose steps always tended westward and who took Emerson to heart, even took him further afield and deeper into nature than the master himself had ever wished to go.

It is probably significant that Emerson gained his audience in 1837, the year of the Panic. For several years he had been asking irritating questions about the nature of Christian conduct and ritual and about Americans' existence in their lands. To him his contemporaries seemed peculiarly incurious about these lands, dead to the natural life they still harbored. Their condition of alienation jarred with the current cockcrowing nationalism. When he asked why Americans should not seek an "original" relationship with the universe, the query had a more troublesome depth to it than most (perhaps Emerson included) could have acknowledged. This was because from his Concord study, musing on the news of the day, the din of limitless growth and exploitation, Emerson sensed that the story of the New World was going to be the story of the Old World again; that there would be no fresh beginning here but only a brutal monument to meretriciousness and emptiness of spirit.

It was the younger man, Thoreau, who best intuited the depth and urgency of Emerson's question. It eventually sent him to Walden Pond and to meditating there on the savage life: whether the departed aborigines whose scattered relics were all around him in the woods might not have once enjoyed that original relationship of which Emerson had spoken and which now seemed so unavailable to nineteenth-century whites. In his hut on the edge of the jewel-like pond, surrounded by the gentle wooded bowl of its hills, he thought about the meanings of savagery, even of spending a day as the animals might. And throughout the book of his experiences there one finds evidence of his intuitive drive to dig, to burrow, to go earthward toward that original relationship. He tells us of digging his cellar where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through the roots of sumach and blackberry "and the lowest stain of vegetation. . . ."

>>13766621
To those who followed Columbus and Cortes the New World truly seemed incredible, not only because of what civilization had made of the Old World but because of the natural endowments of the one they now began to enter. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean, and the coasting whites with their nostrils full of salt and the sour odors of confinement recorded their delight with the odor of forests and verges in bloom. Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. Raleigh's colonists scented what they thought a garden, though they would soon enough make it something else. The men of Henry Hudson's Half Moon, already disposed to hate and fear the natives, were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers.

Wherever they came inland they found that these announcements had been in no way false: the land, wilderness though it was, was a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Even if some of the most glowing descriptions of the New World were in fact realestate advertisements, given then as now to calculated falsehood, still the theme of beauty in abundance is so pervasive that it transcends any scheme, insisting its truth upon the reluctant and hesitant pens of the white observers. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory, around the margins of which one feels the spectacular presence of America.

Waterfowl took flight under their advances with thunderous wings, and deer in unconcerned droves browsed lush meadowlands. Squirrels and huge turkeys barked and gobbled in the endless forests that stretched all the way from the coast to the huge river that Soto had crossed and recrossed and been buried in. Elsewhere ground fruits lavished themselves on the land: scarlet blankets of strawberries painted the bellies of the horses and the legs of the horsemen who rode through them, and swollen clusters of grapes bowered the streams and rivers.

When the whites penetrated the western watercourses they found the life there as abundant as it had been along the eastern seaboard where sturgeon, giant lobsters, and shad were so plentiful that settlers grew nauseated on them. Out west, Pierre Radisson in the middle of the seventeenth century found otters so numerous in the streams that they hindered the progress of the little expedition's canoes. Gigantic catfish thumped ominously against the frail crafts of Jesuit fathers and voyageurs, while overhead flocks of passenger pigeons traveled the skies in such numbers that for hours at a time the sunlight would be obscured.

>>13778212
he writs more as a sociologist which is not at all a like a literary artist. if you want to read a "Unabomber" literary artist you should definitely, DEFIANTLY read this book

https://b-ok.org

this is one of the best books ever written. if you want to understand whats going on with the climate you need to read this

if Ted kaczynski and Nietzsche met at a bar, fucked, and had an offspring the offspring would have written this book.