Sunday, February 27, 2022
5:40 a.m. Shall we proceed? Setting switches. Not sure where we go, but I assume you know.
We make up the music by dancing it, as do you in 3D, less obviously. We usually have more of a vector than an outline. In this case, it is to show America as an example of a soul at a different level of being than the human. It is integrally connected to humans, but has a life of its own when considered at a different level.
So, America to the point we have gotten to – the revolutionary era – concerns white, black, and red races, not yet yellow and brown. It makes a difference what you see, depending upon whether you follow the fortunes of this or that race, even in how the stage of history is set.
I know what you mean, but you haven’t yet said it clearly. You mean, if we follow America’s career from the point of view of white America, it is an expansion from the Atlantic seaboard. Red America might see it as the entire expanse, its complexion changing as white expanded and red diminished and contracted. Black America might see it as expansion from the East mostly to the Southern part initially. Brown America might see it as proceeding from Mexico northward and then being met by the surge of population from the East, after generations of conflict with the red. And yellow America might see it as expansion from the West Eastward, more o penetration of an existing mix than the introduction of a new society into a land previously sparsely settled.
Yes, this is broadly what we mean, only of course remembering that America as an emerging soul was shaped long before Columbus, long before the Indians, by forgotten contacts from other lands. The Indians themselves as they were in the 1600s were already the result of unremembered contacts among forgotten civilizations, and so contained within their racial mix memories of those races.
Just as the English, for example, were a “pure” race without any taint of admixture, if you didn’t count the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Romans, etc. Said smiling, but in seriousness. Anybody who thinks about it for five minutes knows that a “pure” race is mostly an impossible abstraction dependent upon a good deal of forgetting and pretending.
Yes, of course. But that doesn’t mean that the idea – an ideal, in a way – doesn’t motivate people over the ages. It may lead to racism, or to racial (or ethnic) pride, or to a conflation of certain characteristics of a society with one’s presumed genetic heritage. If you can get above the level of seeing things as good or bad, you can get a more interesting perspective on how such ideas shaped people and in turn were reshaped by them.
Carl Jung said condemnation isolates and only understanding builds bridges.
That’s one valid interpretation, yes, if not necessarily the one he most intended.
We mention this interdependence of race and angle of approach lest you should think we implicitly identify with it. Facts are facts, but to explore them one needs to choose an approach. It seems easiest to follow the lines most people follow, in retracing America’s development as remembered. The unremembered contacts with Romans, Phoenicians, Vikings, Chinese, Japanese, etc., must remain unspecified. Such chronicles are for others with different special interests.
I remember Barry Fell’s America, B.C., for instance, written in the middle of the 20th century. The scholarship is there, but, as you say, it is a different argument. I used to think we’d see that history recovered, however sketchily, in my lifetime. Those, let alone Atlantis, which mainstream scholars still refuse to consider seriously.
As you sometimes say, you don’t have a dog in that fight. This does suggest a topic for you to remember, for another time: the influence of ideas on personal reality, and the influence of experiences upon the openness or otherwise to certain kinds of ideas. But – for another time, not for now.
I will try to remember.
Now, returning to America as it existed at the time of the Revolution. The first thing to remember is that the situation as various elements conceived it was not the same as the situation seen whole, or seen in retrospect, or seen by any different element. America’s soul – its mind and emotions, in effect – was not and is not the same as any of its constituent elements thought it to be.
White America thought of America as the settled part that had just renounced its allegiance to the king. It couldn’t yet think of the vast expanse westward as already part of America. How could it? It didn’t even know, before Lewis and Clark, what connected the land east of the Mississippi – really, almost one could say east of the Appalachians – to the western seaboard that whalers and a few exploring ships had touched. For white America at 1800, say, America was the seaboard inward to the Mississippi.
And black America, that was not even allowed literacy, let alone geography or history? What conception of America could it have, by and large, beyond the constricted world of individuals’ personal horizons? Black Americans were Americans, but they weren’t yet Americans in their own minds. This is more complicated than may appear, but we leave the complications for the moment, save to recognize in passing that black individuals and families, like any other, formed individual attachments to white and red individuals.
Red America, in so far as it thought in such abstract terms, thought of what you now call mainland America as mostly red, under pressure by the ever-increasing population of white and, in the southern part, black newcomers. Generation oy generation, red America experienced its life as a frontier, on the other side of which there was no place for the life Indians had led for so long.
Brown America in 1800 was little aware of white or black America, still geographically separated by the ancient red rivals. Not until the 1830s would white America begin to impinge upon brown in any way more intrusive than the trading wagons that made their way to Santa Fe, and the sailing vessels that touched on the Pacific coast.
And for yellow America, well, to all extents and purposes, it did not yet exist, except as part of the racial composition of red America, at the time unrecognized.
Now, note, this sketch hasn’t done anything revolutionary in interpreting the situation in 1800 except – and it is a big “except” – calling it all to mind at the same time.
Yes, I saw that as we were writing it. White America often pretends that black or red or yellow or brown America doesn’t exist, or doesn’t count, or is somehow not authentically part of America.
And you will find this in any country and any culture you explore. It is a human tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them”; the main difference among societies is where the dividing line is drawn. Nor is the dividing-line uniquely drawn across racial composition. It may play out in terms of class, or family (or clan), or religion, or manner of living. Combine “us v. them” with the fruit of The Tree of Seeing Things as Good and Bad, and you have a problem.
A productive problem, presumably.
You mean, “It isn’t all bad”?
I’m smiling too, but yes, I suppose I do.
It is an advance when you realize that nothing that exists is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
That quotation of Shakespeare’s has always bothered me. It seems both true and untrue.
Then perhaps that makes it valuable. By making you ponder, it serves a purpose, does it not? There is no need to judge sparks; it is enough to be kindled by them.
So there’s another hour gone. Today’s theme?
“America’s races,” perhaps, or “America’s past as seen in different viewpoints.”
Maybe, “Different races, different Americas”?
Your choice.
And next time? You have reminded us that our history has to look different to America’s soul than to any of the races that comprise it. Class, next, or what?
TBA and keep your shirt on. We have a long way to go. Whether we actually do it or not depends, of course, but – a long way to go.
Our thanks as always.