Saturday, February 26, 2022
1:15 a.m. Okay, continuing from yesterday, which began to look at America’s karma as an example of how souls at a level other than the human live and change. Setting switches. Go.
When we began our exposition yesterday, we were beginning to say that America as an abstract mind (call it) remembers things unknown to human histories, and is affected by them. We diverted at that point, to discuss the strata that co-exist, then we began again to describe America as it is, rather than only America as humans know her.
So, thousands of years of a human culture unknown to European history. We would call this Indian “civilization,” except that the very word “civil-ized” – “city-oriented” – misleads. It was a culture, parts of which were city oriented, as archaeologists are still discovering – and parts non-city-oriented. How shall we describe a nomadic culture? If there are words for it, you don’t know them. We will have to settle for an explanatory note: In the case of the New World, “civilization” does not necessarily center on cities. Nomadic culture does not necessarily imply a lack of culture, much less of applied intelligence.
In this, when we say “America,” we will mean more or less the area occupied today by mainland United States. (It differs in Canada and Mexico mostly because climatic conditions are so different.) It would be tedious to keep qualifying our use of the word America, so verb sap, and remember.
The pre-Columbian days featured advanced civilizations, mostly forgotten, and nomadic societies that are more well remembered, and settled but not citified cultures (the Five Nations, for instance) that were somewhere between city and nomad. The living of these lives, over generations, was affected by the land and also left its imprint on the land. The Europeans’ America that later emerged was never going to be as European as those people expected it to be, because of just this unconsidered element.
So in the 1500s came contact between the two continents, and this time the contact brought pestilence, and repeated epidemics, one after another after another, until by the early 1600s, the land was largely depopulated. The Europeans thought they came to a land that had always been mostly empty, not realizing that over the previous century the Indian population had been reduced by perhaps 90%. That is, for every thousand in 1500, perhaps a hundred were counted in 1600. Naturally a century of epidemics took a devastating toll on the social life as well as individual families. Europe had been scarred by the Black Death a little earlier, but that had killed only one in four, and had lasted a much shorter time. To lose nine in ten, over the span of a century, meant that three or four generations had lived in the shadow of doom, and this was before the first English settlements.
All those dead citizens, all those forgotten societies, remained, and remain today, as a part of America’s soul. Obviously, if every moment is alive, so is everyone of that moment.
What this means is that in effect the new settlers, though they had their eyes on the trans-Atlantic societies they had left, began to be invisibly influenced by “the land.” As each new generation was born, the link with America’s soul was stronger, and the links with “the old country” correspondingly weaker. And, of course – it is important not to lose sight of this – the lives of the red and white and black inhabitants affected America’s soul in time. They were a part of it; it was a part of them. And this is entirely apart from the question of what each of them may have thought they were doing. The red men (and women, of course, but let’s keep the phrasing simpler, less cumbersome and qualified) may have regarded their lives as Paradise Lost. The black men may have groaned in bondage and yearned for a return to their previous life across the ocean, or the life of their masters. The white men may have hoped to get rich, or may have at least hoped not to get poorer, and may have hoped that their sojourn in America was only a temporary expedient on the way to returning home.
It doesn’t matter, in a way, what people thought they were doing, nor what they experienced while thinking about other things. In a way, what matters is what they did, regardless of what they might have wished to do.
Yet in a way, what they thought they were doing, what they wished to be doing, does matter, and in fact matters more than their actual deeds. You can see it either way, and either way is somewhat right, somewhat incorrect.
In either case, the life they consciously or unconsciously led was being affected by the soul of the American land that was there before them and would be there after them. And, in either case, their own internal and external experience was being written on America’s soul. Just as in every other era, past, present, or future, it was an interaction, largely invisible and all the more powerful for that.
So matters proceeded for more than a century and a half – six or seven generations, say – at which time the colonies became masters of their own fate, and revolutionized their society to a slight (and overstated) degree, and created a new federation influenced, as we mentioned, by Indian examples rather than European monarchical ones. And here is an example of the soul of America influencing human action, you see.
Interesting thought. You are saying our thought was influenced as much by America’s soul as by its physical conditions. We gravitated toward an idea of individual autonomy not only because it was economically feasible in a sparsely populated land, but because – unknown to us – the land itself, the invisible categories of thought encouraged by America’s soul – led us that way.
Most Indians were not drawn to a civilization largely shaped in Europe, and many young whites were powerfully attracted to Indian life.
Sam Houston comes to mind, immediately. * And Daniel Boone comes to mind as someone whose conscious preference was the European mindset, but whose lived-out preferences were closer to Indian. I could dredge up plenty of examples, I’ll bet, even Jefferson “sleeping rough” on the slopes of Monticello as a young man, but time is on the wing as ever.
Note that whites, blacks, reds, were all affected by, and affected, the corporate soul. American whites became quite distinct from their former compatriots in “the old country,” even when they themselves were not the product of many countries, mixed over the years. American blacks were not the same as the tribes and nations they had come rom, and would not have been mistaken for them. And the red man and woman gradually found their culture more and more firmly tied in to the newer one. They bought guns; they trapped bever for the European market; they often worked for white employers either off and on, or as a regular thing. Even the horses that were an intrinsic part of their culture by the 1600s came originally from horses that had escaped the Spanish. No horses before Columbus.
Now, so far, note, no politics, no war, no questions of the morality or practicality of relations among the races or among the classes. So far, we are still delineating America as America itself (rather than its human inhabitants) might have described it.
I understand that it might take a while to present a new point of view, especially using your method of carefully setting out context.
Yes. The idea is to help you see how another level of soul may develop and function. We have to confine ourselves to souls with a human reference, of course, or what would there be to say?
Theme, today?
“Invisible influences,” perhaps.
Okay. Our thanks as always.
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* See, for instance, “Native American Relations in Texas,” https://www.tsl.texas.gov/exhibits/indian/early/page2.html, which begins with Huston’s years living among the Cherokees as an adopted son.