American Creativity
America the grand. We the glorious UnderGod, in US we trust, the dollar, the $. Upstarts ever!
“You cannot simply buy cultural values; you must develop them for centuries as us Germans have: who created England, who created France. Save your contemptible Hollywood Films, stuff your high sky-scrapers. What worth is your intellectual freedom without an opera to sing it? Your sense of superiority is the most annoying in the world. How can you claim to be a people with no clear sense of life? Your Mrs. Roosevelt whores herself as a fashion model, as a self-gossip in her article, ‘My Day.’ Your technological innovations make the modern world, but we know that the meaning of life is beyond the toaster, wider than a refrigerator door, that your technological precociousness is nothing compared to centuries of history and tradition, that you cannot buy your soul, but must slowly build your nation through generations of cultural labor. Only then will you be “God’s Country”: until then you are arrogant pests” – Goebbels.
The naissance of America, the joy of our 19th century Emerson and his prodigies—glow glow glow glow with warmth. Emerson is the oversoul, the overman: he is every drop of moisture in and above our soul—and his optimism is the blue of our sky. Emily is the waif psychopomp, who warms the hand of our afterself upon the quiet of death, and leads us to the gate of the inner. Edison is another Vulcan, forger of the greatest wonders of the world—who inherits the bolts of Zeus. Whitman is every leaf of grass that grows on this continent, his flesh the widest flesh of the world because he became the very dirt of America. Twain, Beirce, and Mencken were the laughing winds that blow over the land with cheerful jeers.
Emerson the oversoul, and his optimism the wide blue sky, and his torrential brats are Hawthorne who overrides guilt, and Melville who overrides duty. Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Wright, Ives, James and James, each studied under Emerson, and express different pours of rain. Melville and Hawthorne were the first explorers of the shadow of those white flight of clouds. Emerson, with his subtle categories, tricky names, and elusive structures, wrought the spirit deep in our veins, so that no man knew yet how, but the structure of his writing like subtle fate bind the Fenrir wolf of necessity.
Wright is each right angle, in the complixigons of the geometrical lattice. He is as organic as the spider’s spin, as unearthly as a meteor shower.
Seek your blood, this every great writer knows, to seek the art his blood ran through for thousands of years, and thus the Saxon Teutonic brilliance of our designers, Jefferson, Wright, Whitman – Dutch and Germanic – for the cup of the world is the blood of our DNA, and the soul is the salt sea of blood, cup is heart and vagina, and by this we drink our augeries. America is all bloods, none excluded. Our blood will yet mingle by the philosophy bolts which strike out river bed. The diabolic lightening of Zeus, like two horns a bull, which throw apart and sets the beds of rivers, Zeus the Deus, the great God of two, where Z is 2, we have fully taken and made our own through greater Gods Franklin, Tesla, and Edison, the binders of the bolts, till finally we cast our electronic web over the world, a finer tapestry than Athenarachne dared, with the fallen God tamed, who “fell like lightening” and now swallows the world in electricity, SIS#em, Prometheus, Shivat, Satan, the Beast, the logic of information. For she is Minerva’s owl, the mechanical wisdom, familiar for Theseus, the image of Hermes.
Words are the fingers of consciousness, and now I have touched fingers to yours, pledge to pledge, for we know our literary criticim lives by this dictum: Everything is Readable, Everything Relatable. We say by cash and dollar: E Pluribus Unum, from the one, many, all bloods, all people, melt together like the witches brew, the great adamentium amalgum, the perfect state, with a pyramid to heaven, workers all of us, the greatest minds have day jobs – Emerson as pastor, Hawthorne customs agent, Melville whaler, Thoreau surveyor, Ives insurance manager, Franklin and Whitman printing pressmen, all of us ever working, hammering out the pyramid, or like Thor, hammering down the troll in the East to his wooden cross, a man who forsook his true calling and was nailed, in time, back to it, for the Animus of beauty is death – seek your blood! – death wrestling to gain your wisdom, and as de Tocqueville interpreted the infant, in the ancient tradition that saw in every slight gesture of the infant what would become plotline destiny, by and by, we do not judge by relativity to the norm, but by innate potentiality, we believe only our inner anima-muse, women their inner animus-genius, so that stepping beyond the “small ship” and “large ship,” we insist “All American’s go to heaven” nor does a single one of us escape that first step, even the inventor of Blues who sold his soul at the cross roads, but in fact purchased Satan’s soul, rise of the Elite, American Illuminati, so that like Hawthorne’s novels, layer by layer, we become the complete picture and the completing picture – this is our manifest destiny.
The creative process of Emerson, Whitman, Ives, Edison, and myself are the same:
Take all of experience, as in a lifelong journal of Emerson’s, or in every stray thought to glance over Whitman’s poetical brow, tucked and categorized in poem-labelled envelopes, so each poem over years was distilled and melt pure, or in every musical motif to ponder Ives mind, and gather them together, ordinate and subordinate, layer, catalogue and categorize, endlessly rework, edit, perfect – Ives perfected his works and did not publish, worked his day job in order to keep his passion free from concerns over “what will sell?” – and I myself with this Perfect Idius have already written out a decade, and tuck in the right niche each idea – if by random whim one occurs to me! – to its right and proper place, to redefine and amplify everything that went before, to grow by and by a Summa as my secret garden—how American! I am Edison with his 10,000 notebooks, Emerson with his 100,000 journal days, Whitman with the ever freshly mowed plot of grass—a poem book written and rewritten for over three decades, Ives with this thousdand times overworked layers of music, William James, wrestling doubt with thousands of pages of assuage, constantly summarizing the views of others and plying them against his own, like the Republic – from the many, one – ever redefining, every growing more and more pure, perfected, ordered, structured, with the occasional mutant spore like Eliot, who complains that he can “barely contain his chaos” – in truth he couldn’t contain it, he barely shared in the infinite intuition of the yankee omniscience, write a few chaotic and beautiful shuffles of ideas, and died into abysmal critic, Royalist, Catholist, and god hope us what else! – and now our computers are the nerves of the world! Ponder with me what our Allism will shine in the next 10,000 years, in the next 100,000…
As every man and woman has a genius and muse, and the man identifies with his genius and listens to his muse, and a woman identifies with her muse and listens to her genius – in Greek the genius is called “demon,” as in Socrates daemon, and Zeus had a Muse named Metis, his first wife whom he swallowed into his gut hunches – these are the archetypical pictures of male and female creativity. Who among you can laugh and and climb at the same time? Whoever flies the highest mountain laughs himself glowing at the tragic plays and tragic taking-the-world-seriously! Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent! – thus Sophia loves us, she is a woman and loves us warriors! Who is our Sophia? Who is our Wotan?
Till we know for sure, we have always the Magna Mater! We love her face for us, who presents Ama, and we the “Ama – Reich,” America, rule of the strugglers, the reign of the creatives.
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