Mark Twain
Presented on: Thursday, June 6, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic America Our Critical Heritage:
James Fenimore Cooper, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Mark Twain
Presentation 10 of 13
Mark Twain
The Mississippi River Hero and His Spiritual Path into the New World
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, June 6, 1985
Transcript:
The date is June 6th, 1985. This is a 10th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Our Critical Heritage. Tonight's lecture is on Mark Twain, Mississippi River Hero and his Spiritual Path into the New World.
I should make, should make this announcement. The, The Gnostics Society of course, is run by my friend Dr. Heller. And he's going to be out of town in July. And so, he's doing a series on alchemy and he wanted me to come in. And so, I'm going to give two lectures there on alchemy. And those of you who have been languishing with our American culture, yearning for these esoteric fields, can tune in on July 12th and July 19th at The Gnostics Society.
And the July 12th lecture will be on Roger Bacon and the alchemical revival. It's a revival because the West had alchemy and passed it onto the Arabs. And the West forgot about it. And the Arabs passed it on to the West. That this all happened about 50 years before Roger came along. And he's the one who reorganized alchemy. Reshaped it. Made it expressible in mathematical terms. Anyway, that will be on the 12th of July.
And the 19th of July will be on the second mutation in the alchemical tradition, the one that happened at the close of the high Renaissance with the Ficino and Trismosin and Trithemius and Agrippa and Paracelsus.
And so, these two lectures will be on the two trans mutations in alchemy. And then Dr. Heller will be back to give the final lecture on Paracelsus. I've lectured on all of these individuals. And if you're interested in having detailed precis, we have I think a whole series and alchemy that we did about two years ago or three years ago.
Also, for those who are dying for the more esoteric fields of Alexandria, the Tuesday night lectures at 2029 Hyperion are all on the ancient Alexandrian tradition. And we have reached the second half of the 1st century B.C. And from now on those lectures on Tuesday night should be of great interest to just about everyone. The themes that we're developing there are the way in which the Jewish ethical form was split into three parts, about 200 B.C. And the third part, the Essences developed a very curious kind of timeline being computation. And began to think of human beings much in the same way that the Tibetan Vajrayana thinks of them, as coming in wave forms over many lifetimes. And this of course produced quite a Renaissance in the old magical beliefs, the old Solomonic magical beliefs. And Alexander became a hotbed of transformation. So those are the Tuesday night lectures and they start at eight.
For those who are somewhat more esoterically minded, the Saturday classes are proceeding as they have for the last year and a half. And we're now discussing the ways in which mythologies rise from the feeling toned subconscious levels and assume a displacement of the expressive form stage of human consciousness. And lead to the development of politics instead of aesthetics. And lead to the development of a skew and the religious vision of man. If any of that appeals to you, why Saturdays are probably for you.
Tonight, we continue with the American tradition, our own tradition. And I have mentioned many times how this tradition is not taught anymore. That if you go to the universities you are given textbooks which slur over all of the material and give you a pablum. Or you are given whole courses on little wedges and told that you must understand everything by Friday so that you can pass an exam. And this makes it impossible to understand the American tradition.
Because of its peculiar nature. Because of its structure. The American heritage cannot be understood like the French heritage or the German heritage. Or even the Italian heritage. It's a peculiar multidimensional experiment and has been from the beginning left open ended. In fact, if there is any characteristic of the American experience, it is that the future is yet to be lived. And this openness was reflected, as we have seen, in the personalities of the founders. In particular we laid great stress on the ability of Benjamin Franklin to turn this openness of personality to the account that the individual is perfectible if he will only pursue in a daily fashion, a code for himself. And this code of self-improvement should be encouraged to take on community aspects. And that the community groups should keep the pressure up to allow for this openness, this experimentalness, to go on up through the structures until finally the unity of the whole is experienced in this way.
What is difficult in this is that the egotistical heritage of empire, and nationalisms are a branch of empire, do not hold with this type of individual. With this type of experience, the open personality is considered naive or considered an anomaly or boring or ridiculous, by those who are used to an empire tradition. And so, we saw the tremendous problems that Jefferson faced in 1800. And with Jefferson's first presidency, he undertook to restructure the United States. And that the so-called revolution of 1800 was much more profound than the revolution of 1776 or 1789. That in fact, in 1800 the capacities for individual transformation were projected not so much in a legal sense on doctrine, but we're actually projected upon the land. The geography itself became the workshop. And rather than making the laws of the land the basic skeleton of American political experience, it was the development of the unknown potential of the land that became the skeleton around which the American experience developed itself.
In this Jefferson was followed by Madison and Monroe each in their term. And so, six presidencies, six administrations, flowed in an unbroken continuity and developed the American character in the first quarter of the 19th century to experience the freedom of movement into the wilderness as a return to Eden, a return to the promised land. And that whatever dreams or speculations individuals might have for themselves or their families or their groups, this was all to be curt, uh, condoned. There were no laws and regulations. Aside from one that was a nagging question that increasingly was a drag upon the American experience. And that issue was slavery.
With Mark Twain we will see the experience of black and white in a new realm. Because the experience of slavery had come to a peak when the United States moved beyond the Mississippi River. It was the trans Mississippi States that were coming into the union that were the precipitant for the entire civil war experience. The state that was poignantly at stake was the state of Missouri. And The Missouri Compromise was the last chance in American history to live out the Jeffersonian dream. The Missouri Compromise was not effective. And of course, the 1850s saw an inevitable avalanche towards civil war on this basic issue.
Had it not been for the tremendous cosmic personality of Abraham Lincoln, the country would have been fragmented and shattered even till this day. It was the extraordinary mystical capacity of Lincoln, to not only grow continuously but to project out to the millions, this sense that the American experience, the American dream if you like, was still viable. That there was still some guiding majesty in the projected star of the union. The unity of the whole was some mystical combine that allowed for transformation to take place. And that fragmented, polarized, none of these energies would work. And of course, as we have seen, Lincoln was not only perspicacious for his time, but was prophetic for our own time as well. One of the great figures in world history.
Mark Twain was born in 1835 in Missouri right in the middle of this entire mess. And we think of him as the naive country boy. And we must understand that he was a country boy on the cutting edge of the whole American experience. If you travel today and you go to Saint Louis Missouri today, the most outstanding structure in that whole metropolitan area is the Jefferson arch. The center of Missouri where the main trail went, and the main highways went from Saint Louis to Kansas city is Jefferson City.
So that the vision of the United States came up again, was rehashed again, in the state of Missouri in the 1830s and the 1840s. Just the period when Mark Twain was a boy. After the civil war was over this poignant geographical area became a focus for the transformations that were yet to happen in the American character. And the Mark Twain being one of the great thinkers of the 19th century, I know we're not used to that, but you will see in this lecture series, by the end of it, that a Twain was a very great thinker, very profound man.
It was after the civil war that he began to look back upon his childhood, upon the Missouri experience, about being a country boy on the Mississippi river and the significance of it. The symbolic vision of it grew in Twain. Now, Twain was a rather mystical individual. The word that he invented was mental telegraphy. About the same time that F.W.H Meyers in England invented the word telepathy. And Twain was convinced that mental telegraphy worked, it operated. He once wrote a little, brief skit called Clairvoyant. And he said in Clairvoyant that there is definitely a difference between the clairvoyant who can envision in their mind the mental picture of something and from that person who is able to send a mental telegraph. That there is no visualization but that the events happen. And that this was a, a noticeable distinction for Twain. In one there's a vision. Yes, you see what the other person sees. Or you see what is there clairvoyantly to be seen. But on the other hand, in mental telepathy or mental telegraphy, there is nothing recorded immediately. It's just that the events turn out coincidentally again and again, and again.
Twain, in fact, in the 1870s when he was in his thirties, began experimenting time and time again with this. And he wrote, I have never seen any mesmeric or clairvoyant performances or spiritual manifestations, which were in the least degree convincing. But I'm forced to believe that one human mind still inhabiting the flesh can communicate with another, over any sort of distance. And Twain was to improve upon this because as he experimented with this, he became convinced that it was possible not only to communicate over distance, but over time. And that the human mind therefore was theoretically an infinite labyrinth to be explored. That in fact, our current lifetime was but some integrating core, rather like the Mississippi River, being fed from all times in all places. So that each individual was in themselves, a conduit of universal experience. This was Twain's way a hundred years ago of saying that archetypical collective behavior unites us. That we are more similar to each other than we would suspect.
And that in fact, proved to be a boon to Twain's looking upon the American experience in terms of its geography, because he could see a parallel between the human personality and the geography of the United States. Not the kind of simplistic parallel that one would see, for instance, when we look at the Nile Delta. And we see that the Nile Delta is about the same shape as the human hand opened up, like this. And that that degree is about 36 degrees. And we could discover that the Los Angeles basin is the same open hand. The same degree of structure as the Nile Delta. And we could very easily see affinities between ancient Egypt and contemporaneous Los Angeles. Not in that kind of a simplistic way but rather in the accumulation of human experience that in human character, if it were delineated exactly, correctly, without any embellishment as to conscious purpose the, as we would call it today, subconscious elements would come more and more to the fore. And we would be able to experience the most ordinary everyday things in a cosmic sense.
And Twain began to play with this issue in terms of himself. He thought if this is so, if this is possible, it must be possible for me. And therefore, if I go back to my own childhood, back to a time when I was open. Before I had the kinds of plans that adults have. Before I have the kinds of experiences that tend to Jade one. I must have been in contact with a more universal self at that time. Therefore, I need a technique of remembrance. I needed a technique to get back to my childhood. And to be there as the child that I was. And so, he developed all writing technique, which is extraordinarily effective. He would take one poignant memory. This was a technique in fact, later on to be developed by Andre Breton or Marcel Proofs, both of them work with this. You take one sensual memory, a smell, a sight, a sound, and you let that occur to you over and over again. Over a period of several or several weeks. And whatever comes associatively to your mind, you jot that down. You make notes on that. And after a while, this poignant veracity of a sight, a smell, a sound will act as a key. And this whole conduit of associative memory will open up. And not come to you so much in the present, but that you will be able to go back through it to that location, to that time. And because in our childhood, we have the capacity to join ourselves to a more universal sense of life, of humanity, it gives us a poignant case whereby we can experience the universal.
Now for Twain this became doubly important because the American experience, which had been torn by the civil war. We have still not recovered from the civil war. The country needed healing. And this was a way of going back to a time where the geography of the United States had focused upon Missouri. Had focused upon the Mississippi River. Had focused upon the tremendous capacity of the Mississippi to allow for transportation and colonization of the vast inner third of the country. Twain will develop this technique and we will see that while he is working on his Mississippi River childhood and become successful at it, that he increasingly raises his sights and realizes if I can do this for my Mississippi childhood, can I not do this for my far Western manhood in California and Nevada?
And later on, he will take himself around the world on trips trying to reacquaint himself with the geography of the whole planet. He will go to the Holy land. He will go to England. He will go to Italy and so forth. And constantly what Twain will be doing, as we will see, is opening himself up to the experience of all mankind. In fact, one of his great books, great travel books is called Following The Equator, which is a very symbolic way to say, spanning the world at its quintessential girth. Another title taken from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is The Innocence Abroad. And we'll see all of this developing in Twain.
So, it was with great insight that Twain looked back to his childhood and began writing the books, which are become classic, Life on the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. Of the three, perhaps Life on the Mississippi is the most easy to approach. Now, in fact, in chapter four in Life on the Mississippi Twain takes us back. And now he is one of the world's great artists because he is writing this in a form that allows us to enter with him and go back with him. And the reader goes back with him, not only in a time machine, but in this psychic capacity of going back to review something of ourselves, which was there. He writes, When I was a boy there was about one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village, on the West bank of the Mississippi River, the West bank.
That was to be a Steamboat man. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns. The first Negro minstrel show that came to our section, left us all suffering to try that kind of life. Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and we were good, God would permit us to be pirates. Those ambitions faded each in its turn, but the ambition to be a Steamboat man always remain.
And then he remembers the character of a friend of his. And he says,
I can still see him now. He came back and he seemed to be an experienced man of the world. He'd been to Saint Louis. He began talking about walking down fourth street and seeing so-and-so. He said we were all jealous. And then we discovered that he had money. He said, none of us ever had money. Kids didn't have money. And he had money to spend. And he had seen things. And he was just a few years older than us. And he said, we used to stare at him with envy and loathing.
So, he said, This was the, the thing that he wanted to do. And he said,
This creatures career could produce, but one result and it speedily followed boy, after boy managed to get on that river. The minister's son became an engineer. The doctors and postmaster sons became mud clerks. The wholesale liquor dealer son became a barkeeper on a boat. Four sons of the chief and two sides of the country Judge became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot even in those days of trivial wages had a princely salary from 150 to $250 a month. And no board to pay. Two months of his wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year. Now, some of us were left just consulate. We could not get on the river. At least our parents would not let us. And so, by and by, I ran away. And I said, I would never come home again till I was a pilot and could come in glory.
The basic insight. Because Twain now sets up the prototype for the great man of the hour, the grand men of the age. He who can navigate this Mississippi river of experience. And it takes a lot of doing. One must know the river. And he will at the same time being, meaning that one was know the river of remembrance. One must be able to understand this whole pattern and flow. Because when it comes together it brings all the classic obstacles with it. The chances are there for a good and gain, but also the snags, the sandbars, the bends, the storms. And he points out again and again in Life on the Mississippi that the river itself changes all the time. It's never the same. It isn't the same this week that it was last week. And the trip that you took several months ago, the river has suddenly and subtly changed its course somewhat. Sandbars emerge, where they weren't there before. Rainstorms leave sags where they weren't there. So that the pilot is someone who always has to know about the nature of the river. He cannot memorize the river. That life is a very peculiar process. There is no map. There is only a sense of navigation. And it is the perspicacity of the pilot that allows him to navigate freely on this river, hence the glory. Hence the desire.
Put this pilot, this whole symbolic value of the pilot, the glory of the man of the hour into the personality of a young boy named Huckleberry Finn. Who doesn't have the training. Who has the nature though and the insight. And what kind of cargo would a pilot like Huckleberry Finn have? Nothing other than another human being, a black man, a slave named Jim that hes going to take to freedom. Because he can't stand the fact that his pal, his chum is owned by someone else. And that's what Huckleberry Finn is about. It is about the American adventurer, who is naive, who is childlike. But just because he is naive and childlike, he has a universal quality about him that allows him to accurately read the currents of life. That's right. He doesn't have the European experience. He can't speak French. But he has this innate sense that he belongs in reality. He belongs in life. He belongs on the river.
And in Huckleberry Finn we have in chapter 14, an interesting interlude between Jim and Huckleberry Finn. The two of them are talking. They've made their escape from Hannibal. They're on the river. They're on their raft. And they've been taking breaks from time to time. And now they're on the bank and they're taking a break. And they're talking about Kings. And Huckleberry Finn says, You know Kings are great. They're even better than pilots. I hear. Of course, we don't have any Kings. He said, but I've heard that Kings can do anything they want. And Jim says, well, I, I don't know about any Kings. The only King I know about is Solomon. Of course, he doesn't pronounce Solomon. Like we do. He pronounces it Sollermun.
So, their conversation finally gets around to the fact that Jim remembers a story about Sollermun. And he says,
You know, he can't be so smart after all. He said, I don't remember the story about threatening to cut that child in half. the on that two different women wanted. And he said, this is kind of a stupid thing. And Huckleberry Finn says, you can't say that about him. That was the King. That was Solomon. He was wise. He could do anything. Well, damn warn, what notion in the world? You just take and look at it a minute. Does the stump dah. Does one of the women and has, has you as another one. Sollermun in this year dollar bills to child. Both of you claims it. What does I do? Does I shine around mongst the neighbors and find out which onna you that bill do belong to and hand it over to the right one, all safe and sound. De way that anybody that had any gumption would. No. I'll take and whack the bill in two and give half to you and half, da other half the other woman. That's da way Solomon was gwun do with that child. Now, I want to ask you, what is the use to that half a bill. You can't buy nothing with it. And what's the use of half a child? I wouldn't give a dern for a million of um. But hang it. Jim you've cleaned missed the point. Blame it, you missed it a thousand month. Who, me? Go on don't talk me about no points. I recogn I knows sense when I sees it. And day is no sense in such doings as dat. Da dispute work about half a child. Da dispute was about a whole child. And de man dat think he can settle a spute about a whole child with half a child, don't know enough to come in out of da rain. Don't talk to me about Sollermun Huck, I knows him by the back. But I'll tell you, you don't get the point. Blamed it point. I recogn I knows what I knows. And mind you, da real point is further down. It's down, deeper. It lays in the way Sollermun was raised. You take a man that's got only one or two children. Is that man want to be wasteful of children? No, he ain't. He can't afford it. He know how to value them. But now you take a man, he got a million wives. He got 5 million children running round the house and it's different. He just assumed drop a child or two as a cat. There's plenty more. A child or two more or less wont no consequences to Sollermun dad fecha.
Jim
then the narrators says,
I never see such a nigger. If he got a notion in his head once there weren't no getting it out again. He was the most down on Solomon of any nigger I ever see. So, I went to talking about other Kings and let Solomon slide. I told him about Louis the 16th that got his head cut off in France, long time. And about his little boy, the dolphin.
Dauphin.
Dolphin that would have been a King. But they took him and shut him up in jail. And some say he died there. Poor Little chap. But some says he got out and got away and came to America. Dats good. But he got pretty lonesome. There ain't no Kings here, is their Huck? No. Then he can't get no situation. What are you gwun to do? Well, I don't know. Some of them gets on the police and some of them people learns how to talk French. Why Huck, don't the French people talk the same way we does? No. Jim, you don't understand a word they said. Not a single word. Well, now I'd be dang busted. How do they do dat? I don't know, but it's so. I got some of their jabber out of a book. Now spose the man was to come and say Parlez vous Francais. What would you think? I wouldn't think nothing. I take him and bust him over da head. As if he weren't wet, I won't allow no nigger to call me that. Shucks. It ain't calling you anything. It's only saying, do you know how to talk French? Well den why couldn't he say it? Well, he is a saying it. That's a Frenchman way of saying it. Well, it's blame ridiculous way and I don't want to hear no more about it. Daint no sense in it. Lookie hear Jim, does a cat talk the way that we do? No, a cat don't. What does a cow? No, a cow don't nother. Does a cat talk like a cow or a cow talk like a cat? No, they don't. It's natural and right for em to talk different from each other aint it. Course. And aint it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us. Why most surely is. Well then why ain't it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? You answer me that. Dat is a cat a man Huck? No. Well den there ain't no sense in the cat talking like a man. Is a cow a man? No, neither of them. Well den he, she got no business talk like either one or the other. Is a Frenchman a man? Yes. Well den don't blame me he don't talk like a man. You answer me that?
The poignancy and the pathos of universal human experience, of how absolutely simple and ordinary it is. And yet on the other side, how incomprehensible. How totally impossible it is. And there doesn't seem to be any middle ground. And this is the great beauty of Huckleberry Finn that Jim and Huckleberry are these parallel tracks that never seemed to really meet but are always companions. They return companions together. It's like an archetype together. Huck and Jim have always been on that raft. They've always been on that river. And this is what Mark Twain is saying. That he has gotten himself, in his mind, by an amplification of his mental telegraphy back there. And what he's doing as a writer is carrying us with him so that we can experience something there.
In Huckleberry Finn, around the middle of it. After the raft has been broke in two by a big steamer coming down the river and they've been forced to live with various families for a short while. Jim finally puts the raft back together and he and Huckleberry finally escape again and get back on the raft and out in the river. This is how Twain writes it.
Sometimes we'd have that whole river to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands across the water. And maybe a spark, which was a candle in a cabin window. And sometimes on the water you would see a spark or two or a raft. Or a scout, you know. And maybe you would hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of those crafts. It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars. And we used to lay on our backs and look up at them and discuss about whether they were made or only just happened. Jim, he allowed there was made, but I allowed that they happened. I just, it would have taken too long to make some many. Jim said the moon could have laid him. Well, that looked kind of reasonable. So, I didn't say nothing against it. Because I've seen a frog lay most as many. So of course, it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fall too and see them streak down. Jim allowed they got spalled and was just hoofed too out of the nest. Once or twice at the night we would see a Steamboat slipping along in the dark. And now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimneys. And they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty. Then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her powwows shut off and leave the river still again. And by and by her ways would get to us long time after she was gone and juggle the raft a bit. And after that, you wouldn't hear nothing. You couldn't tell how long, except maybe some frogs were singing somewhere.
That's great writing. Let's take a break.
The Mississippi River was a, to use a pun, was a watershed in the American experience. When the experience started and even at the origins when it was still being molded in the personal mind of Benjamin Franklin. You remember he's the first one in 1760s who, even before that the 1740s had published that little flag that had a snake cut into 13 different sections. And the motto below it was unite or die. And when the serpent was whole, the motto read don't tread on me. And that was the original flag or the American experience.
The serpent is a symbol of wisdom, not of evil. It is a Hermetic symbol of the unity. When the ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth, this is the unity. It is a unity also when the serpent is coiled, the way it was on the don't tread on me. Not so much coiled to strike but coil because it was moving dynamically as one being, as one vehicle.
And the Mississippi River was the farthest border that could be envisioned at that time. And the first person to envision a trans Mississippi America was Jefferson. And he was forced to this vision by Napoleon, as we saw. That the experience of Europe that Napoleon's tremendous power, even at our distance from him and with the scale of the 20th century, Napoleon is still visible. What did he say? He said, I have awakened all ambition. I have enlarged the bounds of human vision. All things are now possible for man because of me.
END OF SIDE ONE
Jefferson understood that in order to protect the Atlantic to Mississippi America that was emerging, was definitely in the cards as they say. That the West bank of the Mississippi had to be secured, at least the West bank of the river. And the main artery connecting the United States with the Mississippi experience was the Ohio river. And so, the Ohio river where it meets the Mississippi became a symbolic outpost of the American vision. It's a very peculiar landform. It's the last bit of the state of Illinois just before it turns into a Kentucky or turns in down into Missouri. And in fact, the little community that's there has a symbolic name, it's called a Cairo. Just like in Cairo, Egypt. But pronounced there in that a part of the U.S. as Cee-row. Cairo, Cairo, Illinois.
In fact, that area on the Ohio, between the Wabash and the Mississippi, that little stretch of about 70 miles of river, was the site of an ancient civilization. Some of the largest remaining Petroglyphic ruins in the Eastern part of the United States are in the caves along the Ohio there. From the Wabash where it comes into the Mississippi. And in fact, from where the Ohio comes into the Mississippi up to Saint Louis was the great urban center in this land mass several thousands of years ago. In fact, right directly across the Mississippi river from modern Saint Louis was the old metropolitan center of that most ancient of Indian civilizations. And was called and is called today Cahokia. And the great mounds and ceremonial structures at Cahokia rival those of the Valley of Mexico. And it was a ceremonial center of great power. In fact, the powerfulness of that integrated civilization has been obliterated by the American plowing under of the land. Cutting down the forest was not the real devastation. The trees will grow back. But it was plowing under the mounds. Because all of the Mississippi Valley watershed was covered with sacred structures. All of it. A million square miles. So, that the land itself was tattooed. So that the land itself that became the United States was like one of those old Mowery bodies that every square inch was tattooed. And the mounds ran continuously never out of visual sight.
We know from some of the few memoirs left that in fact even the Atlantic coast of the United States were covered with mounds, ceremonial structures. Not all of them in fact, very few were pyramids. Most of them were in various shapes, geometric shapes or animal shapes. And the largest of all the ceremonial shapes was a serpent. An unbroken serpent. And the great serpent mound that still runs about 1400 feet and Southern Ohio has the serpent in the same kind of a position that the don't tread on me serpent has on the flag that Benjamin Franklin in his visionary capacity saw very clearly. And in fact, the mouth of that serpent is open, not to strike, but to receive an object. A very peculiar object for a serpent to receive. Receives the sun. The sun. So that the eternal return of time, of circumstance, is able to come to a focus at the source of life. And that source of life radiate through this sacred structure of the tattooed land. An energy pulsation of reality for the people that lived there. All those people were killed before the United States was even muted. Before the colonies even were conscious of the fact. All of those people in fact were decimated in the 17th century because the British plans for empire and the French plans for empire were playing long range football with the country and the lives. It was the arming of the Iroquoian people with firearms and training them in military organization with British or French military attaches that spread the diseases of Europe and they diseases that comes out of a barrel of the gun. The conquests that comes out of organized military structures. Not a tribe on a warpath, but a nation that trained itself Spartan like to exterminate. So that that whole land mass was depopulated and was seen to be a wilderness by the Americans who were the colonists coming in. It never occurred to them that this fertile land tattooed by millions of monuments and mounds could not have been empty like this previous to them.
I gave a lecture, I think about five years ago, the last Fox Indian medicine man Dakota delivering his ceremonial information to a man named Pigeon, Walter Pigeon. Not the actor, of course. In the 1840s and Dakotas great testimony showed again and again, that he still had living comprehension of what they were for. And he would go up on the mounds and he would tell Pigeon the tremendous visions of past history. Just from the cue of being on the certain mounds and the certain place. And by being able to compute on the geography of the land. And he would say, Oh and such and such happened and so forth. So that the history was in the landscape. And it read out from people who had learned to preserve the landscape in its pristine naturalness, because that was the only way it would record these impressions.
So, when Huckleberry Finn and Jim set down the Mississippi river, they were looking for Cairo, Illinois, because that was the place of freedom. That was the symbolic place where slavery ended. And if they only turned up the Ohio, they wouldn't be in free man's land and Jim would be safe. So, there are great consternation was to be able to tell, where is Cairo? How do we know when we get to where the Ohio and the Mississippi come together? How can we tell?
Chapter 15 has the beginning paragraph. We judged that three nights or more would fetch us to Cairo at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio river comes in. And that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up though how amongst the free States and then be out of trouble. And then he goes on and, in the fog, of course. He says,
We slept all day and started out at night, a little ways behind a monstrous long raft. That was as long going by as a procession. She had four long sweeps at each end, so we judged she carried as many as 30 men likely. She had five big wigwams, a board wide apart and an open campfire in the middle and a tall flagpole at each end. There was a power of style about her. It amounted to something being a raftsman in such a craft as that. We went drifting down into a big bend and the night clouded up and got hot. The river was very wide and was walled with solid timber on both sides. You couldn't see a break in it hardly ever. Or a light.
It's the primordial land you see. The river is still untainted. The ships that pass, leave their clouds of sparks and leave their ripples but when they pass the river is still primordial. Old man river.
We talked about Cairo and wondered whether we would know it when we got to it. I said, likely we wouldn't. Because I'd heard say that werent but a dozen houses there and if they didn't happen to have them lit up how's we going to know that we as passing a town? Jim said if the two big rivers joined together there that would show. But I said, maybe we might think we was passing the foot of an Island and coming into the same old river again. That disturbed Jim and me too. So, the question was what to do? I said, paddle ashore a first time a light show and tell them Pap was behind come along with the trading scout. And there was a green hand at the business, and we wanted to know how far it was to Cairo. Jim thought it was a good idea. So, we took a smoke on it and wait. There weren't nothing to do now but look out sharp for the town and not pass it without seeing. He said he'd be mighty sure to see it because he'd be a free man the minute, he seen it. But if he missed it, he'd be in the slave country again. No more show for freedom. And every little while he would jump up and say, dar she is but it werent. It was jack-o-lanterns or lightning bugs. So, he sat down again and went to watching same as before. Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom.
And so, in this profound development of course, it is punctuated by episodes on the shore because they have to put into shore every once in a while. And constantly in Huckleberry Finn, in Twain's literary greatness, we're shown the great contrast of the way in which men are grabbing the land. It's mine. It's mine to sell for a profit. And we're going to take it all and we're going to all make a profit. And the episodes begin building up. And what happens when these people get that one, have made their profits, 15 people made their profits. And that land finally is sold to somebody who wants to live there. What do they do? Well, they settled down. They settle into a mentality that's been an imported. Doesn't belong to the land. It's been brought over from Europe. Has been brought over from traditions that don't have anything to do with this reality.
And the episodes build again and again, until the tension builds in Huck and in Jim. Because neither of them are adults in that world. Neither of them are caged in those expectations. They are both children of nature. They're both still sensible to the real universe and they long to get back to the river again. And they're slowly realizing that the river is their freedom.
So, Jim has put the raft back together and he says,
Good lad is dat you? Don't make no noise. It was Jim's voice. Nothing ever sounded so good before. I run along the bank of piece and got a board. And Jim he grabbed me and hugged me. He was so glad to see me. He says, Lord bless your child. I was right down sure you was dead again. Jack's been here, he said, he reckon you've been shot case you didn't come home no more. So, I just dis minute start with the raft down towards the mouth and da crick so it as to be already for us to shove out and leave soon as Jack come again tells me for certain you is dead. **inaudible word**, I was mighty glad to see you again? I said, all right that's mighty good. They won't find me. And they'll think I've been killed and floated down the river. Theres something up here that'll help them think so. So, don't you lose no time Jim. Just shove off or the big water as fast as ever you can. I never felt easy till the raft was two miles below there and how in the middle of the Mississippi. Then we hung up our signal lantern and judge that we was free and safe once more. I hadn't had a bite to eat since yesterday, so Jim got out some corn dogs and buttermilk, pork and cabbage and greens. Oh, there ain't nothing in the world so good when it's cooked right. And whilst I get my supper we talked and had a good time. I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds. And so, it was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there wasn't no home like a raft after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
And so, there's the genesis of a new kind of American hero who's able to step into that cosmic stream that's there in the landscape. It's not in some map or some doctrine. It's not in some metaphysical plan. It's in the land. It's in the experience of the life that's free to live that really. And for Twain, as he worked on going back to the Mississippi, he remembered where he went after that childhood, when he was grown to be a man. He went West. And it was the far West. It was the gold in California. That was the next incredible discovery about the nature of the American land. That it was a land of gold. And that's the symbolic vision for next week. Mark Twain's California gold rush. I hope you come.
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