Mark Twain
Presented on: Thursday, June 13, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic America Our Critical Heritage:
James Fenimore Cooper, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Mark Twain
Presentation 11 of 13
Mark Twain
The Gilded Age and Tom Sawyer, Hermetic Innocence and the World of the Split Psyche
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, June 13, 1985
Transcript:
The date is June 13, 1985. This is the third, the 11th lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir where on Our Critical Heritage. Tonight's lecture is entitled Mark Twain, The Gilded Age and Tom Sawyer, Hermetic Innocence and the World of Split Psyche.
Far West was inscrutable as the far East. Of course. More so. Might be more so.
Nowhere is everywhere. **inaudible few words**.
Well, I'm glad Jefferson got the Riverstone.
I am too.
Yeah.
And just find a couple of log beams now.
Old Jack Rabbit ready to tow the line.
**inaudible word**
We're coming to the close of this particular series. And I guess you can see that I'm from the detailing that we're handling, we're going to come to current times very soon. We've been working on this for an awful long time, and it's difficult to appreciate the scale, except for some of you have been coming for years. We're trying to re-calibrate our sense of the real. And we're taking old Plutarch at his word. In The Parallel Lives he demonstrated, which was the ancient way of teaching, that the only way to understand ourselves is to see the shape of our life. And this shape is very complex. It's very difficult to understand oneself from the laws of perspective. You need to have a context in order to see form. And evidently, as Plutarch's demonstrated, the only context refined enough, large enough, complex enough to disclose the shape of the human life is another human life. So that if we're going to see the form of ourselves, we have to put ourselves into the existential business of being aware of others. Other human beings.
So, we have thrown out histories. We've thrown out ideational narratives. And have taken upon ourselves, the task to review lives, individuals. And we have done several hundred by now. And we have put them into an arrangement, and we have seen that the sequencing of lives is very interesting. That there is an interesting overlay that happens without us putting any narrative in whatsoever. And we did the entire history, as it were, person to person of Western civilization.
And now we're sitting in this matrix. The jewel of the wisdom that this country has to offer. And we are discovering again, as we did and all of the other series that no one understands what's going on. We are all like school children who have come late to our lesson. And the boards are filled with complex examples and the teacher is busy or not there. And the substitute can't really help us. And nobody that we know was around. And so, we have to ask ourselves for a very peculiar kind of guidance. We're going back and we're trying to center ourselves through the attentiveness, which I can bring to bear. Try to center ourselves on some of the major events of the individuals who seem to matter most. And looking from the inside of that perspective to try and get a lay of the situation.
And following this pattern, we have come to understand that the United States is a very mysterious event. That the United States is not a country like a nation state. That the United States is in fact, a vision. And that the envisioning of this is based exclusively upon the individual capacities of human beings.
It wasn't until late in the day, it wasn't until the 1830s that there was really anything like political theory in this country. And we have talked somewhat here about the nature of politics more in the Tuesday night series, because it shows up more when you look at ancient Alexandria and Rome. There we discovered that a mythology, which is based on a feeling toned natural horizon of understanding when that mythology rises into consciousness, it transforms itself and becomes political. That the imagery is no longer feeling based but tends to become rational or rationalized. It tends to become thought based.
Now we have discovered in the Tuesday night series again and again that this very peculiar transformation, which allows for in mythology to rise into consciousness, is displaced by something else which must sync. And we discovered it with that realm, that phase of human consciousness that we call art. That art and mythology are related. The one based in consciousness thought the other based in feeling. In images. Desires of comportment. That they do not displace when there's this strong aesthetic theory. That a strong athletics in a civilization holds art in its place. So that art develops then a comprehensive consciousness of expressive form. And that this consciousness of expressive form deepens through human experience so that more and more individuals in that setting tend to mature and see that the most comprehensive expressive form is the form of the person. Themselves. That they are capable of attaining self-realization. And art as an understanding of expressive form leads royally to religion, which is the development of seeing ethical form in the individual and its operative capacities. So that art becomes a very formative fulcrum in the career of civilizations.
Mark Twain is all concerned about mythology and art. He's concerned increasingly with politics and religion. He's concerned with these areas, but in a thoroughly American way. That is to say he does not have a doctrine. He doesn't have a theory. He has only his capacity to live his life rather fully and to learn from his living experience. And to build up on the way, as it were, a sensibility about what is going on.
We saw last week that Huckleberry Finn discovers that he's most at home on the raft. That it isn't any destination along the Mississippi River that he's overly anxious to get to. They'd like to get to Cairo because beyond Cairo where the Ohio comes in, Jim will be free. He will no longer be a slave. But they, being at home in the journey, being at home on the way.
And this week we see that the Mississippi River hero matures and begins to move West. And in his westward move there is a great mythological image base that thrusts itself forward and increasingly will dominate the country in a way, which is detrimental to his character. And Twain is one of the few individuals who attempts to put an artistic form upon the process. So that this mythology can be kept in its place and helpful and not sour into a political morass. And increasingly as he lives, he sees that it is happening anyway. That its a process so pervasive that perhaps no individual can stop it. And the old Mark Twain will become rather embittered about the nature of man.
In the last lecture, we'll say in The Fables of Man just recently dug out of the old files by the university of California Press and published. And Mark Twain, the old Mark Twain in his seventies, was very insightful about the nature of reality. The nature of character.
But we're at the stage now. And Twain is one of the individuals who gave the name to this age. The name was The Gilded Age. The Gilded Age. It was a book. I have a first edition here, The Gilded Age. It has a diamond ring on the cover. The Gilded Age. He wrote it with Charles Dudley Warner, who was a neighbor of his in Hartford, Connecticut. In fact, Warner was a very prominent editor. He was the editor for Harpers. And well build up to where Twain gets to Hartford, Connecticut, and built his Mark Twain house. The house that in 1874 cost him $70,000. And $31,000 for the lot and $20,000 for the furniture. He was a big spender. 19 rooms, five bathrooms.
The perspective that we need to see here though, is that there is a contrast happening. That the individual is finding himself, defining himself, not against other people, not in view of man, but in terms, which are reduced to an abstract measurement of his position. And that the abstract measurement of, of his position will come increasingly from a politicized mythology rather than from a natural toned human development. And more and more, the only measurement that will count will be wealth. Money. Gold. It is the pursuit of wealth, which is reduced down to cash. How much have you got? How much can you get? Which forms the context, the background, against which the individual will see himself maturing. And so, more and more individuals will become caricatures of what they might be. They will become masks rather than persons. And they will band together and create social structures. Which then overlay with one another and produce finally what Twain called the gilded age, something which is gilded. It's a surface application. And it glitters and it looks good. It does not hold up.
Twain's work was not seen in its time for the profundity that is there. One of the first individuals who really understood through being a little cantankerous himself and educated was Vanwick Brooks. And his book called The Ordeal of Mark Twain is one of the very few indispensable works on Twain. And he writes in here that the gilded age, which of course applies most poignantly to the administration of U.S. Grant. Symbolically U.S. Grant, that this was an age that came after the civil war. And we have seen when a tremendous wrench the civil war was. That the civil war was a polarizing of the sense that had been an undifferentiated unity before. And how Lincoln was one of the few individuals who through his training was able to keep in view the essential notion of the union as a unity. And how the polarized dualities had produced the tensions, which then went into making the constructs that the gilded age use to literally cement its social structure into place.
Brooks writes, Less than ever than after the civil war, can America be said to have offered a career open to all talents. It offered only one career. That of sharing in the material development of the continent. Into this one channel past all the religious fervor of the race. These are well chosen words. This was written about the time that Arnold was writing The Folklore of Capitalism.
He writes,
I have spoken of Mark Twain's novel, the novel he wrote in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. It is not a good novel. It is artistically almost an unqualified failure. And yet as inferior works often do it conveys the spirit of its time. Phillip Sterling the hero is in love with Ruth Bolton, the daughter of a rich Quaker and his ambition is to make money so that he may marry her and establish a home. Phil goes West in search of a coal mine. He is baffled in his quest again and again. He still had faith that there was coal in the mountains somewhere.
And of course, we picture him then living as a hermit and trying his best by reducing himself voluntarily down to a shanty by the tunnel with this dedication that he is going to discover the coal. And that he finally does. And he is able to go back and marry the girl. He then becomes a person of great consequence and consideration. As Twain put it, all of his little glances were filled with significances for those around him. He becomes someone who is then able to live in the gilded age.
In this gilded age, we have, as Brooks writes,
A man's individuality is as much compromise then by success, as under the conditions imposed by a system where he might fail. His actual occupation may tend to make his individuality real and fruitful, but the quality of the work is determined by a merely inquisitive motive. And the man himself, thereby usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal independence or any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American businessmen are from one another and temperament or circumstances or habits, they have a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike because the ultimate measure of the value of their work is the same. It all leads to the same object, money. Or, as we will see in roughing it, gold. So that the effect then of the business process and the success of the process required during the epic of industrial pioneering, a virtually automatic sacrifice of almost everything that makes individuality significant.
This produced a very particular bind because the whole elan of the United States with the development of the individual. And now we come to an age where the individual is only paradoxically able to attain to his individuality by giving it up and joining the system, one way or the other. To be successful destroys individuality as much as to be unsuccessful. The man who hasn't made it becomes in Twain's words, a slinker. He slinks around. He doesn't want to be seen. The man who is successful slinks inside because everyone is out to get him, obviously. They're plotting to sue him or to marry off his daughter or so forth.
In The Gilded Age we have this description from Twain chapter eight,
The supper at Colonel Sellers was not some sumptuous in the beginning, but it improved on inquiry on acquaintance. That is to say that what Washington regarded at first sight as mere lowly potatoes presently became awe inspiring agricultural productions that had been reared in some **inaudible word** garden beyond the sea, under the sacred eye of the Duke himself, who had personally sent them to Sellers for the occasion. The bread was from corn, which could be grown only in one favored locality on the earth. And only a favorite few could get it. The real coffee, which at first seemed execrable to the taste took to itself an improved flavor when Washington learned that they should drink it slowly and not in a hurry because it was a luxury and needed to be fully appreciated. It was from the private stores of some Brazilian nobleman. So that a hubble became a palace and present poverty became eminent future riches. Washington slept in a cold bed and a carpet this room and woke up in a palace in the morning. At least the palace linger during the moment that he was rubbing his eyes and getting his bearings.
This vision was a vision that out there, the development of the land, the development of the society, was all leading to participation in the coming golden era. And in fact, The gilded age and the golden era seemed to merge together in their imagery. The Golden Era was actually the name of a newspaper in San Francisco that Mark Twain wrote for. And on the title page of The Golden Era was an engine chief holding up a victorious fist to the setting sun. And there were moneybags to be had if one could only pursue this and go through to the end of the rainbow.
This individuality and the way in which it was difficult to achieve became for Twain the very substance of his life. That is to say he discovered when he took himself to New York city as a young man, 18 years old, he found out that it was very difficult to earn a living there. And in fact, he went to Philadelphia and discovered that he was a poor printer, just like Benjamin Franklin had been. And he was there when the printers of Philadelphia raised about a thousand dollars together and dedicated a statue to Benjamin Franklin in a printers smock to the city of Philadelphia. And he saw for himself that this is what he wanted to do. He wanted to have individual achievement. Individual glory. Franklin had done it, and he was just like him. But Franklin had left his Boston. Gone to Philadelphia at a time when it was the frontier.
So, more and more Twain realized that it was not the East for him, but it was the West. And when opportunity offered after the election of Lincoln, his older brother, Orion was appointed secretary of the Nevada territories. And Mark Twain became secretary to his brother. Secretary to a secretary. And they took the stage. And the stage line in fact, runs direct from Hannibal, Missouri, straight across Missouri to Saint Joseph's. And Saint Joseph's Missouri was the gateway to the West. It was the place that the covered wagons, the overland stage, the pony express, all of the Western movement went through this gateway of Saint Joseph's, Missouri, which was on the border of Missouri. Just like Hannibal was. Only Hannibal was the first step over the Mississippi West and Saint Joseph's at the other end of the state was the first step to the far West.
And in this great symbolic leap Twain thought his destiny lay out there somewhere. All that he had to go on was his individuality and his need to strike it rich. These two elements that seem to go together for Twain and increasingly he would discover are incommensurate that they do not in fact mix. That the one excludes the other almost as if it were a Chinese puzzle, where if you move effectively towards individuality, wealth disappears. And if you attain wealth, individuality becomes almost unattainable. But for young Twain, he was still sensing that perhaps destiny would hold something for him.
He went to Nevada with his brother and they arrived there in 1861. And when we see photographs of Twain when he first came there, he was absolutely a child. A teenage child. And we see photographs of him nine years later and Twain is already the recognizable international Mark Twain figure. In just a few years, seven or eight years, Mark Twain changes and transforms completely. In fact, the transformation was even faster than that. The transformation took only two and a half years. When he got to Nevada, all thoughts of helping his brother went out the window because he realized that people were striking it rich immediately all around him. He lit up for Carson city, Nevada, and Virginia city Nevada and he realized that people ordinary people like himself, whereas we're locating fines. And enormous sums of money were coming.
In fact, Twain loved to tell the story about how one time he went out with a friend and they were doing a particular kind of a gold operation called a pocket mining. Where you take a sample from a wide area and you compare the tailings from it and then you slowly build up a pattern of the landscape. And you hope to find the exact location, so you don't have to dig a lot of earth. And after several weeks of panning for gold, he was dead tired in rainstorm and he refused to take one more bucket full of this pay dirt. And sure enough, later in the morning, somebody else come down the trail. Had seen the rain wash the pay dirt away and there were a couple of gold nuggets in the bottom. They immediately got their partner. And in morning they worked this one little section and got $20,000 worth of gold out. And by the time Twain had woke up late in the afternoon and gotten back to their claim, it was empty. But you see the lure was there. The gamble of wealth. You have to understand that gamble in here. That there's this kind of imagery. As Dostoevsky knew so well.
He writes all of this in Roughing It. He gives us a complete development. And in fact, when we look at Roughing It, we come into possession for the first time of the greatness of Mark Twain. Because Roughing It is an artistic work. It holds all of this corrosive mythology into an order. And the order has a very strong aesthetic organization behind it. It focuses upon an author who is free, not only to write the book, but to be the protagonist in the book. He is mobile. He occurs as the major character within it. And he is also the author without it. In this Roughing It is very close in its approach and its aesthetic to that devised by Don
Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote.
And in fact, if one looks at Cervantes and Twain, structurally, aesthetically, they're remarkably similar. Remarkably close. In their assessment of how man may achieve reality in a time completely decimated by the politics of the visions of gold. Because remember Cervantes lived at the end of the great 16th century and Don Quixote, the first part, was written just one lifetime away from Cortez. And remember how the, the Spanish psyche was completely garroted by the vision of unlimited wealth. The world was there as for remaking. It was very similar development happened to the American psyche and the last half of the 19th century. The belief in the good life that had been engendered under Jefferson, which was a natural development of the individual and the land, had been transformed into something that was now amplified a thousand times, a million times. And in this mega vision we begin to sense something archetypal. Something which is not natural. Something which is manmade and generated. Something which has been hyped up. And the vision became increasingly that we will simply remake the entire continent. And when we're done with that, we will remake the world. This vision is coming out. And in this vision, what is disappearing increasingly is the viability of the individual as a character. Someone who does not necessarily fit in. somebody who is unique.
And so, we find in roughing it not only Mark Twain as the central character, struggling to find himself. But almost all of the individuals that are in here, almost all of the other characters, are misfits. They're humorous and they're funny because they are characters. They aren't the average people. They aren't the average people in Hannibal, Missouri. They're not the average people in New York City. And they're not the average people in San Francisco or even in Virginia City.
Twain when he developed as a lecturer, took his lecturing program back to Virginia City and he said he was surprised to find so many middle class people living in the same town that he had lived in for several years and had seen nothing but gamblers and prostitutes and miners and a newspaper men. They sort of go together. Unfortunately.
The individuality of the author is established in terms of the other people here. The wealth that is here is not used to define the personality. It is not the context of individual discovery. It is only one of the elements in the adventure, but the adventure itself is what a significant. Because as we go through Roughing It, we realize that it is again here, the journey of the companion fellowship of characters that makes reality possible to be discerned out of life. It is the form which is timeless. The Voyage of the Argo is based upon the companions of the Argo. The Fellowship of the Rings of Tolkien. Even if it's reduced to Don Quixote and Sanchez Panza. Or even if it's reduced to Odysseus and the keel on the mast of his ship. As long as the basis, the image base, is on character, consciousness achieves its integration. But where are the image base is unnatural, where it's skewed, where it becomes abstract, the individual cannot emerge. Only a caricature. Only a stereotype can emerge.
And this is the secret in Roughing It. The tremendous capacity of Twain to make real those experiences. So that when we read it, we can go through the names of the characters and the events and we laugh at it. Because the humor that is there is that humor which Cervantes saw. It is the recognition that there is something of our own there. We are like that.
They get into a gulley and they set up their tents and the hill is very steep. And the farmers who've been farming their cows up on the steep hill have never put a fence up. And they start a shouting, an argument or a card game and the cows get curious and they start tumbling over the cliff and through the tent it starts raining cows and destroys the game. It is absolutely hilarious.
They get out onto mano Lake and they're told that they're, they can't expose themselves to the alkaline water. And yet they can see a couple islands out in the Lake. They can't resist rowing themselves out there just to see what's out there. And of course, being dudes that didn't beach the boats. And when they got up to the top of the island, which was just a big slough there of rainwater, heavily alkaline, they noticed their boat drifting away. And they were too far from shore to yell. They had no food or water and they couldn't get into the water. But fortunately, the wind shifted a little and they could see that the boat was just going to graze the island one last time before it went out into Mono Lake. So, they ran like the dickens and got the boat. And Twain says in Roughing It that this was extraordinary that they were able to get back into the boat and they began rowing themselves in. And of course, he couldn't, he couldn't let this thing go. He wanted to embellish the story as best he could. And he told the story of a dog, which had fallen into Mono Lake. And that the alkaline had worked on him so bad that when the dog got to shore, he sort of did weird little flipflops and odd contortions, and then took off at about 250 miles an hour. And he said, you know, no one's ever seen that dog. And here we had thoughts of this as we were rowing ashore. And just as they got to the dock, they were anxious to get out of that Lake, out of that boat. And they both jumped for sure at the same time and sure enough the boat capsized. And they're in the shore, they were covered with alkaline water. And he said, visions of unholy hell just inundated their minds. Ran, keeping their eyes closed onto the shore. And he said they didn't sleep well that night waiting for the symptoms to appear, but nothing happened.
We recognize ourselves. There's something of a self-realization in here. And it's odd to run across it here in Twain instead of in The Bhagavad Gita or The Upanishads. But it has that mystical flavor of the secret exchange of cells, which is the essence of it.
After all Twain says the first time that they got to Virginia City and they were all dudes and they all had to sleep together. And he realized that every young man in this large room that held about 30 or 40 beds had the same visions of wealth that he had. They were all going to be millionaires next week. So, they're all very jocular and carefree. And of course, they didn't watch things too closely and they all slept in the same room. And there was this kind of a comradery. Each was an individual, but all these individuals together shared a life vision. So, everybody had their things set around. And he said the surveyors who had been out caught some tarantulas in some bottles and they had them set up on a shelf. He said,
We had a, quite a, a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room. Some of these spiders would straddle over a common saucer with their hairy muscular legs. And when their feelings were hurt or their dignity offended, they were the wickedness looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish. If they're glass, prison houses were touched ever so lightly, they were up in spoiling for a fight in a minute. Starchy. Proud. Indeed. They would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of Congress. There was as usual a furious zephyr blowing the first night of the brigades return. And about midnight, the roof of an adjoining stable blew off in a corner of it came crashing through the side of our place. And there was a simultaneous awakening and a tumultuous muster of the brigade in the dark. And a general tumbling and sprawling over each other in the narrow aisles between the bed rows. In the midst of the turmoil Bob sprung up out of a sound sleep and knocked down a shelf with his head. And instantly he shouted turnout boys the tarantula is loose. No warning ever sounded so dreadful. Nobody tried any longer to leave the room lest he might step on a tarantula. Every man grow up for a trunk or a bed and jumped on it. There followed the strangest silence. A silence of grizzly suspense it was too. What did he expectancy? Fear. It was dark as pitch and one had to imagine the spectacle of 14 scad clad men, roosting gingerly on trunks and beds for not a thing could be seen. There came occasional little interruptions of the silence and one could recognize a man and tell his locality by his voice. Or locate another sound a suffer made his gropings or changes of position. The occasional voices were not given much to speaking. You simply heard a gentle ejaculation of ooww followed by a solid thump. And you knew a gentleman had felt a hairy blanket or something touches bare skin, and it skipped from a bed or something to the floor. And another silence. Presently you would hear a grasping voice say something's crawling up the back of my neck. And every now and then you would hear a little subdued scramble, a sorrowful oh lord. And then you knew that somebody was getting away from something he took for a tarantula. Not losing any time about it either. Directly a voice in the corner rang out wild and clear, I've got him. I've got him. Pause and probable change of circumstances. No, he's got me. Oh, I ain't never going to fetch me a lantern. The lantern came at that moment in the hands of Mrs. O'Flanagan, whose anxiety to know the amount of damage done by the assaulting roof had not prevented her waiting a judicious interval before getting out of bed and lighting up to see if the wind was done. Well, the landscape when the ladder flashed into the room was the picturesque.
END OF SIDE ONE
It might've been funny to some people but not to us. Although we were perched so strangely upon boxes, trunks, and beds and so strangely attired too, we were earnestly distressed and to genuinely miserable to see any fun about it. And there was not the semblance of a smile anywhere visible. I know I am not capable of suffering more than I did those, during those few moments of suspense in the dark, surrounded by those creeping bloody-minded tarantulas.
And so, he goes on for a little while in that **inaudible word**. It is the perfect image of the comradery of men, of individuals, of human beings sharing the adventure of life. What changes in this is when they are successful. When they have the wealth. Or conversely and just the same on the opposite polarity, when they discover that they are not going to have the wealth. The failure and the success precipitate out of this living strain, the rocks of disappointment. The gilded age. And we'll come back to that after the break. Let's take a about 10 minutes.
The story of the tarantulas in the darkness is an interesting setting. A perfect parable as a matter of fact. Twain, Twain realizing that his questing form, his art form, had to be indigenous. That it couldn't be made up. It couldn't be a quote intellectual in the sense of abstract. It had to be rooted in popular colloquial experience and language. It had to keep it naturalness. It couldn't go very far away from it. He discovered in retrospect that in fact, the medium of language that he was allowed to use in his questioning form was that at the tall tale. He kept experience completely mundane. But the mundane quality of the experience mounted continuously until suddenly one realized that went completely off the ground.
One of the stories and Roughing It. And they're all stories you see. They become a cycle of tales. Becomes like a mythology. But the mythology is always held in place by the artistic form. And the awareness of the author, the artistic awareness of the author, of that form guaranteeing then that the mythology stays natural. That it doesn't usurp consciousness and dominate consciousness then with its imagery, with its lure. And one of the central symbols in this image base of the mythology is, is the constant lure of the unknown, which is a compliment to the gold. One must go into the unknown to have that gold. That's the adventure. This is where courage is necessary.
Another story that's in here about the unknown, but of coming in. they were caught in a snowstorm. The three or four of them. They were riding horses. And the snow came so steadily and so thick that finally they lost their way and they couldn't see anything. And they were completely encased again, only now in a gray darkness. So, they got off their horses. And they were leading their horses trying to find their way. And they realized that they were walking in circles. And they tried to figure out a way that they could walk in a straight line to get out of the unknown. All they had to do is walk in a straight line in any direction and they would eventually come out at the snowstorm. And they couldn't do it till one of them said, the horses will know. Turn the horses loose and will follow the horses. And of course, they turned them loose. After a while, the horse is tired of being cold did start to move. Only they began to move faster and faster, and the men keep up and they were lost. They heard the hoofs and they couldn't tell where it was coming from. So, after many hours and the snow was still coming down, he said they all decided that they'd better tell each other their last will and Testament and confess. And all these confessions came out. And they finally made their peace with each other. And after they had gotten down to desperation and were sitting down to die, the snow stopped. And he said it was totally embarrassing because as soon as the snow stopped the stables were about 50 yards away and the horses had been munching hay. And that horses looking out at these self-confessed men terrified all sin, shivering realized they were going to live after all.
Twain is incredible in his choice of imagery. But he becomes one of the world's great authors when one consciously realizes what he's doing with his art form. He is preserving the individual's right to have experience by himself. The life belongs to him. The old Rosicrucian saying, the life lived is the doctrine received. You have to be able to live a life before anything can happen. There is no Hermetic journey without that. And the skewing away from a life where experience is real. Where we can reflect upon it. Plan on its basis. Build upon it. Without that capacity then we are lost. Then we're thrown into another realm. Then we're thrown into a dependence upon abstract correlations.
And of course, what has made that abstract world necessary, the complete demise of the natural base also displaces our capacity to integrate. And instead of coming to terms with our life upon a personal in-depth basis, we begin to lean on exterior skeletons. We become crustacean in our aspect. And all the solidity goes into the bank buildings. All the solidity goes into the social morays. As he says twice in The Gilded Age,
Laura soon discovered that there were three distinct aristocracies in Washington. One of these it's nicknamed the antiques, consisted of cultivated highbred old families who looked back with pride upon an ancestry that had always been great in the nations councils and its wars from the birth of the Republic downward. Into this select circle it was difficult to gain admission. Number two was the aristocracy of the middle ground of which **inaudible word or two**. Number three, lay beyond. Of it we will say a word here. We will call it the aristocracy of the parva news. As indeed the general public did. Official position, no matter how obtained, entitled a man to a place in it and carried his family with him, no matter whence they sprang. Great wealth gave a man still higher and nobler place in it then did official position. If this wealth had been acquired by conspicuous ingenuity and just a little pleasant spice of illegality about it all the better. This aristocracy was fast and not averse to ostentation. The aristocracy of antiques ignored the aristocracy of the parva news. The parva news laughed at the antiques and secretly envied them. There were certain important society customs, which one in Laura's position needed to understand. For instance, when a lady of any prominence comes to one of our cities and takes up her residence, all the ladies of her grade favor her in turn within the initial call. Giving their cards, the servant at the door by way of introduction. They come singly sometimes. Sometimes in couples. And always in elaborate full drafts. They talk two minutes in a quarter and then go. If the lady receiving the call desires of further acquaintance, she must return the visit within two weeks. To neglect it beyond that time means to let the matter drop.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The Gilded Age you see.
Convention solidifies and makes an exterior skeleton because this is the only amplification that a politics can do. It has to temporarily freeze into form a way of life, which is abstracted. And in order to keep that structure viable, just like in order to keep an art form viable, one need an aesthetics to keep a politics viable one needs an economics. And so, economics becomes the theory of how to keep this political amplification continuing. And at the core of the economics is the cash. The money. The gold. It is that that becomes the overriding symbolic vision of attainment. And this is what Twain increasingly becomes aware of.
He has in fact, the most interesting development in Roughing It. He says. He writes,
Mighty fine family. Old Maryland stock. Old Squire Hagedorn could carry around more mixed liquor and cuss better than any man I ever see. His second wife was the Winter Billings. She that was Becky Martin. Her dime was Deacon Dunlap's first wife. Her oldest child, Maria, married a missionary and died in grace at up by the savages. They had him too, poor fellow. Billed him. It weren't the cousin, so they say, but they explained to friends that his son that went down there to bring away his things. And that they tried missionaries every other way and never could get any good out of em. And so, it annoyed all his relations to find out that the man's life was pooled away just out of a derned experiment, so to speak. But mind you there ain't ever anything really lost. Everything that people can understand and don't see the reason of does good. If you only hold on and give it a fair shake. Providence don't fire no blank cartridges boys. That their missionary substance, unbeknownst to him, actually converted every last one of them heathens that took a chance at the barbecue. Nothing ever fetched them but that. Dont telling me it was an accident that he was built there. Ain't no such thing as an accident. When my uncle Lemon was leaning up against the scaffolding once, sick or drunk or something. An Irish man with a hog full of bricks fell on him out of the third story and broke the old man's back in two places. People said it was an accident. Much, much accident there was about that. He didn't know what he was there for, but he was there for a good object. Nobody can ever make me believe anything different from that. uncle Lemon's dog was there. Why didn't the Irishman fall on the dog? Because the dog would have seen him a coming and stood from under. That's the reason the dog wasn't appointed. The dog can't be depended on to carry out a special providence. Mark my words, it was a put-up thing. Accidents don't happen, boys. Uncle Lemons dog, I wish you could have seen that dog. He was a regular shepherd. Or rather he was part bull and part shepherd. Splendid animal belonged to Parson Hagar before uncle Lemon got him. Parson Hagar belonged to the Western reserve Hagars prime family. His mother was a Watson. One of his sisters, married and Wheeler. They settled in Morgan County. And he got nipped by machinery in a carpet factory and went through and less than a quarter of a minute. Now this widow bought the whole piece of carpet that has remained mold in it. People come a hundred miles to tend the funeral. Well, there was 14 yards in the piece. She wouldn't let them roll it up. Just planted him full length. Yeah, the church was middling small where they preached that funeral. They had to lift one end of the coffin to get the lid down. Well they didn't bury him. They planted one end and they stood him up. Same as the monument. On it they nailed a sign said so and so sacred to memory, 14 yards of the best three-ply carpet lay all the moral remains of William W.
Talking about special providence and pretty soon you realize that he has you strung out. He's got everybody's strung out. He's got you off the ground. There is no way that the rational mind in it's abstractness can keep control because he is surreally gone out. He's off the ground. And we're throwing back again upon our own experience. And **inaudible name** said in his great essay on laughter, the recognition of our own humanity makes us respond fully. And the laughter is that recognition that we, we are there. We are there in the presence of our own presence. We are suddenly miraculously delivered from nowhere to here. Wherever this is. This is that, that the laughter of the Gods is all about. That's the saving grace. And Twain becomes a absolute exquisite at this.
In Twain's humor we have one of the keys to his greatness. The way in which he leads up to it. But there is another quality in Twain, which often is not appreciated. Or not alluded to with all the need that an emphasis that should be placed there. And this is his great narrative capacity to deliver to us miraculous experience. And this miraculous sense, in fact, permeates Twain. He was very susceptible to seeing rainbows at night around the moon. The only other individual who ever recorded this kind of a phenomenon with the same frequency was Benjamin Franklin. Full moon nights where there's a light sprinkle or haze or something you might see a rainbow. A night rainbow.
And in fact, in Roughing It there was an interesting, kind of an interplay. Twain writes it this way.
There's a great American flag fluttering in the wind, 35 feet long and 10 feet wide. Fluttering like a lady's handkerchief from the top, most peak of Mount Davidson, 2000 feet above Virginia City's roofs. And felt that doubtless I was building a bidding a permanent felt farewell to a city which had afforded me the most vigorous enjoyment of life I'd ever experienced. And this reminds me of an incident, which the dullest memory in Virginia City could boast at the time it happened. Everyone will vividly recall at times tell every possessor of the image dies. Late one summer afternoon we had a rain shower. That was astonishing enough in itself to set the whole town buzzing for it only rains during a week or two in the winter in Nevada. And even then, not enough at a time to make it worthwhile for any merchant to keep umbrellas for sale. But the rain was not the chief wonder. It only lasted five or 10 minutes. While the people were still talking about it all the heather
heavens gathered to themselves a dense blackness as of midnight. All the vast Eastern front of Mount Davidson, overlooking the city put on such a funeral gloom that only the nearness and solidity of the mountain made its outlines even faintly distinguishable from the dead blackness of the heavens they rested against. This unaccustomed site turned all eyes toward the mountain. And as they looked at little tongue of rich golden flame was seen waiving and quivering in the heart at the midnight away up there on the extreme summit. In a few minutes the streets were packed with people, gazing with hardly an uttered word at the one brilliant moat in the brooding world of darkness. It flickered like a candle flame and looked no larger, but with such a background. It was wonderfully bright, small as it was. There was the flag. Though no one suspected it at first. It seemed so like a supernatural visitor of some kind of mysterious messenger of good tidings some were fain to believe. It was the nation's emblem transfigured by the departing rays of a sun that was entirely palled from view. And on no other object did the glory fall in all the broad panorama of mountain ranges and deserts. Not even upon the staff of the flag. For that a needle in the distance at any time was now untouched by the light and undistinguishable in the gloom. For a whole hour the weird visitor winked and burned the lofty solid.
The American flag. And still the thousands of uplifted eyes watched it with fascinated interest. How the people were brought up. The superstition grew a pace that this was a mystic courier come with great news from the war. The civil war.
The poetry of the idea, excusing and commending it. And on it spread from heart to heart, from lip to lip, and from street to street, until there was a general impulse to have out the military and welcome the bright wave with a salvo of artillery. And all of that time one sorely tired man, the Telegraph operator, sworn to official secrecy had to lock his lips. Had to change his tongue with a silence that was like to **inaudible word**. For he and he only knew of all the speculating multitude knew the great things this sinking sun had seen him that day, the fall of Vicksburg and the union arms victorious at Gettysburg on that very same day.
Well these are mystic visions. Mark Twain is a major author. Not a TV script writer. Somebody that belongs with Cervantes and Shakespeare. Because he's able to deliver finally out of this incredible flow of experience those moments of realization that are pristine. That are symbolic. That give us the information that there's something here in ourselves, which is extraordinarily real. Obtains, occurs exactly here and now. And is linked with events because all events are linked to a unity, which is unshakeable, unbreakable. But the unity cannot be seen by the polarized mind living in a gilded age. For that mind, in that age, all of this is for children. All of this is interesting enough but give it to children. It doesn't have anything to do adult life. And it is this shameful abrogation of spirituality that permits gilded ages to mature.
And what do they mature into? They mature into empires. That's the natural course. And empires that build for themselves political mythologies centered around the development of power to maintain that structure. And who is the number one enemy of those structures? Individuals who are not members, who are ground out. They are the enemies. They must be put down.
Twain is able to deliver both the humor and the vision. He discovered is that when he took the lecture platform in San Francisco, he was trembling because he had never lectured before in his life. He had just come back from Hawaii. Called the sandwich islands at that time. He had gotten the Sacramento union paper to pay his way over. And he sent letters back from Hawaii. I think there were 35 of them. He got paid $20 a letter. And then somebody said, you know you should go on the lecture circuit with these and deliver your impressions in person. And the first time that Twain lectured was in San Francisco. And he got paid $50 to rent a hall and he paid a couple hundred dollars in advertising, but pamphlets all over town. He didn't know how he'd be received. Put on the notice that the trouble begins at eight o'clock. And at 7:30 he said was choked up. He couldn't go on. He said, he knew the place was empty. You said he was embarrassed because it was all dark out there. He didn't hear a sound. Finally stuffing his hands in his pockets, forced himself out on the stage and feeling bad in the darkness and something caught his inner presence. It's like a sea of whispers. The house lights came on. He realized the place was full. There were 2000 people paid a dollar a head to come in here. And he said he was scared to death, but the vision of all that profit opened up his heart. And he's sang to the people and told them all those stories. So, he was out of debt again. At least for a few weeks.
And you know the high point of that lecture wasn't so much the humorous stories. Although there were so many. Of the old Hawaiians that he met said you know, we understood Christianity. We ate the missionaries. We are communion direct. He packed it full of stories. But the thing that got the audience and brought them to their feet in a standing ovation, brought tears to Twain's eyes, when he gave them his story of his adventure that this a friend of his had taken him to the volcano Kilauea. And he said that he had seen volcanoes before. And said you know Ive; I've seen Vesuvius and it's about a thousand feet across and about 300 feet deep. But he said Kilauea is10 miles in circumference. He said there was enough space, 900, a thousand to 1300 feet down to put the whole Russian army. All this crackling of lava and weird plumes of green smoke coming up and everything. And he said the guide and I after having a little bit, nipping a little bit, started edging more towards it. And he said, pretty soon we found our way working our way down into the crater. And he said, it was just the sheer hypnotic adventure of the whole thing. And they got down finally and he said there was a lot of black and encrusted lava. And the guy tell them that there was a secret trail that only the natives knew. And he said they started walking out and they were there in the midst of Kilauea, in the midst of the crater and all this crackling lava only a few dozen yards off. And he said it was like walking in a dream. He said the greatest image of his whole life was being able to personally walk on that volcano crater floor. And he looked back and he saw his friend disappear into the lava and for a moment Twain said that he thought he had bought it. And then his friend only went up to his chest. And he said that it was old rotten lava. That he'd gotten off the trail and could he help him out. And he helped him out and he said they gingerly retraced their steps and gave thanks to the spirit of the volcano when they got back up to the crater.
The incredible courage of man to be. It's one thing to walk on the floor of the volcano, but it takes the same courage to walk honestly as an individual in the kind of world that was being made in the gilded age. And that was the point that Twain was making In Roughing It. It's rough all over. But we survive when we are really there and live to tell about it. It is that quality that restores back the vision that was essentially there at the beginning. The vision of the peculiar nature of man spiritual reality.
Well, we've seen this week, the world of the split psyche. Next week we'll see not only Twain's world traveling, but his realization that these images go back in time. And for Twain increasingly what became a focus for him, very much like Henry Adams, was that at some time in the past, there had been a fulcrum that was valuable to contemporary man. And Twain unerring, like Carl Jung, realized that it was in the linked classic early medieval period that there was a constellation of values into archetypal images. And for Twain then he realized that the period that most interested him in all the world outside of his own time was the time of King Arthur. Because it was in Arthurian times that all of these collected images became precipitated and crystallized and were still there operating in contemporary man. And Twain, interestingly enough, thought what would happen if you take it contemporary American individual who is unground up by this gilded age, a Connecticut Yankee, and put him back in that time. What would that story's be? And so being a great artist, he let the story tell itself. He just created the situation and then let it go. And in the freedom of his imagination and the vastness of his spirit another man who had known many minds Twain let himself develop the character of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. And we'll see that Twain comes up with a transcendental vision from that encounter, which he will take them into the 20th century.
And I hope that some of you were able to come next week.
We have tapes up here from the Thursday lecture. We also have tapes from the Tuesday lecture. This last Tuesday on Alexander was appropriately entitled The Archetypal Seizure of Mark Anthony. And some of you might be interested in that.
Thank you very much.
END OF RECORDING