Mark Twain

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Hermetic America – Our Critical Heritage:
James Fenimore Cooper, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Mark Twain
Presentation 13 of 13

Mark Twain
World Travels and Fables of Man; The Author Transcends
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, June 27, 1985

Transcript:
The date is June 27th, 1985. This is the last lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on Our Critical Heritage covering James Fenimore Cooper , Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, and Mark Twain. Tonight's lecture is entitled Mark Twain, World travels and Fables of Man. The Author Transcends
Because next week's lecture falls on the 4th of July after the lecture, we will provide over at Whirling Rainbow only about a mile away, a little treat for you. If you manage to come, I think we'll have some lemon meringue pies and some fireworks. Some interesting punches of various stages of interest. So, if you decide that you can spend your 4th of July with this, why we'll, we'll treat you. It will be on us.
And the lecture next week we'll start the last phase of this work. The lecture will be on Walt Whitman's Civil War. And it will be about the most poignant time in the whole history of our country. When the major poet seer stood among the ruins of the country, not so much the battlefields, but the human beings and made a pact with himself that if there was any cosmic vision to be had in this universe, he was going to see it and give it back to the American people. So that they could live. And we'll talk about that next week. Walt Whitman Civil War, the poet seer in the ruins of the union. And this next series is on transformational America. And it'll take us from Whitman's vision that the country needs a universal vision. That there isn't any political vision that's ever going to do for us. And there isn't any kind of nationalistic spiel that's ever going to do for us. That we're the kind of people that we've got to know what it looks like whole. And we'll go from there and develop the transformational spirit that came into the United States with Whitman, Melville, William James, and John Doer. And there'll be only one more series after that on the Western world. And that'll be 20th century America. And that will close up about six-years' worth of work.
And then my courses for the next four or five years are going to go back to Asia, which is my tradition. My home. My mind is Chinese. And all the lecture series after the first of the year will be on the great traditions of, of Asia. It's been interesting but difficult to lecture continuously on the Western world because it is so disjointed. It doesn't have a, a real coherent heritage. Only in the esoteric fields is there any coherence. And even there, it's largely diffracted by the psychic interpretive lenses that have been refined. But in, in the Asian traditions there's a root core that's always there. You're always at home.
So, this lecture tonight closes the whole phase of the rise of critical consciousness. The 19th century in this country, our forebears is so close that we even knew of people who were alive in that period. And it began with a return of James Fenimore Cooper from Europe. He was the first one to sense that something was wrong. That the easy natural gate of life that he had grown up with wasn't there anymore. That in just seven years it vanished somehow. And from that moment in 1835-1840 until the 1880's, late 1880's, the United States stewed. It stewed for a whole lifetime then. It stewed for about 60 or 65 years. And right in the middle of that was the civil war.
The civil war was a chronic outcry of anguish for the national spirit. And we have to understand here that this is not a jingoistic national spirit. It's not the national spirit of, of a race or a country, but of the inner penetration of races of countries. Of human beings coming together and there, their basic natural capacities as beings. And the civil war was a, an outcry of anguish from human beings. And the generation before it and the generation after it were wastelands of value.
And increasingly Twain himself gave the name to the age that came after it. He called it the gilded age, and everyone was glamorously attracted hypnotically desiring the wealth **inaudible word or two** was there. And it was interesting because Twain in his youth had been so happy to be a young man going on the adventure to pan for gold. And then as he grew more mature, he saw that the gold was guilding everything. And as an old man, he was nauseated and blinded by the glare of false values.
The watershed in Twain's life we have seen was the writing of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. And that book came out late in 1889, just 94 years ago. And the same year in the same book season when it was issued, Henry Adams issued his great nine volume History of the United States in the Administrations of Jefferson and Adam…Jefferson and Madison. And these two books are like a age-old **inaudible word** of bringing together. Bringing together the basic core of experience from the past in a historical sense and they substrata in a mythological sentence. So that history and myth were brought together in this country in 1889 by two of the most outstanding minds in our tradition. And their books agreed that the United States had not only strayed far, but that it had undergone an inversion, a sea change. So that there was now a power on earth to devalue all traditions. Instead of bringing those traditions together to empty all traditions, progressively of value. And that this machinery, literally, that was set in motion was the machinery of economic grade raise to superhuman levels by industrial and technological prowess.
Twain especially put his finger on it. That the American individual was a self-made being had to pick and choose and select what was going to go into his culture, into his sense of allegiance. And in that sense, we are all Americans. We have all had to pick and choose, select, put the emphasis one way or another. And yet all of us are very similar. We're all in the same family and that we are a self-made largely in this way. And in that self-making something was left out. The need to keep the vision whole was left out. So that the self-making increasingly became oriented to the exterior, to the material world. And increasingly it was the lure in pull of the gilding of the material war world that became the focus for the self-made person. So that the prototype no longer became Benjamin Franklin, but Horacio Alger. I'm going to make a million. And then I'm going to use that million to make another million. And pretty soon as Frank Lloyd Wright put it one time, it becomes a free for all for everyone to get as much as he can as soon as he can and protect it as best he can. And the criteria of ethical action becomes the payoff. Does it pay off?
Twain's contribution in The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was a resounding success in its time, critically and economically. It was a best seller. It was hailed by every critic in the periodicals and the literary journals as the masterpiece of the age. Twain was compared to Cervantes, rightly so in many ways. They said Twain had become the Cervantes of the modern world. And that where Cervantes had showed the ridiculousness of chivalry from the middle ages, Twain had showed the ridiculousness of the chivalry of the English character.
But oddly enough, when we look at the reviews, and we still have them. We can see them in reprints and in libraries. We see that the entire age was blind because the generation later, almost every literary critic, and they were the only ones reading it still at that time, saw that the work was terribly flawed, In flat, in fact, flawed so deeply that they began to wonder about the quality of Twains sanity. Because it showed a, an earthquake had happened in the man's assessment of himself, of his fellow beings.
In 1916, six years after Twain's death in 1910, his literary executor in order to quell this rising tide of wonderment about Twain together with Twain's publisher. An editor. A very important man. A vice president of the company at Harper Brothers, which is still in business called Harper and Row. But Albert Bellowian got together with this editor and they put together a new Christmas book for 1916. It was the middle of the first world war by then. And Wilson, our president by then, was telling the American people that there was something fractured in world history. That there was something chronically wrong with our whole sense of reality. Not just in this country but the entire world. And in order to take people's minds off this deepening questioning. And a part of that was the, a sidestep of that was the wondering about Twain's sanity. They published The Christmas book that year called The Mysterious Stranger. And they brought it out with the illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. An N.C. Wyeth color drawing on the cover. The Mysterious Stranger.
And it wasn't until 1963 at the university of Iowa, they were putting together the Mark Twain papers that the editors there began noticing that there was no real manuscript for this book. That in fact, the book was an editorial fraud that had been pasted together. Put together in editorial workhouses. And that in fact, the real Mysterious Stranger manuscripts were devastating. That the old Twain had in fact not gone off the deep end. Just that he was a very great artist. A very insightful American. And he had finally seen through the sham. And all of his later works, almost all of them, were unfinished.
And Twain himself wrote in 1906, a very interesting little page and a half entitled When a Book Gets Tired. And I'd like to give you that because it gives you an insight into Mark Twain at 71. Not insane. Not bitter. But insightful looking through the layers of reality in a way that just seemed out of phase with Victorian America. We recognize, and we'll see tonight, many of the insights of Mark Twain will become familiar terrain of the 20th century. And we'll call it surrealism and existentialism. And many other names. It's just someone who saw through the sham.
He wrote this in August 30, 1906. He writes,
There never has been a time in the past 35 years when my literary shipyard hadn't two or more half-finished ships on the way neglected baking in the sun. Generally, there were three or four. At present there are five. This has been an un-businesslike look, but it was not purposeless. It was intentional. As long as a book would write itself, I was a faithful and interested **inaudible word**. And my industry did not flag. But the minute that the book tried to shift to my head, the labors of contriving the situations, of inventing the adventures, and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind.
This of course is the beginning hallmark. It is the absolute hallmark of an artist. An artist cannot lie. Cannot lie because of the nature of the integration of vision. "Then I examined my unfinished properties to see if among them there might not be one whose interest in itself had revived." Notice now that he's talking about it as a living being. The works are living beings.
This would later be discovered, quotations, all over again by the great Spanish existentialist Don Miguel de Moona who, when he would be writing his exemplary novels, he would write appendixes where the characters from the novels would come in and interview the author and tell him, you have created us. We have a life now. You have to go on writing about us. It is murder on your part not to write about us any longer. And de Moona wrote long dialogues with himself and his characters saying, I created you. I have a right. And they say you had a right to create us but created now we have rights.
Twain. Twain is broaching this. You see the European equivalent of Twain is August Strindberg. Strindberg and Twain are very similar. They are protean artist who refuse not to get involved in everything and then can't help but try to bring everything together into one. They cannot help that. And both Twain and Strindberg thought they were going to be going crazy. And both Twain and Strindberg chronicle their insanity. So, well that just looking over it brought them back. And they realized the first noble truth suffering is real. And then the second noble truth that the cure is real also. There must be a cure.
So, Twain writes,
He looks to see if any one of them had revived its interest in itself. And revived through a couple of years restful idleness and was ready to take me on again as amanuensis. It was by accident that I found out that a book is pretty sure to get tired along towards the middle. And refuse to go on with its work until its powers and its interest should have been refreshed by arrest. And it's depleted stock of materials reinforced by lapse of time.
That's a great insight. That in the, in the creative process, there's a natural lull. A natural lull. Twain would never realize but others after him, standing on his shoulders, would take this insight and realize that the, the composition of the United States was like a work of art. And the 19th century was like the lull where the creative work had to lay foul. And that it wouldn't be until the 20th century when people could take it up again. The idea of a humanity of one world brought together.
So, Twain is writing saying that,
It was when I had reached the middle of Tom Sawyer that I made this invaluable find. At page 400 of my manuscript the story made a sudden and determined halt and refuse to proceed another step. Day after day it still refused. I was disappointed, distressed and measurably astonished. For I knew quite well that the tale was not finished, and I could not understand why I was not able to go on with it. The reason was very simple. My tank had run dry.
Now we find it an interesting thing. My tank had run dry. But it isn't the work. Is not the work autonomous? Here's a cue that the work of the artists comes in the underground feeling currents. It's autonomous. But our relationality to it is such that there are times when it seems that it's not there. Because of the cycles that are there and feeling. The mind thinks that things have stopped because the mind has no cycles. The mind goes on and on and on. What did the Zen minister say? It was, it was like having the radio on all the stations all the time. Always going. Always going. Always going. And we get surprised when we learned that there are techniques to turn it off momentarily. No show. No ads. Incredible.
Twain is observing here. Yes, rather naively. And yes, rather **inaudible word**. That there was an odd relationship between himself and his work. And increasingly this awareness will rise in his experience. Increasingly. The author and the protagonist increasingly will become blurred and finally a montaged. And finally, Twain will have to learn to see through all the veils. And when he does, he sees a composite reality. And this is the beginning of a new kind of wholeness. A new kind of vision. One, which we have by now for ourselves made almost natural. But when it was first coming in, in the 1880's and 1890's, the early 1900's, it was unbelievable. All of the people of that time couldn't see. The great artists of that time trying to express themselves were using different ways. Impressionism. Cubism. Futurism. They're trying to say, I'm seeing this different way. I don't see it like this anymore. Yes, I can see how Vermeer handles light, but I don't see that way. I see like Kandinsky. Or I see like Chagall. It seems very real to me.
Twain is beginning to broach this cataclysmic change in perception because the mind which never shuts up didn't realize that feelings and feeling tones have their cycles. And some great cycle had come to a turning point. Some great platonic year of the emotions had run its course and some new age was coming in. So, he writes
The stock of materials and it was exhausted. The story could not go on without materials. Could not be wrought out of nothing. When the manuscript had laid in a pigeonhole two years, I took it out one day and read the last chapter that I had written. It was then that I made the great discovery. That when the tank runs dry you've only got to leave it alone and it'll fill up again in time. When you were asleep, also while you were at work and other things, and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable seravation is going on.
And this is a key here that feeling is intelligent. But it's intelligence is in terms of comprehension. The minds coherence is in terms of perfection. But the feeling in terms of comprehension. Our feelings balk when they are pushed. They will not fragment themselves. They must flow whole. But the mind can abstract itself and go on bit by bit. It can even discipline itself to a single pinpoint of intellection. And even that a vanishing point, but the feelings cannot.
So, Twain says,
Ever since then when I've been writing a book, I have pigeonholed it without misgivings when its tank ran dry. Knowing that it would fill up again without any of my help within the next two or three years. And then the work of completing it would be simple and easy. The Prince and the Pauper stuck working in the middle because the tank was dry. I didn't touch it for two years. A dry interval of two years occurred in writing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. A like interval in court, occurred in the middle of other books of mine. And two several or intervals have occurred in a story of mine called Which Was It.
And then he goes on and he says, "There is an unfinished book, which I should probably entitle The Refuge of the Derelicts. It is half finished and remained so." That he will not touch it.
There is still another one entitled The Adventures of a Microbe During 3000 Years. It has half-finished and will remain. So, there's yet another, The Mysterious Stranger. It is more than half finished. I would dearly like to finish it. And it causes me a real pain to reflect that it is not going to be. These tanks are full, and those books would go gayly along and complete themselves if I were to hold the pen, but I am tired of the pen.
Something is changed in the man. There is an ethical responsiveness that is required to take up the pen. It's like the farmer, putting the traces on the mule and getting out in the furrows. You have to be willing to do it. And it takes an ethical commitment to do that. And that ethical commitment needs to tie up a way of life. And for Twain, the way of life of the author had become so profound that he had unbeknownst to himself become a seer. And in the 1890's and the early 1900's in this country, there was no place for seers. Man, who had been born in Hannibal, Missouri, didn't realize that he had attained almost a yogic level of insight. And he couldn't talk to anybody about it. Nobody would have understood it here in this country. They wouldn't have understood him almost anywhere.
In British India or international China. The boxer rebellion in 1900 burned Twain up. He couldn't understand why the European powers were trying to divvy up China yet again. And the Russia, Japanese war of 1905, embittered him. He thought that the whole world was heading towards a war. Another nine years.
What Twain had achieved was the quality of perception that is appropriate for someone who has broken through the egotistical veil. Who is no longer tied down to the reflection that the exterior world gives us. No longer consulting the mirrors of the watches of the compasses to tell you where you are. You are where you are, not where they are. They lie. And one can go along with their necessary lie for a while. But one cannot do that indefinitely.
And it was this kind of a sea change that was happening in Mark Twain, which began in the late 1880's. And the clue in there was the rise of organized labor and Twain's involvement with this. And in his writing of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. He wanted to make a farce and he wanted to put a 20th century personality, an 1890's man back in King Arthur's court to show them up. And as the book went along more and more, the character did show them up. But increasingly the ways in which he showed them up had consequences. Karma. He showed them up by developing gunpowder, by developing telephones, by developing technology, industrialization, stock markets. And as they developed in Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court that began to run pall mall. And Twain could see that his fiction was beginning just a little bit to outstrip the contemporary world and that it was leading to disaster. That if one followed along in the tone that modern civilization was as an industrial, technological, money-oriented society it leads inevitably to a destructive war. That the destructive war is the true flower of that direction. It is inevitable. And the only way to mitigate that is to turn back away from that culture. And that there is a flaw somehow in that process.
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court ends up with a massive war with him destroying 25,000 Knights with dynamite. How it serves and so forth. And then feeling absolutely crumbled by this. And as a punishment for him, the master magician, because magic plays a large part in this. The master magician Merlin puts a spell on the protagonist, on the Connecticut Yankee, and makes him think that he has woken up again in his own time.
And Mark Twain says that he is an author. Has received this manuscript from the man. And that when he died, it was not so much that a physical man died, but that a dreaming man woke up and went back to the time that he had learned to love. That they were not yokels. It's true they didn't have industry or technology, but they have a sense of human reality. The people there were real. The community of human beings was real. The purposes, the causes, the travail of life, was worth it and was not any longer.
When this end came, in Connecticut Yankee, Mark Twain turned in himself and realized that he had lost faith with modern civilization. And that the United States in the 1890's was leading the way in this new world. In fact, the country was transforming itself at such an incredible rate that it was almost a blur. It's rather like a teenager begins to grow four or five inches a year. The United States every year was transforming itself. If you remember when Abe Lincoln first went to Chicago, it had in its population about 16,000 people. When Mark Twain went to lecture in Chicago, 50 years later, there were more than a million people there. And by the turn of the century, there were 1,000,600,000 thousand people. When Mark Twain was born the whole state of Missouri had 110,000 people. The transformation was colossal. It was unbelievable.
And in this. I'm going to give you a few lines from Henry Nash, Smith's book, Mark Twain The
Development of a Writer. This is a very fine work.
The exact causes of this loss of faith are irrecoverable, but the evidence that it occurred is playing to be seen in the book itself. What seemed the inevitable salvation of man by the course of history now seemed man's inevitable damnation by the same power. Operating as the training that perverted every member of society.
And Twain again, and again, returns back to this thing that we are evidently in large part what our training is. And our training is a kind of a conditioning. And the environment, the milieu that is the basis for our training. It is very deep. It's not just the physical environment. It's also the intellectual, the economic environment. And that all of us were being trained to this kind of a bland existence where we were increasingly devalued from our spiritual insides and increasingly caught and shaped to be pasted upon the exterior world to cover its own requirements. And that something in this whole structure was wrong.
The final chapter in Nash Smith's great work is This Pathetic Drift Between the Eternities. And after finishing Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain's works turned to a new realm. He wrote a series of letters from the Earth. And there are letters written by Satan from the earth back to heaven. And in the first part, he gives us a picture of heaven before the creation. And he's going to give us now the colloquial mythological image base of heaven that was current in his day. It's what children were told. It's what adults, if you really questioned and believed. It's what old people hope for.
The creator sat upon the throne thinking. Behind him stretch the illimitable continent of heaven, steeped in the glory of light and color behind him. And there before him Rose the black Knight of space like a wall. His mighty bow towered rugged mountain like into the Zenith. His divine had blazed there like a distance sun at his feet stood three colossal figures diminished to extinction almost by contrast.
Archangels their heads level with his ankle bone.
When the creator finished thinking, he said, I have thought behold. He lifted his hand and from it burst a fountain spray of fire. A million stupendous suns, which clothed the blackness and sword away and away and away. Diminishing and magnitude and intensity as they pierced the far frontiers of space until it last, they were but as diamond nail head sparkling under the domed vast roof of the universe. At the end of an hour a grand council is dismissed. They left the presence, impressed and thoughtful and retired to a private place where they might speak privately. None of the three seem to want to begin.
The three archangels.
Though all wanted somebody to do it. Each was burning to discuss the great advent, but they would not prefer to commit himself to someone else spoken first. So, there was some aimless and holding conversation until finally Satan gathered his courage together. And he said, we know that we are here to talk about this, my Lords. And we may put pretense aside. I think that this must be a very useful creation, but I do not understand what it is for. The cold and the dark was a restful place. And now and then after a series season of over delicate climate and trying splendors of heaven, we needed it. But these are dale…details of no considerable moment. The new feature, the immense feature is what gentlemen. And the archangels reply, the invention and introduction of automatic unsupervised self-regulating law. For the government of those myriads of whirling and racing suns and worlds.
This is a very familiar Valentinian Gnostic insight that the material universe having no spirit of its own must be governed by law. And that the law must be automatic from the beginning. The spirit is never ending. Has no need for exteriorization of law, but the material universe must have law and it must be automatic. Thus, it is neutral. It has no ethic. "That's it, said Satan. You perceive that it is a stupendous idea. Nothing approaching it has been evolved from the master intellect before. Law, automatic law, exact and unvarying law." And of course, the product of the superior ultimate product of this is the machine. And the largest scope of this is the machine civilization. But man, doesn't accept the automatic unvarying law. He cannot. And so, he fights against it. And it is this recoil against the conditions that impel his own ordering that condemn him to war.
And Twain increasingly will go into this and he will have Satan talk to the creator. And he will say, "Wither are they gone divine one?" Because he has made some animals of various shapes. Where have they gone divine one?
To the earth, they and all their fellow animals. What is the earth? A small globe I made two and a half times ago. You saw it but did not notice it in the explosion of worlds and suns that sprayed from my hand. Man is an experiment. The other animals are another experiment. Time will show whether they were worth the trouble. The exhibition is over. You may take your leave, my Lords.
And it goes on in that vein. So, Satan wants to visit the Earth to find out what is man? What is he doing? What can he do? Doesn't he know that it's just automatic law governing everything? He's diluted. He thinks that he is free. He thinks that he can create something. How miserable is man? And so increasingly Twain goads us. Goads us into responding to say, but we are free. That this scenario is fictive. Isn't it? Where in the mind is it fictive? Is it a dream world? It is an unconscious world? Is it some archetypal level? Because that would be of great interest to us to find where in the mind is effective.
And so, Twain will turn from this and he will begin to write The Mysterious Stranger. And he will probe deeper and deeper into The Mysterious Stranger's psychology. Who he just numbers in the manuscript, Number 44. The mysterious strangers is number 44. And of course, he is the spirit of Satan trying to find out what's real. And man keeps telling him, we are real. Even to the extent that if we have to deny creators and you, we will be real in our way.
Well, let's take a break and we'll come back.

END OF SIDE ONE

At the time, at the time that Twain was making this change, which was at the time that Henry Adams was making his change. At the time that the whole United States was making its change. Technology had reached a new level. And the symbol of this new level was the machine that Twain put all of his fortune into and went bankrupt. And for many years wrote to just pay off the debts that piled up. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the machine was a machine for type setting, mechanical type setting, that Twain thought was going to revolutionize the printing industry. And being an old printer, an old publisher. He thought this is fantastic. And he put everything into it.
And this is the paragraph from Justin Caplins Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, which is not a very good book, but this is an excellent paragraph.
These type setting machines. At one time there were so many of them that the basement of the London times was full of all the different kinds of typesetting machines. For all of them, including the one Mark Twain had backed, represented successively intricate elaborations, unworkable, delicate, and temperamental of the same outmoded principle. These machines were designed to imitate the work of a man setting, justifying and distributing single foundry types by hand. They were all made on that model. On that principle actually type distribution, which was one half the function of Pages early machine was no longer necessary, or even practical. As Clemons might've discovered if he had not been so beguiled by Pages eloquence and ingenuity. The London Times was using a rotary type caster patented already in 1881, which works so fast it turned out 60,000 characters in an hour from a hundred basic molds. That instead of distributing type at the end of the run, the printer simply melted it down, started over again with fresh type. This bypass of the human analogy was the basic principle of the linotype machine, which cast its own type from its own matrices in single slogs of a lion's length, which afterwards were thrown back in the melting pot.
The very structure of the principal changed. And thought changed with it. Because the old analogy of what a man can do based on hand to mouth, like post and beam, was completely made obscure and old fashion. Not just old fashioned that another fad had come in. But a completely new sense of structure had emerged. Something that was scintillating instead of drudgery. Something that moves so fast that this human analogy was lost. This is what art was experiencing at the turn of the century. It was experiencing the fact that there was a new structure to experience. It isn't the same old thing. This isn't just a new ornament. It was a completely new way of being. And it was dynamic. And the tragedy of Twain putting all of this money into a super-fast human being went down the drain. Because it isn't the super-fast human being that's the model at all. It's the flow of the process. It's the process that's real, not the analogy.
And all of the minds that were schooled from Aristotle up until then are all based upon a polarity and analogy. The whole logic in the Western mind is all based on polarity and analogy. And it was all completely obliterated as an effective way of doing things, of dealing with things. And technology changed. It advanced. It, it did a fancy step.
Twain never understood this technically, but he understood it as an artist. And in his work, Twain has a very interesting document. It was never published. It was referred to in the 1906 passage that I read from. It's collected now by The University of California Press in The Mark Twain Papers. And the general title of the volume is Which was the Drain. But the work in here that I want to give you some excerpts is called The Great Dark. The Great Dark. And this is the late Mark Twain.
He tells us that through 1897, 1898, that he was just constantly thinking of this story. And finally, when he sat down to write it, his wife Livie said that he was so ecstatic about being able to finally just sit down and write this story. Or we should put it in Twain's artistic language. He was so glad that this particular story was finally gonna tell itself finally. Could finally hear, what is the story? It's like an author who's dying to hear it himself. The first reader of a creation is the author himself. When you create that way. This incidentally is the model of creativity that Shakespeare used. That's why the plays were always never printed and put out. There were always actors copies. Because it changes. The characters are alive. The play is different. And the only time to have a first folio is after the author is dead. You wouldn't do it while you're alive. That was ruined the plays.
In The Great Dark Twain begins with two statements. One by Mrs. Edwards and one by Mr. Edwards. And Mrs. Edward says, "We were in no way prepared for this dreadful thing. We were a happy family. We'd been happy from the beginning. We did not know what the trouble was. We were not thinking nor expecting it." And the trouble wasn't that a microscope came into the family as a present. Oh boy. Mr. Edward says,
We were experimented with the microscope and pretty ignorantly. Along were a little glass slides in a box and we found one labeled section of a fly's eye. On it set was a faintly visible dot. We put it a low power lens and showed up like a fragment of honeycomb. We put it under a stronger lens, and it became a window sash. We put it under the most powerful lens of all and there was room in the field for only one pain of the, of several hundred. We were childishly delighted and astonished at the magnifying capacities of that lens. And said now we can find out if they really are living animals in a drop of water, as the books say.
All those words of valuable. Living animals in a drop of water. Worlds within worlds, within worlds, without end.
They brought another slide out. In fact, they made a slide by taking a drop of water from the nearby pond. And they put the lens down and they only saw a white blur. And then he says in the story that they tightened it and they put it right into the water and they still only saw light blur. So, in desperation they thought, well it's ruined. And one of the kids put it all the way down so that is was touching the glass and then they came into focus. Little animals spinning around and Twain says is remarkable that the lens was touching the glass so that there was no space at all. And yet in the scale of this world, there were oceans. These little animals.
And then in The Great Dark he goes to the couch to lay down to think about this. And as he goes there one of his favorite characters from the late Twain works, the Superintendent of Dreams, makes an appearance. These are capitalized. We groped…
I threw myself on the sofa profoundly impressed by what I had seen. And oppressed with thinkings. An ocean in a drop of water. An unknown, uncharted, unexplored by man. By man who gives all his time to the Africas and the poles with this unsearchable marvelous world right at his elbow. Then the Superintendent of Dreams appeared at my side and we talked it over. He was willing to provide a ship and a crew. But said, it will be like other gauges of the sort, not altogether a holiday excursion. And he says, well that's all, this is not an objection. I'll go.
And so, the Superintendent of Dreams outfits, a ship and the crew and the man and his family are able to go there into that world. And they're sailing along then.
Oh, my goodness. There it is again. It's gone, Lord. It takes a body's breath. I've got, I know that for sure. I want the coffee. It'll do me some good. If you could help me, sir, I feel very weak. We groped along the sleety dock to my door and entered and there was the bright glare of the lamps. And they're set as I have expected a man with a long cloak, slouch hat on the sofa, my friend, the Superintendent of Dreams. I was annoyed for a moment because of course I expected Turner to make a jump at him. And yet nothing and be at once and in a more miserable state than he already was. I reached for my cabin door and closed it.
And it goes on,
The superintendent of dreams smiled a smile. It was full of pious satisfaction. He said, this is very interesting. You're now in this adventure, in this experience. And it seems that you're not prepared for the new world. For this new scale of adventures. Because there are not like the adventures that you used to have. Because this world is quite different. In fact, the talk in the feeding went along in a natural way. I could find nothing unusual about it anywhere. The captain was pale. Had a jaded and harassed look. And the subject to little fits of absence of mind. And these things could be said of the mate also. But this was all natural enough considering the grizzly time that they'd been having. And certainly, there was nothing about it to suggest that they were dream creatures and that their troubles were unreal.
And he's all the time trying to keep in the back of his mind, the context that this is a dream journey, not the real world. The real world is back there. I am still real back there. Increasingly he's involved in the fact that the adventures are here, and they were quite real. And he's beginning to wonder, where is the dreaming? What level his dream.
The captain and the mate managed to seem comfortable enough until Phillips raised the subject of the day's run, the position of the ship. The distance of and so on. And it became irritable and sharp of speech and were unkind or to the young, young fellow than the case seemed to call for. All the pleasure was gone now. Everybody felt personally affronted wanted and the abuse conversation ceased and uncomfortable silence still upon the company. Though through it one could hear the wailing of the wind and the doll trap of the sailors and the muffled words of command overhead. And this made the silence all the more dismal. The dinner was a failure. While it was still unfinished the company began to break up and slip out one after another. Presently none was left but me. And I sat long, said sipping strong, dark coffee thinking about this.
Because it has become real. And what he thought was real has become the dream. "An incident of by American life would rise upon me, vague at first then grow more distinct and articulate. Then sharp and clear. Then in the moment it was gone and in place there was a dull and just an image of some long past episode whose theater was this ship." He begins remembering that he has been on this ship before a long time ago. So, he has different levels of dream images that start to come up. Are they dreams within dreams? Which of these dreams within dreams is connected to the real theatre? And then it would develop and clarify and become strong and real. That is, as he thought about these images, these dream images, and the longer he thought about them, the more sharp and real they became. The more detailed they became. We recognize and hear the technique of the seer visionary.
I don't know if some of you remember in Black Elk Speaks, when Black Elk was an Eagle flying and wherever his eye looked in his swoop. And the longer he looked the more detailed it was. Like a zoom lens and zoomed into incredible detail. Saw everything. And if he looked away in the vision came back to where he was as an eagle. It is this kind of a thing.
In chanting, fascinating, this spying among the elusive mysteries of my bewitched memory. And I went up to my parlor and continued it with the help of punch and pipe hour after hour, as long as I could keep awake. With this curious result that the main incidents of both my lives were now recovered, but only those of one of them persistently gathered strength and vividness. Our life on the ship.
You began to notice the differentiation that when he tried to think of this American life, it no longer seemed to have the energy to it. The ummpft to it. But the ship's life increasingly had more energy. It's the very same thing that was in Connecticut Yankee. That the life in King Arthur's Court became more real to him than his own life. This is symptomatic of modern man. Any place, any time, but now it's more reachable. Anytime. The future. The past. Ascended masters spaceships. Whatever is more real than this present because of a peculiar quality that this present is really phantasmal. When seen accurately for what it is, it is phantasmal. It doesn't register. It's not that one is not seeing the present is that one is seeing the present. One is seeing the vacuousness, the elusiveness of the present. It is in fact that. It's that one institution has become very attuned and shocking.
"Hour after hour," he says,
As long as I could keep awake. With the curious result, the life and the ship becomes more and more real. Those of our land life were good enough, plain enough but in minuteness of detail they fell precipitately short of those others. And in matters of feeling joy, grief, physical pain, physical pleasure, immeasurably short. My land life had become to fade, but not this.
And so, the projected life, the dream life, the remembered life, becomes more real than the lived life. It's a very recognizable tone. It's the quality of a high drama. That the present moment looks more and more vacuous. And the only way that the traditional teachings of discipline manage to support an individual in this is that one must develop compassion along with this pragna. That along with this pragna, without compassion you will dissolve the world away. And yourself with it. It will all go. Because in this present moment there is nothing here. I'm not talking about analogies; I'm talking about high Dharma.
And so, compassion to let things be even in their nothingness must accompany that penetrating visionary, capacity. And Twain discovers again and again, that his generation didn't have that. They didn't have the universal compassion. They loved their family members. They hated their enemies. They love people that were nice to them. They didn't like people that were not. But this kind of penetrating vision requires universal compassion. All sentient beings are beloved. There are no enemies. No one is an enemy. That if one keeps that kind of differentiation and fragmentation the penetrating vision vanishes everything. And the surrogate world of dreaming and memory, of imagination and recollection, becomes more and more real. And one becomes then in a real bind. No longer cutouts pasted on the exterior of the material universe, but phantasmal wisps circulating in the psychic universe. Because the spirits are present no longer is unreal in that. It is there. It is real and it's pristine not being there.
And this is what bothered Twain. This is what got to Twain as it got to Henry Adams. In fact, all of the Americans of this period, it got to in this way. All of our major speakers ran up against this problem. And it wasn't great. And Twain says, finally the end of The Great Dark, "The same thing happened again. The captain said, come back to your places men. They obeyed looking puzzled and surprised and a good deal demoralized." Because they're all starting to go through this. All, the whole crew.
The officers got up looking astonished and rather ashamed. Carpenter come back to your place. He did it, but reluctantly. And swearing into himself. And it was easy to see that the captain was contented with his dramatic effects. He resumed his speech in is pleasantest manner. Men, you have mutinied two or three times. It's all right up to now. I would have done it myself in my common seamen days. I reckon if my ship was bewitched and I didn't know where I was. Now then, can you be trusted with the facts? Are we rational men? Manly men? Men who can stand up and face hard luck in a big difficulty that has been brought about by nobody's fault and say, live or die, survive, or perish. We are in it. For good or bad, live or die, survive or parish. We are in for it. We'll stand by the ship. Even if she goes to hell. And the men let go of a tolerably hearty cheer. Are we men, grown men, salt, sea men nursed upon dangerous and cradled in storms. Men made in the image of God and ready to do when he commands and die when he calls? Or are we just sneaks and curves and carpenters? This brought cheers and laughter. And the captain was happy there. That's the kind. So, I'll tell you how the thing stands. I don't know where the ship is. But she is in the hands of God and that is good enough for me. It's good enough for you. It's good enough for anyone. If it's God's will that we pull through, we shall. Otherwise not. We haven't had an observation for four months but we're going ahead and we're going to do our best to fetch out somewhere.
And that's how it ends. With that kind of an affirmation.
In that whole generation only, a few individuals were able to stand this explosion of consciousness. This realization of the dissolving penetrating quality that consciousness had come to. And next week we'll see one of the greatest of them, Walt Whitman, who has it because he does develop universal compassion. And so, when the vision comes to Whitman, he is able to extend himself out and give himself to the universe. And the universe like the mother she is, gives him back himself. Writ large. Large as she could.
So, we'll see that next week.

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