Chapter 18
Longing Crosses the Sea
2The PERIOD now under consideration, in our history of essential motivating forces and the economics of creative art, is that which began with Columbus’s discovery of a new continent and ended with Copernicus’s postulate that our ‘‘world’’ is not a standing-still center of the universe. The dates relative to this most arbitrarily selected point in history are unimportant. It is always NOW.
3 The center of the considered period was approximately 121,000 earth revolutions ago. Rays originally emanating from each and every star, then reflected from earth-events of that time, have in the meantime expanded outward 2 quintillion miles from earth, or about 1/500 of the distance to the farthest currently discovered star. Possible persons with able telescopes on planets of that neophite star member will actually see the events happening 15,000 years hence from ‘‘now,’’ which we now preposterously call ‘‘330 years ago" Those events are actually sensorially and mechanically occurring, at this instant, upon the surface of a sphere only 330 light years radiantly out from earth, for, remember, radiation includes all ray types, and whereas light rays reflect from the surface, other rays penetrate to and reflect from each and every physical depth outward at the same rate as the light reflected from the surface.
4 The mind, when comprehending events of 330 years ‘‘ago,’’ is merely exercising its limitless function of jumping outward into the universe to that series and area of expanding time spheres to intercept the events now. What we sometimes call ‘‘ghostly’’ phenomena may quite scientifically be ‘‘assumed’’ to be events which have rebounded off other heavenly bodies, with the same certainty of angularity impact as that involved in the impacting of billiard balls, back to earth in the highly ephemeralized form of their interim expansion. It is to be noted that fictions of lying or imagination subsequently interwoven into ‘‘past’’ events cannot be reflected because they did not happen.
5 During our now considered period, which covered slightly more than a century, Galileo presented scientific proof of the postulate of Copernicus. Vasco de Gama and Magellan added empirical proof, the one by voyaging southeast to the Orient around the Cape of Good Hope, and the other by sailing southwest around the Horn and girdling the globe. Despite Magellan’s physical death or abandonment of self-ship one half way around, Magellan’s phantom captain completed the trip of his original undertaking, for his thought momentum was convincing enough to his successors to persuade them to continue westward into the unknown instead of ‘‘turning back,’’ which is always eastward from the viewpoint of the ‘‘overall’’ trend of man migration. Man follows the source of his energy, ever westward.
6 In the very center of this century, which was of tremendous significance for popular industry then incubating in Europe, Leonardo wedded science, art and mechanics, the first stable matrimonial triangle. Leonardo, the artist-scientist, and Savonarola, the dramatic, dogmatic, fear-inspiring priest, were symbolical of the intersection of the new road of civilization emergent and the old one certified for death. The world of Leonardo, the world of truth, was usefully emergent; that of Savonarola a hoax, uselessly recessional and dissipant.
7 The world of Savonarola was one of surface glamour, highly sensorial and popular. In it, the religions of materialism found fertility for their seeds planted in the fearful popular credulity. The great churches developed the surfaces of their edifices, in an utterly time-wasting manner and with complete lack of consideration of the barest necessities of living beings, expecially children. The result was an exquisite intricacy of lacy craft workings of academic art, for which the age came to be particularly famous, and nothing more. Filth, disease, torture and pillage rampaged while ignorant beings were taught to ‘‘embroider’’ their souls.
8 The feudalist, seeking industrial control, fought hypocritically behind the period’s romanticism; the fighting was carried on in the romantic guise of great wars of religious principle.
9 ‘‘England’’ and ‘‘Spain,’’ in quest of new lands and people for exploitation sent out ships with great crosses on their sails. The word ‘‘nation’’ represented at that time the financial ruler in contradistinction to the idea that a nation is its people. The ‘‘nation’’ captured new lands in the name of the cross, actually planting its symbol with great solemnity. England, seeking to reopen and control the way to the Far East by land, found it expedient to send crusaders through Europe to the eastern Mediterranean. Mayhap many crusaders were quite romantically intent upon recapturing the Holy Grail from the infidels, and the many incidental en route pillagings were accounted as gestures of God-given beneficence. The Holy Grail, though a physical prize, was quite possibly symbolic of a longing urge to recapture the secret well of thought sealed up with the passing of the Greek and Yogi scientist-philosophers. But behind the romance and spirituality of the quest and the cross-emblazoned shields, there was an economic causality, namely, the necessity of controlling far-flung elemental sources and export markets by overland route to the Far East. While England and Spain vied for the control of these, Holland and France, participating to lesser degree, strove primarily for control of the money exchanges complementary to the traffic.
10 England, wresting such maritime victories from Spain as the sinking of her Armada, emerged victorious in the struggle for control of the industrial colonies in North Temperate America. She took off, also, India and African Centralia, Australia, et cetera, and became the greatest export-import trade empire ever established.
11 Leonardo, harbinger of a new world, demonstrated in his thinking and activity an element that was unnoted by the exploiters. Through simplification, scientific analysis and the harmonious articulation of his philosophy, he demonstrated to humanity an ‘‘out’’ from rampant selfishness, materialism and exploitation. This ‘‘out’’—no matter how diminutive and random it then appeared—became, by virtue of far-time-ahead sightedness and the abstract quality of truth, ever more tactically important, as the progression in all lines of efficiency approached ephemerality. The ‘‘out’’ was to be attained by a new and more effective way of thinking and doing, i.e., by teleology.
12 The new era, so brilliantly budding in Leonardo, had inevitably to become dominant through successive teleologists. Leonardo, the longing-motivated teleologist, was the interpolator, partially from the findings of academic specialists and pagan art, but mostly from scientific contemplation of nature, into goods, mechanisms and harmonies essential for the re-encouragement of humanity during its transition into an ultimate kingdom of Life Heaven from that of a Death Heaven.
13 Until the personalization in da Vinci of the forces presaging emancipation of man, through mind-over-matter control, the only ‘‘out’’ for popular man was death. Only after death, life being so bitterly hard, could he conceive of attaining heaven.
14 Synchronously, North Temperate America, new stage for industry’s transplantation, is seen to have been not only relatively clear of any static civilization that, unknown to us, may have thrived upon it in prehistoric days (there are more Indians now than there were then), but it was also rich in almost every element essential to the highest development of the industrial principle. The impact of the Spanish invasion on Central American static civilizations, coupled with will-o’-the-wisp intrinsic values of pillaged gold which debilitated Spanish pioneering, certified industrial supremacy to the north.
15 Remembering that we have assumed man’s motivation to be only through either longing or fear, although neither in pure condition, and that the longing type is wont to include and refine whereas the fear type tends to exclude and confuse, it becomes apparent that the fear-motivated feudalists were forced by circumstances of the trend to patronize the longing-motivated, industry-incubating individuals of that time such as Leonardo or Columbus in order to survive. Otherwise, we may be sure, feudalists’ ships would never have billowed forth on fear-bestirring voyages of discovery. Certainly the fear type would not have dared in the poor little vessels then available, to cross a sea of unknown hazards, the terrific dynamics of which were so often reported in lurid misaccounts, which included such fabrications as sea serpents. (Such hardship folk tales as ‘‘Sinbad the Sailor’’ are typical.) It is certain, also, that the slothful, fearful, organized feudal servants would not have essayed to run away from their bully masters, let alone make initial crossings of the awful sea.
16 Colonization of the new continent was accomplished, therefore, by an extraction of a relatively ‘‘pure’’ longing type from out the confused, ‘‘Middle-Ages’’ world. The colonizers longed for liberty; longed for freedom of philosophic thought, or physical exploration, and for economic freedom, either by deed or invention. They longed, too, for freedom in which to breed a new race, no longer enchained by confused religions, traditional esthetic art, and superficial, material, intrinsic values. There was likewise manifest a longing to articulate physical might, such as in high seas buccaneering. This latter may not have been a very pure form of longing, but it was nevertheless longing.
17 Broadly, the combined longing of the many types was pure enough in strain to provide a colonization that was predominantly mental, for longing is a mental trait. It is the essence of mind-overmatter proclivity, even though it be only employed to break down, capture or annihilate space in order to be in the living presence of a loved one.
18 America was colonized, on the one hand, by communes of thinkers, and, on the other, by buccaneers who ‘‘blackbirded’’ slaves from Africa to till the soil of Virginia. It is significant that the mind-over-matterists, the Pilgrims, and others who in due course developed the inanimate slave, landed in the north, whereas materialists who perpetuated the animate slave settled in the south. This was in accord with the northwest progression of the mind-overmatterist and industry. Here was a clear trend indicator.
19 Shiploads of immigrants, eschewing all raiment and gadgets reminiscent of the decadent artistic glamour of the civilization they had left behind, landed en masse, and, with equanimity, faced the hardships and difficulties of communal survival. Being of the longing type and embodying in large measure the scientist-artist, they succeeded rapidly and efficiently in industrializing their survival problems. They differentiated wisely between difficulties arising from the special and personal causes of their pilgrimage and the requirements of their common welfare.
20 The colonies became commonwealths, the geographical layout of which bespoke in every way ‘‘common wealth.’’ The town was planned as radiant from a ‘‘common’’ center for special buildings, typifying the tolerant recognition of all specific philosophic proclivities of the individual. Churches, representative of the gamut of philosophic tenets, were erected side by side upon this ‘‘common,’’ together with a town meeting house which stood for the fromphilosophy-segregated common interest of civil affairs, and, most exciting of all, there was included a public school designed to nurture the mind-over-matter abstract minds of new beings on the verge of coming into existence. Erudition, objectively obtainable through reading, writing and arithmetic, was the universal longing of all the colonists. It was revered as the positive emancipating force of mankind from the religion-bogged philosophy articulate in Old World churches.
21 Dwellings were reared around the ‘‘common,’’ all hands taking part in their construction. A tolerant allowance was popularly accredited either to the prospective occupant or to the town carpenter for structural design invention. Incidentally, the carpenter of that period, who transported books of ‘‘stock’’ designs from the old country to the new, was the forerunner of those architects who, for two succeeding centuries (though still humbly entitled ‘‘carpenter’’) copied European styles, and, for still another century professionally, as architects, ‘‘worked’’ their styling trade. This ‘‘architect’’ fad was not to die out completely until a quarter century after the ‘‘World War’’ of 1914--1918.
22 The area of land surrounding the early commonwealth dwellings was apportioned for individual tillage, each allotment being within the tiller’s ability, and the total product being used for the sustenance of the community. (Incidentally the word ‘‘till’’ as a depository of money derives from the depository of the fruits of tillage.)
23 In the course of time, intelligent efficiency discerned that the ability of some persons was greatest in carpentry, or in metal work, or in some other craft. With gradual recognition these abilities came to be tolerantly patronized by all the community. Those of craft skill were released from the primary necessity of field tillage; others were singled out because of a strategic ability to organize youths with a proclivity for military activity into armed units for mutual protection against the ravages of nomadic and curious savages, whose land they were ‘‘settling.’’
24 So efficient was this communal life that it was not long before it became a materially fertile field for the engraftment of the best mechanical characteristics of ‘‘industry’’ so recently emergent in renaissance Europe. Be it noted that the Pilgrims did not come to this country as conscious pioneers of the industrial principle, but by segregation through longing happened to be its most able progenitors. This is another demonstration of the persistence of inadvertence, or the random element, in the industrial progression.