Previous essays of 2003 were designed to symbolize human triumph: with Beethoven's "Fifth" in mind, leading to my favorite hymn to nature in the pastoral "Sixth." Now a more elemental mind-set leads me to ask what more can be learned from our rustic brethren? African Bushmen, for example, seem to echo early humanity's rather rhythmically musical revelation of language.

Australian Aborigines have much irony to add about "dreamland," supplementing "civilized" philosophy and science—notably from great Germans—concerning the still enigmatic roots of consciousness itself. A synthesis of such sources is need to finally figure out what is going on all around this verbally-sheltered enclave of civilization.

We sheltered folks can thereby transcend Eliot's "Wasteland"--devoid of spirituality—and return to the sacred Garden which spawned us. We hesitate upon the cusp with forbidding words like "pantheism"--dichotomized against a preferred "monotheism"--and the verbally verboten "animism." Such terrifying words need no longer trouble our way back to natural beginnings. For they are ephemeral things, labeling paradoxical "shadows" on "walls" of Plato's Cave erected (artificially) around us. Reality calls from beyond the screen to understanding which the labels impose.

We can all be fugitives from the cave. Prometheus unchained from a rock; Brother Atlas relieved of its weight. Abel resurrected and Cain exonerated. Individuals integrated to survive the most adventurous drama yet imagined: the very BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. Especially the whole nutty twentieth century with Stalingrad and Kursk. Pulp "Fiction" indeed. Desperation made ironically to be man. And woman. Yin and Yang. A toughened alliance bound for the stars.

The "roughs" celebrated by Walt Whitman are vanguards: a mainstream of pragmatically yankee transcendentalists and hardheaded counterparts in the southern mountains—now throughout this continent—with roots back to the Indians. Americans.

Haunted Home of a Peaceful American
(Polk County, MO)

Waiting for the Seventh Man
(Recurrent dream of the mighty warrior who became this man)

American technology has reached the moon and mars. The big challenge lies beyond. Language has both impeded and facilitated the progress. Everything is a mixed bag of ironies like that: always working for and against. Up and down, light and dark (good and bad). Maybe someday a fluid vocabulary can surpass the Cheyenne poetry paradoxically portraying it all as a Cosmic Mirror.

McCord

From the Cactus Club

Branson West, MO

November 21, 2003 (with subsequent editorials)

Scientific Challenge (March 1, 2006); Consider Newton's law of action-reaction (but where did the rest of all that expectable "anti-matter" go?).

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