Yet to Really Prove Ourselves

Looking outside this morning I thought about how close we were to the winter solstice.  Noting the date as I title this doc I’m reminded; eleven days.  The mornings will then come earlier and earlier with each passing day.  Five PM darkness will give way to Six PM dusk, once again.  Winter’s only begun and I’m done with it.

Reading a collection of the late nineteenth century Nicaraguan poet and essayist, Rueben Dario.  It is remarkably wide ranging; poems, travel writings, essays, short horror stories.  He has ardent appreciation of nineteenth century literature of the United States, but he is disdainful of the bulging American presence.  America is ‘Caliban’, populated by crass, voracious, domineering Yankees.  One can appreciate how noxious someone like Theodore Roosevelt would have appeared to a person from Nicaragua, or nearly anywhere else in Latin America.  The United States occupied the world’s attention at that time, the same way China does today.  Rising, seemingly inevitable, but we had yet to really prove ourselves as anything other than an economic force, internationally, certainly outside of our hemisphere, much the same way China’s non-commercial heft, beyond its boarders is entirely untested. 

The United States at the turn of the nineteenth century was a flicker of pending floodlights.  Vaudeville, jazz, cinema, were all still pending.   There was little evidence of a distinct, domestic art form, and certainly nothing at that time to have broadly infected the arts anywhere else.

Dario loved Poe and his burning eyes, Whitman and his and his infectious, salacious ecstasy.  Is this the equivalent of someone today waxing on about Mo Yan’s baby chefs or Zhang Yi Mou’s sorghum, while simultaneously repulsed by much of China’s rough ascendancy?  Will there be a “jazz” or “cinema”-like disruption of the arts or human experience that pours out of China and on to the world in the next century?   It certainly won’t mimic either of those art forms but inevitably the world will feel the impact of six or seven hundred million Chinese of means, as they work to express the internationalization of their civilization.   

We just had a very interesting embankment.  Outside it looks like a river.  There are roaring waterfalls of clouds, frozen in their charge, moving only perceptibly pulled by the wind’s current.  And we were buffeted, some thousands of feet above it all.  Racing forward into the wind the plane shook violently.  So the captain banked left and we cut horizontal across the stream.  But this was only to find a smoother pass up the wind’s current.  Pushing on we were pummeled once again.  Shelves of cloud cover stretched out below, dropping off in broad, thousand foot cliffs extending back ten miles to the next shelf up.  Easy it was to imagine and anticipate the wind we would eventually run into, again.

The shaking stopped, the shaking started.  We dropped down and eventually were in the clouds themselves, where we have remained.  Lunch was served and I looked over the Dario to refresh myself about his impressions of the United States.  The essay “The Misfits” narrates a remarkable approach into New York Harbor. The essay, “The Triumph of Caliban” is less forgiving:

I have seen those Yankees in their overwhelming cities of iron and stone, and the hours I have lived among them, I have spent in a state of vague dread and anguish.  I seemed to feel the oppression of a mountain upon me, I seemed to be drawing breath in a land of Cyclops.  Eaters of raw meat, bestial blacksmiths and iron mongers, inhabitors of the house of mastodons.  Red faced, corpulent, gross, they make their way down their streets pushing and shoving one another. Brushing against one another like animals, on a hunt for the almighty dollar.  The ideals of these Calibans are none but the stock market and the factory.  They eat and eat and eat and calculate and drink whiskey and make millions,  They sing: “Home Sweet Home” and their home is a checking account a banjo a black man and a pipe. 

I can’t see how we’ll have much of any blue skies when we land in Tokyo.   I am thick within the rivers clouds.  But I saw them from afar and I know they are beautiful and made of moisture not dust.