The American Spirit

The embodiment of what I believe to be an American is best represented by three texts that I have read. They represent the beginning, middle, and end of the developing precepts that constitute the heart of our social, economic, and religious values. These three texts go on to identify the many struggles men and women encounter along the way.

As a woman, being an American signifies accepting certain values indigenous to our way of life, signified by three basic holidays celebrated yearly. They are Easter, Independence Day, and Christmas. The cultural struggle that inflamed my ancestor’s passions can still be found on the streets of America, embodying the very tenets of what an American truly is. From the citizen to the immigrant seeing its legendary shores for the first time, the concept of an American becomes more than just commerce and religion; it is a kingdom whose king has yet to return for the final theocracy, a king whose memory is often replaced with a combination of Calvinistic-Commerce, where everything of deeper value gets forgotten by the almighty dollar. The mighty dollar’s all seeing eye echo’s 1776: One from Many. The dollar’s pyramid is the symbol of the beginning, middle, and final chapter in our country’s history. The dollar’s symbol is the place holder for the American dream of a home and family, ruled by a returning God we can trust.

Every year the embodiment of what it means to be an American can be ascertained by what I call the “Placeholder Day,” otherwise known as New Years Eve. It is a variable that constantly shifts like the new promises everyone makes at the stroke of midnight. Similar to the Cathedral of Chartres, a woman’s place in society, or the power struggle of family over business technology, there is a constant change of values on that specific day. Pope Gregory was so troubled by changing years that he arranged to have the Gregorian calendar adapted to leap years, thereby joining Pagan and Christian holidays. New Years Eve is the American dream’s “missing link” to our basic holidays. It is a troublesome day to me that has a mystical joining of the finite and infinite. After all, everyone knows the New Year is just a place holder of sorts, waiting for one thousand years to roll by. “… But forget not this one thing, beloved, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day…” (2 Peter 3:8). After the sixth one thousandth year day, the seventh will bring in the New Year (New Beginning). The “New Beginning” will refresh the six thousand years of man’s dreams and aspirations. When the Messianic Daystar appears, all those unsolved questions, inner values, and cultural struggles will finally be resolved.

Meanwhile, the American writer’s unsolved questions echo the human emotions of a nation that still searches for its place in life. I believe the following American writer’s texts especially fit the description of what being an American truly signifies. They are, Henry Adams’, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” Mary Freeman’s, “The Revolt of Mother,” and finally Allen Ginsberg’s, “Howl.” The core values that constitute our makeup, along with our society’s ability to allow conflicting religions and social norms to co-exist in the same country, serves to embody the melting pot that makes our Democratic way of life. Our nation, while democratic, often leaves some people in a kind of void that sends some on a crusade to find a doorway of escape that will give meaning to their life.

To Henry Adams, the doorway to bring meaning to his very Puritan American life was best represented by technology, commerce, and religion, in the form of a woman. Why should a woman, a virgin no less, be so ingrained in the American culture? As a woman myself, it can only be the historical and mystical root of what the Virgin truly signifies. People need to see and feel a power that can guide them back from the brink of hopelessness. We struggle for meaning and seek to excel in our endeavors. While we deny the power of a higher being, we secretly hope that he will have the mercy shown by the Virgin’s Messiah. The promise echoes through the ages, “The seed of the women shall crush the serpents head” (Genesis 3:15). Technology was changing while Adams’ mind wrestled with what was real and sublime. The spiritual composition of the Puritan thoughts of the Virgin had long since lost her ardor, being replaced with the discovery of bodies of atoms, rather than the beauty and power of the female form.

This disconnection from the spiritual makeup of what makes us Americans often gets lost as our country goes through new revelations of change. Adams was bothered by this, as well as the deeper meaning of sexuality and the female form. The connection was seen to ebb and flow in certain periods of our country’s development. The political concepts of religion conflicted with the concept of a new force which freed the worker as viewed by Karl Marx, while instituting the concept of a new era of freedom from labor. Yet, was the Mother of Knowledge (Virgin) being replaced by the Mother of Forces (Dynamo), whose deep intrinsic value was actually money and capitalism, rather than the higher spiritual calling of the Virgin Mother? When Adams was a puritan boy in Boston, the local chemist had, “…never heard of Venus except by way of scandal, or of the Virgin except as idolatry. Neither had he heard of Dynamos or automobiles or Radium; yet his mind was ready to feel the force of it all, though the rays were unborn and the women were dead…” (Adams 667). Every Puritan realized that Diana of the Ephesians, nor the goddess Artemus, was worshipped for her beauty. She was worshipped because of her force, an animated dynamo of reproduction and new life. Procreation was the fig leaf that America used for covering their Virgin of Force. She was standing in the harbor, holding her torch for all to see. Dante’s “Divine Comedy” invokes the Virgin just as Lucretius invokes Venus. The Venus bothered the Puritan mind. Adams and Langley struggled with concepts of force that dealt with the freedoms of society (political science) through the Virgin’s “Seven Liberal Arts” as well as those precepts that conflicted with her own birthplace in Rome. Langley had constantly “…repeated that the new forces were anarchical (support no order) and especially that he was not responsible for the new rays; that were little short of parricidal in their wicked spirit toward science…” (Adams 665).

Through the forces of the “Seven Liberal Arts,” America still retained a sexless art, which Adams struggled to understand. He slowly saw the connection of force being the female form in which all things flowed. “..On one side, at the Louvre and at the Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy known to man the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed…(Adams 668). The force of female power lay not only in her ability to bring love and reproduction, but stability to the American family structure.

In Mary Freeman’s “The Revolt of Mother,” her character Sarah revolts against Puritan ideals, echoing Adams’ struggle with new social forces, forces which ignore the female as keystone to the center of the American family. Her power is contained in her ability to get work done by her family, work that often was taken for granted, until some momentous event takes place in which the social structure itself is turned upside down by a women’s noble cause. Her place in life is transformed by her revolting against a system in which the noble Virgin and her seed are given second place in a male dominated society. She had taken her husbands name, allowed her children to take his name, with half of their genes and chromosomes coming from her body. The promise of a new home is replaced with a place holder of a home. The old house is falling down around mother. “…Mother, she said, don’t you think it is too bad father’s going to build that new barn, much as we need a decent house to live in…”(Freeman 759). This part of American life highlights the growing awareness of a woman’s need to take a larger role in education and influences in the American home. Mother was rightly named Sarah, akin to the wife of biblical Abraham; she expects the promise of a new home to be fulfilled. The final citadel of Adoniram is changed forever when father finally arrives home to a new reality. A long awaited consummation of marriage finally arrives through the unrepentant, nagging echoes of a promise. The equine adventure ends happily as father said, “Why, mother,” he said, hoarsely, “I hadn’t no idea you was so set on’t as all this comes” (Lauter 767). A final dwelling fit for a family appears through a woman’s love for her husband and children.

The family structure in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” seems to have become broken as the industrial revolution has given birth to generations of disgruntled workers, void of a woman’s love. Commerce has managed to take over our culture and politics to the point where nothing is good, unless it conforms to the standards of secular business dictums. Henry Adams’ Virgin has become buried even deeper in a quagmire of social and economic issues. I find Ginsberg to be on the level with Adams’ writing of “The Dynamo and the Virgin.” Ginsberg’s writing seems to connect to the aftermath of what is happening to our country’s loss of direction in life. For a country that continues to evolve, his writing is timeless. The question that needs to be asked, and maybe this is Ginsberg’s way of raising that question, is, when does degeneration set in for an Empire? The tower of Babel fell, Rome fell, each balanced by a manmade premise of glory and economics, cannon fodder for future historians. What became of Plato’s Utopia, or the Superman of the melting pot on the hill? Meanwhile, the hippy looks up, waiting for a deliverer, a Messianic precept whose completion only has to be acknowledged. Ginsberg’s section on Moloch really clarifies, at least in part, what he may be feeling toward the American way of life. Moloch was a pagan god mentioned in the bible and ancient history. His worship involved all that was opposite of morals we know to be commonly good. Children would be sacrificed to this pagan image by casting them into the fire. Often cannibalism was involved, as well as every kind of sexual deviation you can imagine. Ginsberg mentions the Sphinx, the common monster of the play “Oedipus Tyrannus,” by Sophocles. The Sphinx challenges the hero to solve the riddle or face death and plagues in the cities. In Ginsberg’s case, I believe his search for finding America’s roots lies in his depicting America’s capitalism in the guise of a type of Moloch incarnate. He sees the city of New York as a modern day Tower of Babel. “…They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!…” (Ginsberg 276-278). Ginsberg implies that America has lost its direction on what are most important, not material things; rather the real American dream is symbolically flushed down the river of death. “…They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers ! down to the river ! into the street!…” (Ginsberg 288-289).

The solution to stop the flushing of the American dream down the river of death can only be achieved by rediscovering the revelation of the hero cast as the Virgin of history. The embodiment of what it means to be that American hero through the flow of time is best represented by the three writers portrayal’s of history’s developing ideals. They embody the beginning, middle, and end of the developing decrees that constitute the heart of our social, economic, and religious values. Like the timeless story by Sophocles, “Oedipus Tyrannus,” Ginsberg’s narrator criticizes the loss of direction in a country that had so much hope, but lost the clues to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. “…What Sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination…?” (Ginsberg 242-43). If only they sought once again the answer to the question, one that plagued the hero Oedipus so long ago. Is it free will or fate that determines our final end? Free will that offer the clues through the words of life, “…with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years…?” (Ginsberg 240-41). As it is written, “…man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God… the words that I speak, they are spirit and they are truth…”(Luke 4:3-4). Ginsberg’s “Howl” reflects the weaknesses and innocent sincerity, which serves to enable each generation in their quest to find that proverbial needle in the hay stack, the Golden Fleece or life’s true meaning. Ginsberg and Adams both appear to be trying to capture the atmosphere of discovering the mystical nature that worked in unison with capitalism. In Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the narrator relates his generation’s search for answers. They are drawn away by illicit drugs, tempted to escape through suicide or madness. The kingdom that could be theirs, unlike that of Jason’s “Iolchos,” is already there, but its form has not yet been defined. The alchemy of love and family order has been stolen by the numerous traps set by bogus Prophets, “…Who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated …” (Ginsberg 10-12). The new forces may be those spoken by Thomas Jefferson, anarchic, but none-the-less a repetition that may become a historical model of revival. This new force can only be made good by the themes that Mary Freeman captures in her portrayal of American life. She evokes the feelings of family love and the need for the reemergence of the mothering of our nation. “…Like a fortress whose walls had no active resistance, and went down the instant the right besieging tools were used…” (Freeman 767).

Works Cited

Adams, Henry. The Dynamo and the Virgin. The Heath Anthology of American

Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002, 664-71.

Freeman, Mary. The Revolt of Mother. The Heath Anthology of American Literature.

Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002, 757-67.

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002, 2296-2304.

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