The Cambridge Scene

He wore a fool's cap crowned with tiny bells, and he strummed, of all things, a lyre--probably brass, but it looked gold. And he said:

I am the myth-maker, the symbolist, the seer of truths. I have wandered down the pedestrian centuries, beneath the bright flags, toting a bag of legends and singing the old songs. I have been Homer's eyes. I suggested Mephistopheles. They say--with some salt to be sure--that I pinched Beatrice and Dante merely followed her flight to comfort. I am the Muse, the Artist, or if you will, the Human Venture. You may think my costume outlandish and my demeanor strange; but that is your fault, not mine. I have endured.

In each age I have found a home: I was swaddled in immortality and time was my play-pen. Men burned candles at my altar--in religion, poetry, the sciences. All the professions engendered their terms, and the terms became symbols, and the symbols grew into myths, and the myths became legends. And the legends were allegories, teaching the racial wisdom.

I was at home in Thebes; I whispered in Cassandra's ear; I felt secure in the shadow of the cross; I rode phantom horses through the Nordic lands and danced on the Northern twilight--among the apparitions of the imagination.

In this time only am I alone.

I counseled the children as they spoke, one heart to another. I understand the idiot's smile. I sing of the simple savage.

Know me, and you know why man aspired from the cave to Westchester County, from the sling to the mushroom cloud. Know me, and you know that primitive man conceived in images, that his images were ideas; that he ascribed words to these ideas. And now, in this technological century, the word has grown further from the idea, until they have separated, and the word is all. The shattered images lie in a pile, along with utopia and dreams.

The dream needs neither time nor mathematics.

Ask me why you have no poets and no epics. Ask me to talk to you of greatness and Art. I will tell you that you are lost. That the Indian with the name of a bird and the hieroglyphic picture-writing and the stone monuments of island cultures have a wisdom which you lack. They have not divided the estate of God into man and nature, into past and present. They have not abandoned the essence of image and the picture-idea.

Civilization, and the apotheosis of abstraction. When words become their own meaning, when Angry Young Men and hipsters plunge into the night and the academicians experiment with style--ask me why there is no literature.

Did not Eliot return to dead cultures, ancient languages, and the Legend of the Fisher King? Did not Yeats sustain himself on the Irish folklore? Did not Lawrence traipse across continents to Mexico, seeking the meaning of the Aztecs, the wisdom of primitive man?

What obsessed scowling Melville to create a new symbolism of the sea? Whence Faulkner's new mythology? Why all the shouting and none of the beauty of literature?

I will tell you, for I know. There are no men who think symbolically. There are no artists who understand the myth. These are no times to sing of the Abstract and the investigating subcommittee.

You come nearest to the ancient rhythms in jazz and rock 'n' roll. Your modern art has lost its meaning. The myth, tongue of the unconscious and language of the race, was sanctioned solely by children, savages, and fools--before Freud. And now only by psychiatrists.

The modern poet comes to symbolism with a consciousness: This is a symbol, meaning such and such. But a symbol means itself, and must be understood for itself, and must be conceived.

Freud discovered mythology and meaning in the dream, explained Hamlet and charted the mind by means of Oedipus. Jung wrote of archetypes, of the recurring myth in art, of the common symbols of man. There is a racial consciousness, a spiritus mundi--human history is community property among the family of artists. But the word has supplanted the Idea.

I condemn you, who have made me an orphan. You attack the logic of religion and laugh, at cocktail parties, over totem poles and pillars. You dismiss mystics as paranoids and prophets as crackpots. You pride yourselves as Men of Logic when your understanding is mechanical. In your anxiety to reason, you have for gotten how to feel.

Yours is a motel civilization, from gentlemen farmers to university professors. Your literature has standardized the Bible and propitiated the cult of the Word. Your art makes no sense and your music is too loud. You cannot speak to one another and you have for gotten who you are. You have only dictionaries and manuals and wireless sets--tuned in to nothing and listening attentively to babble.

And you give me no home. No home but park benches and gutters and all-night motion picture houses full of sailors. No home but pinball machines and erotica shelves and occasional wine cellars, and a night in jail.

I do not begrudge my loneliness, not my persecution. But you have taken my lyre and broken it, and spit on the dead centuries, and rendered art into pornography. For what it availeth, I can do naught but curse you.

There aren't many soap boxes for men with bells on their heads. (The bells had a tinny sound, anyway.) And, what with his plaid patches and his broken lyre, the myth-maker was only marking time until a vagrancy charge or an asylum.

Besides, only a few of us saw him, and we were drunk at the time.