Transcript
{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this
...and speech. Who was the gentleman who said he had never seen a mask? {Here was this}. Who was it? Didn't you say you had never seen a mask of a tribe? Wie? Who was it?
(He's not here today.)
There were some more people who were ignorant. Huh? Well, here, gentlemen.
This is a mask from the museum, gentlemen. I took only the most solid one. And that's already a m- -- comp- -- comp- -- compound -- a compromise between Spanish influence and a Guatemala mask. It's very important, gentlemen. It's the puma, one of the important animals of the place. And I want you to go to Mr. {Bourne's} place, to the museum on College Street and -- to look at the New Guinea mask there, which I think is the most beautiful. It is rea- -- if you compare this rather ultra-realistic, and clumsy, and ugly wooden mask--which is already under the influence of the Church; it was used in a Guatemala religious place, and is a compromise between the old pagan tradition and the Christian tradition--and you will see there the most delicate mask, which I couldn't carry over here, because it would have crumbled--it was too dangerous--you may get, if you want to, an impression of the -- of the greatness of this tribal art, where it is uncompromising, and where it is pure. You will si- -- see there that art has all -- everywhere the idealistic features of seeing in one face--there is another animal--the whole world. And seeing, as we see in a Greek statue of a god, beauty. You will admit that Venus, the -- Aphrodite of -- of Melos is a beautiful body.
So you will see the -- the power of one starting point, one specific starting point of this one mask to get man into a dream of the order of the universe. Around the mask there, there is play -- there is woven -- there are woven all kind of implements. And I told Mr. {Bourne} that you would come, so -- who has not been to the museum yet, ever? Be honest. Well, the others all took Sociology 1, huh?
I would like to make things simple for you today, and dwell on this problem, gentlemen, that all our modern human economic, and capitalistic, and socialistic, and communistic problems--which Marx has developed at great length--are contained in this mask. You may have heard--some of you--that Mas- -- Marx' whole problem of the proletariat is developed on the basis of self-alienation, that the worker in modern capitalism is alienated from self. Who has heard
this expression? Only these few people? Well, it's the basis of Marxism. Please, I would like to know who has heard this expression of self-alienation? It's terribly important. It plays the greatest part in the propaganda of Communism against capitalism, gentlemen. It says that under capitalism, in our big -- big corporations, man is alienated from himself while he is working. And it's simply true.
But what Marx, in his narrowing down the problem of the good life to the production, did not see was that the first man alienated himself from his own generation in order to speak. That -- this mask is self-alienation. All masks are, gentlemen. Anybody who is a professional lawyer or a professional doctor is alienated from himself. You couldn't trust a doctor who was selfish. You couldn't trust a man -- a doctor who might poison you because you are his enemy. You can go to a doctor. He will not poison you, because he is a doctor, not because he isn't a hateful and spiteful human self. But he has superseded this by the mask of his profession, which today we -- express by the white gown which he's wearing. -- And in an operation, he even wears a mask. But that's a very minor matter, of course. But the great thing is, gentlemen, that history begins with man's power to say farewell to himself. There is no man in history -- you aren't here if you couldn't be Dartmouth students. You aren't a Dartmouth student, Sir. You become a Dartmouth student. And while you are a Dartmouth student, you are not yourself. You play a role. Very insufficiently, by the way.
The full role perhaps, in -- of a -- real Dartmouth student is played by the Senior Fellows and Palaeopitus, because they are responsible, in a way for -- for the rank of a Dartmouth student. Palaeopitus by hi- -- their morality, and Senior Fellows by their high intelligence. The rest of you are just by -- so to speak, on the way of being -- representing Dartmouth College. More or less you abuse the shield and screen of Dartmouth College. Not one of you really could say to himself that he -- you could re-create Dartmouth College as the most representative student. But you are just a little bit of it, aren't you? Therefore, you are on the way of alienating yourself from yourself, and become the ideal Dartmouth student. That is, you are playing a role. And without playing this role, you can't become educated.
Therefore, gentlemen, to participate in human speech means to be able--will you kindly be very sure that you get this?--to admit into yourself some power which is not yourself. This mask, the actor, anybody who -- enacts something, you see--a legislator who says, "Be it enacted a law," means that he speaks with authority to other generations. No self has a right to say anybody -- anything to anybody else about what he should do, you see. Self has nothing to say to self. If you were not the father to this child, you had no right to command this child. If you were just one selfish animal playing football with your own son--as the -- American ideal is, that the father should always be the playmate of this
child--that's -- chil- -- childish, gentlemen. That's your ideal of fatherhood. But a father is a man who represents to the child, history. He represents to his child what is -- has gone on before, and what the child is going to be. He says ev- -- you, all of you, when you get a son, you have only a right to educate him if you can talk him into becoming a father. A son is a potential father. And therefore, you owe him fatherhood. That is, you have to show him what it is to be a father. That's the relation of son and father. And that means the creation of the family names, the -- the -- rel- -- names for our relationships. You -- if you speak to your children, you see, you appeal to their already now knowing what they are going to be. And they, of course, must be made aware -- what you have been. They must -- and can only understand you if they understand that you once have been a child and are now grown up.
So gentlemen, when we speak, we act. We perform a role in society. Speech is always drama. And the play-stage, to which you go, makes only sense if there is ser- -- serious acting. We have so little drama today, because the philosophy of this society is against separating self and the agency which I represent. You say, "We're all just human beings," and so we are down to the animal level.
Man is that being, gentlemen, who can allow others who have been before him, and others who come after him to be let in -- into him. It's a rather artificial way of expressing it. But I have to be so primitive to remind you that humanity begins with the knowledge: who has been before me, and who will be after me? It is always a three-generation problem. You pray in church of God: "He who has been in the beginning is now and ever shall be." Now the whole Creed, gentlemen, of Christianity is so universal and so eternal, because it has embraced all previous achievements, and one of the tribal features is embodied in our Creed by this verse, by this sentence: that God has been before us, is now and ever shall be.
Put it around, gentlemen: the tribes experience a spiritual power, what we call divine. We call it "demons," perhaps, now, or "ancestral spirits." They experience them by coming to know for the first time other -- differently from animals, who had been before them, and who was going to come after them. Could you take this down, gentlemen? It's worth your while, because you don't find this interpretation anywhere. There are two great things in our Creed which are representing the tribal tradition of mankind. One, this -- before, now, and after. And the other is that we say of Christ that he came to judge the living -- the quick and the dead. -- Gentlemen, in the tribes, the dead judge the quick--the living, "quick" meaning, you see. The people play in order to admit into their lives a greater memory, a greater continuity, a greater time span, an avenue through time, the continuity of the race. They admit into themselves the role of
previous generations, and the role of generations to come. And this is expressed in antiquity by the fact that the living fear the dead. They fear to be judged by the dead. The judge will come back and sit in judgment. You have to respond to the eyes of the ancestor when you wish to live right.
And therefore, when Jesus reva- -- revamps our Creed by saying that Christ is beyond this distinction between the living and the dead, it means that the dead come under judgment as much as the living. But in the tribes, this is not true, gentlemen. In the tribe, the dead are beyond reproach. The dead are right. And the living have to be judged by the dead.
So the -- our Creed corrects a tradition of still one-fourth of humanity, of all tribal traditions, when it is said that the -- that the dead judge the quick. The authority of what has been, as in any good Republican--in Bob Taft or so--is that we were right and we were wrong. And that's still in you -- all in -- of you, very strong, gentlemen.
When President Hoover in the Depression was told that the -- we had 13 million unemployed, and that only 4 million of these had any support, and that ni- -- 9 million were starved -- starving, and that something had to be done about them--there had to be a dole, there had to be an unemployment insurance, something--he said that this is the most dangerous and newest proposition that has ever been made in the history of the United States. He was -- had the ancestral spirit besetting him. That is, because it never had been done before, he thought that 9 million people and their families in this country could die from famine. That's how strong even today this -- the feeling is that the dead judge the quick. Don't laugh off this formula in the Creed, gentlemen, if Christ would not judge the quick and the dead, He would have no progress. It would be quite impossible. Because the dead to this day would judge the quick.
Now most of you come from families where the dead judge the quick. Any family is prone just to this attitude, because the family is the remnant of tribal tradition. In the family, the -- usually the -- the dead judge the quick. Our -- reporting, gentlemen, said that the dead speak to the quick, to the living. But that's only a milder expression for saying that they judge the -- the living, because if you say they speak to the living, it means that they direct the living. They tell them what's right and wrong. They give them direction.
So I take up his own sentence, which he repeated, by the way, not -- wantonly several times in his report. Don't repeat yourself in a report. Say everything once. You see, I have to say everything many times so that you can get it. But when you render it, you have to say everything only once, in order to show that you have understood it. Teaching is repetition, you see. But learning is
know- -- knowledge, you see. That's a great difference.
Well, that's a -- just -- about your reports, gentlemen. In your report, you have not the right to repeat. But I, in teaching, have to repeat. I have to say everything 20 times, and you have to, out of 20 times, finally to get it, once.
So the dead judge the -- quick, because they teach them to speak, because the only ego, gentlemen, in a tribe are the ancestors. The first experience of human beings, in this world of ours, in humanit- -- in human history is that the living are addressed. Addressees, they are. They are "thee." If you still say, "Poor me," you still have the feeling that somebody is talking to you--your mother, you see--and addressing you in the -- for -- in the accusative as "me." That's why we speak of ourselves when we are sane as "me." And when we are insane as "I." The "I" plays God. Nobody can say "I" except God Himself. A painter, when he is inspired, can write, "I have painted it," because he feels that while he painted it, God was with him.
Anybody who says "I," gentlemen, plays the role of a spirit. And anybody who is a decent person speaks of "Poor me." And in a tribe, you have still this sanity that the living do not dare to say "I." The only person who speaks "I" in the tribe is the man who wears this mask. "I" is the person of the mask. The first person in a tribe is he who already has left the tribe and is now kept alive by the medicine man.
And now you can study the performance of the medicine -- perhaps a little closer. The man who puts on this, gentlemen, can only be seen through his eyes and through his tongue. If I -- the only opening here is the tongue. So the -- that power that speaks to the living, gentlemen, is the tongue of the tribe. That's why language is called the "tongue." Every human being in the tribe has to give up his natural, his selfish tongue, and receive the tongue of the tribe. The tongue of the tribe, gentlemen, is the first spiritual ling- -- limb, so to speak, which is put into you, by initiation. Everybody has to learn the tribal tongue. I promised to -- show you what it means to create speech. Well, it means that a -- a universal, common tongue has to be implanted into your body. Your fleshly tongue is good for eating. It is not good for speech. How to pronounce, what to say, how to intone, how to articulate, you see, is something that has to be created in every nation, in every group. That's how you learn to speak. That's why we can speak of the mother tongue. The mother tongue is not the fleshly tongue in your body, obviously, you see. But it is the tongue which has to be taught, which has to be impregnated. And it takes, gentlemen, all these years until you graduate from college, until you commence, to teach you your tongue, the tongue in which you have to speak.
So you come here to the first layer of creation, gentlemen. The tongue, which you take to be just an anatomical, a physiological, or carnal thing is in fact the first instrument of your spiritual life. In speaking English, you impersonate that which the medicine man has conveyed to you as the message from beyond the grave. Your tongue makes you hear what the dead have to tell you.
And it is still true to this day, gentlemen. You cannot express anything which English doesn't contain. How can you? You have all megalomania. You say -- you say what you think. Gentlemen, you don't think. Drop this illusion. I still have to find a Dartmouth student who thinks. You speak, you prattle, you discuss, you debate with words which you have grabbed somewhere in an editorial or in a broadcast. And so that -- are not your own words. Not one of you has a right to call these words your own. I will call your words your own if you die for them on the battlefield. A soldier. One of you has fought in Korea. I would say he knows what he's talking about. You don't. You're playing with all these things. And -- the sooner you come -- become aware of the fact that your words have no meaning -- outside the stream of the tradition of English--and human language in general--the more -- powerful you will become in your eloquence, gentlemen. The person who know...
[tape interruption]
...{didn't want to} do anything. Stand on your head and say it's normal. This is the infamy of the modern college student, that he'll sell his truth, his convictions, his opinions for a joke.
Therefore gentlemen, you don't know what speech is. Speech is the {label} of the dead. That's the first thing. It goes with every word, gentlemen. If you say, "Good," you must mean "good." Because "good" means that you know what you should do. That's what the meaning of the word "good" is. It entitles you to -- to loo- -- watch out that you don't fall on evil days.
That is, gentlemen, all words are imperatives to the man who speaks them. They are commands. The character, gentlemen, of all language in seriousness is not description, and is not statement of natural laws or any such nonsense, gentlemen. That's all belated sophistry. The whole problem is that when your father calls you "Son," you have to be his son, and become once the father of your self- -- -same family. Anytime your father calls you "Son," he makes you into a son. You can withdraw, and disobey, and not behave as a son, or it may impress you so much that he has called you "Dear Son," in his letters that you will do the -- and fulfill the honor of your family.
Will you take this down, gentlemen? All names are vocatives and impera-
tives. They are commands. You will never recover from the complete degradation of the American mind at this moment if you do not turn around and say, "Words are not mere words." Where they are talk -- speak -- spoken in love and loyalty, they are meant to command you. Any word is a command, Sir. If you say "death," you know this is -- commands you to think that you must die. "Death" is not the description of an animal death, you see. It's the reminder of where you are heading for. So there -- there is no -- sim- -- no word in the hu- -- human language which is not a directing force. Why is that so, gentlemen? Because all speech would be impossible if we could not put ourselves into -- somebody else's shoes. To speak means to become an orchestra, a symphony, a group within myself, because the tribesman who hears the ancestor speak, you see, receives into himself the knowledge of somebody else's life. Speech, gentlemen, is always social in the sense that society enters you by every word you speak.
The first thing, gentlemen, is that you acquire, because somebody died before you and now speaks to you through this mask of this puma here, is that you know that you must die. Now no animal knows that it must die. We know. You can therefore acquire freedom of action. If you would know that you were able to die, you couldn't make any sacrifices, couldn't be able to distinguish between important and unimportant things, you see. If you wouldn't know that you die, you will overeat every day, you see, and you will just throw everything out of the window. You will not lay something in for -- for a rainy af- -- day. Because -- why? The -- you -- you are immortal, nothing can happen to you. The immortal gods are immoral. They have no reason to be moral, you see. If you can go through any -- automobile accident and never die, obviously -- why not have automobile accidents? The only -- the only thing why you don't like to have them is that you may die.
Well, this is only a very subtle thing, gentlemen. You take it for granted, because your language has taught it -- you, that you know you must die, and that you have a limited life. Gentlemen, do you know that this is the one thing that distinguishes you from the animal? Your foreknowledge of your own death gives you freedom. Animals are not free because they have no foreknowledge of their death, and therefore they cannot deviate from their instinctive life. You know this very well. They have to fight like mad for their own life, because they think that's all they have. They are within their own life. Anybody who speaks, gentlemen--since he knows what has gone on before, and what is to come hereafter, since he has been called "Son" by his father, and since he has called somebody "Son," himself--is immersed in a continuity which is bigger than he himself. And therefore he can place his own life in perspective. There is no law and order without this, gentlemen. If you do not know that your life is between two other lives, you can neither think, nor speak, nor act with any freedom.
This is the one side, gentlemen, of speech, that speech explodes self. Therefore, all speech is supernatural. We don't have speech by nature, because by nature: everybody to himself. By supernature: we, all together. All speech proclaims solidarity of all generations through time. Speech is the great proclamation of the solidarity of the human generations. Because the dead assume there the power to be still here, and endow men therefore with the same overflowing superenergy of talking to the -- coming generations. All this, as you know, has been given up in the naturalistic gospel of our days by -- Americans. They have -- said they -- "We have no right to tell our children anything." This is all nonsense, gentlemen. They have given up not only the right to tell something to their children, but to say anything themselves. That's -- the only thing you get are -- who are the representative Americans today? Bob Hope, and -- and -- what's the other gentleman? And he isn't even a gentleman.
Here, the comics -- are -- the -- comics mean -- is an attempt to get out of this continuity of the history into self again. That's the attempt of a comic strip. It's the annulment of history. What is comical, gentlemen, means that you can look at it from the point of view of self, and how little the self is able to step into the role of history, how weak we are.
So we have -- I -- my pr- -- trouble with you is, gentlemen, that everything that this country, and Darwinism, and the last hundred years of naturalism have sought to imply, that we are nothing but dirt and shit--which we are--and that we are -- have to die, that we are animals, does not explain our discovery that we are animals. The animals are animals, but they can't say that they are animals. We can, and we can even distinguish the points where we are not animals.
So man s- -- knows how far he is a puma, gentlemen, and how far he is not a puma. And that's the interesting fact about the character of the masks. How many more minutes?
(About two.)
Ach!
You took -- got the -- the -- strong points, gentlemen, that when we speak, we explode the hard shell of our selfishness. To speak means to ig- -- let into ourselves the stream of life that runs through all generations. Speech is times united. Not nation -- not -- not nations united, not the United Nations, but united times. Because we speak so that we shall know what has been before and who is to be hereafter. You see the little difference. Our weak, modern philosophers say, "What is -- has been before, and what comes?" In the tribal tradition, of course, the only interest is: "Who has been before, and who is going to come, and
who is today?"
And to give you -- unfortunately this is here, now. If you want to know then what speech does, gentlemen, I have to revive three expressions of the English language. They are obsolete in part--this word is obsolete, but it still exists in the dictionary. Language gives men three things. You call them just with a dead word, "perspective." That's not good. But it makes you able to pay your respects backward. The respective character of speech me- -- deals with the past. The conspective deals with men and women of your own generation. And the prospective, of course, deals with the children and -- aren't -- and grandchildren to come.
[tape interruption]
...animal, this puma descendant, who admits that he comes from the animal kingdom, that he is entitled and empowered to know of the spirit who is the same--whether in retrospect or in prospect, in advance, or in conspicuity--around him. And it is this, gentlemen, which is so strange. As you know, in the last hundred years, you have boasted that you descend from the apes, from the animal. Now these people knew that they came from the puma, and they dreaded it. And they wanted to be thrown beyond the puma. The funny thing is that you boast of having sprung from the apes. They were ashamed of it. They wanted to speak. They threw themselves, with the help of this role, beyond the ordinary puma. They are speaking pumas. Don't you see? It's the distinction between the puma...
[tape interruption]
...the whole animal kingdom, and the whole botany kingdom, the whole plant kingdom, and be all to all men, all plants, all animals. Because the step which Darwin and you people, of the Chamber of Commerce of America think is wonderful that you are just in the jungle and just apes, to them was the challenge to be more than an ape, to speak out, and to be that animal, gentlemen, which is -- conscious of itself through his whole life on earth. To super- -- overcome the dead -- the animal death is the whole problem of speech, gentlemen. I speak because I come from animals. That pushes me forward. Mr. Sartre has expressed it today in a new expression: man is that being which is thrown into the future. That's modern existentialism. It's the same thing all the time, gentlemen. Give up this ridiculous laughter that you know better than the Bible and say that man came from the animal. Gentlemen, the Bible says that man came after the animal. But he -- it says that he came after the animal. That's all the difference. You see, you say you spring from the animal, then you are nothing but animals. But the Bible says that we came after the animal. Then we are
something different. We still come after the animal. And you all the time -- we can only add to the animal this one thing that no lion knows of his father, and of his grandfather. But we do.
Thank you.