Humanyte

Wm Arrowsmith defined Humanyte in the way we seek. Chairman of the classics dept at Texas during the Athenian reign of John Silber, where I ended up between sojourns at HBCUs in Fayetteville and Dallas, the essence was this: the inspired amateur hits the mark, the professional, studied, the higher mind so called, becomes corrupt as soon as it leaves the realm of the intuitive implicit wonder of its life.  This is true of science let us add and religion, which puts in jeopardy more than the bulk of academia, corporate life, government and military vocations. For essentially the life of the child is the only integrity, therefore it has been said, a little child shall lead them. My exercise in humanyte begins in a row house in Germantown PA on Sedgwick St that backed up into an orphanage on a large embankment at the back surrounded by barred fences at the top. Children of the orphanage would stand  at the fences and catcall out at the a world to which they could not escape. I witnessed this at the earliest age from the back porch of that row house elevated also on an embankment at the earliest ages of two, three, four, and suppose now that this is the cause of all the little pretty ones I came to write of later in those poems of loving the world, where when your father grows up and your mother grows up, which means grows down, if down is the child, to the world of blossoms and waves, of children lifting pretty heads from pillowed beds, a highly romanticized take on the consternation and pain that child felt before age from that porch. In the front of the house up a slight gradient in memory, up on the high concrete steps from the sidewalk below,  he would sit after the mandatory afternoon nap in abstraction and more than once see his grandfather come up the walk, who would then tie his shoes. It was a slower different time, 1943 thereabouts. That grandfather much adored by his mother, being his daughter, would visit on occasion from whatever architect job he was working, for all these families lived in proximity in north Philadelphia, went to churches nearby each other, Tioga Presbyterian, First Mennonite engaged the same lives, but not wealthy, my father had to borrow the down payment for that house from his sister, Libby, the watercolor artist and curmudgeon of later years, as I discovered, for the first knowledge was this grandfather, E. A. Yeo, who had lived in large tents on the New Jersey lakes while he build by hand a very large house on a lake that in those poems I, again romantically associate with the afterlife. This was before the youth criticized the aged. Immediate family included an older brother and younger sister at that time, two more added later. The older brother added to the pathos when he was seen coming through a honeysuckle arbor in full bloom with bees, the perfume of yellow and white flowers there offset by the blood pouring from his nose, for he attracted bullies the way flowers did bees all his life. When they overflowed into my life I generally offered them the first punch as they surrounded me like the bulls of Bashan on one occasion. When I had decided to fight however the Blood among flowers, a predominant image, red on gold, Siegfried, the Nibelungenlied warriors, translated to Wales where 300 of them against an infantry of ten thousand, there might be a harvest in a cutting down, predominant images in the later Taliesin. Orphans, children, warriors, blood accrue somehow into the new world, the Viking, St. Brendan, Raleigh, the primitive, the naïve, the Cotswold world lost and found at the same time together, stirring sympathies of the amateur humanyte without introspection or planning. So neither have all these poetical and prose works or the sculptural ceramics been a result of deliberation, but of the moment, observed later and made some sense of after the fact. It is a mixed up way to compose. The last note is the first. When that Germantown family moved to the Chartiers valley outside Pittsburgh when that boy was five that began the next echelon of the natural world in that life roaming the hills, creeks and remains of strip mines polluted ye beautiful landscape, itself an explanation of life among good and evil, corrupt and pure, or at least the desire for it, sum total of all literature and life in every author of note and in all those not. Literature, the land and the people that inhabit become hence the story to tell of our Humanyte.