89
Light turns to darkness and back again. Love lasts until its origins have vanished. Is
it so among other species? Even the most intimate human family connections turn
sour and grave, as in the case of the Indian young man suing his parents for not
conferring with him before choosing to give birth to him who claims that life is suffering.
7
In 1879 Henry George’s book Progress and Poverty
8
was acquired by millions of readers caught up in the most paradoxical of a Progressive Era, as more and
more people became enfranchised in direct proportion to the multitudes plunged
into poverty. That paradox fueled the vital correspondence between Leo Tolstoy and
Mahatma Gandhi during their own respective efforts to resurrect a tenable proposition of equality and sustainability within community life, from South Africa to
Czarist Russia. Certain inexplicabilities taunted both the great Russian Christian
communitarian sage of War and Peace, and India’s complicated liberator from
England. With hindsight we can decipher other characteristics marking the whole
long saga of noble savage conceptualizations from English surgeon Walter Hamond
to Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and even mid-nineteenth-century American artists and
poets from George Catlin to Henry David Thoreau. Each of them imagined a world
where the most “primitive” among us were the most enlightened (Figs. 9.2 and 9.3).
It was Hamond who, in 1640, published his emphatically romanticized treatise,
A Paradox, Prooving, That The Inhabitants Of The Isle Called Madagascar, Or St.
Lawrence, (In Temporall Things) Are The Happiest People In The World.
9
As for
Catlin’s own dream of a personal paradise, at the time of his death in Jersey City in
1872, his entire collection of remarkable Native Americana, containing “over 500
paintings, all in neat and appropriate frames, and my notes completely prepared,
explanatory of everything in it” remained unsaleable. For decades the great explorer,
artist, and ethnographer had failed to persuade with his beloved Indian Gallery. No
historical society, nor the Smithsonian (which would wait and acquire it for free
years later), showed the slightest interest. Catlin perished knowing that not one of
his paintings ever sold, despite his enormous contribution to history’s understanding
of nineteenth-century Indian life. He, who had advocated for all of Native Americana
to be enshrined as a national park, would see his great dream vanish in much the
manner of his successor, the photographer Edward Curtis who had initially deemed
it fitting to name his 20-volume masterpiece The Vanishing Race.
10
History has its
Volume 1, New York, 1895. See Donne’s Biathanatos, A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or Thesis,
that Self-homicide is not so naturally sin…London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1648.
7 “India man to sue parents for giving birth to him,” BBC News US, February 7, 2019, https://www.
bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287, Accessed February 7, 2019.
8 Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of
Want with Increase of Wealth – The Remedy, Wm. M. Hinton & Co., San Francisco.
9 …Whereunto Is Prefixed, A Briefe And True Description Of That Island, With Most Probable
Arguments Of A Hopefull And Fit Plantation Of A Colony There. Published for Nathaniel Butter,
London.
10 See George Catlin And His Indian Gallery, by Brian W. Dippie, Therese Thau Heyman,
Christopher Mulvey and Joan Carpenter Troccoli, Edited by George Gurney and Therese Thau
Heyman, Smithsonian American Art Museum and W.W.Norton & Company, Washington D.C.,
2002, from Christopher Mulvey’s essay, “George Catlin in Europe,” pp. 63–64.
9.1 The Ineffable Landscape
Light turns to darkness and back again. Love lasts until its origins have vanished. Is
it so among other species? Even the most intimate human family connections turn
sour and grave, as in the case of the Indian young man suing his parents for not
conferring with him before choosing to give birth to him who claims that life is suffering.
7
In 1879 Henry George’s book Progress and Poverty
8
was acquired by millions of readers caught up in the most paradoxical of a Progressive Era, as more and
more people became enfranchised in direct proportion to the multitudes plunged
into poverty. That paradox fueled the vital correspondence between Leo Tolstoy and
Mahatma Gandhi during their own respective efforts to resurrect a tenable proposition of equality and sustainability within community life, from South Africa to
Czarist Russia. Certain inexplicabilities taunted both the great Russian Christian
communitarian sage of War and Peace, and India’s complicated liberator from
England. With hindsight we can decipher other characteristics marking the whole
long saga of noble savage conceptualizations from English surgeon Walter Hamond
to Rousseau, Chateaubriand, and even mid-nineteenth-century American artists and
poets from George Catlin to Henry David Thoreau. Each of them imagined a world
where the most “primitive” among us were the most enlightened (Figs. 9.2 and 9.3).
It was Hamond who, in 1640, published his emphatically romanticized treatise,
A Paradox, Prooving, That The Inhabitants Of The Isle Called Madagascar, Or St.
Lawrence, (In Temporall Things) Are The Happiest People In The World.
9
As for
Catlin’s own dream of a personal paradise, at the time of his death in Jersey City in
1872, his entire collection of remarkable Native Americana, containing “over 500
paintings, all in neat and appropriate frames, and my notes completely prepared,
explanatory of everything in it” remained unsaleable. For decades the great explorer,
artist, and ethnographer had failed to persuade with his beloved Indian Gallery. No
historical society, nor the Smithsonian (which would wait and acquire it for free
years later), showed the slightest interest. Catlin perished knowing that not one of
his paintings ever sold, despite his enormous contribution to history’s understanding
of nineteenth-century Indian life. He, who had advocated for all of Native Americana
to be enshrined as a national park, would see his great dream vanish in much the
manner of his successor, the photographer Edward Curtis who had initially deemed
it fitting to name his 20-volume masterpiece The Vanishing Race.
10
History has its
Volume 1, New York, 1895. See Donne’s Biathanatos, A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or Thesis,
that Self-homicide is not so naturally sin…London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1648.
7 “India man to sue parents for giving birth to him,” BBC News US, February 7, 2019, https://www.
bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287, Accessed February 7, 2019.
8 Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of
Want with Increase of Wealth – The Remedy, Wm. M. Hinton & Co., San Francisco.
9 …Whereunto Is Prefixed, A Briefe And True Description Of That Island, With Most Probable
Arguments Of A Hopefull And Fit Plantation Of A Colony There. Published for Nathaniel Butter,
London.
10 See George Catlin And His Indian Gallery, by Brian W. Dippie, Therese Thau Heyman,
Christopher Mulvey and Joan Carpenter Troccoli, Edited by George Gurney and Therese Thau
Heyman, Smithsonian American Art Museum and W.W.Norton & Company, Washington D.C.,
2002, from Christopher Mulvey’s essay, “George Catlin in Europe,” pp. 63–64.
9.1 The Ineffable Landscape