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PARTISAN REVIEW
manifestations which are governed by psychological and aesthetic
needs rather than by objective reason and physical law.
Such habits of mind do not flourish in an efficient technological
society. Visions of Our Lady are more likely to appear in rural
Spain than at Los Alamos or Oak Ridge where they are perhaps
more needed. Navajo children who have gone away to American
schools have difficulty thereafter in remembering the chants for the
numerous ceremonials (there used to be eight hundred songs for
the creation myth and four hundred and forty for the hail chant).
In American education generally there is no training of the sym–
bolic and associative faculties which are so spontaneously lively in
children, who naturally personalize and emotionalize days, seasons,
ages, places, and all kinds of animate and inanimate objects. In
religious societies this kind of subjective differentiation is formalized
as part of the pattern of adult experience. American novelists can deal
imaginatively with childhood, but our culture provides no adequate
means for making a richly and traditionally patterned response to the
emotional experiences of adult life. In American schools imaginative
literature is treated as a branch of social science by teachers trained
in a pseudo-scientific methodology whose vocabulary alone is enough
to kill all imaginative feelings. Self-expression in painting is en–
couraged, but the offering of models, the suggestion of themes or
symbolic patterns is ruled out. Since there is nothing in the culture
outside the school to sustain the metaphoric and symbolic sense, to
teach the doctrine of signatures in all things, no way is opened from
the individual imagination to the traditional cultural heritage, and
spiritually essential faculties are allowed to atrophy.
Compare the meager ritual and symbolism of our few secularized
public holidays with the agonalia, carmentalia, lupercalia, matronalia,
saturnalia, robigalia, vertumnalia, fornacalia, palilia, 1aralia, etc., of
the ancient Roman year, many of whose rites are duplicated in the
pagan-Catholic fiestas of South American villages today. The same
comparative poverty exists in our rites of passage, of birth, puberty,
initiation, marriage, death. The Christmas parades provided by de–
partment stores at Thanksgiving time for children can draw on
folk tales and comics for their themes, but displays directed at adults,
like the huge Aquatennial parade in Minneapolis, are totally barren
thematically. They consist of nothing but chocolate-box advertising
