The Fire and the Rock

November 23, 1966
Plainfield
Thanksgiving Eve

The Fire and the Rock

Underlying all the dynamics of social change and beyond the undeniable cultural differences in the family of man, there is an imperishable truth which needs emphasis at the time of Thanksgiving. To feel good about the bounty of the earth while being irresponsible about the obligations of proper stewardship is to ensure disaster by remembering the fire and forgetting the rock.

The Promethean myth has remained an enduring symbolic creation, particularly for those who are optimistic about human nature and hopeful about the possibility of human progress by human effort. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Man’s mind became the difference between human and non-human animals. The fire of the gods symbolized man’s acquisition of the power to reason, the skill to invent, adapt, and use tools. This evening, perhaps, the theft of god-fire represents the discovery and refinement of agriculture. In ancient days, more remote than history records, man learned that he need not wander in search of wild berries, nuts, and game. He learned to scatter the good seed on the land, to domesticate goat, sheep, and cattle, and to wait patiently as the seed germinated, as green broke through the crust of earth, then bud and bloom and harvest. Man learned he had to store his crops in order to live from harvest to harvest. Paying the high costs of experience, man found that soil must be fertilized and fields like fallow now and then if the harvest was to remain bountiful.

The cost of storms and the terrible experiences of flood taught the human family to be wary of weather. So ingrained is the sensitivity to weather that even today with our steam heat and air conditioning, seldom does a conversation proceed without reference to sun and shadow, rain and clear, freeze and thaw.

Much has changed, particularly in the lifetimes of many of us. Our barns are supermarkets or freezers in the basement. Few of us ever till the soil. Our work on the good earth is largely confined to manicuring lawns and tending domesticated flowers. Our milk is powdered; our peas are frozen; our bread is fortified; our diet reinforced with capsuled vitamins; our potatoes come already fried; our meat boned; and in some households, even the Thanksgiving turkey arrives already roasted.

One of the jingling songs one hears around Thanksgiving time is “over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go.” For a few, perhaps this is still true to their experience. But for many of us, one grandmother may have lived in a thickly-populated city; and the other grandmother we never knew because she stayed in the old country. Today when we go over (or under) the river, we are more likely to go through a toll booth than through the woods.

But the basic insight of the Promethean fire remains. Man has converted the powers and abundance of earth to man’s use. Because of man’s ability to think, to reflect on experience, to propose change, to pass on to his posterity the lessons he has learned and the tools he has developed, man has accumulated skills and knowledge in an amount and complexity that is a perpetual astonishment.

Man has converted the plant to fiber; the chemical to fabric; the herb to medicine; the rocks of the earth to shining steel bars and shapes; the sap of trees to flexible rubber.

Man has converted the drops of petroleum to combustible power; man has converted the falling waters to light and power; man has converted mass to energy, unlocking the door to incredible power.

The fire Prometheus stole from the gods symbolizes these – the power to discover, know, re-learn and pass on the tested knowledge so that the new generation does not have to start at the beginning. A son could pick up where the father put down.

But one of the tragic oversights of man has been to forget, or underestimate, the other half of the Promethean myth, the rock. For his presumption and impertinence in stealing the fire of the gods, Prometheus was condemned to be forever chained to the rock in never-ending torture as a vulture continually ate his body. This was the punishment for stealing fire – knowledge. There has been a price to being human because we have not always been proper stewards of the abundance and energies we have converted from the bounty of the earth.

One of the memories our family has of Yellowstone Park is the instruction of the Park Rangers not to feed the bears who beg so cutely (or fearsomely, depending on how scared one is when a ... bruin approaches). Bears should not be fed candy bars or peanuts or crackers or sugar-lumps because then they may fail to eat sufficient wild-berries and other foods natural to them. The bears require this natural diet in order to put on enough fat to live through the hibernation season. When that instinctive diet is upset with tourist food, the bears may die.

This is suggestive of matters more vital. Think of the great rivers of our continent – try to imagine our routes of commerce, our water for cities, our development of homes for man without the St. Lawrence, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Platte, the Snake, the Sacramento, the Columbia, the Merced; or in our immediate surroundings, the Hudson, the Delaware, the Raritan, the Passaic.

We have used the fire of the gods to make servants for us of these great arteries of civilization. But also we have abused them. Did you swim this summer in the Hudson, the Raritan, the Passaic? Our own man-made pollutions have placed us on a rock of torture.

There has been a ruination of the Redwoods and other forests. The air is unhealthy in our cities; the skylines obscured by the smoke of our indiscriminate use of the powers we have acquired and our heedlessness for our long-run welfare.

One of the favorite themes of horror movies is the man-made monster. The scientist experimenting in the lab creates a Frankenstein [monster] he cannot control. Terror, death, and destruction inevitably are in the plot. Or the experimenter makes a mistake and is exposed to terrible radiation or electricity. In the fantasy plot, he does not die but loses his humane qualities while gaining immeasurable strength and immunity to the usual weapons of man. There seems to be something obsessive about this theme, as it appears again and again.

The Promethean myth of the fire and the rock is relevant enough so that man should never forget the controls needed for his marvelous devices and astonishing technologies.

Amid the abundant thanksgiving for the majority of Americans, can there be reflection on the fire and the rock? The conservation and pollution studies as well as efforts to increase controls receive too little attention. Beyond those, we should realize that the problem goes deeper. As we overpopulate the earth, we undermine our reserves in the soil, air, and water. Failure to establish international controls on nuclear weapons ensures that the atmosphere will become increasingly poisonous as tests will multiply on the part of nations who are not parties to the agreement to test underground only.

If we people of the world are to come to grips with such awesome problems, we must learn from the ancient of days. The ceremonies and celebrations of primitive man were founded on the belief that human survival was possible only with a correct relationship with the powers that provided growth and harvest, the forces resident in the universe.

We no longer are naïve about fertility rites and sacrifices to the gods to ensure harvest, but the need is great, still, to recognize the relational nature of man and his world of sea and oil and air and climate.

May not only our thankfulness be plentiful but also our responsibility deepen.

Addendum: handwritten by CJW

As is a ceremonial custom, the President’s proclamation was read. There are those of us who would assert that there is an overflowing of pride and an insufficiency of humility in the nationalistic rhetoric. Penance is more appropriate than boastfulness.

Yes many of us are better fed and housed, but not all – extensive pockets of poverty still prevail. Inequality is a grim reality.

Yes, our men are fighting on a foreign field. But the cause for which they sacrifice is still unconvincing. We must dis-enthrall ourselves. When one believes in his cause, particularly when it is held by a minority, he has an obligation to persist in that for which we should be truly thankful – the right of dissent, the process of searching for truth – examining all claims, even those asserted by those with the greatest power.

Addendum: From John Masefield

Might not the birth of every man be hailed
As a divine appearance, come to lead
Men to the living brotherhood they need?
Each brings a person hitherto unknown,
For want of whom man travails and has ailed.
Might not this reverence for life prepare
A state more worth, wherein each citizen
Should have, for faith, the world of fellowmen,
For charity, a paradise on earth,
For hope the beauty of the singing there?