Dixieland
Dixieland was just an idea I liked - what would an American Myth look like. The concept was simple, you start in a mythical Europe that has been devastated wars, a sort of Napoleonic-Post WWII Europe where the myth had died, and into that you incorporate an embedded philosophical history, sort of larger than life Philosophical Patriarchs who had led their people out of a mythological history, like Moses lead his people out of Egypt in the Torah, so you have the People of Marx, the People of Proudhon, the People of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and so on. The premise being the Hegelian surge for Freedom had failed in Europe but it was alive in America, the people of Emerson.
My original idea was the Western Dream was a manuscript, and there were three copies, one that was burnt in France, one that was destroyed somewhere in Russia, and a third that had got lost somewhere in America, and you had a bunch of characters like Billy Boston and the Tea Party, who were a Jame Dean-esque Wild One olden day Bike Gang, and Lee Roy Brown, who was bad, bad, baddest cat, in the whole damn town, who lived with his woman, gambling debts and a Cadillac he was always working on, all running around, trying to find it.
Mostly I just wanted to see what a modern American myth might feel like, I s’pose.
That's some of the first rough, rough draft there.
There’s more, kicking around somewhere, I just don’t know what happened to it.
___________________________________________________
Dixieland
Prologue
I
War had swept across Europe devouring the land and leaving smoke and ash in its wake. From the Grand River Rhine, to the Mighty Thames the Old Country was burnt and scared.
The last of Europe’s youth had gone to the Fields of Geneva, and beyond that, in a small Cabin Grandfather Hegel sat, for four days now he had been working on the cure to this madness, the final moment of Geist, the Freedom, the Enlightenment, yes! The Phenomenology of Spirit.
His hands shook with rheumatism, and his eyes were blood shot, he coughed long and hard, and there, upon the handkerchief was blood. But a life time of work, an endless battle against depression, anxiety, and fear, had lead him to seek the final solution, a pattern, a moment of consciousness, the final manifestation, yes, he had seen it in a dream long ago, a dream that swept all of the madness, the war, the tyranny and oppression away, a dream he had called, The Western Dream.
He lifted his eyes from the page, his fingers stained with ink.
Outside the Cabin cannon balls roared, and the sky was lit by mad blasts and fire. Close. Too close!
“Solider” he whispered, blood and foam upon his lips. “Solider?”
The boy stirred on the lounge where he’d fallen asleep, tired and weary from waiting. Orange lanterns swayed over head, thrown into motion by tremors from the battle.
“Solider” he said again, his voice now grown with fever, strength, timbre.
There was an explosion outside, not too far away.
The young boy opened his eyes. They were a pale blue. He was young, far too young.
“What time is it?”
“It is nigh midnight” said Grandfather Hegel.
“The battle?”
“It rages just outside these walls, in that valley, over them hills” Grandfather Hegel pointed a trembling finger. He knew the valley, had grown up here, and had spent his youth in those hills. He knew every tree, every field, every brook and knoll. Now they were being destroyed, ripped apart by mad men, lost men, men of Old Europe chasing death.
“Are you finished?”
“It is finished.”
“Then I have to go.”
“Yes.”
“Will you becoming with me?”
“No, no. My time is here. The work is done. Here, take it.”
“But if the battle comes - ”
“Then the battle will come. Nothing can save me now. These old legs have seen too many years.”
The Messenger boy looked upon the old man. He was worn, tired, withered, like all the spirit had gone out of him, as if it had been expelled with the effort it took to write those last pages.
Another shell rocked the small cottage. Plaster fell from the ceiling.
Somewhere in the distance a trumpet sounded and there came more screams.
Grandfather Hegel pushed himself to his feet, and hobbled to the boy clutching the manuscript. As he walked he lent heavily on a walking stick. “Take this to the three sons, ride for the boarder, if you leave now you will make it.”
“But I can’t leave you, I have my orders - ”
Outside, there came the sound of dogs barking and a man screaming.
“Your orders were to wait with me, and to carry my final message, now take it”
Grandfather Hegel thrust the package into the boy’s hands. The exertion was more than he could bear, because it brought him to his knees. He coughed then caught his breath, now resolution had taken his keen but faded eye, which he turned upon the boy. “Now ride, ride like the wind.” He pointed with a ringed finger. “Take the high pass until you see the Morning light, and there head for the mountains, from there its two days ride to the boarder. Now Go!”
The boy looked down at the ink stained and splattered pages. With care he put them into his satchel, and hailed the old philosopher.
“Now go!”
The boy nodded, and fetched his riding clock from the stand. Once outside he moved swiftly down to the old stables where his Chestnut mare waited. The moon was high and red as he untethered the horse then mounted it. The violence, the smoke of battle, something errie fell upon this old country, and then. . .
And then a strange quiet seemed to pervade the yard. A gentle wind shook the trees, and the clamour of battle seemed to lift with the mist for a moment. He glanced back, and saw Grandfather Hegel there, on out on the porch silhouetted by the orange lanterns shinning from inside the cottage. There was frost in the air.
Then the spell was broken. The sound of dogs braking grew louder. In the distance a dying man shouted a death rattle.
The boy shook off a shiver.
“Ride my boy, ride like the wind,” came old Grandfather Hegel’s voice. “Ride for liberty!”
Suddenly a falling shell shook the night, and the light momentarily blinded the solider. He shielded his eyes, and when he looked back, the dogs were upon the old man, tearing him, as the philosopher screamed.
Then the words came back to him, he remembered the old man’s words. “Ride like the wind. Ride for liberty.”
He shook the horse into a stir, gripping the satchel to his chest, and suddenly he was in flight. Suddenly, the night melted around him, and the wind brushed his face. Suddenly, he was riding for liberty.
II
Fredrick Nietzsche once said that if a man looks too far into the abyss, sometimes the abyss stares back at him. What he was really saying is that man is a becoming, and in becoming, a making of myth. It was only by making man into a myth that he could remake history into an abyss. Thus if man is a myth, and history is an abyss, then what stares back at man is truth, and it is a truth unlike any other, because what stares back at man from behind the abyss of history is nothing more than his own reflection.
The myth behind our own history started long ago, in a place far away. It started in a war marked only by myth and legend. It started when a father watched his son die then looked into the face of his killer. It started when that killer looked back, and he saw in the grieving father’s eyes a bottomless abyss. That father was called Priam and the name of his son’s killer was Achilles.
It is said in that moment our Civilisation was born.
Myths have always made our people.
We are a people unlike any other. We believe not in any one race or religion, we believe in neither king nor sovereign, we are a people defined by something else that has grown with us from that moment. Something we call the Western Dream.
Our people have prospered and spread across the face of the Earth. We are many tribes, and many nations. We live from the edge of the Asian Steppe, through the mid Atlantic Ocean, and down to the very antipodes of the Earth. Our history is no different to other people’s, ancient and modern. It, like other civilisations, is steeped in the blood of many peoples we have conquered, killed, held in bondage, or murdered. We have the blood of Celt, of Koori, of Jew, and of many others in our histories.
We murdered, and warred amongst ourselves, and killed each other. We took lands not our own, and turned the earth black, dark as night with our waring. But it is not what makes our people blood thirsty and common that defines us, but what makes us different, that tells us who we are. For within our many peoples there is something that unites us in a way that the Earth has not seen before. A dream that started in the Far East. A dream that started with the idea that one man can be free. A dream of the other people. The ones who came before us. The Dream that first gave us birth. It was the Dream that first gave us our own.
They believed in a God King. The Ruler. The Maker of Laws, the Sovereign, He who we might call Emperor, who’s might, who’s strength, who in spirit, and with thumos, gave him the ability to rise above other men and command them, and though our dream started in such times, and though its vestiges still dog the heels of our people, that dream is not our own.
Our dream starts not with glory, not with grandeur, but with grief, despair, and horror. It starts in an abyss, in that moment when a single tear drop fell from the eye of a grieving father, and at the moment it touched the Earth, Our People were born.
For we, the people of the Western Dream began not in the joys of victory, the triumph of conquest, but in something else. It begins in the abyss of human tragedy, and something like a question. A question conceived over the body of Hector when Achilles saw an abyss staring back at him from the face of an old man.
And from there the dream grew, until it became something the world had not seen hitherto. We Westerners are not afraid to stare into the Abyss, because the truth we find there is freedom, the truth that unites our people is the abyss, it is the freedom to question what lays upon the other side. Because only a free man can question what is. And only a man who is free to question what is may decide what he may be
And from that moment Freedom, like wildfire, ran through our people, down the ages, and through the aeons, sometimes struggling, sometimes at ends with ourselves, but always, the furnace burning at the heart of the Western Dream. The idea that forged us like iron, that made us hard as bronze, and swift as steel. The fire that burns strongest in our bellies. The idea that not just one man can be free, but that some men, the we, the citizens, the people of the city, or state, the people of democracy, the men of the West, who by the will, and strength, and sweat of brow and back, can rule our own republic. We the civilians. We the citizens. We the people. . .
And we grew to love freedom, but soon it was not enough. Our people, scattered and warning, divided, and ruled by prejudice, we warred upon each other for our freedoms, for our dominion, for our own safety, for our pride, for our strength. The Western Dream lead to a war of all against all, of people against people, of one brand of liberty against another, and the old dream of the city state, the old dream of the us, it was no longer enough. And we realised that something more was needed. It was not enough to have one people free, but all people. It was not enough that some should be free, while others should not, but all men, and all women must be free. The Western Dream demanded it.
And so Grandfather Hegel wrote down his phenomenology, he wrote down the histories of our warring peoples, of our liberties, our histories, and our unending struggles towards the final concept of Freedom, that last stage in the Western Dream, that would appear as a light upon the dawn of a new day for mankind, and on the eve of the Battle of Europe, he sent it to three brothers.
And so the brothers upon reciving the dream, all decided that it was too dangerous a task to undertake together, instead they would each take their part in the dream, and set off in different directions to realize it, lest one of them fall, then at least the other two might succeed, but should they fall together, the dream would be lost, forever. . .
III
The oldest Brother was called Proudhon, and he said he would take the dream back with him, and rebuild France. It would become the Capital of the new world. He would take this freedom, and from the ashes a new Empire would be built, and there, on the cusp of freedom, France, ancient Kingdom of Charlemagne, holder of wealth, custom, knowledge, the harbinger of philosophy, science, and Revolution! Viva La France, descendant of Gaul, Frank, and Goth. Yes! She would bring the world into the new age, as she had once brought Europe out of the Dark Ages, and by her great, and noble, and poetic peoples, she would light the way.
The second brother was called Marx. He said he would travel to the very edges of Europe, and once there, he would seek out the Lost Vikings and Slavic Tribes, and in a place called Russia, he would bring hope, wisdom, equality, where each man to his abilities would he be granted, and to his needs he would be given.
And the youngest brother, the most reckless, the most unready for this task, who, unlike the other two, had not fulfilled the trials of youth, he took the dream to the new world, and that brother’s name was Emerson.
IV
Now two centuries have passed, and the two older brothers, both visionaries, heralds, carriers of the Western Dream, they have both failed. They rose up to grasp universal freedom, but as they flew towards the Sun, like Icarus, their wings melted, and they fell sprawling to the earth, only to realise that the Western Dream lay in ashes around them, under the shadows of new God-Kings.
Both had failed.
They awoke only to find dictatorships where they had thought to find freedom, liberty, and equality. The People of Marx lived in despair, and repression, while the People of Proudhon, those valiant sons and daughters of the Revolution, found themselves in unceasing war with all of Europe for a Great General who had crowned himself Emperor.
There is but one hope left for the Western Dream. The youngest brother, The People of Emerson, they now carry the dream, but a questions shadows their steps; can they do what has not been done? All Western Eyes now turn upon the Americas, waiting to see if this young gun, this most reckless, this most unprepared, the most vulnerable of the three, can this wild young nation seize liberty, freedom, and justice for all? Or will The People Of Emerson fall by the wayside, will they perish, and in perishing, take the last light of Western Hope with them, as they fall into the gaping abyss of history? Will the dream be extinguished beneath the tread of inequality, tyranny, dictatorship, and bondage? Will Dixieland’s people be free, or shall they live in bondage?
All Western Tribes now look to the bright light of Dixieland, the last hope, afraid to ask; will she be a funeral pyre, or a beacon of hope?
Chapter One
Welcome to Dixieland.
My original idea was the Western Dream was a manuscript, and there were three copies, one that was burnt in France, one that was destroyed somewhere in Russia, and a third that had got lost somewhere in America, and you had a bunch of characters like Billy Boston and the Tea Party, who were a Jame Dean-esque Wild One olden day Bike Gang, and Lee Roy Brown, who was bad, bad, baddest cat, in the whole damn town, who lived with his woman, gambling debts and a Cadillac he was always working on, all running around, trying to find it.
Mostly I just wanted to see what a modern American myth might feel like, I s’pose.
That's some of the first rough, rough draft there.
There’s more, kicking around somewhere, I just don’t know what happened to it.
___________________________________________________
Dixieland
Prologue
I
War had swept across Europe devouring the land and leaving smoke and ash in its wake. From the Grand River Rhine, to the Mighty Thames the Old Country was burnt and scared.
The last of Europe’s youth had gone to the Fields of Geneva, and beyond that, in a small Cabin Grandfather Hegel sat, for four days now he had been working on the cure to this madness, the final moment of Geist, the Freedom, the Enlightenment, yes! The Phenomenology of Spirit.
His hands shook with rheumatism, and his eyes were blood shot, he coughed long and hard, and there, upon the handkerchief was blood. But a life time of work, an endless battle against depression, anxiety, and fear, had lead him to seek the final solution, a pattern, a moment of consciousness, the final manifestation, yes, he had seen it in a dream long ago, a dream that swept all of the madness, the war, the tyranny and oppression away, a dream he had called, The Western Dream.
He lifted his eyes from the page, his fingers stained with ink.
Outside the Cabin cannon balls roared, and the sky was lit by mad blasts and fire. Close. Too close!
“Solider” he whispered, blood and foam upon his lips. “Solider?”
The boy stirred on the lounge where he’d fallen asleep, tired and weary from waiting. Orange lanterns swayed over head, thrown into motion by tremors from the battle.
“Solider” he said again, his voice now grown with fever, strength, timbre.
There was an explosion outside, not too far away.
The young boy opened his eyes. They were a pale blue. He was young, far too young.
“What time is it?”
“It is nigh midnight” said Grandfather Hegel.
“The battle?”
“It rages just outside these walls, in that valley, over them hills” Grandfather Hegel pointed a trembling finger. He knew the valley, had grown up here, and had spent his youth in those hills. He knew every tree, every field, every brook and knoll. Now they were being destroyed, ripped apart by mad men, lost men, men of Old Europe chasing death.
“Are you finished?”
“It is finished.”
“Then I have to go.”
“Yes.”
“Will you becoming with me?”
“No, no. My time is here. The work is done. Here, take it.”
“But if the battle comes - ”
“Then the battle will come. Nothing can save me now. These old legs have seen too many years.”
The Messenger boy looked upon the old man. He was worn, tired, withered, like all the spirit had gone out of him, as if it had been expelled with the effort it took to write those last pages.
Another shell rocked the small cottage. Plaster fell from the ceiling.
Somewhere in the distance a trumpet sounded and there came more screams.
Grandfather Hegel pushed himself to his feet, and hobbled to the boy clutching the manuscript. As he walked he lent heavily on a walking stick. “Take this to the three sons, ride for the boarder, if you leave now you will make it.”
“But I can’t leave you, I have my orders - ”
Outside, there came the sound of dogs barking and a man screaming.
“Your orders were to wait with me, and to carry my final message, now take it”
Grandfather Hegel thrust the package into the boy’s hands. The exertion was more than he could bear, because it brought him to his knees. He coughed then caught his breath, now resolution had taken his keen but faded eye, which he turned upon the boy. “Now ride, ride like the wind.” He pointed with a ringed finger. “Take the high pass until you see the Morning light, and there head for the mountains, from there its two days ride to the boarder. Now Go!”
The boy looked down at the ink stained and splattered pages. With care he put them into his satchel, and hailed the old philosopher.
“Now go!”
The boy nodded, and fetched his riding clock from the stand. Once outside he moved swiftly down to the old stables where his Chestnut mare waited. The moon was high and red as he untethered the horse then mounted it. The violence, the smoke of battle, something errie fell upon this old country, and then. . .
And then a strange quiet seemed to pervade the yard. A gentle wind shook the trees, and the clamour of battle seemed to lift with the mist for a moment. He glanced back, and saw Grandfather Hegel there, on out on the porch silhouetted by the orange lanterns shinning from inside the cottage. There was frost in the air.
Then the spell was broken. The sound of dogs braking grew louder. In the distance a dying man shouted a death rattle.
The boy shook off a shiver.
“Ride my boy, ride like the wind,” came old Grandfather Hegel’s voice. “Ride for liberty!”
Suddenly a falling shell shook the night, and the light momentarily blinded the solider. He shielded his eyes, and when he looked back, the dogs were upon the old man, tearing him, as the philosopher screamed.
Then the words came back to him, he remembered the old man’s words. “Ride like the wind. Ride for liberty.”
He shook the horse into a stir, gripping the satchel to his chest, and suddenly he was in flight. Suddenly, the night melted around him, and the wind brushed his face. Suddenly, he was riding for liberty.
II
Fredrick Nietzsche once said that if a man looks too far into the abyss, sometimes the abyss stares back at him. What he was really saying is that man is a becoming, and in becoming, a making of myth. It was only by making man into a myth that he could remake history into an abyss. Thus if man is a myth, and history is an abyss, then what stares back at man is truth, and it is a truth unlike any other, because what stares back at man from behind the abyss of history is nothing more than his own reflection.
The myth behind our own history started long ago, in a place far away. It started in a war marked only by myth and legend. It started when a father watched his son die then looked into the face of his killer. It started when that killer looked back, and he saw in the grieving father’s eyes a bottomless abyss. That father was called Priam and the name of his son’s killer was Achilles.
It is said in that moment our Civilisation was born.
Myths have always made our people.
We are a people unlike any other. We believe not in any one race or religion, we believe in neither king nor sovereign, we are a people defined by something else that has grown with us from that moment. Something we call the Western Dream.
Our people have prospered and spread across the face of the Earth. We are many tribes, and many nations. We live from the edge of the Asian Steppe, through the mid Atlantic Ocean, and down to the very antipodes of the Earth. Our history is no different to other people’s, ancient and modern. It, like other civilisations, is steeped in the blood of many peoples we have conquered, killed, held in bondage, or murdered. We have the blood of Celt, of Koori, of Jew, and of many others in our histories.
We murdered, and warred amongst ourselves, and killed each other. We took lands not our own, and turned the earth black, dark as night with our waring. But it is not what makes our people blood thirsty and common that defines us, but what makes us different, that tells us who we are. For within our many peoples there is something that unites us in a way that the Earth has not seen before. A dream that started in the Far East. A dream that started with the idea that one man can be free. A dream of the other people. The ones who came before us. The Dream that first gave us birth. It was the Dream that first gave us our own.
They believed in a God King. The Ruler. The Maker of Laws, the Sovereign, He who we might call Emperor, who’s might, who’s strength, who in spirit, and with thumos, gave him the ability to rise above other men and command them, and though our dream started in such times, and though its vestiges still dog the heels of our people, that dream is not our own.
Our dream starts not with glory, not with grandeur, but with grief, despair, and horror. It starts in an abyss, in that moment when a single tear drop fell from the eye of a grieving father, and at the moment it touched the Earth, Our People were born.
For we, the people of the Western Dream began not in the joys of victory, the triumph of conquest, but in something else. It begins in the abyss of human tragedy, and something like a question. A question conceived over the body of Hector when Achilles saw an abyss staring back at him from the face of an old man.
And from there the dream grew, until it became something the world had not seen hitherto. We Westerners are not afraid to stare into the Abyss, because the truth we find there is freedom, the truth that unites our people is the abyss, it is the freedom to question what lays upon the other side. Because only a free man can question what is. And only a man who is free to question what is may decide what he may be
And from that moment Freedom, like wildfire, ran through our people, down the ages, and through the aeons, sometimes struggling, sometimes at ends with ourselves, but always, the furnace burning at the heart of the Western Dream. The idea that forged us like iron, that made us hard as bronze, and swift as steel. The fire that burns strongest in our bellies. The idea that not just one man can be free, but that some men, the we, the citizens, the people of the city, or state, the people of democracy, the men of the West, who by the will, and strength, and sweat of brow and back, can rule our own republic. We the civilians. We the citizens. We the people. . .
And we grew to love freedom, but soon it was not enough. Our people, scattered and warning, divided, and ruled by prejudice, we warred upon each other for our freedoms, for our dominion, for our own safety, for our pride, for our strength. The Western Dream lead to a war of all against all, of people against people, of one brand of liberty against another, and the old dream of the city state, the old dream of the us, it was no longer enough. And we realised that something more was needed. It was not enough to have one people free, but all people. It was not enough that some should be free, while others should not, but all men, and all women must be free. The Western Dream demanded it.
And so Grandfather Hegel wrote down his phenomenology, he wrote down the histories of our warring peoples, of our liberties, our histories, and our unending struggles towards the final concept of Freedom, that last stage in the Western Dream, that would appear as a light upon the dawn of a new day for mankind, and on the eve of the Battle of Europe, he sent it to three brothers.
And so the brothers upon reciving the dream, all decided that it was too dangerous a task to undertake together, instead they would each take their part in the dream, and set off in different directions to realize it, lest one of them fall, then at least the other two might succeed, but should they fall together, the dream would be lost, forever. . .
III
The oldest Brother was called Proudhon, and he said he would take the dream back with him, and rebuild France. It would become the Capital of the new world. He would take this freedom, and from the ashes a new Empire would be built, and there, on the cusp of freedom, France, ancient Kingdom of Charlemagne, holder of wealth, custom, knowledge, the harbinger of philosophy, science, and Revolution! Viva La France, descendant of Gaul, Frank, and Goth. Yes! She would bring the world into the new age, as she had once brought Europe out of the Dark Ages, and by her great, and noble, and poetic peoples, she would light the way.
The second brother was called Marx. He said he would travel to the very edges of Europe, and once there, he would seek out the Lost Vikings and Slavic Tribes, and in a place called Russia, he would bring hope, wisdom, equality, where each man to his abilities would he be granted, and to his needs he would be given.
And the youngest brother, the most reckless, the most unready for this task, who, unlike the other two, had not fulfilled the trials of youth, he took the dream to the new world, and that brother’s name was Emerson.
IV
Now two centuries have passed, and the two older brothers, both visionaries, heralds, carriers of the Western Dream, they have both failed. They rose up to grasp universal freedom, but as they flew towards the Sun, like Icarus, their wings melted, and they fell sprawling to the earth, only to realise that the Western Dream lay in ashes around them, under the shadows of new God-Kings.
Both had failed.
They awoke only to find dictatorships where they had thought to find freedom, liberty, and equality. The People of Marx lived in despair, and repression, while the People of Proudhon, those valiant sons and daughters of the Revolution, found themselves in unceasing war with all of Europe for a Great General who had crowned himself Emperor.
There is but one hope left for the Western Dream. The youngest brother, The People of Emerson, they now carry the dream, but a questions shadows their steps; can they do what has not been done? All Western Eyes now turn upon the Americas, waiting to see if this young gun, this most reckless, this most unprepared, the most vulnerable of the three, can this wild young nation seize liberty, freedom, and justice for all? Or will The People Of Emerson fall by the wayside, will they perish, and in perishing, take the last light of Western Hope with them, as they fall into the gaping abyss of history? Will the dream be extinguished beneath the tread of inequality, tyranny, dictatorship, and bondage? Will Dixieland’s people be free, or shall they live in bondage?
All Western Tribes now look to the bright light of Dixieland, the last hope, afraid to ask; will she be a funeral pyre, or a beacon of hope?
Chapter One
Welcome to Dixieland.