The Golden Book of Springfield

by Vachel Lindsay

The book is a friend of men. It is disposed to descend to its friends. It is carried in flying and fluttering state to the three-color printing department of the school, where hundreds of rainbow replicas of the pages are made, though not on this earth can replicas of the wings be made. And while the book is within the four walls, the school becomes a place of fairyland. Every cottage has its own copy of the volume in time. Edition after edition goes out, first from the school, then from the greater, more dazzling printing presses of the University, to the scholars and artists of Europe and Asia, through their colleagues who are attending the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield. But the book itself, having once been copied in the printing room there, flies around the Truth Tower, the center of town; it goes up in higher and wider circles. At last it is seen, a star among the stars. Meanwhile the transfiguration of the city begins.

The future plays a curious trick with our artist friend, the valiant and patriotic American who sent forth all his sons against the Germans. He is astonished to find himself reborn a pacifist, Anno Domini, 2018. And there are other sad changes. He sees himself in a mirror as a long-haired creature, a ragged libel of the William Cullen Bryant type, with similar features, but dressed in ready made garments, and with much food spilled down the front of his vest. His nickname in 2018 is “Old Sparrow Short,” because at that time the sparrow is his favorite bird, and because he is tall. This increased height is the only concession to his vanity in the revelation, for in 1920 he has been obliged to stand on his toes over and over, to give any impression of height.

In 2018, though a pacifist, he is still militant in the aesthetic field. He is a leader of a group of young Springfield painters, sculptors, and architects who are always dynamiting our stagnant exhibitions with appropriate bombs of paint. He insists it is the painting and sculpture of his followers that make Springfield such a dazzling success. He is still the head teacher of the Springfield Art Association which has its headquarters at the Edwards Place on North Fifth, as of old.

His political hobby in 2018 is that we should return to the glory of the ancient time of the unchained nations, especially, as he hears himself say, the era of peace and good will when the Czar instituted the Hague tribunal, and Andrew Carnegie sent out his peace lecturers. He is sent to our local World Government prison which is built across the street from the City and County Jails on Seventh and Jefferson Streets. He is here locked up for emphasizing his views to the point of world-treason. The book flies in through the walls of his cell as though those walls were shadows, and as though the book were made of but air and sunshine, woven together. He who is doomed to become this awful Sparrow Short declares that the principal mandate of the volume is for the immediate dissolution of the entire International Government. It demands a restoration of the conditions of 1913. The mandate of the volume for the artist is the same as for the nation. “Live like the Sparrow. Be yourself completely. Utter your soul, regardless of cost.” This condition, universally accepted, will secure a real world-peace, and one that is not hypocrisy or oppression.

It comes the turn of the Jewish boy I so much admire. He says that in 2018 he is “Rabbi Terence Ezekiel,” a rank heretic, and an old man. He dreams of himself as being the grandson and the son of two other Rabbis of the same name and as having a rebel congregation all his own in 2018, of being in their estimation and that of many others, the leading citizen of the community. His temple is on the site of the old Isador Kanner Synagogue. He it is, who, as the leading champion of the aggrandizement of the photoplay as a general social factor, fights his best chum, St. Friend, when films are a public issue, because St. Friend preaches against them from the Cathedral. No longer is his life the slow, devious midnight-lamp technique of the pawnshop, the furtive, the futile, the too confidential. Not his the bad street abounding in second-hand stores and cheap rooming lofts.

To his temple come the wise of all the world, and there is preached the gospel of righteousness as symbolized by the planting all around the world of the Ezekiel Oak (for thus he has taken a leaf from the testimony of Roxana Grey), and the distribution of all other great trees, including the Golden Rain-Tree and the Apple Amaranth. But within this wave of beneficence his sect has a peculiar and especial discipline, as rigid and elaborate as Leviticus, which is, in another set of forms, essentially the same curious flowering of the Jewish mind on the same general level of the soul. When he looks into the glass he sees, in 1920, a young rascal who has stooped shoulders, from long bending over the jewelry and watches he has mended. He sees dull-brown hair and eyes, a blank face, a heavy jaundiced skin, all of which give the lie to the great brain. And he is five feet in height.

In 2018 he is six feet four, an old man, but with a blazing eye and a voice like the surf in a storm. His hair is brilliant black, his face is that of the Arabian war horse and the American eagle. Into his temple come all the wise of the world, week after week, and he introduces them, and they speak to his people and the rest. But he is to deliver his own discourse on a certain day in the autumn of the Mystic Year. It is a little before the beginning of the services. Amid faint music from afar the light before the doors of the tabernacle is suddenly enriched in color and splendor. The holy doors swing open with a noble deliberation, and there, instead of the Torah, is The Book of Air and Wonder,—The Golden Book, poised like a cloud and a moon and a bird. It has six wings, woven from the rays of a strange moonrise, perhaps like the wings of the cherubim, that bent above the ark long ago. The book settles on the desk. The pennons fade. The volume is open at the beginning of a series of prophecies about the soul of Springfield, as though Springfield were a living personality and not a mere assembly of citizens, and as though the book were a person, and not mere wings of air.

He tells us that he sees a face much like mine in the assembly of 2018, and I have not changed, but have the same yellow hair and pale face, as he says, “still look like a Swede,” and, (as he insists, with the pawnbroker’s emphasis on material texture), I wear the same suit of clothes, and carry the same iron and leather cane.

And so he tells us his tale of double consciousness, with the honest glow of the blood that I love in all leaders of his race, with that thick fire which no other race can equal. His synagogue is rebuilt on a vast scale in 2018 to hold Golden Book devotees; And this is but the beginning of his history of great affairs in Springfield.

The Christian Science Reader says she sees my face in the Sunday morning Christian Science congregation of her vision. We are one and all given new names. Her name in 2018 is Rachel Madison, and, though I am not of her faith today, in the new time I have grown toward this light, and she sees me with my unfortunate yellow hair and my iron cane, for all the world as the young pawnbroker does, but sitting in the back of the Christian Science temple listening attentively, Sunday after Sunday. She says that it is a silver book that we see upon the great day of November 1st, 2018. It sheds an ineffable white light, it is almost as impalpable as a comet in the sky, yet a substance that comes flying through the walls as though they were but gleaming shadows. The air is filled with music from all the high heavens. The book spreads six wings, like those of celestial swans. The pages have no illuminations or other abominable traces of the Gothic.