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"The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone...This is the most familiar and certain fact about life, but it is also the most poetical, and the knowledge of it has never ceased to entrance me, and to throw a halo of poetry around the dustiest record." --George Macauley Trevalyan quoted by Ballen
Where were we in here???

Have to get the nine sons/brothers re-posted.

Roger Williams is headed into the woods with a very collapsed sense of excitement and a bewildered postmodernism.

And...Monk has been busy gaining an overview of the situation.



Why was Roger Williams in a postmodern funk?

It's not a simple answer since postmodernism is a multiplicitous definition word.  Pomfret tells us that Roger Williams was "an individualistic intellectual who plowed a lonely furrow" (191 FOUNDING).  And it's funny because at some point in Pomfret's brief summary of the man's life he shows Williams in an argument with the majority in which each is accusing the other of fanaticism.

By the time Williams headed off into the woods in a funk he'd experienced a gamut of participation AND had a very conscious sense of his own interior development.  It was impossible to reckon these two aspects of humanity 100%.  That's kind of like understanding that a person can be a genius but be out of step on some points in the road or understanding that even breaking down psychology and politics and religion into scientific explanation, a person can't automatically control those fields.  In Williams' case he was able to reason almost everything, but also accepted that passions can defy logic just like spirituality may contain elements of description that don't fit neatly into a religious category or a lone voice about an aspect of majority may stand as less equally weighted than that majority but IS still existing.  He carefully plodded his way along with the culture he was born into but like most "youth" he could grasp at new ideas in addition to understanding the old ideas.  This didn't entitle him to win the arguments of the day and in his time (when the elders were in charge of every breath of life) he was cut loose from the hornlock.  There wasn't a rush of fans to dote on his personality or character but he continued on his path becoming more like a monk than a statesman for a time.  In later times, education provided the forum for such introspection and gaining insight into how other men have lived.  As he was walking into the woods, choosing life instead of nihilism, there wasn't even much support for his choice afterall, his culture readily disposed of anybody who didn't agree with them and who wasn't pliable as a com- in compliance.  Questioning value is a human propensity whether times are fat or thin, but in isolation humans have to come up with a sense of value that may or may not fit into a picture of relative value.  Such microcosmic analysis of course doesn't easily lend itself to navigating the larger currents and to be removed from those larger currents poses more stress on top of the baseline large tasks of reckoning individuality with collectivity.  How do you plan for that?  Stepping out, stepping in...an enormous amount of privacy in the wilderness that early America was at first let many people out of the spotlight/microscope.  And Williams reasoned that if he could at least step away from the marriage between religion and government, as a wayward soul if need be, he'd be FREE enough, kind of like some of the poets during the time of the English Civil Wars.  And if he put some language to his freedom, not only might he save himself from the madness of indescript primalism, he might leave a trail marker.  In some ways he seems to have been sure that regardless of the outcome of colonizing and preaching, humanity would pulse on.  He might, of course, fall into a pit of quicksand or be slaughtered by a boar at any moment as he trekked away from the modern, but that wouldn't change the world either.  It might be comforting to imagine a God that would whisk him away to paradise if he fell off a cliff, but whether or not that was his primary thought as he slipped away wouldn't change the world...and jeez, beaver, it seemed like for all the trouble that man was making imagining God, maybe the world would be better off if there was some mystery to faith.  Of course, the Quakers were the living examples of going the distance to prove that point, so even they were afforded existence in God's Kingdom.  And isn't nature a splendid kingdom?  No shortage of contemplating nature when a human isn't caught in one social construct or another.  Williams may have wondered at the many sounds and sights on his journey, may have spent days in total silence, that natural human state that does not even include singing hymns or thinking about what so and so had said to further or thwart a line of reasoning.  He may have gleaned some perspective of Native Americans that Puritan culture certainly wasn't sitting around listening to or contemplating.  He may have pushed himself to imagine a man's world that was a blend of all these things that he was feeling and thinking and being, maybe not know that others would soon be mobilizing throughout the continent, maybe fantasizing about a world in which it was just him and his God making the rules.  He couldn't have KNOWN too much of the future of the world and this may have heightened his sense of the importance to a self being as well-rounded and stubborn as humanly possible.  And always fighting the recesses of the dark and unknown...that must have contributed to his consciousness.  A flood of emotions about being scared, being smart, being healthy, being manly, being hungry, being satiated...all of these connections in his being between himself and the different realms of the same earthly existence...all of these human experiencings would have been part of the Roger Williams making way.  And making way FROM added no small dimension to his relativity to "modern."


Of course, there are other ways in which Roger Williams was postmodern like...

Being away from England.
Being post-Renaissance.  And once we start to understand how the Renaissance generation was postmodern to medieval, it's easier to fathom how cultures of people go through periods together and how characteristics of the times define modern each time a modern happens.

It's not all confusing...a postmodern mindset or period or phase and with some hindsight on any contemporary gone by or unfolding comes the challenges to individual and collectivities to sort through what's been and struggle to bring stuff forward or to put things in the past.