The Fourth Pig by Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner Page B

much of a step from shooting Indians
    To shooting strikers. It isn’t much of a step
    From exterminating the Indian civilisation to exterminating
    Your own.
    And who will weep on the grave, who will put Fifth Avenue
    In a glass case? Who will be there to contemplate? Only the Furies
    In their black shirts and red shirts, dancing the Horst Wessel Carmagnole?
    Will they be there? Or nothing?
    Or is it possible
    That a few Indians may come back, slowly, out of the Reservations,
    Out of the Pueblos, smiling a little, a little,
    Stretching their arms a little, looking about them a little?
    And they will begin putting things in order, letting the decent earth
    And the decent rivers eat up what they will, letting iron rust
    And concrete crumble, and the old bodies of Fords
    Be grown over quietly with brambles where in time will nest
    Oriole and cardinal.
    And they will dance the rain dances and bring back the rain
    To the parched deserts which the settlers’ ploughing made
    Out of the buffalo lands. And they will watch the forest growing,
    Slowly and softly growing on the eroded mountain sides,
    Till the top soil comes back. And there will be no newspapers
    To eat the forests. And there will be no advertisements
    On the trunks of the forest trees. And the Indians will move quietly
    About the forests, with their minds full of patterns.
    And there is no doubt they will be a hundred per cent
    American …
    GRAND-DAUGHTER
    (For Stella Benson and The House of Living Alone )
    Last week I was looking through some of the political books of the nineteen-thirties. It is queer reading those old books now, careful, angry, unhappy books in hard red covers with sad black lettering. All the authors, with their prefaces and tables of statistics and careful indexes, speak of the new times which they tried to foresee, as though it would all make a great difference to people; but they never saw what kind of a difference it was going to be. Most of the people who wrote those books were economists, poor things, or else a special sort of historian which existed then, who was trained to see just one particular kind of event, like a truffle-pig. And those who were capable of seeing other sorts of events such as we can see now (Brailsford for instance) were rather ashamed of this side of their minds. There were also, of course, the physicists and to some extent the biologists and biochemists, though the latter were usually humbler, having rather less immediate contact with the technocrats and a good deal of sympathy, because of their manual technique, with the factory workers.
    My grandfather on my mother’s side must have read dozens of these books; he even wrote one or two. They must have affected him considerably. I take it they made people gloomy and over intent on that side of life, and must have made them feel inferior and changeable compared with the figures and statistics which strode about over their heads. I should have hated living then!Yet I expect my grandfather believed in it all, or at any rate thought there was no other kind of thing which could better be believed in.
    His wife, my grandmother, was very much laughed at for saying that the industrial revolution had destroyed magic. She was of course a Marxist, as most of them were, and preferred seeing things in economic terms. It was plain to her that play of any kind must have been exceedingly ill-thought-of in the moral system of a ruling class which had made its position by making other people work for it, and, to some extent, by working itself. Magic was one step beyond play. And so the whole idea of magic had become immoral—it had in fact arrived at the stage of immorality where people cease altogether to believe in a thing—and serious, moral people such as socialists did not use the word at all. But my grandmother managed to use it to herself, and she could at least see in a kind of apologetic, theoretical way, that good magic, being essentially democratic,