Note 8 — JOCASTA

These positions might perhaps be more clearly illustrated in their respective attitudes to place. The collective-realist is poetically attached to the idea of the there; reality is romantic, far-away, collective—superior to the personal here; it is the eternally old fountain of eternal youthfulness. From this feeling comes the morbid fondness of Western man for other races, so severely condemned by Mr. Lewis. The individual-realist is poetically attached to the idea of the here; reality is classical, local, individual—superior to the collective there; it is the eternally old fountain of eternal adultishness. The first attitude ends in doctrinaire universalism, the second in doctrinaire provincialism: both the collective-realist and the individual-realist believe in the social significance of locality, differing only in their location of locality. Both, in fact, suffer from this obsession with social significance. Take, for example, niggerish jazz: its real strength and attraction is that it is movement free from significance; pure, ritualistic, barbaric social pleasure that can only be properly understood and enjoyed by those who understand and enjoy the civilized individuality of significance. To the romantic universalist niggerish jazz is a religious devotion of the sensations to eternal youthfulness. To the classical provincialist it is a depraved, democratic infantilism. Both emotionalize it, the one as elevation, the other as degradation: to one the jazz nigger is the angel-symbol, to the other the devil-symbol. While the only one able to intellectualize it properly is the jazz nigger himself—generally an individual, unreal, paleface Jew with a dusky make-up of social clownishness.