Book, The Ghost in the Underblows by Alfred Young Fisher

This is a Book. It was designed by Alvin Lustig. It is dated 1940 and we acquired it in 1993. Its medium is lithography in orange and black ink on off-white wove paper. It is a part of the Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design department.

This object was donated by Tamar Cohen. It is credited Gift of Tamar Cohen and Dave Slatoff.

Its dimensions are

H x W: 23.9 x 31.5 cm (9 7/16 x 12 3/8 in.)

It is inscribed

Printed in black ink, left: XII/To love one’s neighbor as oneself…/To live in righteousness…/These sayings are seeds of water in a stony field,/Or the rainy reiteration of the word of God/Or noises on skin drums;/They are nothing at all to the voice underneath it all./And when I think that this humanity/Has made such gauds,/Planted such false jewels for seed, I suspect the fruit/Of rottenness./Do I then not love men until the pain flows down in the cracks of/my heart,/The stony heart if you like, where nothing lives?/Continual pain, the drip of persistent water,/The seep of poison into the brain?/I hear my old friend in the cellarage,/The ubiquitous ghost, the unearthly music./He is singing old songs out of myself, out of our day,/Out of older days:/They are bawdy sometimes, or great as Bach’s Mass;/Or willful as Beethoven; gentle sometimes too,/Bitter and kind. He is the old singing fellow/In my brain, who skips or digs to sow salt./And there is not peace or pause for me even before/The reiteration which convinces truth of truthfulness./‘To love one’s neighbor’ fronts ‘to live in righteousness,’/And they slash like soldiers of a bloody peace./For they pray for self and then for the other’s good,/Both counting beads of abnegation:/‘I love you as I love myself.’ ‘I live in righteousness,/I am sincere, nor have I other gods before Him.’/This gives me pause, starts me from sleep in the dawn/Begins to pound my head between stones big as fists,/And sets my feet in a path to be hewn out./I hear my neighbor who is just whisper out,/22.

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