The Voice of the Machines

G >> Gerald Stanley Lee >> The Voice of the Machines

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What is true of the men who make the machines is equally true of the
men who live with them. The brakeman and the locomotive engineer and
the mechanical engineer and the sailor all have the same spirit. Their
days are invested with the same dignity and aspiration, the same
unwonted enthusiasm, and self-forgetfulness in the work itself. They
begin their lives as boys dreaming of the track, or of cogs and
wheels, or of great waters.

As I stood by the track the other night, Michael the switchman was
holding the road for the nine o'clock freight, with his faded flag,
and his grim brown pipe, and his wooden leg. As it rumbled by him,
headlight, clatter, and smoke, and whirl, and halo of the steam, every
brakeman backing to the wind, lying on the air, at the jolt of the
switch, started, as at some greeting out of the dark, and turned and
gave the sign to Michael. All of the brakemen gave it. Then we watched
them, Michael and I, out of the roar and the hiss of their splendid
cloud, their flickering, swaying bodies against the sky, flying out to
the Night, until there was nothing but a dull red murmur and the
falling of smoke.

Michael hobbled back to his mansion by the rails. He put up the foot
that was left from the wreck, and puffed and puffed. He had been a
brakeman himself.

Brakemen are prosaic men enough, no doubt, in the ordinary sense, but
they love a railroad as Shakespeare loved a sonnet. It is not given to
brakemen, as it is to poets, to show to the world as it passes by that
their ideals are beautiful. They give their lives for them,--hundreds
of lives a year. These lives may be sordid lives looked at from the
outside, but mystery, danger, surprise, dark cities, and glistening
lights, roar, dust, and water, and death, and life,--these play their
endless spell upon them. They love the shining of the track. It is
wrought into the very fibre of their being.

Years pass and years, and still more years. Who shall persuade the
brakemen to leave the track? They never leave it. I shall always see
them--on their flying footboards beneath the sky--swaying and
rocking--still swaying and rocking--to Eternity.

They are men who live down through to the spirit and the poetry of
their calling. It is the poetry of the calling that keeps them there.

Most of us in this mortal life are allowed but our one peephole in the
universe, that we may see IT withal; but if we love it enough and
stand close to it enough, we breathe the secret and touch in our lives
the secret that throbs through it all.

For a man to have an ideal in this world, for a man to know what an
ideal is, even though nothing but a wooden leg shall come of it, and a
life in a switch-house, and the signal of comrades whirling by, this
also is to have lived.

The fact that the railroad has the same fascination for the railroad
man that the sea has for the sailor is not a mere item of interest
pertaining to human nature. It is a fact that pertains to the art of
the present day, and to the future of its literature. It is as much a
symbol of the art of a machine age as the man Ulysses is a symbol of
the art of an heroic age.

That it is next to impossible to get a sailor, with all his hardships,
to turn his back upon the sea is a fact a great many thousand years
old. We find it accounted for not only in the observation and
experience of men, but in their art. It was rather hard for them to do
it at first (as with many other things), but even the minor poets have
admitted the sea into poetry. The sea was allowed in poetry before
mountains were allowed in it. It has long been an old story. When the
sailor has grown too stiff to climb the masts he mends sails on the
decks. Everybody understands--even the commonest people and the minor
poets understand--why it is that a sailor, when he is old and bent and
obliged to be a landsman to die, does something that holds him close
to the sea. If he has a garden, he hoes where he can see the sails. If
he must tend flowers, he plants them in an old yawl, and when he
selects a place for his grave, it is where surges shall be heard at
night singing to his bones. Every one appreciates a fact like this.
There is not a passenger on the Empire State Express, this moment,
being whirled to the West, who could not write a sonnet on it,--not a
man of them who could not sit down in his seat, flying through space
behind the set and splendid hundred-guarding eyes of the engineer, and
write a poem on a dead sailor buried by the sea. A crowd on the street
could write a poem on a dead sailor (that is, if they were sure he was
dead), and now that sailors enough have died in the course of time to
bring the feeling of the sea over into poetry, sailors who are still
alive are allowed in it. It remains to be seen how many wrecks it is
going to take, lists of killed and wounded, fatally injured, columns
of engineers dying at their posts, to penetrate the spiritual safe
where poets are keeping their souls to-day, untouched of the world,
and bring home to them some sense of the adventure and quiet splendor
and unparalleled expressiveness of the engineer's life. He is a man
who would rather be without a life (so long as he has his nerve) than
to have to live one without an engine, and when he climbs down from
the old girl at last, to continue to live at all, to him, is to linger
where she is. He watches the track as a sailor watches the sea. He
spends his old age in the roundhouse. With the engines coming in and
out, one always sees him sitting in the sun there until he dies, and
talking with them. Nothing can take him away.

Does any one know an engineer who has not all but a personal affection
for his engine, who has not an ideal for his engine, who holding her
breath with his will does not put his hand upon the throttle of
that ideal and make that ideal say something? Woe to the poet who
shall seek to define down or to sing away that ideal. In its glory,
in darkness or in day, we are hid from death. It is the protection of
life. The engineer who is not expressing his whole soul in his
engine, and in the aisles of souls behind him, is not worthy to place
his hand upon an engine's throttle. Indeed, who is he--this man--that
this awful privilege should be allowed to him, that he should dare to
touch the motor nerve of her, that her mighty forty-mile-an-hour
muscles should be the slaves of the fingers of a man like this,
climbing the hills for him, circling the globe for him? It is
impossible to believe that an engineer--a man who with a single touch
sends a thousand tons of steel across the earth as an empty wind can
go, or as a pigeon swings her wings, or as a cloud sets sail in the
west--does not mean something by it, does not love to do it because
he means something by it. If ever there was a poet, the engineer is a
poet. In his dumb and mighty, thousand-horizoned brotherhood,
hastener of men from the ends of the earth that they may be as one, I
always see him,--ceaseless--tireless--flying past sleep--out through
the Night--thundering down the edge of the world, into the Dawn.

Who am I that it should be given to me to make a word on my lips to
speak, or to make a thing that shall be beautiful with my hands--that
I should stand by my brother's life and gaze on his trembling
track--and not feel what the engine says as it plunges past, about the
man in the cab? What matters it that he is a wordless man, that he
wears not his heart in a book? Are not the bell and the whistle and
the cloud of steam, and the rush, and the peering in his eyes words
enough? They are the signals of this man's life beckoning to my life.
Standing in his engine there, making every wheel of that engine thrill
to his will, he is the priest of wonder to me, and of the terror of
the splendor of the beauty of power. The train is the voice of his
life. The sound of its coming is a psalm of strength. It is as the
singing a man would sing who felt his hand on the throttle of things.
The engine is a soul to me--soul of the quiet face thundering
past--leading its troop of glories echoing along the hills, telling it
to the flocks in the fields and the birds in the air, telling it to
the trees and the buds and the little, trembling growing things, that
the might of the spirit of man has passed that way.

If an engine is to be looked at from the point of view of the man who
makes it and who knows it best; if it is to be taken, as it has a
right to be taken, in the nature of things, as being an expression of
the human spirit, as being that man's way of expressing the human
spirit, there shall be no escape for the children of this present
world, from the wonder and beauty in it, and the strong delight in it
that shall hem life in, and bound it round on every side. The idealism
and passion and devotion and poetry in an engineer, in the feeling he
has about his machine, the power with which that machine expresses
that feeling, is one of the great typical living inspirations of this
modern age, a fragment of the new apocalypse, vast and inarticulate
and far and faint to us, but striving to reach us still, now from
above, and now from below, and on every side of life. It is as though
the very ground itself should speak,--speak to our poor, pitiful,
unspiritual, matter-despising souls,--should command them to come
forth, to live, to gaze into the heart of matter for the heart of God.
It is so that the very dullest of us, standing among our machines, can
hardly otherwise than guess the coming of some vast surprise,--the
coming of the day when, in the very rumble of the world, our sons and
daughters shall prophesy, and our young men shall see visions, and our
old men shall dream dreams. It cannot be uttered. I do not dare to say
it. What it means to our religion and to our life and to our art, this
great athletic uplift of the world, I do not know. I only know that so
long as the fine arts, in an age like this, look down on the
mechanical arts there shall be no fine arts. I only know that so long
as the church worships the laborer's God, but does not reverence
labor, there shall be no religion in it for men to-day, and none for
women and children to-morrow. I only know that so long as there is no
poet amongst us, who can put himself into a word, as this man, my
brother the engineer, is putting himself into his engine, the engine
shall remove mountains, and the word of the poet shall not; it shall
be buried beneath the mountains. I only know that so long as we have
more preachers who can be hired to stop preaching or to go into life
insurance than we have engineers who can be hired to leave their
engines, inspiration shall be looked for more in engine cabs than in
pulpits,--the vestibule trains shall say deeper things than sermons
say. In the rhythm of the anthem of them singing along the rails, we
shall find again the worship we have lost in church, the worship we
fain would find in the simpered prayers and paid praises of a thousand
choirs,--the worship of the creative spirit, the beholding of a
fragment of creation morning, the watching of the delight of a man in
the delight of God,--in the first and last delight of God. I have made
a vow in my heart. I shall not enter a pulpit to speak, unless every
word have the joy of God and of fathers and mothers in it. And so long
as men are more creative and godlike in engines than they are in
sermons, I listen to engines.

Would to God it were otherwise. But so it shall be with all of us. So
it cannot but be. Not until the day shall come when this wistful,
blundering church of ours, loved with exceeding great and bitter love,
with all her proud and solitary towers, shall turn to the voices of
life sounding beneath her belfries in the street, shall she be
worshipful; not until the love of all life and the love of all love is
her love, not until all faces are her faces, not until the face of the
engineer peering from his cab, sentry of a thousand souls, is
beautiful to her, as an altar cloth is beautiful or a stained glass
window is beautiful, shall the church be beautiful. That day is bound
to come. If the church will not do it with herself, the great rough
hand of the world shall do it with the church. That day of the new
church shall be known by men because it will be a day in which all
worship shall be gathered into her worship, in which her holy house
shall be the comradeship of all delights and of all masteries under
the sun, and all the masteries and all the delights shall be laid at
her feet.

VI

PROPHETS

The world follows the creative spirit. Where the spirit is creating,
the strong and the beautiful flock. If the creative spirit is not in
poetry, poetry will call itself something else. If it is not in the
church, religion will call itself something else. It is the business
of a living religion, not to wish that the age it lives in were some
other age, but to tell what the age is for, and what every man born in
it is for. A church that can see only what a few of the men born in an
age are for, can help only a few. If a church does not believe in a
particular man more than he believes in himself, the less it tries to
do for him the better. If a church does not believe in a man's work as
he believes in it, does not see some divine meaning and spirit in it
and give him honor and standing and dignity for the divine meaning in
it; if it is a church in which labor is secretly despised and in which
it is openly patronized, in which a man has more honor for working
feebly with his brain than for working passionately and perfectly with
his hands, it is a church that stands outside of life. It is
excommunicated by the will of Heaven and the nature of things, from
the only Communion that is large enough for a man to belong to or for
a God to bless.

If there is one sign rather than another of religious possibility and
spiritual worth in the men who do the world's work with machines
to-day, it is that these men are never persuaded to attend a church
that despises that work.

Symposiums on how to reach the masses are pitiless irony. There is no
need for symposiums. It is an open secret. It cries upon the
house-tops. It calls above the world in the Sabbath bells. A church
that believes less than the world believes shall lose its leadership
in the world. "Why should I pay pew rent," says the man who sings with
his hands, "to men who do not believe in me, to worship, with men who
do not believe in me, a God that does not believe in me?" If heaven
itself (represented as a rich and idle place,--seats free in the
evening) were opened to the true laboring man on the condition that he
should despise his hands by holding palms in them, he would find some
excuse for staying away. He feels in no wise different with regard to
his present life. "Unless your God," says the man who sings with his
hands, to those who pity him and do him good,--"unless your God is a
God I can worship in a factory, He is not a God I care to worship in a
church."

Behold it is written: The church that does not delight in these men
and in what these men are for, as much as the street delights in them,
shall give way to the street. The street is more beautiful. If the
street is not let into the church, it shall sweep over the church and
sweep around it, shall pile the floors of its strength upon it, above
it. From the roofs of labor--radiant and beautiful labor--shall men
look down upon its towers. Only a church that believes more than the
world believes shall lead the world. It always leads the world. It
cannot help leading it. The religion that lives in a machine age, and
that cannot see and feel, and make others see and feel, the meaning of
that machine age, is a religion which is not worthy of us. It is not
worthy of our machines. One of the machines we have made could make a
better religion than this. Even now, almost everywhere in almost every
town or city where one goes, if one will stop or look up or listen,
one hears the chimneys teaching the steeples. It would be blind for
more than a few years more to be discouraged about modern religion.
The telephone, the wireless telegraph, the X-rays, and all the other
great believers are singing up around it. The very railroads are
surrounding it and taking care of it. A few years more and the
steeples will stop hesitating and tottering in the sight of all the
people. They will no longer stand in fear before what the crowds of
chimneys and railways and the miles of smokestacks sweeping past are
saying to the people.

They will listen to what the smokestacks are saying to the people.

They will say it better.

In the meantime they are not listening.

Religion and art at the present moment, both blindfolded and both with
their ears stopped, are being swept to the same irrevocable issue. By
all poets and prophets the same danger signal shall be seen spreading
before them both jogging along their old highways. It is the arm that
reaches across the age.

RAILROAD CROSSING
LOOK OUT FOR THE ENGINE!

PART II.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES

I

AS GOOD AS OURS

One is always hearing it said that if a thing is to be called poetic
it must have great ideas in it, and must successfully express them.
The idea that there is poetry in machinery, has to meet the objection
that, while a machine may have great ideas in it, "it does not look
it." The average machine not only fails to express the idea that it
stands for, but it generally expresses something else. The language of
the average machine, when one considers what it is for, what it is
actually doing, is not merely irrelevant or feeble. It is often
absurd. It is a rare machine which, when one looks for poetry in it,
does not make itself ridiculous.

The only answer that can be made to this objection is that a
steam-engine (when one thinks of it) really expresses itself as well
as the rest of us. All language is irrelevant, feeble, and absurd. We
live in an organically inexpressible world. The language of everything
in it is absurd. Judged merely by its outer signs, the universe over
our heads--with its cunning little stars in it--is the height of
absurdity, as a self-expression. The sky laughs at us. We know it when
we look in a telescope. Time and space are God's jokes. Looked at
strictly in its outer language, the whole visible world is a joke. To
suppose that God has ever expressed Himself to us in it, or to suppose
that He could express Himself in it, or that any one can express
anything in it, is not to see the point of the joke.

We cannot even express ourselves to one another. The language of
everything we use or touch is absurd. Nearly all of the tools we do
our living with--even the things that human beings amuse themselves
with--are inexpressive and foolish-looking. Golf and tennis and
football have all been accused in turn, by people who do not know them
from the inside, of being meaningless. A golf-stick does not convey
anything to the uninitiated, but the bare sight of a golf-stick lying
on a seat is a feeling to the one to whom it belongs, a play of sense
and spirit to him, a subtle thrill in his arms. The same is true of a
new fiery-red baby, which, considering the fuss that is made about it,
to a comparative outsider like a small boy, has always been from the
beginning of the world a ridiculous and inadequate object. A man could
not possibly conceive, even if he gave all his time to it, of a more
futile, reckless, hapless expression of or pointer to an immortal soul
than a week-old baby wailing at time and space. The idea of a baby may
be all right, but in its outer form, at first, at least, a baby is a
failure, and always has been. The same is true of our other musical
instruments. A horn caricatures music. A flute is a man rubbing a
black stick with his lips. A trombone player is a monster. We listen
solemnly to the violin--the voice of an archangel with a board tucked
under his chin--and to Girardi's 'cello--a whole human race laughing
and crying and singing to us between a boy's legs. The eye-language of
the violin has to be interpreted, and only people who are cultivated
enough to suppress whole parts of themselves (rather useful and
important parts elsewhere) can enjoy a great opera--a huge conspiracy
of symbolism, every visible thing in it standing for something that
can not be seen, beckoning at something that cannot be heard. Nothing
could possibly be more grotesque, looked at from the outside or by a
tourist from another planet or another religion, than the celebration
of the Lord's Supper in a Protestant church. All things have their
outer senses, and these outer senses have to be learned one at a time
by being flashed through with inner ones. Except to people who have
tried it, nothing could be more grotesque than kissing, as a form of
human expression. A reception--a roomful of people shouting at each
other three inches away--is comical enough. So is handshaking. Looked
at from the outside, what could be more unimpressive than the
spectacle of the greatest dignitary of the United States put in a vise
in his own house for three hours, having his hand squeezed by long
rows of people? And, taken as a whole, scurrying about in its din,
what could possibly be more grotesque than a great city--a city looked
at from almost any adequate, respectable place for an immortal soul to
look from--a star, for instance, or a beautiful life?

Whether he is looked at by ants or by angels, every outer token that
pertains to man is absurd and unfinished until some inner thing is put
with it. Man himself is futile and comic-looking (to the other
animals), rushing empty about space. New York is a spectacle for a
squirrel to laugh at, and, from the point of view of a mouse, a man is
a mere, stupid, sitting-down, skull-living, desk-infesting animal.

All these things being true of expression--both the expression of men
and of God--the fact that machines which have poetry in them do not
express it very well does not trouble me much. I do not forget the
look of the first ocean-engine I ever saw--four or five stories of it;
nor do I forget the look of the ocean-engine's engineer as in its
mighty heart-beat he stood with his strange, happy, helpless "Twelve
thousand horse-power, sir!" upon his lips.

That first night with my first engineer still follows me. The time
seems always coming back to me again when he brought me up from his
whirl of wheels in the hold to the deck of stars, and left me--my new
wonder all stumbling through me--alone with them and with my thoughts.

The engines breathe.
No sound but cinders on the sails
And the ghostly heave,
The voice the wind makes in the mast--
And dainty gales
And fluffs of mist and smoking stars
Floating past--
From night-lit funnels.

In the wild of the heart of God I stand.
Time and Space
Wheel past my face.
Forever. Everywhere.
I alone.
Beyond the Here and There
Now and Then
Of men,
Winds from the unknown
Round me blow
Blow to the unknown again.

Out in its solitude I hear the prow
Beyond the silence-crowded decks
Laughing and shouting
At Night,
Lashing the heads and necks
Of the lifted seas,
That in their flight
Urge onward
And rise and sweep and leap and sink
To the very brink
Of Heaven.

Timber and steel and smoke
And Sleep
Thousand-souled
A quiver,
A deadened thunder,
A vague and countless creep
Through the hold,
The weird and dusky chariot lunges on
Through Fate.
From the lookout watch of my soul's eyes
Above the houses of the deep
Their shadowy haunches fall and rise
--O'er the glimmer-gabled roofs
The flying of their hoofs,
Through the wonder and the dark
Where skies and waters meet
The shimmer of manes and knees
Dust of seas...
The sound of breathing, urge, confusion
And the beat, the starlight beat
Soft and far and stealthy-fleet
Of the dim unnumbered trampling of their feet.

II

ON BEING BUSY AND STILL

One of the hardest things about being an inventor is that the machines
(excepting the poorer ones) never show off. The first time that the
phonograph (whose talking had been rumored of many months) was allowed
to talk in public, it talked to an audience in Metuchen, New Jersey,
and, much to Mr. Edison's dismay, everybody laughed. Instead of being
impressed with the real idea of the phonograph--being impressed
because it could talk at all--people were impressed because it talked
through its nose.

The more modern a machine is, when a man stands before it and seeks to
know it,--the more it expects of the man, the more it appeals to his
imagination and his soul,--the less it is willing to appeal to the
outside of him. If he will not look with his whole being at a
twin-screw steamer, he will not see it. Its poetry is under water.
This is one of the chief characteristics of the modern world, that its
poetry is under water. The old sidewheel steamer floundering around in
the big seas, pounding the air and water both with her huge, showy
paddles, is not so poetic-looking as the sailboat, and the poetry in
the sailboat is not so obvious, so plainly on top, as in a gondola.

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