The Voice of the Machines

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

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At least it seems so to me. I was looking out of my study window down
the long track in the meadow the other morning and saw a smoke-cloud
floating its train out of sight. A high wind was driving, and in long
wavering folds the cloud lay down around the train. It was like a
great Bird, close to the snow, forty miles an hour. For a moment it
almost seemed that, instead of a train making a cloud, it was a cloud
propelling a train--wing of a thousand tons. I have often before seen
a broken fog towing a mountain, but never have I seen before, a train
of cars with its engine, pulled by the steam escaping from its
whistle. Of course the train out in my meadow, with its pillar of fire
by night and of cloud by day hovering over it, is nothing new; neither
is the tower of steam when it stands still of a winter morning
building pyramids, nor the long, low cloud creeping back on the
car-tops and scudding away in the light; but this mad and splendid
Thing of Whiteness and Wind, riding out there in the morning, this
ghost of a train--soul or look in the eyes of it, haunting it,
gathering it all up, steel and thunder, into itself, catching it away
into heaven--was one of the most magical and stirring sights I have
seen for a long time. It came to me like a kind of Zeit-geist or
passing of the spirit of the age.

When I looked again it was old 992 from the roundhouse escorting
Number Eight to Springfield.

VI

THE MACHINES AS PHILOSOPHERS

If we could go into History as we go into a theatre, take our seats
quietly, ring up the vast curtain on any generation we liked, and then
could watch it--all those far off queer happy people living before our
eyes, two or three hours--living with their new inventions and their
last wonders all about them, they would not seem to us, probably to
know why they were happy. They would merely be living along with their
new things from day to day, in a kind of secret clumsy gladness.

Perhaps it is the same with us. The theories for poems have to be
arranged after we have had them. The fundamental appeal of machinery
seems to be to every man's personal everyday instinct and experience.
We have, most of the time, neither words nor theories for it.

I do not think that our case must stand or fall with our theory. But
there is something comfortable about a theory. A theory gives one
permission to let ones self go--makes it seem more respectable to
enjoy things. So I suggest something--the one I have used when I felt
I had to have one. I have partitioned it off by itself and it can be
skipped.

1. The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.

2. A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals
the nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea.

3. Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately
expressed.

4. Machinery has poetry in it because the three immeasurable ideas
expressed by machinery are the three immeasurable ideas of poetry and
of the imagination and the soul--infinity and the two forms of
infinity, the liberty and the unity of man.

5. These immeasurable ideas are consummately expressed by machinery
because machinery expresses them in the only way that immeasurable
ideas can ever be expressed: (1) by literally doing the immeasurable
things, (2) by suggesting that it is doing them. To the man who is in
the mood of looking at it with his whole being, the machine is
beautiful because it is the mightiest and silentest symbol the world
contains of the infinity of his own life, and of the liberty and unity
of all men's lives, which slowly, out of the passion of history is now
being wrought out before our eyes upon the face of the earth.

6. It is only from the point of view of a nightingale or a sonnet that
the aesthetic form of a machine, if it is a good machine, can be
criticised as unbeautiful. The less forms dealing with immeasurable
ideas are finished forms the more symbolic and speechless they are;
the more they invoke the imagination and make it build out on God, and
upon the Future, and upon Silence, the more artistic and beautiful and
satisfying they are.

7. The first great artist a modern or machine age can have, will be
the man who brings out for it the ideas behind its machines. These
ideas--the ones the machines are daily playing over and about the
lives of all of us--might be stated roughly as follows:

The idea of the incarnation--the god in the body of the man.
The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from others.
The idea of unity--the soul's rescue from its mere self.
The idea of the Spirit--the Unseen and Intangible.
The idea of immortality.
The cosmic idea of God.
The practical idea of invoking great men.
The religious idea of love and comradeship.

And nearly every other idea that makes of itself a song or a prayer in
the human spirit.

PART FOUR

IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES

I

THE IDEA OF INCARNATION

"_I sought myself through earth and fire and seas,

And found it not--but many things beside;
Behemoth old, Leviathans that ride.
And protoplasm, and jellies of the tide.

Then wandering upward through the solid earth
With its dim sounds, potential rage and mirth,
I faced the dim Forefather of my birth,

And thus addressed Him: 'All of you that lie
Safe in the dust or ride along the sky--
Lo, these and these and these! But where am I?_'"

The grasshopper may be called the poet of the insects. He has more hop
for his size than any of the others. I am very fond of watching
him--especially of watching those two enormous beams of his that loom
up on either side of his body. They have always seemed to me one of
the great marvels of mechanics. By knowing how to use them, he jumps
forty times his own length. A man who could contrive to walk as well
as any ordinary grasshopper does (and without half trying) could make
two hundred and fifty feet at a step. There is no denying, of course,
that the man does it, after his fashion, but he has to have a trolley
to do it with. The man seems to prefer, as a rule, to use things
outside to get what he wants inside. He has a way of making everything
outside him serve him as if he had it on his own body--uses a whole
universe every day without the trouble of always having to carry it
around with him. He gets his will out of the ground and even out of
the air. He lays hold of the universe and makes arms and legs out of
it. If he wants at any time, for any reason, more body than he was
made with, he has his soul reach out over or around the planet a
little farther and draw it in for him.

The grasshopper, so far as I know, does not differ from the man in
that he has a soul and body both, but his soul and body seem to be
perfectly matched. He has his soul and body all on. It is probably the
best (and the worst) that can be said of a grasshopper's soul, if he
has one, that it is in his legs--that he really has his wits about
him.

Looked at superficially, or from the point of view of the next hop, it
can hardly be denied that the body the human soul has been fitted out
with is a rather inferior affair. From the point of view of any
respectable or ordinarily well-equipped animal the human body--the one
accorded to the average human being in the great show of
creation--almost looks sometimes as if God really must have made it as
a kind of practical joke, in the presence of the other animals, on the
rest of us. It looks as if He had suddenly decided at the very moment
he was in the middle of making a body for a man, that out of all the
animals man should be immortal--and had let it go at that. With the
exception of the giraffe and perhaps the goose or camel and an extra
fold or so in the hippopotamus, we are easily the strangest, the most
unexplained-looking shape on the face of the earth. It is exceedingly
unlikely that we are beautiful or impressive, at first at least, to
any one but ourselves. Nearly all the things we do with our hands and
feet, any animal on earth could tell us, are things we do not do as
well as men did once, or as well as we ought to, or as well as we did
when we were born. Our very babies are our superiors.

The only defence we are able to make when we are arraigned before the
bar of creation, seems to be, that while some of the powers we have
exhibited have been very obviously lost, we have gained some very fine
new invisible ones. We are not so bad, we argue, after all,--our
nerves, for instance,--the mentalized condition of our organs. And
then, of course, there is the superior quality of our gray matter.
When we find ourselves obliged to appeal in this pathetic way from the
judgment of the brutes, or of those who, like them, insist on looking
at us in the mere ordinary, observing, scientific, realistic fashion,
we hint at our mysteriousness--a kind of mesh of mysticism there is in
us. We tell them it cannot really be seen from the outside, how well
our bodies work. We do not put it in so many words, but what we mean
is, that we need to be cut up to be appreciated, or seen in the large,
or in our more infinite relations. Our matter may not be very well
arranged on us, perhaps, but we flatter ourselves that there is a
superior unseen spiritual quality in it. It takes seers or surgeons to
appreciate us--more of the same sort, etc. In the meantime (no man can
deny the way things look) here we all are, with our queer, pale,
little stretched-out legs and arms and things, floundering about on
this earth, without even our clothes on, covering ourselves as best we
can. And what could really be funnier than a human body living before
The Great Sun under its frame of wood and glass, all winter and all
summer ... strange and bleached-looking, like celery, grown almost
always under cloth, kept in the kind of cellar of cotton or wool it
likes for itself, moving about or being moved about, the way it is, in
thousands of queer, dependent, helpless-looking ways? The earth, we
can well believe, as we go up and down in it is full of soft laughter
at us. One cannot so much as go in swimming without feeling the fishes
peeking around the rocks, getting their fun out of us in some still,
underworld sort of way. We cannot help--a great many of us--feeling,
in a subtle way, strange and embarrassed in the woods. Most of us, it
is true, manage to keep up a look of being fairly at home on the
planet by huddling up and living in cities. By dint of staying
carefully away from the other animals, keeping pretty much by
ourselves, and whistling a good deal and making a great deal of noise,
called civilization, we keep each other in countenance after a
fashion, but we are really the guys of the animal world, and when we
stop to think of it and face the facts and see ourselves as the others
see us, we cannot help acknowledging it. I, for one, rather like to,
and have it done with.

It is getting to be one of my regular pleasures now, as I go up and
down the world,--looking upon the man's body,--the little funny one
that he thinks he has, and then stretching my soul and looking upon
the one that he really has. When one considers what a man actually
does, where he really lives, one sees very plainly that all that he
has been allowed is a mere suggestion or hint of a body, a sort of
central nerve or ganglion for his real self. A seed or spore of
infinity, blown down on a star--held there by the grip, apparently, of
Nothing--a human body is pathetic enough, looked at in itself. There
is something indescribably helpless and wistful and reaching out and
incomplete about it--a body made to pray with, perhaps, one might say,
but not for action. All that it really comes to or is for, apparently,
is a kind of light there is in it.

But the sea is its footpath. The light that is in it is the same light
that reaches down to the central fires of the earth. It flames upon
heaven. Helpless and unfinished-looking as it is, when I look upon it,
I have seen the animals slinking to their holes before it, and
worshipping, or following the light that is in it. The great waters
and the great lights flock to it--this beckoning and a prayer for a
body, which the man has.

I go into the printing room of a great newspaper. In a single flash of
black and white the press flings down the world for him--birth, death,
disgrace, honor and war and farce and love and death, sea and hills,
and the days on the other side of the world. Before the dawn the
papers are carried forth. They hasten on glimmering trains out through
the dark. Soon the newsboys shrill in the streets--China and the
Philippines and Australia, and East and West they cry--the voices of
the nations of the earth, and in my soul I worship the body of the
man. Have I not seen two trains full of the will of the body of the
man meet at full speed in the darkness of the night? I have watched
them on the trembling ground--the flash of light, the crash of power,
ninety miles an hour twenty inches apart, ... thundering aisles of
souls ... on into blackness, and in my soul I worship the body of the
man.

And when I go forth at night, feel the earth walking silently across
heaven beneath my feet, I know that the heart-beat and the will of the
man is in it--in all of it. With thousands of trains under it, over
it, around it, he thrills it through with his will. I no longer look,
since I have known this, upon the sun alone, nor upon the countenance
of the hills, nor feel the earth around me growing softly or resting
in the light, lifting itself to live. All that is, all that reaches
out around me, is the body of the man. One must look up to stars and
beyond horizons to look in his face. Who is there, I have said, that
shall trace upon the earth the footsteps of this body, all wireless
telegraph and steel, or know the sound of its going? Now, when I see
it, it is a terrible body, trembling the earth. Like a low thunder it
reaches around the crust of it, grasping it. And now it is a gentle
body (oh, Signor Marconi!), swift as thought up over the hill of the
sea, soft and stately as the walking of the clouds in the upper air.

Is there any one to-day so small as to know where he is? I am always
coming suddenly upon my body, crying out with joy like a child in the
dark, "And I am here, too!"

Has the twentieth century, I have wondered, a man in it who shall feel
Himself?

And so it has come to pass, this vision I have seen with my own
eyes--Man, my Brother, with his mean, absurd little unfinished body,
going triumphant up and down the earth making limbs of Time and Space.
Who is there who has not seen it, if only through the peephole of a
dream--the whole earth lying still and strange in the hollow of his
hand, the sea waiting upon him? Thousands of times I have seen it, the
whole earth with a look, wrapped white and still in its ball of mist,
the glint of the Atlantic on it, and in the blue place the vision of
the ships.

Between the seas and skies
The Shuttle flies
Seven sunsets long, tropic-deep,
Thousand-sailed,
Half in waking, half in sleep.

Glistening calms and shouting gales
Water-gold and green,
And many a heavenly-minded blue
It thrusts and shudders through,
Past my starlight,
Past the glow of suns I know,
Weaving fates,
Loves and hates
In the Sea--
The stately Shuttle
To and fro,
Mast by mast,
Through the farthest bounds of moons and noons.
Flights of Days and Nights
Flies fast.

It may be true, as the poets are telling us, that this fashion the
modern man has, of reaching out with steel and vapor and smoke, and
holding a star silently in his hand, has no poetry in it, and that
machinery is not a fit subject for poets. Perhaps. I am merely judging
for myself. I have seen the few poets of this modern world crowded
into their corner of it (in Westminster Abbey), and I have seen also a
great foundry chiming its epic up to the night, freeing the bodies and
the souls of men around the world, beating out the floors of cities,
making the limbs of the great ships silently striding the sea, and
rolling out the roads of continents.

If this is not poetry, it is because it is too great a vision. And yet
there are times I am inclined to think when it brushes against
us--against all of us. We feel Something there. More than once I have
almost touched the edge of it. Then I have looked to see the man
wondering at it. But he puts up his hands to his eyes, or he is merely
hammering on something. Then I wish that some one would be born for
him, and write a book for him, a book that should come upon the man
and fold him in like a cloud, breathe into him where his wonder is. He
ought to have a book that shall be to him like a whole Age--the one he
lives in, coming to him and leaning over him, whispering to him,
"Rise, my Son and live. Dost thou not behold thy hands and thy feet?"

The trains like spirits flock to him.

There are days when I can read a time-table. When I put it back in my
pocket it sings.

In the time-table I carry in my pocket I unfold the earth.

I have come to despise poets and dreams. Truths have made dreams pale
and small. What is wanted now is some man who is literal enough to
tell the truth.

II

THE IDEA OF SIZE

Sometimes I have a haunting feeling that the other readers of Mount
Tom (besides me) may not be so tremendously interested after all in
machinery and interpretations of machinery. Perhaps they are merely
being polite about the subject while up here with me on the mountain,
not wanting to interrupt exactly and not talking back. It is really no
place for talking back, perhaps they think, on a mountain. But the
trouble is, I get more interested than other people before I know it.
Then suddenly it occurs to me to wonder if they are listening
particularly and are not looking off at the scenery and the river and
the hills and the meadow while I wander on about railroad trains and
symbolism and the Mount Tom Pulp Mill and socialism and electricity
and Schopenhauer and the other things, tracking out relations. It gets
worse than other people's genealogies.

But all I ask is, that when they come, as they are coming now, just
over the page to some more of these machine ideas, or interpretations
as one might call them, or impressions, or orgies with engines, they
will not drop the matter altogether. They may not feel as I do. It
would be a great disappointment to all of us, perhaps, if I could be
agreed with by everybody; but boring people is a serious
matter--boring them all the time, I mean. It's no more than fair, of
course, that the subscribers to a magazine should run some of the
risk--as well as the editor--but I do like to think that in these next
few pages there are--spots, and that people will keep hopeful.

* * * * *

Some people are very fond of looking up at the sky, taking it for a
regular exercise, and thinking how small they are. It relieves them. I
do not wish to deny that there is a certain luxury in it. But I must
say that for all practical purposes of a mind--of having a mind--I
would be willing to throw over whole hours and days of feeling very
small, any time, for a single minute of feeling big. The details are
more interesting. Feeling small, at best, is a kind of glittering
generality.

I do not think I am altogether unaware how I look from a star--at
least I have spent days and nights practising with a star, looking
down from it on the thing I have agreed for the time being (whatever
it is) to call myself, and I have discovered that the real luxury for
me does not consist in feeling very small or even in feeling very
large. The luxury for me is in having a regular reliable feeling,
every day of my life, that I have been made on purpose--and very
conveniently made, to be infinitely small or infinitely large as I
like. I arrange it any time. I find myself saying one minute, "Are not
the whole human race my house-servants? Is not London my valet--always
at my door to do my bidding? Clouds do my errands for me. It takes a
world to make room for my body. My soul is furnished with other worlds
I cannot see."

The next minute I find myself saying nothing. The whole star I am on
is a bit of pale yellow down floating softly through space. What I
really seem to enjoy is a kind of insured feeling. Whether I am small
or large all space cannot help waiting upon me--now that I have taken
iron and vapor and light and made hands for my hands, millions of
them, and reached out with them. A little one shall become a thousand.
I have abolished all size--even my own size does not exist. If all the
work that is being done by the hands of my hands had literally to be
done by men, there would not be standing room for them on the
globe--comfortable standing room. But even though, as it happens, much
of the globe is not very good to stand on, and vast tracts of it,
every year, are going to waste, it matters nothing to us. Every thing
we touch is near or far, or large or small, as we like. As long as a
young woman can sit down by a loom which is as good as six hundred
more just like her, and all in a few square feet--as long as we can do
up the whole of one of Napoleon's armies in a ball of dynamite, or
stable twelve thousand horses in the boiler of an ocean steamer, it
does not make very much difference what kind of a planet we are on, or
how large or small it is. If suddenly it sometimes seems as if it were
all used up and things look cramped again (which they do once in so
often) we have but to think of something, invent something, and let it
out a little. We move over into a new world in a minute. Columbus was
mere bagatelle. We get continents every few days. Thousands of men are
thinking of them--adding them on. Mere size is getting to be
old-fashioned--as a way of arranging things. It has never been a very
big earth--at best--the way God made it first. He made a single spider
that could weave a rope out of her own body around it. It can be
ticked all through, and all around, with the thoughts of a man. The
universe has been put into a little telescope and the oceans into a
little compass. Alice in Wonderland's romantic and clever way with a
pill is become the barest matter of fact. Looking at the world a
single moment with a soul instead of a theodolite, no one who has ever
been on it--before--would know it. It's as if the world were a little
wizened balloon that had been given us once and had been used so for
thousands of years, and we had just lately discovered how to blow it.

III

THE IDEA OF LIBERTY

Some one told me one morning not so very long ago that the sun was
getting a mile smaller across every ten years. It gave me a shut-in
and helpless feeling. I found myself several times during that day
looking at it anxiously. I almost held my hands up to it to warm them.
I knew in a vague fashion that it would last long enough for me. And a
mile in ten years was not much. It did not take much figuring to see
that I had not the slightest reason to be anxious. But my feelings
were hurt. I felt as if something had hit the universe. I could not
get myself--and I have not been able to get myself since--to look at
it impersonally. I suppose every man lives in some theory of the
universe, unconsciously, every day, as much as he lives in the
sunlight. And he does not want it disturbed. I have always felt safe
before. And, what was a necessary part of safety with me, I have felt
that history was safe--that there was going to be enough of it.

I have been in the world a good pleasant while on the whole, tried it
and got used to it--used to the weather on it and used to having my
friends hate me and my enemies turn on me and love me, and the other
uncertainties; but all the time, when I looked up at the sun and saw
it, or thought of it down under the world, I counted on it. I
discovered that my soul had been using it daily as a kind of fulcrum
for all things. I helped God lift with it. It was obvious that it was
going to be harder for both of us--a mere matter of time. I could not
get myself used to the thought. Every fresh look I took at the sun
peeling off mile after mile up there, as fast as I lived, flustered
me--made my sky less useful to me, less convenient to rest in. I
found myself trying slowly to see how this universe would look--what
it would be like, if I were the last man on it. Somebody would have to
be. It would be necessary to justify things for him. He would probably
be too tired and cold to do it. So I tried.

I had a good deal the same experience with Mount Pelee last summer. I
resented being cooped up helplessly, on a planet that leaked.

The fact that it leaked several thousand miles away, and had made a
comparatively safe hole for it, out in the middle of the sea, only
afforded momentary relief. The hurt I felt was deeper than that. It
could not be remedied by a mere applying long distances to it. It was
underneath down in my soul. Time and Space could not get at it. The
feeling that I had been trapped in a planet somehow, and that I could
not get off possibly, the feeling that I had been deliberately taken
body and soul, without my knowing it and without my ever having been
asked, and set down on a cooled-off cinder to live, whether I wanted
to or not--the sudden new appalling sense I had, that the ground
underneath my feet was not really good and solid, that I was living
every day of my life just over a roar of great fire, that I was being
asked (and everybody else) to make history and build stone houses, and
found institutions and things on the bare outside--the destroyed and
ruined part of a ball that had been tossed out in space to burn itself
up--the sense, on top of all this, that this dried crust I live on, or
bit of caked ashes, was liable to break through suddenly at any time
and pour down the center of the earth on one's head, did not add to
the dignity, it seemed to me, or the self-respect of human life. "You
might as well front the facts, my dear youth, look Mount Pelee in the
face," I tried to say coldly and calmly to myself. "Here you are, set
down helplessly among stars, on a great round blue and green something
all fire and wind inside. And it is all liable--this superficial crust
or geological ice you are on--perfectly liable, at any time or any
place after this, to let through suddenly and dump all the nations and
all ancient and modern history, and you and Your Book, into this awful
ceaseless abyss--of boiled mountains and stewed up continents that is
seething beneath your feet."

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