The Voice of the Machines

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

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It is hard enough, it seems to me, to be an optimist on the edge of
this earth as it is, to keep on believing in people and things on it,
without having to believe besides that the earth is a huge round
swindle just of itself, going round and round through all heaven, with
all of us on it, laughing at us.

I felt chilled through for a long time after Mount Pelee broke out. I
went wistfully about sitting in sunny and windless places trying to
get warmed all summer. And it was not all in my soul. It was not all
subjective. I noticed that the thermometer was caught the same way. It
was a plain case enough--it seemed to me--the heater I lived on had
let through, spilled out and wasted a lot of its fire, and the ground
simply could not get warmed up after it. I sat in the sun and pictured
the earth freezing itself up slowly and deliberately, on the outside.
I had it all arranged in my mind. The end of the world was not coming
as the ancients saw it, by a kind of overflow of fire, but by the
fires going out. A mile off the sun every ten years (this for the loss
of outside heat) and volcanoes and things (for the inside heat), and
gradually between being frozen under us, and frozen over us, both,
both sides at once, the human race would face the situation. We would
have to learn to live together. Any one could see that. The human race
was going to be one long row, sometime--great nations of us and little
ones all at last huddled up along the equator to keep warm. Just
outside of this a little way, it would be perfectly empty star, all in
a swirl of snowdrifts.

I do not claim that it was very scientific to feel in this way, but I
have always had, ever since I can remember, a moderate or decent human
interest in the universe as a universe, and I had always felt as if
the earth had made, for all practical purposes, a sort of contract
with the human race, and when it acted like this--cooled itself off
all of a sudden, in the middle of a hot summer, and all to show off a
comparatively unknown and unimportant mountain hid on an island far
out at sea--I could not conceal from myself (in my present and usual
capacity as a kind of agent or sponsor for humanity) that there was
something distinctly jarring about it and disrespectful. I felt as if
we had been trifled with. It was not a feeling I had very long--this
injured feeling toward the universe in behalf of the man in it, but I
could not help it at first. There grew an anger within me and then out
of the anger a great delight. It seemed to me I saw my soul standing
afar off down there, on its cold and emptied-looking earth.

Then slowly I saw it was the same soul I had always had. I was
standing as I had always stood on an earth before, be it a bare or
flowering one. I saw myself standing before all that was. Then I
defied the heaven over my head and the ground under my feet not to
keep me strong and glad before God. I saw that it mattered not to me,
of an earth, how bare it was, or could be, or could be made to be; if
the soul of a man could be kept burning on it, victory and gladness
would be alive upon it. I fell to thinking of the man. I took an
inventory down in my being of all that the man was, of the might of
the spirit that was in him. Would it be anything new to the man to be
maltreated, a little, neglected--almost outwitted by a universe? Had
he not already, thousands of times in the history of this planet,
flung his spirit upon the cold, and upon empty space--and made homes
out of it? He had snuggled in icebergs. He had entered the place of
the mighty heat and made the coolness of shadow out of it.

It was nothing new. The planet had always been a little queer. It was
when it commenced. The only difference would seem to be that, instead
of having the earth at first the way it is going to be by and by
apparently--an earth with a little rim of humanity around it, great
nations toeing the equator to live--everything was turned around. All
the young nations might have been seen any day crowded around the ends
or tips of the earth to keep from falling into the fire that was still
at work on the middle of it, finishing it off and getting it ready to
have things happen on it. Boys might have been seen almost any
afternoon, in those early days, going out to the north pole and
playing duck on the rock to keep from being too warm.

It is a mere matter of opinion or of taste--the way a planet acts at
any given time. Now it is one way and now another, and we do as we
like.

I do not pretend to say in so many words if the sun grew feeble, just
what the man would do, down in his snowdrifts. But I know he would
make some kind of summer out of them. One cannot help feeling that if
the sun went out, it would be because he wanted it to--had arranged
something, if nothing but a good bit of philosophy. It is not likely
that the man has defied the heavens and the earth all these centuries
for nothing. The things they have done against him have been the
making of him. When he found this same sun we are talking about, in
the earliest days of all, was a sun that kept running away from him
and left him in a great darkness half of every day he lived, he knew
what to do. Every time that Heaven has done anything to him, he has
had his answer ready. The man who finds himself on a planet that is
only lighted part of the time, is merely reminded that he must think
of something. He digs light out of the ground and glows up the world
with her own sap. When he finds himself living on an earth that can
only be said to be properly heated a small fraction of the year, he
makes the earth itself to burn itself and keep him warm. Things like
this are small to us. We put coal through a desire and take the breath
out of its dark body, and put it in pipes, and cook our food with
poisons. We take water and burn it into air and we telegraph boilers,
and flash mills around the earth on poles. We move vast machines with
a little throb, like light. We put a street on a wire. Great crowds in
the great cities--whole blocks of them--are handed along day and night
like dots and dashes in telegrams. A man cannot be stopped by a
breath. We save a man up in his own whisper hundreds of years when he
is dead. A human voice that reaches only a few yards makes thousands
of miles of copper talk. Then we make the thousand miles talk without
the copper wire. We stand on the shore and beat the air with a thought
thousands of miles away--make it whisper for us to ships. One need not
fear for a man like this--a man who has made all the earth a deed, an
action of his own soul, who has thrown his soul at last upon the waste
of heaven and made words out of it. One cannot but believe that a man
like this is a free man. Let what will happen to the sun that warms
him or the star that seems just now his foothold in space. All shall
be as his soul says when his soul determines what it shall say. Fire
and wind and cold--when his soul speaks--and Invisibility itself and
Nothing are his servants.

The vision of a little helpless human race huddled in the tropics
saying its last prayers, holding up its face to a far-off
neglected-looking universe, warming its hands at the stars--the vision
of all the great peoples of the earth squeezed up into Esquimaux, in
furs up to their eyes, stamping their feet on the equator to keep
warm, is merely the sort of vision that one set of scientists gloats
on giving us. One needs but to look for what the other set is saying.
It has not time to be saying much, but what it practically says is:
"Let the sun wizen up if it wants to. There will be something.
Somebody will think of something. Possibly we are outgrowing suns. At
all events to a real man any little accident or bruise to the planet
he's on is a mere suggestion of how strong he is. Some new beautiful
impossibility--if the truth were known--is just what we are looking
for."

A human race which makes its car wheels and napkins out of paper, its
street pavements out of glass, its railway ties out of old shoes,
which draws food out of air, which winds up operas on spools, which
has its way with oceans, and plays chess with the empty ether that is
over the sea--which makes clouds speak with tongues, which lights
railway trains with pin-wheels and which makes its cars go by stopping
them, and heats its furnaces with smoke--it would be very strange if a
race like this could not find some way at least of managing its own
planet, and (heaped with snowdrifts though it be) some way of warming
it, or of melting off a place to live on. A corporation was formed
down in New Jersey the other day to light a city by the tossing of the
waves. We are always getting some new grasp--giving some new sudden
almost humorous stretch to matter. We keep nature fairly smiling at
herself. One can hardly tell, when one hears of half the new things
nowadays--actual facts--whether to laugh or cry, or form a stock
company or break out into singing. No one would dare to say that a
thousand years from now we will not have found some other use for
moonlight than for love affairs and to haul tides with. We will be
manufacturing noon yet, out of compressed starlight, and heating
houses with it. It will be peddled about the streets like milk, from
door to door in cases and bottles.

First and last, whatever else may be said of us, we do as we like with
a planet. Nothing it can do to us, nothing that can happen to it,
outwits us--at least more than a few hundred years at a time. The idea
that we cannot even keep warm on it is preposterous. Nothing would be
more likely--almost any time now--than for some one to decide that we
ought to have our continents warmed more, winters. It would not be
much, as things are going, to remodel the floors of a few of our
continents--put in registers and things, have the heat piped up from
the center of the earth. The best way to get a faint idea of what
science is going to be like the next few thousand years, is to pick
out something that could not possibly be so and believe it. We
manufacture ice in July by boiling it, and if we cannot warm a planet
as we want to--at least a few furnished continents--with hot things,
we will do it with cold ones, or by rubbing icebergs together. If one
wants a good simple working outfit for a prophet in science and
mechanics, all one has to do is to think of things that are unexpected
enough, and they will come to pass. A scientist out in the Northwest
has just finished his plans for getting hold of the other end of the
force of gravity. The general idea is to build a sort of tower or
flag-pole on the planet--something that reaches far enough out over
the edge to get an underhold as it were--grip hold of the force of
gravity where it works backwards. Of course, as anyone can see at a
glance, when it is once built out with steel, the first forty miles or
so (workmen using compressed air and tubular trolleys, etc.),
everything on the tower would pull the other way and the pressure
would gradually be relieved until the thing balanced itself. When
completed it could be used to draw down electricity from waste space
(which has as much as everybody on this planet could ever want, and
more). What a little earth like ours would develop into, with a
connection like this--a sort of umbilical cord to the infinite--no one
would care to try to say. It would at least be a kind of planet that
would always be sure of anything it wanted. When we had used up all
the raw material or live force in our own world we could draw on the
others. At the very least we would have a sort of signal station to
the planets in general that would be useful. They would know what we
want, and if we could not get it from them they would tell us where we
could.

All this may be a little mixing perhaps. It is always difficult to
tell the difference between the sublime and the ridiculous in talking
of a being like man. It is what makes him sublime--that there is no
telling about him--that he is a great, lusty, rollicking, easy-going
son of God and throws off a world every now and then, or puts one on,
with quips and jests. When the laugh dies away his jokes are
prophecies. It behooves us therefore to walk softly, you and I, Gentle
Reader, while we are here with him--while this dear gentle ground is
still beneath our feet. There is no telling his reach. Let us notice
stars more.

In the meantime it does seem to me that a comparatively simple affair
like this one single planet, need not worry us much.

I still keep seeing it--I cannot help it--I always keep seeing
it--eternities at a time, warm, convenient, and comfortable, the same
old green and white, with all its improvements on it, whatever the sun
does. And above all I keep seeing the Man on it, full of defiance and
of love and worship, being born and buried--the little-great man,
running about and strutting, flying through space on it, all his
interests and his loves wound about it like clouds, but beckoning to
worlds as he flies. And whatever the Man does with the other worlds or
with this one, I always keep seeing this one, the same old stand or
deck in eternity, for praying and singing and living, it always was.
Long after I am dead, oh, dear little planet, least and furthest
breath that is blown on thy face, my soul flocks to you, rises around
you, and looks back upon you and watches you down there in your round
white cloud, rowing faithfully through space!

IV

THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY

If I had never thought of it before, and some one were to come around
to my study tomorrow morning and tell me that I was immortal, I am not
at all sure that I would be attracted by it. The first thing that I
should do, probably, would be to argue a little--ask him what it was
for. I might take some pains not to commit myself (one does not want
to settle a million years in a few minutes), but I cannot help being
conscious, on the inside of my own mind, at least, that the first
thought on immortality that would come to me, would be that perhaps it
might be overdoing things a little.

I can speak only for myself. I am not unaware that a great many men
and women are talking to-day about immortality and writing about it. I
know many people too, who, in a faithful, worried way seem to be
lugging about with them, while they live, what they call a faith in
immortality. I would not mean to say a word against immortality, if I
were asked suddenly and had never thought of it before. If by putting
out my hand I could get some of it, for other people,--people that
wanted it or thought they did--I would probably. They would be happier
and easier to live with. I could watch them enjoying the idea of how
long they were going to last. There would be a certain social pleasure
in it. But, speaking strictly for myself, if I were asked suddenly and
had never heard of it before, I would not have the slightest
preference on the subject. It may be true, as some say, that a man is
only half alive if he does not long to live forever, but while I have
the best wishes and intentions with regard to my hope for immortality
I cannot get interested. I feel as if I were living forever now, this
very moment, right here on the premises--Universe, Earth, United
States of America, Hampshire County, Northampton, Massachusetts. I
feel infinitely related every day and hour and minute of my life, to
an infinite number of things. As for joggling God's elbow or praying
to Him or any such thing as that, under the circumstances, and begging
Him to let me live forever, it always seems to me (I have done it
sometimes when I was very tired) as if it were a way of denying Him to
His face. How a man who is literally standing up to his soul's eyes,
and to the tops of the stars in the infinite, who can feel the eternal
throbbing through the very pores of his body, can so far lose his
sense of humor in a prayer, or his reverence in it, as to put up a
petition to God to live forever, I entirely fail to see. I always feel
as if I had stopped living forever--to ask Him.

I have traveled in the blaze of a trolley car when all the world was
asleep, and have been shot through still country fields in the great
blackness. All things that were--it seemed to my soul, were snuffed
out. It was as if all the earth had become a whir and a bit of
light--had dwindled away to a long plunge, or roll and roar through
Nothing. Slowly as I came to myself I said, "Now I will try to realize
Motion. I will see if I can know. I spread my soul about me...." Ties
flying under my feet, black poles picked out with lights, flapping
ghostlike past the windows.... Voices of wheels over and under.... The
long, dreary waver of the something that sounds when the car stops
(and which feels like taking gas) ... the semi-confidential,
semi-public talk of the passengers, the sudden collision with silence,
they come to, when the car halts--all these. Finally when I look up
every one has slipped away. Then I find my soul spreading further and
further. The great night, silent and splendid, builds itself over me.
The night is the crowded time to travel--car almost to one's self,
nothing but a few whirls of light and a conductor for company--the
long monotone of miles--miles--flying beside me and above and around
and beneath--all this shadowed world to belong to, to dwell in, to
pick out with one's soul from Darkness. "Here am I," I said as the
roar tightened once more, and gripped on its awful wire and glowed
through the blackness. "Here I am in infinite space, I and my bit of
glimmer.... Worlds fall about me. The very one I am on, and stamp my
feet on to know it is there, falls and plunges with me out through
deserts of space, and stars I cannot see have their hand upon me and
hold me."

No one would deny that the idea of immortality is a well-meaning idea
and pleasantly inclined and intended to be appreciative of a God, but
it does seem to me that it is one of the most absent-minded ways of
appreciating Him that could be conceived. I am infinite at 88 High
Street. I have all the immortality I can use, without going through my
own front gate. I have but to look out of a window. There is no denying
that Mount Tom is convenient, and as a kind of soul-stepping-stone, or
horse-block to the infinite, the immeasurable and immortal, a mountain
may be an advantage, perhaps, and make some difference; but I must
confess that it seems to me that in all times and in all places a man's
immortality is absolutely in his own hands. His immortality consists in
his being in an immortally related state of mind. His immortality is
his sense of having infinite relations with all the time there is, and
his infinity consists in his having infinite relations with all the
space there is. Wherever, as a matter of form, a man may say he is
living or staying, the universe is his real address.

I have been at sea--lain with a board over me out in the wide night
and looked at the infinite through a port-hole. Over the edge of the
swash of a wave I have gathered in oceans and possessed them. Under my
board in the night I have lain still with the whole earth and mastered
it in my heart, shared it until I could not sleep with the joy of
it--the great ship with all its souls throbbing a planet through me
and chanting it to me. I thought to my soul, "Where art thou?" I
looked down upon myself as if I were a God looking down on myself and
upon the others, and upon the ship and upon the waters.

A thousand breaths we lie
Shrouded limbs and faces
Horizontal
Packed in cases
In our named and numbered places,
Catalogued for sleep,
Trembling through the Godlight
Below, above,
Deep to Deep.

How a church-going man in a world like this can possibly contrive to
have time to cry out or worry on it, or to be troubled about
another--how he can demand another, the way he does sometimes, as if
it were the only thing left a God could do to straighten matters out
for having put him on this one, and how he can call this religion--is
a problem that leaves my mind like an exhausted receiver. It is a
grave question whether any immortality they are likely to get in
another world would ever really pay some people for the time they have
wasted in this one, worrying about it.

Does any science in the world suppose or dare to suppose that I am as
unimportant in it as I look--or that I could be if I tried? that I am
a parasite rolled up in a drop of dew, down under a shimmering mist of
worlds that do not serve me nor care for me? I swear daily that I am
not living and that I will not and cannot live underneath a universe
... with a little horizon or teacup of space set down over me. The
whole sky is the tool of my daily life. It belongs to me and I to it.
I have said to the heavens that they shall hourly minister to me--to
the uses of my spirit and the needs of my body. When I, or my spirit,
would move a little I swing out on stars. In the watches of the night
they reach under my eyelids and serve my sleep and wait on me with
dreams, I know I am immortal because I know I am infinite. A man is at
least as long as he is wide. There is no need to quibble with words. I
care little enough whether I am supposed to say it is forever across
my soul or everywhere across it. Whichever it is, I make it the other
when I am ready. If a man is infinite and lives an infinitely related
life, why should it matter whether he is eternal as he calls it or
not,--takes his immortality sideways here, now, and in the terms of
space or later with some kind of time-arrangement stretched out and
petering along over a long, narrow row of years?

Thousands of things are happening that are mine--out, around, and
through the great darkness--being born and killed and ticked and
printed while I sleep. When I have stilled myself with sleep, do I not
know that the lightning is waiting on me? When I see a cloud of steam
I say, "There is my omnipresence." My being is busy out in the
universe having its way somewhere. The days on the other side of the
world are my days. I get what I want out of them without having to
keep awake for them. In the middle of the night and without trying I
lay my hand on the moon. It is my moon, wherever it may be, or whether
I so much as look upon it, and when I do look upon it it is no roof
for me, and the stars behind it flow in my veins.

II

I have been reading lately a book on Immortality, the leading idea of
which seems to be a sort of astral body for people--people who are
worthy of it. The author does not believe after the old-fashioned
method that we are going to the stars. He intimates (for all practical
purposes) that we do not need to. The stars are coming to us,--are
already being woven in us. The author does not say it in so many
words, but the general idea seems to be that the more spiritual or
subtle body we are going to have, is already started in us--if we live
as we should--growing like a kind of lining for this one.

I can only speak for one, but I find that when I am willing to take
the time from reading books on immortality to enjoy a few infinite
experiences, I am not apt to be troubled very much about another
world.

It is daily obvious to me that I belong and that I am living in an
infinite and eternal world, inconceivably better planned and managed
than one of mine would be, and the only logical thing that I can do,
is to take it for granted that the next one is even better than this.
If the main feature of the next world consists in there not being one,
then so much the better. I would not have thought so. It seems a
little abrupt at this moment, perhaps, but it is a mere detail and why
not leave it to God to work it out? He doesn't have to neglect
anything to do it--which is what we do--and He is going to do it
anyway.

I have refused to take time from my infinity now for a theory of a
theory about some new kind by and by. I have but to stand perfectly
still. There is an infinite opening and shutting of doors for me,
through all the heavens and the earth. I lie with my head in the deep
grass. A square yard is forever across. I listen to a great city in
the grass--millions of insects. Microscopes have threaded it for me. I
know their city--all its mighty little highways. I possess it. And
when I walk away I rebuild their city softly in my heart. Winds,
tides, and vapors are for me everywhere, that my soul may possess
them. I reach down to the silent metals under my feet that millions of
ages have worked on, and fire and wonder and darkness. I feel the sun
and the lives of nations flowing around to me, from under the sea. Who
can shut me out from anybody's sunrise?

"Oh, tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven
And one in my desire."

I play with the Seasons, with all the weathers on earth. I can
telegraph for them. I go to the weather I want. The sky--to me--is no
longer a great, serious, foreign-looking shore, conducting a big
foolish cloud-business, sending down decrees of weather on helpless
cities. With a whistle and a roar I defy it--move any strip of it out
from over me--for any other strip. I order the time of year. It is my
sky. I bend it a little--just a little. The sky no longer has a
monopoly of wonder. With the hands of my hands, my brother and I have
made an earth that can answer a sky back, that can commune with a sky.
The soul at last guesses at its real self. It reaches out and dares.
Men go about singing with telescopes. I do not always need to lift my
hands to a sky and pray to it now. I am related to it. With the hands
of my hands I work with it. I say "I and the sky." I say "I and the
Earth." We are immortal because we are infinite. We have reached over
with the hands of our hands. They are praying a stupendous prayer--a
kind of god's prayer. God's hand has been grasped--vaguely--wonderfully
out in the Dark. No longer is the joy of the universe to a man, one of
his great, solemn, solitary joys. The sublime itself is a neighborly
thought. God's machine--up--There--and the machines of the man have
signaled each other.

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