The Voice of the Machines
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Gerald Stanley Lee >> The Voice of the Machines
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V
THE IDEA OF GOD
My study (not the place where I get my knowledge but the place where I
put it together) is a great meadow--ten square splendid level miles of
it--as fenceless and as open as a sky--merely two mountains to stand
guard. If H---- the scientist who lives nearest to me (that is;
nearest to my mind,) were to come down to me to-morrow morning, down
in my meadow, with its huge triangle of trolleys and railways humming
gently around the edges and tell me that he had found a God, I would
not believe it. "Where?" I would say, "in which Bottle?" I have groped
for one all these years. Ever since I was a child I have been groping
for a God. I thought one had to. I have turned over the pages of
ancient books and hunted in morning papers and rummaged in the events
of the great world and looked on the under sides of leaves and guessed
on the other sides of the stars and all in vain. I never could make
out to find a God in that way. I wonder if anyone can.
I know it is not the right spirit to have, but I must confess that
when the scientist (the smaller sort of scientist around the corner in
my mind and everybody's mind) with all his retorts and things,
pottering with his argument of design, comes down to me in my meadow
and reminds me that he has been looking for a God and tells me
cautiously and with all his kind, conscientious hems and haws that he
has found Him, I wonder if he has.
The very necessity a man is under of seeking a God at all, in a world
alive all over like this, of feeling obliged to go on a long journey
to search one out makes one doubt if the kind of God he would find
would be worth while. I have never caught a man yet who has found his
God in this way, enjoying Him or getting anyone else to.
It does seem to me that the idea of a God is an absolutely plain,
rudimentary, fundamental, universal human instinct, that the very
essence of finding a God consists in His not having to be looked for,
in giving one's self up to one's plain every-day infinite experiences.
I suppose if it could be analyzed, the poet's real quarrel with the
scientist is not that he is material, but that he is not material
enough,--he does not conceive matter enough to find a God. I cannot
believe for instance that any man on earth to whom the great spectacle
of matter going on every day before his eyes is a scarcely noticed
thing--any man who is willing to turn aside from this spectacle--this
spectacle as a whole--and who looks for a God like a chemist in a
bottle for instance--a bottle which he places absolutely by itself,
would be able to find one if he tried. It seems to me that it is by
letting one's self have one's infinite--one's infinitely related
experiences, and not by cutting them off that one comes to know a God.
To find a God who is everywhere one must at least spend a part of
one's time in being everywhere one's self--in relating one's knowledge
to all knowledge.
There are various undergirding arguments and reasons, but the only way
that I really know there is an infinite God is because I am
infinite--in a small way--myself. Even the matter that has come into
the world connected with me, and that belongs to me, is infinite. If
my soul, like some dim pale light left burning within me, were merely
to creep to the boundaries of its own body, it would know there was a
God. The very flesh I live with every day is infinite flesh. From the
furthest rumors of men and women, the furthest edge of time and space
my soul has gathered dust to itself. I carry a temple about with me.
If I could do no better, and if there were need, I am my own
cathedral. I worship when I breathe. I bow down before the tick of my
pulse. I chant to the palm of my hand. The lines in the tips of my
fingers could not be duplicated in a million years. Shall any man ask
me to prove there are miracles or to put my finger on God? or to go
out into some great breath of emptiness or argument to be sure there
is a God? I am infinite. Therefore there is a God. I feel daily the
God within me. Has He not kindled the fire in my bones and out of the
burning dust warmed me before the stars--made a hearth for my soul
before them? I am at home with them. I sit daily before worlds as at
my own fireside.
I suppose there is something intolerant and impatient and a little
heartless about an optimist--especially the kind of optimism that is
based upon a simple everyday rudimentary joy in the structure of the
world. There is such a thing, I suppose, with some of us, as having a
kind of devilish pride in faith, as one would say to ordinary mortals
and creepers and considerers and arguers "Oh now just see me believe!"
We are like boys taking turns jumping in the Great Vacant Lot, seeing
which can believe the furthest. We need to be reminded that a man
cannot simply bring a little brag to God, about His world, and make a
religion out of it. I do not doubt in the least, as a matter of
theory, that I have the wrong spirit--sometimes--toward the scientific
man who lives around the corner of my mind. It seems to me he is
always suggesting important-looking unimportant things. I have days of
sympathizing with him, of rolling his great useless heavy-empty pack
up upon my shoulders and strapping it there. But before I know it I'm
off. I throw it away or melt it down into a tablet or something--put
it in my pocket. I walk jauntily before God.
And the worst of it is, I think He intended me to. I think He intended
me to know and to keep knowing daily what He has done for me and is
doing now, out in the universe, and what He has made me to do. I also
am a God. From the first time I saw the sun I have been one daily. I
have performed daily all the homelier miracles and all the common
functions of a God. I have breathed the Invisible into my being. Out
of the air of heaven I have made flesh. I have taken earth from the
earth and burned it within me and made it into prayers and into songs.
I have said to my soul "To eat is to sing." I worship all over. I am
my own sacrament. I lay before God nights of sleep, and the delight
and wonder of the flesh I render back to Him again, daily, as an
offering in His sight.
And what is true of my literal body--of the joy of my hands and my
feet, is still more true of the hands of my hands.
When I wake in the night and send forth my thought upon the darkness,
track out my own infinity in it, feel my vast body of earth and sky
reaching around me, all telegraphed through with thought, and floored
with steel, I may have to grope for a God a little (I do sometimes),
but I do it with loud cheers. I sing before the door of heaven if
there is a heaven or needs to be a heaven. When I look upon the glory
of the other worlds, has not science itself told me that they are a
part of me and I a part of them? Nothing is that would not be
different without something else. My thoughts are ticking through the
clouds, and the great sun itself is creeping through me daily down in
my bones. The steam cloud hurries for me on a hundred seas. I turn
over in my sleep at midnight and lay my hand on the noon. And when I
have slept and walk forth in the morning, the stars flow in my veins.
Why should a man dare to whine? "Whine not at me!" I have said to man
my brother. If you cannot sing to me do not interrupt me.
Let him sing to me
Who sees the watching of the stars above the day,
Who hears the singing of the sunrise
On its way
Through all the night.
Who outfaces skies, outsings the storms,
Whose soul has roamed
Infinite-homed
Through tents of Space,
His hand in the dim Great Hand that forms
All wonder.
Let him sing to me
Who is The Sky Voice, The Thunder Lover
Who hears above the wind's fast-flying shrouds
The drifted darkness, the heavenly strife,
The singing on the sunny sides of all the clouds,
Of His Own Life.
VI
THE IDEA OF THE UNSEEN AND INTANGIBLE
_AN ODE TO THE UNSEEN_
Poets of flowers, singers of nooks in Space,
Petal-mongers, embroiderers of words
In the music-haunted houses of the birds,
Singers with the thrushes and pewees
In the glimmer-lighted roofs
Of the trees--
Unhand my soul!
Buds with singing in their hearts,
Birds with blooms upon their wings,
All the wandering whispers of delight,
The near familiar things;
Voice of pine trees, winds of daisies,
Sounds of going in the grain
Shall not bind me to thy singing
When the sky with God is ringing
For the Joy of the Rain.
Sea and star and hill and thunder,
Dawn and sunset, noon and night,
All the vast processional of the wonder
Where the worlds are,
Where my soul is,
Where the shining tracks are
For the spirit's flight--
Lift thine eyes to these
From the haunts of dewdrops,
Hollows of the flowers,
Caves of bees
That sing like thee,
Only in their bowers;
From the stately growing cities
Of the little blowing leaves,
To the infinite windless eaves
Of the stars;
From the dainty music of the ground,
The dim innumerable sound
Of the Mighty Sun
Creeping in the grass,
Softest stir of His feet
(Where they go
Far and slow
On their immemorial beat
Of buds and seeds
And all the gentle and holy needs
Of flowers),
To the old eternal round
Of the Going of His Might,
Above the confines of the dark,
Odors and winds and showers,
Day and night,
Above the dream of death and birth
Flickering East and West,
Boundaries of a Shadow of an Earth--
Where He wheels
And soars
And plays
In illimitable light,
Sends the singing stars upon their ways
And on each and every world
When The Little Shadow for its Little Sleep
Is furled--
Pours the Days.
* * * * *
The first time I gazed in the great town upon a solid mile of electric
cars--threaded with Nothing--mesmerism hauling a whole city home to
supper, it seemed to me as if the central power of all things, The
Thing that floats and breathes through the universe, must have been
found by someone--gathered up from between stars, and turned
on--poured down gently on the planet--falling on a thousand wheels,
and run on the tops of cars--the secret thrill that softly and out in
the darkness and through all ages had done all things. I felt as if I
had seen the infinite in some near familiar, humdrum place. I walked
on in a dazed fashion. I do not suppose I could really have been more
surprised if I had met a star walking in the street.
In my deepest dream
I heard the Song
Running in my sleep
Through the lowest caves of Being
Down below
Where no sound is, sun is,
Hearing, seeing
That men know.
There was something about it, about that sense of the mile of cars
moving, that made it all seem very old.
_An Ode to the Lightning._
Before the first new dust of dream God took
For making man and hope and love and graves
Had kindled to its fate. Before the floods
Had folded round the hills. Before the rainbow
Born of cloud had taught the sky its tints,
The Lightning Minstrel was. The cry of Vague
To Vague. The Chaos-voice that rolled and crept
From out the pale bewildered wonder-stuff
That wove the worlds,
Before the Hand had stirred that touched them,
While still, hinged on nothing,
Dim and shapeless Things
And clouds with groping sleep upon their wings
Floated and waited.
Before the winds had breathed the breath of life
Or blown from wastes of Space
To Earth's creating place,
The souls of seeds
And ghosts of old dead stars,
The Lightning Spirit willed
Their feet with wonder should be thrilled.
--Primal fire of all desire
That leaps from men to men,
Brother of Suns
And all the Glorious Ones
That circle skies,
He flashed to these
The night that brought the birth,
The vision of the place
And raised his awful face
To all their glittering crowds,
And cried from where It lay
--A tiny ball of fire and clay
In swaddling clothes of clouds,
"Behold the Earth!"
* * * * *
* * * * *
Oh heavenly feet of The Hot Cloud! Bringer
Of the garnered airs. Herald of the shining rains!
Looser of the locked and lusty winds from their misty caves.
Opener of the thousand thousand-gloried doors twixt heaven
And heaven and Heaven's heaven. Oh thou whose play
Men make to do their work (_Why do their work?_)
--And call from holidays of space, sojourns
Of suns and moons, and lock to earth
(_Why lock to earth?_)
* * * * *
That the Dead Face may flash across the seas
The cry of the new-born babe be heard around
A world. Ah me! and the click of lust
And the madness and the gladness and the ache
Of Dust, Dust!
AN ODE TO THE TELEGRAPH WIRES.
THE SONG THE WORLD SANG LAYING THE ATLANTIC CABLE
The mortal wires of the heart of the earth
I sing, melted and fused by men,
That the immortal fires of their souls should fling
To eaves of heaven and caves of sea,
And God Himself, and farthest hills and dimmest bounds of sense
The flame of the Creature's ken,
The flame of the glow of the face of God
Upon the face of men.
Wind-singing wires
Along their thousand airy aisles,
Feet of birds and songs of leaves,
Glimmer of stars and dewy eves.
Sea-singing wires
Along their thousand slimy miles,
Shadowy deeps,
Unsunned steeps,
Beating in their awful caves
To mouthing fish and bones
And weeds unfurled
Deserts of waves
The heart-beat of this upper world.
Infinite blue, infinite green,
Infinite glory of the ear
Ticking its passions through
Infinite fear,
Ooze of storm, sodden and slanting wrecks
The forever untrodden decks
Of Death,
Ever the seething wires
On the floors
Of the world,
Below the last
Locked fast
Water-darkened doors
Of the sun,
Lighting the awful signal fires
Of our speechless vast desires
On the mountains and the hills
Of the sea
Till the sandy-buried heights
And the sullen sunken vales
And fire-defying barrens of the deep
The hearth of souls shall be
Beacons of Thought,
And from the lurk of the shark
To the sunrise-lighted eerie of the lark
And where the farthest cloud-sail fills
Shall be felt the throbbing and the sobbing and the hoping
The might and mad delight,
The hell-and-heaven groping
Of our little human wills.
AN ODE TO THE WIRELESS
THE PRAYER OF MAN THROUGH ALL THE YEARS IN WHICH THE SKY-TELEGRAPH
WOULD NOT WORK
Roofed in with fears,
Beneath its little strip of sky
That is blown about
In and out
Across my wavering strip of years--
Who am I
Whose singing scarce doth reach
The cloud-climbed hills,
To take upon my lips the speech
Of those whose voices Heaven fills
With splendor?
And yet--
I cannot quite forget
That in the underdawn of dreams
I have felt the faint surmise
Shining through the starry deep of my sleep
That I with God went singing once
Up and down with suns and storms
Through the phantom-pillared forms
And stately-silent naves
And thunder-dreaming caves
Of Heaven.
Great Spirit--Thou who in my being's burning mesh
Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh,
Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust
Hast thrust
Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights,
Where are the deeds that needs must be,
The dreams, the high delights,
That I once more may hear my voice
From cloudy door to door rejoice--
May stretch the boundaries of love
Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears
To the faint-remembered glory of those years--
May lift my soul
And reach this Heaven of thine
With mine?
Where are the gleams?
Thou shalt tell me,
Shalt compel me.
The sometime glory shall return
I know.
The day shall be
When by wondering I shall learn
With vapor-fingers to discern
The music-hidden keys of skies--
Shall touch like thee
Until they answer me
The chords of the silent air
And strike the wild and slumber-music out
Dreaming there.
Above the hills of singing that I know
On the trackless, soundless path
That wonder hath
I shall go,
Beyond the street-cry of the poet,
The hurdy-gurdy singing
Of the throngs,
To the Throne of Silence,
Where the Doors
That guard the farthest faintest shores
Of Day
Swing their bars,
And shut the songs of heaven in
From all our dreaming-doing din,
Behind the stars.
There, at last,
The climbing and the singing passed,
And the cry,
My hushed and listening soul shall lie
At the feet of the place
Where the Singer sings
Who Hides His Face.
VII
THE IDEA OF GREAT MEN
"_I had a vision under a green hedge
A hedge of hips and haws--Men yet shall hear
Archangels rolling over the high mountains
Old Satan's empty skull._"
As it looks from MOUNT TOM, casting a general glance around, the Earth
has about been put into shape, now, to do things.
The Earth has never been seen before looking so trim and
convenient--so ready for action--as it is now. Steamships and looms
and printing presses and railways have been supplied, wireless
telegraph furnishings have lately been arranged throughout, and we
have put in speaking tubes on nearly all the continents, and it
looks--as seen from Mount Tom, at least, as if the planet were just
being finished up, now, for a Great Author.
It is true that art and literature do not have, at first glance, a
prosperous look in a machine age, but probably the real trouble the
modern world is having with its authors is not because it is a world
full of materialism and machinery, but because its authors are the
wrong size.
The modern world as it booms along recognizes this, in its practical
way, and instead of stopping to speak to its little authors, to its
poets crying beside it, and stooping to them and encouraging them, it
is quietly and sensibly (as it seems to some of us) going on with its
machines and things making preparations for bigger ones.
I have thought the great authors in every age were made by the
greatness of the listening to them. The greatest of all, I notice,
have felt listened to by God. Even the lesser ones (who have sometimes
been called greatest) have felt listened to, most of them, one finds,
by nothing less than nations. The man Jesus gathers kingdoms about Him
in His talk, like an infant class. It was the way He felt. Almost any
one who could have felt himself listened to in this daring way that
Jesus did would have managed to say something. He could hardly have
missed, one would think, letting fall one or two great ideas at
least--ideas that nations would be born for.
It ought not to be altogether without meaning to a modern man that the
great prophets and interpreters have talked as a rule to whole nations
and that they have talked to them generally, too, for the glory of the
whole earth. They could not get their souls geared smaller than a
whole earth. Shakspeare feels the generations stretching away like
galleries around him listening--when he makes love. It was no
particular heroism or patience in the man Columbus that made him sail
across an ocean and discover a continent. He had the girth of an earth
in him and had to do something with it. He could not have helped it.
He discovered America because he felt crowded.
One would think from the way some people have of talking or writing of
immortality that it must be a kind of knack. As a matter of historic
fact it has almost always been some mere great man's helplessness.
When people have to be created and born on purpose, generation after
generation of them, to listen to a man, two or three thousand years of
them sometimes, on this planet, it is because the man himself when he
spoke felt the need of them--and mentioned it. It is the man who is in
the habit of addressing his remarks to a few continents and to several
centuries who gets them.
I would not dare to say just how or when our next great author on this
earth is going to happen to us, but I shall begin to listen hard and
look expectant the first time I hear of a man who gets up on his feet
somewhere in it and who speaks as if the whole earth were listening to
him. If ever there was an earth that is getting ready to listen, and
to listen all over, it is this one. And the first great man who speaks
in it is going to speak as if he knew it. It is a world which has been
allowed about a million years now, to get to the point where it could
be said to begin to be conscious of being a world at all. And I cannot
believe that a world which for the first time in its history has at
last the conveniences for listening all over, if it wants to, is not
going to produce at the same time a man who shall have something to
say to it--a man that shall be worthy of the first single full
audience, sunset to sunset, that has ever been thought of. It would
seem as if, to say the least, such an audience as this, gathering half
in light and half in darkness around a star, would celebrate by having
a man to match. It would not be necessary for him to fall back,
either, one would think, upon anything that has ever been said or
thought of before. Already even in the sight and sounds of this
present world has the verse of scripture about the next come
true--"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard." It is not conceivable that
there shall not be something said unspeakably and incredibly great to
the first full house the planet has afforded.
I have gone to the place of books. I have seen before this all the
peoples flocking past me under the earth with their little
corner-saviors--each with his own little disc of worship all to
himself on the planet--partitioned away from the rest for thousands of
years. But now the whole face of the earth is changed. No longer can
great men and great events be aimed at it and glanced off on it--into
single nations. Great men, when they come now, can generally have a
world at their feet. It is not possible that we shall not have them.
The whole earth is the wager that we are going to have them. The bids
are out--great statesmen, great actors, great financiers, great
authors--even millionaires will gradually grow great. It cannot be
helped. And it will be strange if someone cannot think of something to
say, with the first full house this planet has afforded.
Even as it is now, let any man with a great girth of love in him but
speak once--but speak one single round-the-world delight and nations
sit at his feet. When Rudyard Kipling is dying with pneumonia seven
seas listen to his breathing. The nations are in galleries on the
stage of the earth now, one listening above the other to the same play
following around the sunrise. Every one is affected by it--a kind of
soul-suction--a great pulling from the world. People who do not want
to write at all feel it--a kind of huge, soft, capillary attraction
apparently--to a pen. The whole planet kindles every man's solitude.
Continents are bellows for the glow in him if there is any. The
wireless telegraph beckons ideas around the world. "How does a planet
applaud?" dreams the young author. "With a faint flush of light?" One
would like to be liked by it--speak one's little piece to it. When one
was through, one could hear the soft hurrah through Space.
I wonder sometimes that in This Presence I ever could have thought or
had times of thinking it was a little or a lonely world to write
in--to flicker out thoughts in. When I think of what a world it was
that came to men once and of the world that waits around me--around
all of us now--I do like to mention it.
When many years ago, as a small boy, I was allowed for the first time
to open the little inside door in the paddle-box of a great side-wheel
steamer and watched its splendid thrust on the sea, I did not know why
it was that I could not be called away from it, or why I stood and
watched hour after hour unconscious before it--the thunder and the
foam piling up upon my being. I have guessed now. I watch the
drive-wheel of an engine now as if I were tracking out at last the
last secret of loneliness. I face Time and Space with it. I know I
have but to do a true deed and I am crowded round--to help me do it. I
know I have but to think a true thought, but to be true and deep
enough with a book--feel a worldful for it, put a worldful in it--and
the whole planet will look over my shoulder while I write. Thousands
of printing presses under a thousand skies I hear truth working
softly, saying over and over, and around and around the earth, the
word that was given to me to say.
Can any one believe that this strange new, deep, beautiful,
clairvoyant feeling a man has nowadays every day, every hour, for the
other side of a star, is not going to make arts and men and words and
actions great in the world?
Silently, you and I, Gentle Reader, are watching the first great
gathering-in of a world to listen and to live. The continents are
unanimous. There has never been a quorum before. They are getting
together at last for the first world-sized man, for the first
world-sized word. They are listening him into life. It is really
getting to be a planet now, a whole completed articulated, furnished,
lived-through, loved-through star, from sun's end to sun's end. One
sees the sign on it
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