The Voice of the Machines
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Gerald Stanley Lee >> The Voice of the Machines
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TO LET
TO ANY MAN WHO REALLY WANTS IT.
VIII
THE IDEA OF LOVE AND COMRADESHIP
"_Ever there comes an onward phrase to me
Of some transcendent music I have heard;
No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered,
No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory.
But a glad strain of some still symphony
That no proud mortal touch has ever stirred._"
Have you ever walked out over the hill in your city at night, Gentle
Reader--your own city--felt the soul of it lying about you--lying
there in its gentleness and splendor and lust? Have you never felt as
you stood there that you had some right to it, some right way down in
your being--that all this haze of light and darkness, all the people
in it, somehow really belonged to you? We do not exactly let our souls
say it--at least out loud--but there are times when I have been out in
the street with The Others, when I have heard them--heard our souls,
that is--all softly trooping through us, saying it to ourselves. "O to
know--to be utterly known one moment; to have, if only for one second,
twenty thousand souls for a home; to be gathered around by a city, to
be sought out and haunted by some one great all-love, once, streets
and silent houses of it!"
I go up and down the pavements reaching out into the days and nights
of the men and the women. Perhaps you have seen me, Gentle Reader, in
The Great Street, in the long, slow shuffle with the others? And I
have said to you though I did not know it: "Did you not call to me?
Did you hear anything? I think it was I calling to you."
I have sat at the feet of cities. I have swept the land with my soul.
I have gone about and looked upon the face of the earth. I have
demanded of smoking villages sweeping past and of the mountains and of
the plains and of the middle of the sea: "Where are those that belong
to me? Will I ever travel near enough, far enough?" I have gone up and
down the world--seen the countless men and women in it, standing on
either side of their Abyss of Circumstance, beckoning and reaching
out. I have seen men and women sleepless, or worn, or old, casting
their bread upon the waters, grasping at sunsets or afterglows,
putting their souls like letters in bottles. Some of them seem to be
flickering their lives out like Marconi messages into a sort of
infinite, swallowing human space.
Always this same wild aimless sea of living. There does not seem to be
a geography for love. My soul answered me: "Did you expect a world to
be indexed? Life is steered by a Wind. Blossoms and cyclones and
sunshine and you and I--all blundering along together." "Let every
seed swell for itself," the Universe has said, in its first fine
careless rapture. God is merely having a good time. Why should I go up
and down a universe crying through it, "Where are those that belong to
me?" I have looked at the stars swung out at me and they have not
answered, and now when I look at the men, I have seemed to see them,
every man in a kind of dull might, rushing, his hands before him,
hinged on emptiness. "You are alone," the heart hath said. "Get up and
be your own brother. The world is a great WHO CARES?"
But when, in the middle of deep, helpless sleep, tossed on the wide
waters, I wake in a ship, feel it trembling all through out there with
my brother's care for me, I know that this is not true. "Around
sunsets, out through the great dark," I find myself saying, "he has
reached over and held me. Out here on this high hill of water, under
this low, touching sky, I sleep."
Sometimes I do not sleep. I lie awake silently, and feel gathered
around. I wonder if I could be lonely if I tried. I touch the button
by my pillow. I listen to great cities tending me. I have found all
the earth paved, or carpeted, or hung, or thrilled through with my
brother's thoughts for me. I cannot hide from love. He has hired
oceans to do my errands. He has made the whole human race my
house-servants. I lie in my berth for sheer joy, thinking of the
strange peoples where the morning is, running to and fro for me, down
under the dark. Next me, the great quiet throb of the engine--between
me and infinite space--beating comfortably. I cannot help answering to
it--this soft and mighty reaching out where I lie.
My thoughts follow along the great twin shafts my brother holds me
with. I wonder about them. I wish to do and share with them.
Were I a spirit I would go
Where the murmuring axles of the screws
Along their whirling aisles
Break through the hold,
Where they lift the awful shining thews
Of Thought,
Of Trade,
And strike the Sea
Till the scar of London lies
Miles and miles upon its breast
Out in the West.
As I lie and look out of my port-hole and watch the starlight stepping
along the sea I let my soul go out and visit with it. The ship I am
in--a little human beckoning between two deserts. Out through my
port-hole I seem to see other ships, ghosts of great cities--an ocean
of them, creeping through their still huge picture of the night, with
their low hoarse whistles meeting one another, whispering to one
another under the stars.
"And they are all mine," I say, "hastening gently."
I lie awake thinking of it. I let my whole being float out upon the
thought of it. The bare thought of it, to me, is like having lived a
great life. It is as if I had been allowed to be a great man a minute.
I feel rested down through to before I was born. The very stars, after
it, seem rested over my head. I have gathered my universe about me. It
is as if I had lain all still in my soul and some beautiful eternal
sleep--a minute of it--had come to me and visited me. All men are my
brothers. Is not the world filled with hastening to me? What is there
my brother has not done for me? From the uttermost parts of the
morning, all things that are flow fresh and beautiful upon my flesh.
He has laid my will on the heavens. His machines are like the tides
that do not stop. They are a part of the vast antennae of the earth.
They have grown themselves upon it. Like wind and vapor and dust, they
are a part of the furnishing of the earth. If I am cold and seek furs
Alaska is as near as the next snowdrift. My brother has caused it to
be so. Everywhere is five cents away. I take tea in Pekin with a spoon
from Australia and a saucer from Dresden. With the handle of my knife
from India and the blade from Sheffield, I eat meat from Kansas.
Thousands of miles bring me spoonfuls. The taste in my mouth, five or
six continents have made for me. The isles of the sea are on the tip
of my tongue.
And this is the thing my brother means, the thing he has done for me,
solitary. I keep saying it over to myself. I lie still and try to take
it in--to feel the touch of the hands of his hands. Does any one say
this thing he is doing is done for money--that it is not done for
comradeship or love? Could money have thought of it or dared it or
desired it? Could all the money in the world ever pay him for it? This
paper-ticket I give him--for this berth I lie in--does it pay him for
it? Do I think to pay my fare to the infinite?--I--a parasite of a
great roar in a city? These seven nights in the hollow of his hand he
has held me and let me look upon the heaped-up stillness in heaven--of
clouds. I have visited with the middle of the sea.
And now with a thought, have I furnished my hot plain and smoke
forever.
I have not time to dream. I spell out each night, before I sleep, some
vast new far-off love, this new daily sense of mutual service, this
whole round world to measure one's being against. Crowds wait on me in
silence. I tip nations with a nickel. Who would believe it? I lie in
my berth and laugh at the bigness of my heart.
When I go out on the meadow at high noon and in the great sleepy sunny
silence there I stand and watch that long imperious train go by
putting together the White Mountains and New York, it is no longer as
it was at first, a mere train by itself to me,--a flash of parlor cars
between a great city and a sky up on Mt. Washington. When it swings up
between my two little mountains its huge banner of steam and smoke, it
is the beckoning of The Other Trains, the whole starful, creeping
through the Alps (that moment), stealing up the Andes, roaring through
the sun or pounding through the dark on the under sides of the world.
In the great silence on the meadow after the train rolls by, it would
be hard to be lonely for a minute, not to stand still, not to share in
spirit around the earth a few of the big, happy things--the far unseen
peoples in the sun, the streets, the domes and towers, the statesmen,
and poets, but always between and above and beneath the streets and
the domes and the towers, and the statesmen and poets--always the
engineers,--I keep seeing them--these men who dip up the world in
their hands, who sweep up life ... long, narrow, little towns of
souls, and bowl them through the Days and Nights.
In this huge, bottomless, speechless, modern world--one would rather
be running the poems than writing them. At night I turn in my sleep. I
hear the midnight mail go by--that same still face before it, the
great human headlight of it. I lie in my bed wondering. And when the
thunder of the Face has died away, I am still wondering. Out there on
the roof of the world, thundering alone, thundering past death, past
glimmering bridges, past pale rivers, folding away villages behind him
(the strange, soft, still little villages), pounding on the
switch-lights, scooping up the stations, the fresh strips of earth and
sky.... The cities swoon before him ... swoon past him. Thundering
past his own thunder, echoes dying away ... and now out in the great
plain, out in the fields of silence, drinking up mad splendid, little
black miles.... Every now and then he thinks back over his shoulder,
thinks back over his long roaring, yellow trail of souls. He laughs
bitterly at sleep, at the men with tickets, at the way the men with
tickets believe in him. He knows (he grips his hand on the lever) he
is not infallible. Once ... twice ... he might have ... he almost....
Then suddenly there is a flash ahead ... he sets his teeth, he reaches
out with his soul ... masters it, he strains himself up to his
infallibility again ... all those people there ... fathers, mothers,
children, ... sleeping on their arms full of dreams. He feels as the
minister feels, I should think, when the bells have stopped on a
Sabbath morning, when he stands in his pulpit alone, alone before God
... alone before the Great Silence, and the people bow their heads.
But I have found that it is not merely the machines that one can see
at a glance are woven all through with men (like the great trains)
which make the big companions. It is a mere matter of getting
acquainted with the machines and there is not one that is not woven
through with men, with dim faces of vanished lives--with inventors.
I have seen great wheels, in steam and in smoke, like swinging spirits
of the dead. I have been told that the inventors were no longer with
us, that their little tired, old-fashioned bodies were tucked in
cemeteries, in the crypts of churches, but I have seen them with
mighty new ones in the night--in the broad day, in a nameless silence,
walk the earth. Inventors may not be put like engineers, in show
windows in front of their machines, but they are all wrought into
them. From the first bit of cold steel on the cowcatcher to the little
last whiff of breath in the air-brake, they are wrought in--fibre of
soul and fibre of body. As the sun and the wind are wrought in the
trees and rivers in the mountains, they are there. There is not a
machine anywhere, that has not its crowd of men in it, that is not
full of laughter and hope and tears. The machines give one some idea,
after a few years of listening, of what the inventors' lives were
like. One hears them--the machines and the men, telling about each
other.
There are days when it has been given to me to see the machines as
inventors and prophets see them.
On these days I have seen inventors handling bits of wood and metal. I
have seen them taking up empires in their hands and putting the future
through their fingers.
On these days I have heard the machines as the voices of great peoples
singing in the streets.
* * * * *
And after all, the finest and most perfect use of machinery, I have
come to think, is this one the soul has, this awful, beautiful daily
joy in its presence. To have this communion with it speaking around
one, on sea and land, and in the low boom of cities, to have all this
vast reaching out, earnest machinery of human life--sights and sounds
and symbols of it, beckoning to one's spirit day and night everywhere,
playing upon one the love and glory of the world--to have--ah, well,
when in the last great moment of life I lay my universe out in order
around about me, and lie down to die, I shall remember I have lived.
This great sorrowing civilization of ours, which I had seen before,
always sorrowing at heart but with a kind of devilish convulsive
energy in it, has come to me and lived with me, and let me see the
look of the future in its face.
And now I dare look up. For a moment--for a moment that shall live
forever--I have seen once, I think--at least once, this great radiant
gesturing of Man around the edges of a world. I shall not die, now,
solitary. And when my time shall come and I lie down to do it, oh,
unknown faces that shall wait with me,--let it not be with drawn
curtains nor with shy, quiet flowers of fields about me, and silence
and darkness. Do not shut out the great heartless-sounding,
forgetting-looking roar of life. Rather let the windows be opened. And
then with the voice of mills and of the mighty street--all the din and
wonder of it,--with the sound in my ears of my big brother outside
living his great life around his little earth, I will fall asleep.
BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THIS BOOK
PART ONE
I. The word beautiful in 1905 is no longer shut in with its ancient
rim of hills, or with a show of sunsets, or with bouquets and doilies
and songs of birds. It is a man's word, says The Twentieth Century.
"If a hill is beautiful. So is the locomotive that conquers a hill."
II. The modern literary man--slow to be converted, is already driven
to his task. Living in an age in which nine-tenths of his fellows are
getting their living out of machines, or putting their living into
them, he is not content with a definition of beauty which shuts down
under the floor of the world nine tenths of his fellowbeings, leaves
him standing by himself with his lonely idea of beauty, where--except
by shouting or by looking down through a hatchway he has no way of
communing with his kind.
III. Unless he can conquer the machines, interpret them for the soul
or the manhood of the men about him he sees that after a little
while--in the great desert of machines, there will not be any men. A
little while after that there will not be any machines. He has come to
feel that the whole problem of civilization turns on it--on what seems
at first sight an abstract or literary theory--that there is poetry in
machines. If we cannot find a great hope or a great meaning for the
machine-idea in its simplest form, the machines of steel and flame
that minister to us, if inspiring ideas cannot be connected with a
machine simply because it is a machine, there is not going to be
anything left in modern life with which to connect inspiring ideas.
All our great spiritual values are being operated as machines. To take
the stand that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be
connected with machinery is to take a stand for the continued
existence of modern religion (in all reverence) the God-machine, for
modern education, the man-machine, for modern government, the
crowd-machine, for modern art, the machine that expresses the crowd,
and for modern society--the machine in which the crowd lives.
IV. V. The poetry in machinery is a matter of fact. The literary men
who know the men who know the machines, the men who live with them,
the inventors, and engineers and brakemen have no doubts about the
poetry in machinery. The real problem that stands in the way of
interpreting and bringing out the poetry in machinery, instead of
being a literary or aesthetic problem is a social one. It is in getting
people to notice that an engineer is a gentleman and a poet.
VI. The inventor is working out the passions and the freedoms of the
people, the tools of the nations.
The people are already coming to look upon the inventor under our
modern conditions as the new form of prophet. If what we call
literature cannot interpret the tools that men are daily doing their
living with, literature as a form of art, is doomed. So long as men
are more creative and godlike in engines than they are in poems the
world listens to engines. If what we call the church cannot interpret
machines, the church as a form of religion loses its leadership until
it does. A church that can only see what a few of the men born in an
age, are for, can only help a few. A religion that lives in a
machine-age and that does not see and feel the meaning of that age, is
not worthy of us. It is not even worthy of our machines. One of the
machines that we have made could make a better religion than this.
PART TWO
THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACHINES
I. I have heard it said that if a thing is to be called poetic it must
have great ideas in it and must successfully express them; that the
language of the machines, considered as an expression of the ideas
that are in the machines, is irrelevant and absurd. But all language
looked at in the outside way that men have looked at machines, is
irrelevant and absurd. We listen solemnly to the violin, the voice of
an archangel with a board tucked under his chin. Except to people who
have tried it, nothing could be more inadequate than kissing as a form
of human expression, between two immortal infinite human beings.
II. The chief characteristic of the modern machine as well as of
everything else that is strictly modern is that it refuses to show
off. The man who is looking at a twin-screw steamer and who is not
feeling as he looks at it the facts and the ideas that belong with it,
is not seeing it. The poetry is under water.
III. I have heard it said that the modern man does not care for
poetry. It would be truer to say that he does not care for
old-fashioned poetry--the poetry that bears on. The poetry in a Dutch
windmill flourishes and is therefore going by, to the strictly modern
man. The idle foolish look of a magnet appeals to him more. Its
language is more expressive and penetrating. He has learned that in
proportion as a machine or anything else is expressive--in the modern
language, it hides. The more perfect or poetic he makes his machines
the more spiritual they become. His utmost machines are electric.
Electricity is the modern man's prophet. It sums up his world. It has
the modern man's temperament--the passion of being invisible and
irresistible.
IV. Poetry and religion consist--at bottom, in being proud of God.
Most men to-day are worshipping God--at least in secret, not merely
because of this great Machine that He has made, running softly above
us--moonlight and starlight ... but because He has made a Machine that
can make machines, a machine that shall take more of the dust of the
earth and of the vapor of heaven and crowd it into steel and iron and
say "Go ye now,--depths of the earth, heights of heaven--serve ye me!
Stones and mists, winds and waters and thunder--the spirit that is in
thee is my spirit. I also, even I also am God!"
V. Everything has its language and the power of feeling what a thing
means, by the way it looks, is a matter of noticing, of learning the
language. The language of the machines is there. I cannot precisely
know whether the machines are expressing their ideas or not. I only
know that when I stand before a foundry hammering out the floors of
the world, clashing its awful cymbals against the night, I lift my
soul to it, and in some way--I know not how, while it sings to me, I
grow strong and glad.
PART THREE
THE MACHINES AS POETS
I. II. Machinery has poetry in it because it expresses the soul of
man--of a whole world of men.
It has poetry in it because it expresses the individual soul of the
individual man who creates the Machine--the inventor, and the man who
lives with the machine--the engineer.
It has poetry in it because it expresses God. He is the kind of God
who can make men who can make machines.
III. IV. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the man's
soul it expresses the greatest idea that the soul of man can have--the
man's sense of being related to the Infinite. It has poetry in it not
merely because it makes the man think he is infinite but because it is
making the man as infinite as he thinks he is. When I hear the
machines, I hear Man saying, "God and I."
V. Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the infinity of
man it expresses the two great immeasurable ideas of poetry and of the
imagination and of the soul in all ages--the two forms of
infinity--the liberty and the unity of man.
The substance of a beautiful thing is its Idea.
A beautiful thing is beautiful in proportion as its form reveals the
nature of its substance, that is, conveys its idea.
Machinery is beautiful by reason of immeasurable ideas consummately
expressed.
PART FOUR
THE IDEAS BEHIND THE MACHINES
The ideas of machinery in their several phases are sketched in
chapters as follows:
I. II. The idea of the incarnation. The God in the body of the man.
III. The idea of liberty--the soul's rescue from environment.
IV. The idea of immortality.
V. The idea of God.
VI. The idea of the Spirit--of the Unseen and Intangible.
VII. The practical idea of invoking great men.
VIII. The religious idea of love and comradeship.
* * * * *
Note.--The present volume is the first of a series which had their
beginnings in some articles in the _Atlantic_ a few years ago,
answering or trying to answer the question, "Can a machine age have a
soul?" Perhaps it is only fair to the present conception, as it
stands, to suggest that it is an overture, and that the various phases
and implications of machinery--the general bearing of machinery in our
modern life, upon democracy, and upon the humanities and the arts, are
being considered in a series of three volumes called:
I. The Voice of the Machines.
II. Machines and Millionaires.
III. Machines and Crowds.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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