The Voice of the Machines Part 9

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 l.u.s.t? 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 Circ.u.mstance, 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 suns.h.i.+ne and you and I--all blundering along together." "Let every seed swell for itself," the Universe has said, in its first fine careless rapture. G.o.d 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, rus.h.i.+ng, 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 b.u.t.ton 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 s.p.a.ce--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 s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+p I am in--a little human beckoning between two deserts. Out through my port-hole I seem to see other s.h.i.+ps, ghosts of great cities--an ocean of them, creeping through their still huge picture of the night, with their low hoa.r.s.e 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 furnis.h.i.+ng 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 comrades.h.i.+p 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. Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 G.o.d ... 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 G.o.d-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 pa.s.sions 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 G.o.dlike 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 pa.s.sion of being invisible and irresistible.

IV. Poetry and religion consist--at bottom, in being proud of G.o.d.

Most men to-day are wors.h.i.+pping G.o.d--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 G.o.d!"

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, clas.h.i.+ng 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.