TYRANNY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
_Accord and discord between organs and acts.--Torses
and sacred scarab.--The hand of man.--Mediocre
fitness of sexual organs for copulation.--Origin
of "luxuria."--The animal is a nervous
system served by organs.--The organ does not
determine the aptitude.--Man's hand inferior
to his genius.--Substitution of one sense for
another.--Union and rôle of the senses in love.--Man
and animal under the tyranny of the nervous
system.--Wear and tear of humanity compensated by
acquisitions.--Man's inheritors._
It is a universal belief that nature or God, in their wisdom, have made
the corporal organs in the best possible form: perfection of the eye,
of the hand, of the paw-jaw of the mantis, of the sexual apparatus of
man, of the bird or the scarab, the furnishing tarses of hymenoptera,
the beaver's tail, the grasshopper's hams, the cicada's tambourine. It
is sometimes true and very often false. It happens that there appears
an exact concord between the organ and the act which it is to perform;
but it happens also, and that not rarely, that the organs seem in no
way fashioned for the deed they must accomplish: most of them are
indeed chance tools, with which the creature manages, as he can, the
acts which he wants to, or should, do.
The forefeet of scarabs are so little destined for modelling and
rolling mud-balls that their tarses are worn out in the process, as
human fingers would perhaps be worn if they had to knead the raw clay
and mortar. In considering the scarab one has to think of a humanity
lacking fingers, having lost them by a long and slow diminution of
nails, bones, flesh. The scarab is a modeller, nothing would be more
useful to him than fingers; instead of losing them by use, he ought to
have grown them longer and more supple. He has lost them, and it is
with the arm stumps that he turns the little balls which are to be food
for himself or his offspring. This insect is condemned to a labour that
will become increasingly difficult as the species grows increasingly
older. It remains to know whether the ancestors of the sacred scarab
had tarses. Horus Apollo grants them as many fingers as the month has
days, that is thirty, which corresponds quite well with the six feet
and five tarses of the scarab. If he was a good observer, the question
is answered, but a single testimony is insufficient, and moreover it is
unlikely that so great a wearing-away would have occurred in so small a
number of centuries. Horus, and a savant like Latreille himself, have
been the dupes of symmetry; if either has looked closely at a scarab,
and if he has seen the forefeet lacking tarses, he has put this down
to chance or to accident. Fabre has at least noted one indisputable
fact, it is that neither as nymph nor adult has the scarab tarses on
his forefeet. If it ever had them, our reasoning draws new vigour
from the negation, for then less than ever is it possible to find the
least logical concordance between the insect's stumps and the need of
modelling and turning to which nature condemns it.
This scarab is a type to which one can relate a great number of other
examples: purveyor hymenoptera are wholly deprived of tools adapted
to their work as quarry-men and well-diggers: thus, at the end of
their labours the greater part of these fragile insects are very much
damaged. One knows the beaver's constructions, but who without the
certitude we have gained by observation, would have dared to attribute
them to these great rats?
Eighteenth century philosophers set themselves the question: Is man
man because he has hands; or has he hands because he is man? One may
answer boldly, that man's hands marvellous as they appear to us, add
almost nothing to his intelligence. One does not see that they are
indispensable for anything save for playing the piano. What constitutes
man is his intelligence, his nervous system. The exterior organ is
secondary: no matter what exterior organ, beak, prehensile tail, teeth,
proboscis, paws would have done the work of the hands. There are birds'
nests which no manual cleverness could weave.
The reproductive organs are no better adapted to their purpose than
are the working organs. Doubtless they attain very often their end,
but at the cost of efforts which a better disposition would have
attenuated or eliminated altogether. The interior mechanism is, or
seems, marvellous; the external mechanism is rudimentary and gives no
result, save, as they say, thanks to the ever-renewed ingenuity of the
couples. Instinct, in one of its most necessary acts, is often put to
difficult proof. The plausible adventure of Daphnis has been presumably
often repeated, even though the limberness of the human form is well
suited to coition; but who has not been surprised to see a heavy bull
leap clumsily onto a lowing cow, bending his useless hocks along her
back, panting, and often not succeeding save thanks to the good offices
of a farm hand? Among beavers, says A. de Quatrefages (Orbigny's
"Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle"), the external orifice of the
generative organs opens in a cloaca so placed under the tail that one
hardly understands how the coupling takes place.
Certain matings are sheer tours de force, and the animal whether it be
the scutilary, a tiny insect, or the elephant, a colossus, is compelled
to take positions absolutely different from its normal postures.
Nature who firmly intends the perpetuity of the species, has not yet
found a simple and unique means thereto; or else, having found it, in
budding, she has cast it aside to adopt the diversity of organs, means,
and movements. There are none, even to those of our own specie which
man may not criticize, even though he prize them; he has criticized,
and his criticism has been to diversify them still further, which
simplifies a fated necessity in making it pleasanter. Morals term this
diversification "luxure."[1] This term is a pejorative which may be
applied also to the exercise of our other senses. All is but _luxuria_.
_Luxuria_, the variety of foods, their cooking, their seasoning, the
culture of special garden plants; _luxuria_: the exercises of the
eye, decoration, the toilet, painting; _luxuria_, music; luxuria, the
marvellous exercises of the hand, so marvellous that direct hand work
can be mimicked by a machine but never equalled; _luxuria_, flowers,
perfumes; _luxuria_, rapid voyages; luxuria, the taste for landscape;
luxuria, all art, science, civilization; _luxuria_, also the diversity
of human gestures, for the animal in his virtuous sobriety has but
one gesture for each sense, and that gesture unvarying; or if the
gesture, as probable, undergoes a change, it is but a slow, invisible
change, and there is at the end but one gesture. The animal is
ignorant of diversity, of the accumulation of aptitudes; man alone is
"_luxurieux_," is libidinous.
There is a principle which I will call the individualism of species.
Each specie is an individual which profits as best it may, for its
useful ends, by the instruments which have devolved to it. A specie of
hymenoptera feels itself obliged to protect its eggs from new enemies,
by digging holes in the ground; it makes use of the tools which it
has, without taking count of the fact that these tools have not been
made for excavation; it acts thus at pressure of necessity, as man
climbs trees in a flood, or gets onto the roof in case of fire. The
need is independent of the organ; it precedes it, and does not always
create it. In the sexual act, need commands the gesture: the animal
adapts itself to positions which are strange to it, and very difficult.
Coupling is nearly always a grimace. One would say that nature has
set the male organ here, and the female there, and left to specific
ingenuity the care of effecting the junction.
It is, I think, permitted us to conclude from the mediocre fitness of
animals to milieu, and of organs to acts, that it is not the milieu
which absolutely fashions, or the organs which absolutely govern,
the acts. One then feels oneself inclined to reaccept Bonald's
definition of man, and even to find it admirable, just, and strict:
An intelligence served by organs. Not "obeyed," not always, but
served, service implying imperfection, a discord between the order
and its fulfillment. But the phrase applies not to man only, and its
spiritualistic origin in no way diminishes its aphoristic value; it
qualifies every animal. The animal is a nervous centre, served by the
different tools in which its branches terminate. It commands, and the
tools, good or bad ones, obey. If they were incapable of performing
their work, at least the essential parts of it, the animal would
perish. There are forms of parasitism which seem to be the consequence
of a general renunciation of organs; impotent to enter into direct
relations with the outer world, unmanned by the softness of the
muscles, the nervous system brings the skiff it was piloting into some
harbour or other, and beaches it.
Fabre says, thinking particularly of insects: "The organ does not
determine the aptitude." And this most aptly confirms Bonald's manner
of seeing. Thrown in at the end of a chapter, with scarcely anything
directly to justify it, this affirmation but gains in value. It is the
conclusion, not of a dissertation, but of a long sequence of scientific
observations. As for the facts that one can set inside it, they are
innumerable; one would group them under two heads: The animal serves
himself as best he can with the organs he possesses; he does not
always make use of them. The flying-stag, the best armed of all our
insects, is inoffensive; while the carabe, of peaceful appearance, is
a formidable beast of prey. Apropos of the pill in which the scarab
shuts its egg, the skill with which it is worked up and felted, in a
dark hole by a stump-armed insect, Fabre says simply: "It gave me the
idea of an elephant wanting to make lace." But in what insect will we
see perfect accord of work and organ? In the bee? It would scarcely
seem so. The bee uses for building, modelling, waxing, bottling honey,
exactly the same organs that her sisters, the ammophile, bembex, sphex,
ant, chalicodome, use for hollowing earth, excavating sand, making
cellars, mud houses. The libellule does nothing with the hooks which
render the termite dangerous, and she loafs, while her industrious
brother, also neuroptera and nothing more, builds Himalayas.
The mole-cricket is so well organized for digging with her short
powerful bow legs that she could cut sandstone: she frequents only
the soft soil of gardens. The antophore, on the other hand, with no
instruments save her mediocre mandibles, her velvet paws, forces the
cement which holds the stone walls together, and bores the hardened
earth of the slopes by the roadside.
Insects, like man, moreover, ask nothing better than to do nothing and
to let their tools sleep; the xylocope, that fine violet bumble-bee,
who ought to bore into wood, a gallery twice a hand's length wherein
to lay her eggs, if she finds a suitable hole ready made, confines
herself to the meagerest possible works of accommodation. In sum, the
insects who like the saw-fly (tenthredes) use a precise instrument for
a precise job, are almost rare.
Man's hand, to come back to this point, is useful to him because he
is intelligent. In itself the hand is nothing. Proof, in the monkeys
and rodents who use their hands only to climb trees, louse themselves,
and crack nuts. Our five fingers! Really nothing is more broadcast
in nature, where they are only a sign of age: the saurians have
them, and are not a bit more clever thereby. It is without fingers,
without hands, without members that the larvæ of insects construct
for themselves marvellous mosaic shells, weave themselves tents in
silk-floss, exercise the trades of plasterer, miner, and carpenter.
But this hand of man, become the world's marvel, how inferior to his
genius, and how he has had to lengthen it, refine it, complicate it,
in order to obtain obedience to the increasingly precise orders of
his intelligence. Has the hand created machines? Man's intelligence
immeasureably surpasses his organs, and submerges them; it demands of
them the impossible and the absurd: hence the railway, the telegraph,
the microscope and everything which multiplies the power of organs
which have become rudimentary in the face of the brains' exigence, the
brain being our master, who has demanded also of the sexual organs more
than they were able to give: it is to satisfy these orders that the bed
of love has been scattered with so many dreams and rose-leaves.
It is difficult to make people understand that the eye sees, not
because it is an eye, but because it is situated at the tip of some
filaments of nerve which are sensitive to light. At the end of
filaments sensitive to sound, the eye would hear. Doubtless it is
adapted to its function, as the ear is to hearing, but this function
is an effect, not a cause. Insects' eyes are very different from ours.
One has spoken of the experiments of a German savant who wished to
throw visual images on the brain without the eye's intervention. This
is suspicious, but not absurd: insects are gifted certainly with the
power to smell, but one has never been able to discover the organ
in any single one of them; and, also, the rôle of the antennæ which
seems very considerable in their life, remains very obscure, since the
removal of these appendices has not always a measurable effect on their
activity.[2]
Organs, evidently the most useful, are sometimes placed in a position
which diminishes their value. Notice a resting horse, and another horse
coming toward him (observation can be made quite easily in the streets
of Paris), what is he to do to gauge the danger, and reconnoitre the
movement? Look at the other horse? No. His eyes are made to look
sideways, not forward. He uses his long ears, raises them, shifts
their open side toward the noise. Reassured he lets them fall, and
re-establishes his calm. The horse looks with his ears. The blinkers by
which people pretend to make him look forward, merely blind him, and
perhaps, thereby diminish his impressionability. Blind horses moreover
do the same work as the others.
The senses, as one knows, are substitutable one for the other, in a
certain degree; but in the normal state they seem rather to reinforce
each other mutually, and lend each other a certain support. One does
not shut the eyes to hear better, save when one has determined the
source of the sound. And even then, is it to hear better? Is it not
rather to reflect and to hear at the same time, to manage an interior
concentration with which the eye, essentially an explorative organ,
would interfere?
It is in love that this alliance of all the senses is most intimately
exercised. In superior animals, as well as in man, each sense, together
or in groups, comes to reinforce the genital sense. None remain
inactive, eye, ear, scent, touch, even taste come into play. Thus one
explains the gleam of plumage, the dance, song, sexual odours. The
female eye, in birds, is more sensitive than the male eye; the contrary
is true of humanity; but female birds and women are particularly moved
by song or words. The two sexes in dogs have, equally, recourse to
scent; sight seems to play but an insignificant rôle in their sexual
access, since minuscule canine beasts do not fear to address themselves
to monsters, which for man would be in proportion more than that of
a mammoth. Insects before mating often caress each other with their
mysterious antennæ; the male is sometimes given a sounding apparatus:
cricket and grasshopper drum to charm their companions.
It is not necessary to explain how in humans, especially in the male,
all the senses concur in the amour, at least when moral and religious
prejudices do not stop their impetus. It should be so, in an animal
so sensitive, and of so complex and multiple a sensibility. The
abstention of a single sense from the coupling is enough to enfeeble
the pleasure very greatly. The coldness of many women may proceed
less from a diminution of their genital sense, than from the general
mediocrity of their senses. Intelligence, being but the ripe fruit
of the general sensibility, its intensity is very often found to be
in a certain relation with the sexual sensibility. Absolute coldness
might signify stupidity. There are, however, too many exceptions for
one to generalize in this matter. It happens indeed that intelligence
instead of being the sum total of the sensibility, is, so to speak, the
deviation or transmutation. There remains very little sensibility; it
is nearly all turned into intelligence.
Every organized animal has a master: its nervous system; and there
is, doubtless, no real life save where a nervous system exists, be it
the magnificent infinitely branching tree of mammals and birds, be it
the double, knotted cord of the mollusks, or the nail head which is
planted, in ascides, between the buccal and anal orifice. As soon as
this new matter appears, it reigns despotically, and the unforeseen
appears in the world. One would say a conqueror, or rather an intruder,
a parasite come in by stealth, and lifting itself into the royal rôle.
Animals bear this tyranny better than man. Their master asks fewer
things. Often it only asks one: to create a being in its exact
likeness. The animal is sane, that is to say, ruled; man is mad, that
is to say, out of rule: he has so many orders to execute at once, that
he scarcely does any one well. In civilized countries he can hardly
reproduce himself and the specie is in danger. It would disappear, if
the means of protecting it did not compensate the sterility.
One can not say that humanity has attained its intellectual limits,
although its physical evolution seems completed; but as superior human
specimens are nearly always sterile, or capable of only mediocre
posterity, it is found that, alone among values, intelligence is not
transmitted by generation. Then the circle closes and the same effort
ends ceaselessly in the same recommencement. However, even here,
artificial means intervene, and the transmission of the acquisitions
of intelligence is relatively assured by all sorts of instruments.
This mechanism, much inferior to carnal generation, permits us, if the
most exquisite forms of intelligence disappear as fast as they flower,
to preserve at least part of their contents. Notions are transmitted,
that is a result, even though most of them are vain, in default of
sensibilities sufficiently powerful to assimilate them and make a real
life of them.
Finally, if man ought to abdicate, which seems unlikely, animality
is rich enough to raise up an inheritor. The candidates for humanity
are in great number, and they are not those whom the crowd supposes.
Who knows if our descendants may not some day find themselves faced
with a rival, strong and in the flower of youth. Creation has not gone
on strike, since man appeared: since making this monster, nature has
continued her work: the human hazard might reproduce itself on the
morrow.
[1] The Latin _luxuria_ and French _luxure_ have no exact English
equivalent; our "luxury," is the French _luxe_; the phrase "the
exercise of pleasant lusts" is perhaps as near as I can come to a
definition of _luxure_.--Translator.
[2] Fabre's experiments on mason bees, the shaggy ammophile, and
great-peacock moth.
TRANSLATOR'S POSTSCRIPT
"Il y aurait peut-être une certain correlation entre la copulation
complète et profonde et le développement cérébral."
Not only is this suggestion, made by our author at the end of his
eighth chapter, both possible and probable, but it is more than likely
that the brain itself, is, in origin and development, only a sort of
great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve; at first
over the cervical ganglion, or, earlier or in other species, held in
several clots over the scattered chief nerve centres; and augmenting in
varying speeds and quantities into medulla oblongata, cerebellum and
cerebrum. This hypothesis would perhaps explain a certain number of as
yet uncorrelated phenomena both psychological and physiological. It I
would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter
of images. Species would have developed in accordance with, or their
development would have been affected by, the relative discharge and
retention of the fluid; this proportion being both a matter of quantity
and of quality, some animals profiting hardly at all by the alluvial
Nile-flood; the baboon retaining nothing; men apparently stupefying
themselves in some cases by excess, and in other cases discharging
apparently only a surplus at high pressure; the gateux, or the genius,
the "strong-minded."
I offer an idea rather than an argument, yet if we consider sider that
the power of the spermatozoide is precisely the power of exteriorizing
a form; and if we consider the lack of any other known substance
in nature capable of growing into brain, we are left with only one
surprise, or rather one conclusion, namely, in face of the smallness of
the average brain's activity, we must conclude that the spermatozoic
substance must have greatly atrophied in its change from lactic to
coagulated and hereditarily coagulated condition. Given, that is, two
great seas of this fluid, mutually magnetized, the wonder is, or at
least the first wonder is, that human thought is so inactive.
Chemical research may have something to say on the subject, if it be
directed to comparison of brain and spermatophore in the nautilus,
to the viscous binding of the bee's fecundative liquid. I offer only
reflections, perhaps a few data. Indications of earlier adumbrations of
an idea which really surprises no one, but seems as if it might have
been lying on the study table of any physician or philosopher.
There are traces of it in the symbolism of phallic religions, man
really the phallus or spermatozoide charging, head-on, the female
chaos. Integration of the male in the male organ. Even oneself has felt
it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a
sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.
Without any digression on feminism, taking merely the division Gourmont
has given (Aristotelian, if you like), one offers woman as the
accumulation of hereditary aptitudes, better than man in the "useful
gestures," the perfections; but to man, given what we have of history,
the "inventions," the new gestures, the extravagance, the wild shots,
the impractical, merely because in him occurs the new up-jut, the new
bathing of the cerebral tissues in the residuum, in _la mousse_ of the
life sap.
Or, as I am certainly neither writing an anti-feminist tract, nor
claiming disproportionate privilege for the spermatozoide, for the sake
of symmetry ascribe a cognate rôle to the ovule, though I can hardly be
expected to introspect it. A flood is as bad as a famine; the ovular
bath could still account for the refreshment of the female mind, and
the recharging, regracing of its "traditional aptitudes;" where one
woman appears to benefit by an alluvial clarifying, ten dozen appear to
be swamped.
Postulating that the cerebral fluid tried all sorts of experiments,
and, striking matter, forced fit; into all sorts of forms, by gushes;
we have admittedly in insect life a female predominance; in bird,
mammal and human, at least an increasing male prominence. And these
four important branches of "the fan" may be differentiated according to
their apparent chief desire, or source of choosing their species.
Insect, utility; bird, flight; mammal, muscular splendour; man,
experiment.
The insect representing the female, and utility; the need of heat being
present, the insect chooses to solve the problem by hibernation, i.e.,
a sort of negation of action. The bird wanting-continuous freedom,
feathers itself. Desire for decoration appears in all the branches, man
exteriorizing it most. The bat's secret appears to be that he is not
the bird-mammal, but the mammal-insect: economy of tissue, hibernation.
The female principle being not only utility, but extreme economy,
woman, falling by this division into a male branch, is the least
female of females, and at this point one escapes from a journalistic;
sex-squabble into the opposition of two principles, utility and a sort
of venturesomeness.
In its subservience to the money fetish our age returns to the
darkness of medievalism. Two osmies may make superfluous egg-less
nests, but do not kill each other in contesting which shall deposit
the supererogatory honey therein. It is perhaps no more foolish to go
at a hermit's bidding to recover an old sepulchre than to make new
sepulchres at the bidding of finance.
In his growing subservience to, and adoration of, and entanglement in
machines, in utility, man rounds the circle almost into insect life,
the absence of flesh; and may have need even of horned gods to save
him, or at least of a form of thought which permits them.
Take it that usual thought is a sort of shaking or shifting of a fluid
in the viscous cells of the brain; one has seen electricity stripping
the particles of silver from a plated knife in a chemical bath, with
order and celerity, and gathering them on the other pole of a magnet.
Take it as materially as you like. There is a sort of spirit-level
in the ear, giving us our sense of balance. And dreams? Do they not
happen precisely at the moments when one has tipped the head; are they
not, with their incoherent mixing of known and familiar images, like
the pouring of a complicated honeycomb tilted from its perpendicular?
Does not this give precisely the needed mixture of familiar forms in
non-sequence, the jumble of fragments each coherent within its own
limit?
And from the popular speech, is not the sensible man called
"level-headed," has he not his "head well screwed on" or "screwed on
straight;" and are not lunatics and cranks often recognizable from some
peculiar carriage or tilt of the head-piece; and is not the thinker
always pictured with his head bowed into his hand, yes, but level so
far as left to right is concerned? The upward-jaw, head-back pose has
long been explained by the relative positions of the medulla and the
more human parts of the brain; this need not be dragged in here; nor do
I mean to assert that you can cure a lunatic merely by holding his head
level.
Thought is a chemical process, the most interesting of all transfusions
in liquid solution. The mind is an up-spurt of sperm, no, let me alter
that; trying to watch the process: the sperm, the form-creator, the
substance which compels the ovule to evolve in a given pattern, one
microscopic, minuscule particle, entering the "castle" of the ovule.
"Thought is a vegetable" says a modern hermetic, whom I have often
contradicted, but whom I do not wish to contradict at this point.
Thought is a "chemical process" in relation to the organ, the brain;
creative thought is act like fecundation, like the male cast of the
human seed, but given that cast, that ejaculation, I am perfectly
willing to grant that the thought once born, separated, in regard to
itself, not in relation to the brain that begat it, does lead an
independent life much like a member of the vegetable kingdom, blowing
seeds, ideas from the paradisal garden at the summit of Dante's Mount
Purgatory, capable of lodging and sprouting where they fall. And
Gourmont has the phrase "fecundating a generation of bodies as genius
fecundates a generation of minds."
Man is the sum of the animals, the sum of their instincts, as Gourmont
has repeated in the course of his book. Given, first a few, then as
we get to our own condition, a mass of these spermatozoic particles
withheld, in suspense, waiting in the organ that has been built up
through ages by a myriad similar waitings.
Each of these particles is, we need not say, conscious of form, but
has by all counts a capacity for formal expression: is not thought
precisely a form-comparing and form-combining?
That is to say we have the hair-thinning "abstract thought" and we have
the concrete thought of women, of artists, of musicians, the mockedly
"long-haired," who have made everything in the world. We have the
form-making and the form-destroying "thought," only the first of which
is really satisfactory. I don't wish to be invidious, it is perfectly
possible to consider the "abstract" thought, reason, etc., as the
comparison, regimentation, and least common denominator of a multitude
of images, but in the end each of the images is a little spoiled
thereby, no one of them is the Apollo, and the makers of this kind of
thought have been called dry-as-dust since the beginning of history.
The regiment is less interesting as a whole than any individual in it.
And, as we are being extremely material and physical and animal, in the
wake of our author, we will leave old wives' gibes about the profusion
of hair, and its chance possible indication or sanction of a possible
neighbouring health beneath the skull.
Creative thought has manifested itself in images, in music, which is to
sound what the concrete image is to sight. And the thought of genius,
even of the mathematical genius, the mathematical prodigy, is really
the same sort of thing, it is a sudden out-spurt of mind which takes
the form demanded by the problem; which creates the answer, and baffles
the man counting on the abacus.
I query the remarks about the sphex in Chapter XIX, "que le sphex s'est
formé lentement," I query this with a conviction for which anyone is
at liberty to call me lunatic, and for which I offer no better ground
than simple introspection. I believe, and on no better ground than
that of a sudden emotion, that the change of species is not a slow
matter, managed by cross-breeding, of nature's leporides and bardots,
I believe that the species changes as suddenly as a man makes a song
or a poem, or as suddenly as he starts making them, more suddenly
than he can cut a statue in stone, at most as slowly as a locust or
long-tailed Sirmione false mosquito emerges from its outgrown skin. It
is not even proved that man is at the end of his physical changes. Say
that the diversification of species has passed its most sensational
phases, say that it had once a great stimulus from the rapidity of the
earth's cooling, if one accepts the geologists' interpretation of that
thermometric cyclone.
The cooling planet contracts, it is as if one had some mud in a tin
pail, and forced down the lid with such pressure that the can sprung
a dozen leaks, or it is as if one had the mud in a linen bag and
squeezed; merely as mechanics (not counting that one has all the
known and unknown chemical elements cooling simultaneously), but
merely as mechanics this contraction gives energy enough to squeeze
vegetation through the pores of the imaginary linen and to detach
certain particles, leaving them still a momentum. A body should cool
with decreasing speed in measure as it approaches the temperature of
its surroundings; however, the earth is still, I think, supposed to be
warmer than the surrounding unknown, and is presumably still cooling,
or at any rate it is not proved that man is at the end of his physical
changes. I return to homed gods and the halo in a few paragraphs. It
is not proved that even the sort of impetus provided by a shrinking of
planetary surface is denied one.
What is known is that man's great divergence has been in the making of
detached, resumable tools.
That is to say, if an insect carries a saw, it carries it all the time.
The "next step," as in the case of the male organ of the nautilus, is
to grow a tool and detach it.
Man's first inventions are fire and the club, that is to say he
detaches his digestion, he finds a means to get heat without releasing
the calories of the log by internal combustion inside his own stomach.
The invention of the first tool turned his mind (using this term in the
full sense); turned, let us say, his "brain" from his own body. No need
for greater antennæ, a fifth arm, etc., except, after a lapse, as a
tour de force, to show that he is still lord of his body.
That is to say the langouste's long feelers, all sorts of extravagances
in nature may be taken as the result of a single gush of thought. A
single out-push of a demand, made by a spermatic sea of sufficient
energy to cast such a form. To cast it as one electric pole will cast
a spark to another. To exteriorize. Sometimes to act in this with more
enthusiasm than caution.
Let us say quite simply that light is a projection from the luminous
fluid, from the energy that is in the brain, down along the nerve cords
which receive certain vibrations in the eye. Let us suppose man capable
of exteriorizing a new organ, horn, halo, Eye of Horns. Given a brain
of this power, comes the question, what organ, and to what purpose?
Turning to folk-lore, we have Frazer on homed gods, we have Egyptian
statues, generally supposed to be "symbols," of cat-headed and
ibis-headed gods. Now in a primitive community, a man, a volontaire,
might risk it. He might want prestige, authority, want them enough
to grow horns and claim a divine heritage, or to grow a cat head;
Greek philosophy would have smiled at him, would have deprecated his
ostentation. With primitive man he would have risked a good deal, he
would have been deified, or crucified, or possibly both. Today he would
be caught for a circus.
One does not assert that cat-headed gods appeared in Egypt after the
third dynasty; the country had a long memory and such a phenomenon
would have made some stir in the valley. The horned god would appear
to have persisted, and the immensely high head of the Chinese
contemplative as shown in art and the China images is another stray
grain of tradition.
But man goes on making new faculties, or forgetting old ones. That
is to say you have all sorts of aptitudes developed without external
change, which in an earlier biological state would possibly have found
carnal expression. You have every exploited "hyper-æsthesia," i.e.,
every new form of genius, from the faculty of hearing four parts in a
fugue perfectly, to the ear for money (vide Henry James in "The Ivory
Tower" the passages on Mr. Gaw). Here I only amplify what Gourmont has
indicated in Chapter XX. You have the visualizing sense, the "stretch"
of imagination, the mystics,--for what there is to them--Santa Theresa
who "saw" the microcosmos, hell, heaven, purgatory complete, "the
size of a walnut;" and you have Mr. W., a wool-broker in London, who
suddenly at 3 a.m. visualizes the whole of his letter-file, three
hundred folios; he sees and reads particularly the letter at folder
171, but he sees simultaneously the entire contents of the file, the
whole thing about the size of two lumps of domino sugar laid flat side
to flat side.
Remains precisely the question: man feeling this protean capacity to
grow a new organ: what organ? Or new faculty; what faculty?
His first renunciation, flight, he has regained, almost as if the
renunciation, so recent in terms of biology, had been committed in
foresight. Instinct conserves only the "useful" gestures. Air provides
little nourishment, and anyhow the first great pleasure surrendered,
the simple ambition to mount the air has been regained and regratified.
Water was never surrendered, man with sub-aqueous yearnings is still,
given a knife, the shark's vanquisher. The new faculty? Without then
the ostentation of an organ. Will? The hypnotist has shown the vanity
and Blake the inutility of willing trifles, and black magic its
futility. The telepathic faculty? In the first place is it new? Have
not travellers always told cock and bull stories about its existence
in savage Africa? Is it not a faculty that man has given up, if not
as useless, at any rate as of a very limited use, a distraction,
more bother than it is worth? Lacking a localizing sense, the savage
knowing, if he does, what happens "somewhere" else, but never knowing
quite where. The faculty was perhaps not worth the damage it does to
concentration of mind on some useful subject. "Instinct preserves the
useful gestures."
Take it that what man wants is a capacity for clearer understanding,
or for physical refreshment and vigour, are not these precisely the
faculties he is forever hammering at, perhaps stupidly? Muscularly he
goes slowly, athletic records being constantly worn down by millimetres
and seconds.
I appear to have thrown down bits of my note somewhat at random; let me
return to physiology. People were long ignorant of the circulation of
the blood; that known, they appeared to think the nerves stationary;
Gourmont speaks of "circulation nerveuse," but many people still
consider the nerve as at most a telegraph wire, simply because it
does not bleed visibly when cut. The current is "interrupted." The
school books of twenty years ago were rather vague about lymph, and
various glands still baffle physicians. I have not seen the suggestion
that some of them may serve rather as fuses in an electric system, to
prevent short circuits, or in some variant or allotropic form. The
spermatozoide is, I take it, regarded as a sort of quintessence; the
brain is also a quintessence, or at least "in rapport with" all parts
of the body; the single spermatozoide demands simply that the ovule
shall construct a human being, the suspended spermatozoide (if my wild
shot rings the target bell) is ready to dispense with, in the literal
sense, incarnation, en-fleshment. Shall we postulate the mass of
spermatozoides, first accumulated in suspense, then specialized?
Three channels, hell, purgatory, heaven, if one wants to follow yet
another terminology: digestive excretion, incarnation, freedom in
the imagination, i.e., cast into an exterior formlessness, or into
form material, or merely imaginative visually or perhaps musically or
perhaps fixed in some other sensuous dimension, even of taste or odour
(there have been perhaps creative cooks and perfumers?).
The dead laborious compilation and comparison of other men's dead
images, all this is mere labour, not the spermatozoic act of the brain.
Woman, the conservator, the inheritor of past gestures, clever,
practical, as Gourmont says, not inventive, always the best disciple of
any inventor, has been always the enemy of the dead or laborious form
of compilation, abstraction.
Not considering the process ended; taking the individual genius as
the man in whom the new access, the new superfluity of spermatozoic
pressure (quantitative and qualitative) up-shoots into the brain,
alluvial Nile-flood, bringing new crops, new invention. And as Gourmont
says, there is only reasoning where there is initial error, i.e.,
weakness of the spurt, wandering search.
In no case can it be a question of mere animal quantity of sperm. You
have the man who wears himself out and weakens his brain, echo of the
orang, obviously not the talented sieve; you have the contrasted case
in the type of man who really can not work until he has relieved the
pressure on his spermatic canals.
This is a question of physiology, it is not a question of morals and
sociology. Given the spermatozoic thought, the two great seas of
fecundative matter, the brain lobes, mutually magnetized, luminous in
their own knowledge of their being; whether they may be expected to
seek exterior "luxuria," or whether they are going to repeat Augustine
hymns, is not in my jurisdiction. An exterior paradise might not allure
them "La bêtise humaine est la seule chose qui donne une idée de
l'infini," says Renan, and Gourmont has quoted him, and all flesh to
grass, a superior grass.
It remains that man has for centuries nibbled at this idea of
connection, intimate connection between his sperm and his cerebration,
the ascetic has tried to withhold all his sperm, the lure, the ignis
fatuus perhaps, of wanting to super-think; the dope-fiend has tried
opium and every inferior to Bacchus, to get an extra kick out of the
organ, the mystics have sought the gleam in the tavern, Helen of
Tyre, priestesses in the temple of Venus, in Indian temples, stray
priestesses in the streets, un-uprootable custom, and probably with a
basis of sanity. A sense of balance might show that asceticism means
either a drought or a crowding. The liquid solution must be kept at
right consistency; one would say the due proportion of liquid to
viscous particles, a good circulation; the actual quality of the sieve
or separator, counting perhaps most of all; the balance of ejector and
retentive media.
Perhaps the clue is in Propertius after all:
Ingenium nobis ipsa puella fecit.
There is the whole of the XIIth century love cult, and Dante's
metaphysics a little to one side, and Gourmont's Latin Mystique; and
for image-making both Fenollosa on "The Chinese Written Character,"
and the paragraphs in "Le Problème du Style." At any rate the quarrel
between cerebralist and viveur and ignorantist ends, if the brain is
thus conceived not as a separate and desiccated organ, but as the very
fluid of life itself.
Ezra Pound
June 21, 1921.
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End of Project Gutenberg's The Natural Philosophy of Love, by Remy de Gourmont