"'Tis only fools speak evil of the clay--
The very stars are made of clay like mine."
The mightiest and absurdest sleep-walker on the planet! Chained in the
circle of his own imaginings, man is only too keen to forget his origin
and to shame that flesh of his that bleeds like all flesh and that is
good to eat. Civilization (which is part of the circle of his
imaginings) has spread a veneer over the surface of the soft-shelled
animal known as man. It is a very thin veneer; but so wonderfully is man
constituted that he squirms on his bit of achievement and believes he is
garbed in armour-plate.
Yet man to-day is the same man that drank from his enemy's skull in the
dark German forests, that sacked cities, and stole his women from
neighbouring clans like any howling aborigine. The flesh-and-blood body
of man has not changed in the last several thousand years. Nor has his
mind changed. There is no faculty of the mind of man to-day that did not
exist in the minds of the men of long ago. Man has to-day no concept
that is too wide and deep and abstract for the mind of Plato or Aristotle
to grasp. Give to Plato or Aristotle the same fund of knowledge that man
to-day has access to, and Plato and Aristotle would reason as profoundly
as the man of to-day and would achieve very similar conclusions.
It is the same old animal man, smeared over, it is true, with a veneer,
thin and magical, that makes him dream drunken dreams of self-exaltation
and to sneer at the flesh and the blood of him beneath the smear. The
raw animal crouching within him is like the earthquake monster pent in
the crust of the earth. As he persuades himself against the latter till
it arouses and shakes down a city, so does he persuade himself against
the former until it shakes him out of his dreaming and he stands
undisguised, a brute like any other brute.
Starve him, let him miss six meals, and see gape through the veneer the
hungry maw of the animal beneath. Get between him and the female of his
kind upon whom his mating instinct is bent, and see his eyes blaze like
an angry cat's, hear in his throat the scream of wild stallions, and
watch his fists clench like an orang-outang's. Maybe he will even beat
his chest. Touch his silly vanity, which he exalts into high-sounding
pride--call him a liar, and behold the red animal in him that makes a
hand clutching that is quick like the tensing of a tiger's claw, or an
eagle's talon, incarnate with desire to rip and tear.
It is not necessary to call him a liar to touch his vanity. Tell a
plains Indian that he has failed to steal horses from the neighbouring
tribe, or tell a man living in bourgeois society that he has failed to
pay his bills at the neighbouring grocer's, and the results are the same.
Each, plains Indian and bourgeois, is smeared with a slightly different
veneer, that is all. It requires a slightly different stick to scrape it
off. The raw animals beneath are identical.
But intrude not violently upon man, leave him alone in his somnambulism,
and he kicks out from under his feet the ladder of life up which he has
climbed, constitutes himself the centre of the universe, dreams sordidly
about his own particular god, and maunders metaphysically about his own
blessed immortality.
True, he lives in a real world, breathes real air, eats real food, and
sleeps under real blankets, in order to keep real cold away. And there's
the rub. He has to effect adjustments with the real world and at the
same time maintain the sublimity of his dream. The result of this
admixture of the real and the unreal is confusion thrice confounded. The
man that walks the real world in his sleep becomes such a tangled mass of
contradictions, paradoxes, and lies that he has to lie to himself in
order to stay asleep.
In passing, it may be noted that some men are remarkably constituted in
this matter of self-deception. They excel at deceiving themselves. They
believe, and they help others to believe. It becomes their function in
society, and some of them are paid large salaries for helping their
fellow-men to believe, for instance, that they are not as other animals;
for helping the king to believe, and his parasites and drudges as well,
that he is God's own manager over so many square miles of earth-crust;
for helping the merchant and banking classes to believe that society
rests on their shoulders, and that civilization would go to smash if they
got out from under and ceased from their exploitations and petty
pilferings.
Prize-fighting is terrible. This is the dictum of the man who walks in
his sleep. He prates about it, and writes to the papers about it, and
worries the legislators about it. There is nothing of the brute about
_him_. He is a sublimated soul that treads the heights and breathes
refined ether--in self-comparison with the prize-fighter. The man who
walks in his sleep ignores the flesh and all its wonderful play of
muscle, joint, and nerve. He feels that there is something godlike in
the mysterious deeps of his being, denies his relationship with the
brute, and proceeds to go forth into the world and express by deeds that
something godlike within him.
He sits at a desk and chases dollars through the weeks and months and
years of his life. To him the life godlike resolves into a problem
something like this: _Since the great mass of men toil at producing
wealth_, _how best can he get between the great mass of men and the
wealth they produce_, _and get a slice for himself_? With tremendous
exercise of craft, deceit, and guile, he devotes his life godlike to this
purpose. As he succeeds, his somnambulism grows profound. He bribes
legislatures, buys judges, "controls" primaries, and then goes and hires
other men to tell him that it is all glorious and right. And the
funniest thing about it is that this arch-deceiver believes all that they
tell him. He reads only the newspapers and magazines that tell him what
he wants to be told, listens only to the biologists who tell him that he
is the finest product of the struggle for existence, and herds only with
his own kind, where, like the monkey-folk, they teeter up and down and
tell one another how great they are.
In the course of his life godlike he ignores the flesh--until he gets to
table. He raises his hands in horror at the thought of the brutish
prize-fighter, and then sits down and gorges himself on roast beef, rare
and red, running blood under every sawing thrust of the implement called
a knife. He has a piece of cloth which he calls a napkin, with which he
wipes from his lips, and from the hair on his lips, the greasy juices of
the meat.
He is fastidiously nauseated at the thought of two prize-fighters
bruising each other with their fists; and at the same time, because it
will cost him some money, he will refuse to protect the machines in his
factory, though he is aware that the lack of such protection every year
mangles, batters, and destroys out of all humanness thousands of
working-men, women, and children. He will chatter about things refined
and spiritual and godlike like himself, and he and the men who herd with
him will calmly adulterate the commodities they put upon the market and
which annually kill tens of thousands of babies and young children.
He will recoil at the suggestion of the horrid spectacle of two men
confronting each other with gloved hands in the roped arena, and at the
same time he will clamour for larger armies and larger navies, for more
destructive war machines, which, with a single discharge, will disrupt
and rip to pieces more human beings than have died in the whole history
of prize-fighting. He will bribe a city council for a franchise or a
state legislature for a commercial privilege; but he has never been
known, in all his sleep-walking history, to bribe any legislative body in
order to achieve any moral end, such as, for instance, abolition of
prize-fighting, child-labour laws, pure food bills, or old age pensions.
"Ah, but we do not stand for the commercial life," object the refined,
scholarly, and professional men. They are also sleep-walkers. They do
not stand for the commercial life, but neither do they stand against it
with all their strength. They submit to it, to the brutality and carnage
of it. They develop classical economists who announce that the only
possible way for men and women to get food and shelter is by the existing
method. They produce university professors, men who claim the _role_ of
teachers, and who at the same time claim that the austere ideal of
learning is passionless pursuit of passionless intelligence. They serve
the men who lead the commercial life, give to their sons somnambulistic
educations, preach that sleep-walking is the only way to walk, and that
the persons who walk otherwise are atavisms or anarchists. They paint
pictures for the commercial men, write books for them, sing songs for
them, act plays for them, and dose them with various drugs when their
bodies have grown gross or dyspeptic from overeating and lack of
exercise.
Then there are the good, kind somnambulists who don't prize-fight, who
don't play the commercial game, who don't teach and preach somnambulism,
who don't do anything except live on the dividends that are coined out of
the wan, white fluid that runs in the veins of little children, out of
mothers' tears, the blood of strong men, and the groans and sighs of the
old. The receiver is as bad as the thief--ay, and the thief is finer
than the receiver; he at least has the courage to run the risk. But the
good, kind people who don't do anything won't believe this, and the
assertion will make them angry--for a moment. They possess several magic
phrases, which are like the incantations of a voodoo doctor driving
devils away. The phrases that the good, kind people repeat to themselves
and to one another sound like "abstinence," "temperance," "thrift,"
"virtue." Sometimes they say them backward, when they sound like
"prodigality," "drunkenness," "wastefulness," and "immorality." They do
not really know the meaning of these phrases, but they think they do, and
that is all that is necessary for somnambulists. The calm repetition of
such phrases invariably drives away the waking devils and lulls to
slumber.
Our statesmen sell themselves and their country for gold. Our municipal
servants and state legislators commit countless treasons. The world of
graft! The world of betrayal! The world of somnambulism, whose exalted
and sensitive citizens are outraged by the knockouts of the prize-ring,
and who annually not merely knock out, but kill, thousands of babies and
children by means of child labour and adulterated food. Far better to
have the front of one's face pushed in by the fist of an honest
prize-fighter than to have the lining of one's stomach corroded by the
embalmed beef of a dishonest manufacturer.
In a prize-fight men are classed. A lightweight fights with a
light-weight; he never fights with a heavy-weight, and foul blows are not
allowed. Yet in the world of the somnambulists, where soar the
sublimated spirits, there are no classes, and foul blows are continually
struck and never disallowed. Only they are not called foul blows. The
world of claw and fang and fist and club has passed away--so say the
somnambulists. A rebate is not an elongated claw. A Wall Street raid is
not a fang slash. Dummy boards of directors and fake accountings are not
foul blows of the fist under the belt. A present of coal stock by a mine
operator to a railroad official is not a claw rip to the bowels of a
rival mine operator. The hundred million dollars with which a
combination beats down to his knees a man with a million dollars is not a
club. The man who walks in his sleep says it is not a club. So say all
of his kind with which he herds. They gather together and solemnly and
gloatingly make and repeat certain noises that sound like "discretion,"
"acumen," "initiative," "enterprise." These noises are especially
gratifying when they are made backward. They mean the same things, but
they sound different. And in either case, forward or backward, the
spirit of the dream is not disturbed.
When a man strikes a foul blow in the prize-ring the fight is immediately
stopped, he is declared the loser, and he is hissed by the audience as he
leaves the ring. But when a man who walks in his sleep strikes a foul
blow he is immediately declared the victor and awarded the prize; and
amid acclamations he forthwith turns his prize into a seat in the United
States Senate, into a grotesque palace on Fifth Avenue, and into endowed
churches, universities and libraries, to say nothing of subsidized
newspapers, to proclaim his greatness.
The red animal in the somnambulist will out. He decries the carnal
combat of the prize-ring, and compels the red animal to spiritual combat.
The poisoned lie, the nasty, gossiping tongue, the brutality of the
unkind epigram, the business and social nastiness and treachery of
to-day--these are the thrusts and scratches of the red animal when the
somnambulist is in charge. They are not the upper cuts and short arm
jabs and jolts and slugging blows of the spirit. They are the foul blows
of the spirit that have never been disbarred, as the foul blows of the
prize-ring have been disbarred. (Would it not be preferable for a man to
strike one full on the mouth with his fist than for him to tell a lie
about one, or malign those that are nearest and dearest?)
For these are the crimes of the spirit, and, alas! they are so much more
frequent than blows on the mouth. And whosoever exalts the spirit over
the flesh, by his own creed avers that a crime of the spirit is vastly
more terrible than a crime of the flesh. Thus stand the somnambulists
convicted by their own creed--only they are not real men, alive and
awake, and they proceed to mutter magic phrases that dispel all doubt as
to their undiminished and eternal gloriousness.
It is well enough to let the ape and tiger die, but it is hardly fair to
kill off the natural and courageous apes and tigers and allow the spawn
of cowardly apes and tigers to live. The prize-fighting apes and tigers
will die all in good time in the course of natural evolution, but they
will not die so long as the cowardly, somnambulistic apes and tigers club
and scratch and slash. This is not a brief for the prize-fighter. It is
a blow of the fist between the eyes of the somnambulists, teetering up
and down, muttering magic phrases, and thanking God that they are not as
other animals.
GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA.
_June_ 1900.