1
A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have
exhumed, will march. You'll read them--or they'll march. Some of them
livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten.
Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering,
animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants
that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are
theorems and things that are rags: they'll go by like Euclid arm in arm
with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots.
Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are
assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere
shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the
pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the
insincere, the profound and the puerile.
A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety.
The ultra-respectable, but the condemned, anyway.
The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness: the aggregate
voice is a defiant prayer: but the spirit of the whole is processional.
The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is
Dogmatic Science.
But they'll march.
The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and
the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their
buffooneries--but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the
impressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on and
keep on and keep on coming.
The irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy,
but arrange themselves in mass-formations that pass and pass and keep on
passing.
* * * * *
So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.
But by the excluded I mean that which will some day be the excluding.
Or everything that is, won't be.