The Hudson is very still this morning; a few battleships have swung
out with the tide; gulls seem to be forever passing up and down the
river in white eddies; smoke from the factories rises straight and
white. The morning sun strikes like a sledge upon the Palisades.
How grand that old river is, and how untiring in its endless ebb
and flood--almost like a solar system in the serene way it deals
with human traffic.
A great new sense of words has come over me lately. At the very
birth of language lies a chest of rich obsolete words--quite like a
Spanish treasure chest, with its doubloons, bezoar stones and "pots
of Arica bronze." The artists go treasure hunting in language, and
a few do startle the world with their wealth. The live-long day
seems to me now like a shuttle driving back and forth, weaving from
soul to matter, a golden fabric.
This word-chest means much to me because it deals with the sea.
Lift up the lid, and tucked away in those little drawers lies the
seaman's religion in bits of turquoise, in coils of fish line
and hooks, in pink sea-shells, perhaps in an old violin, or in a
few stray books of Carlyle, Goethe, Dante and Melville's _Moby
Dick_. The point is we all bungle along through our world-term
somehow; we have our work and religion and pleasures and tales in
a camphor-wood chest with a brass band around it. Sometimes we
bring out the violin and make God-awful discords, calling it music
of the sea; we brighten people's eyes with our bits of turquoise;
terrorise them with the philosophy that Carlyle and Goethe and Moby
Dick have given us; we make them feel that endless _wroom, wroom,
wroom_ of the ocean that is washing in our souls.
Yes, we must first learn the futility of life before we can live.
The war teaches this lesson well, but won't it be great when
everybody is singing over his golden shuttle and laughing? Won't
it be great when the chastened New Race springs up, like green
shoots at the passing of winter? Won't it be great when the world
has grown serene and wise enough to sit down beside a blazing
bark fire, with the shadows of pine trees about, or near the dim
breakers, and consider it profitable to talk about the stars?
... There are times when one feels he must be alone--when he wants
to be connected with nothing--when he wants to go to a distant and
high altitude, and there boil his pot of alchemy--there, where the
air is dust free, and the incense of one's devotion goes straight
up. He must listen and listen, until he believes that he hears the
stars humming in their courses; then the sun drawing like a magnet,
then a crescendo of song up to a deafening roar,--that all things,
all stars, are headed towards one point of balance among that whole
mass of sapphires we see above.
Man, but the joy of telling tales, of recording the warmth of human
hearts, of loving men and their ways--to fill out a morning with
that golden shuttle! One has but to sit and the sun on the walls
and the shadows in the corners, or if at night, the flame on the
stones of the hearth turn to words!... The old sea is full of that.
The heart within her breast sounds the footfalls of quest; the
ecstasy of life tears in her storm and in still hours she sits in
her glitter....
Some day we shall be together on the blessed Pacific coast. We
shall have bookshelves and packages of dates, bottles of cream and
combs of honey. We shall work with that rugged lunge of mountains
in our products; and that endless and insistent _wroom, wroom,
wroom_ of the ocean in all. Listen, here is a day as we shall have
it:
The sun lifting up the depth of Canyon shall awake us. After
we have cooked and eaten of crisp toast and honey and coffee,
we shall go to our desks and bring out a most rigid problem in
mathematics,[16] and dwell perhaps for an hour in drawing all
forces of thinking into play--awaking the mind--shaking off that
inertia of body. After that we shall penetrate the thing which
we wish to work upon that particular morning. We shall see its
functions and logical action, then begin the shuttle and weave back
and forth with that pliancy that sees the deepest of metaphysics in
an old man lighting a pipe or loitering over a pork-pie. To top the
morning, we'll have a meal of milk and dates. The afternoon shall
mean an isolation with the books--perhaps on the sand with the sun
tanning our backs. Both healthfully and mentally an efflux of soul.
At about five in the afternoon comes the humming calm--the poise
of mind and soul and body. Another meal of the simple foods and
once more, production, as the sun goes into the sea--giving one's
soul the might and expanse that the planets use in weaving their
ways. Perhaps, at ten or eleven we shall reach up, switch out the
electric bulb and open the door. That shall be a day mastered. Side
by side, we'll walk over to the cliff at whose base mumbles the
mighty Pacific. We shall pass no words--the earth'll be good to
feel and smell. We'll honour the still night of stars.
[16] Help!
That day is a privilege to earn--our bodies must suffer and become
scarred and jostled by the currents of people, and cursed upon
by foul mouths. All pleasant presently. We must know the heart
of a bartender as we would want to know the heart of the Christ.
Do you know that Masefield was a bartender? The secret of the
real artist is sanity. One must grow hair the medium length--keep
a well muscled and full lunged body--and if chronic fishermen
should happen in on us for a meal we must be able to argue that a
hickory pole is better for a pound-net than pine; or if a devout
pastor--that we would much rather praise God's work outside on the
beach....
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