But the freight has to be paid. John Barleycorn began to collect, and he
collected not so much from the body as from the mind. The old long
sickness, which had been purely an intellectual sickness, recrudesced.
The old ghosts, long laid, lifted their heads again. But they were
different and more deadly ghosts. The old ghosts, intellectual in their
inception, had been laid by a sane and normal logic. But now they were
raised by the White Logic of John Barleycorn, and John Barleycorn never
lays the ghosts of his raising. For this sickness of pessimism, caused
by drink, one must drink further in quest of the anodyne that John
Barleycorn promises but never delivers.
How to describe this White Logic to those who have never experienced it!
It is perhaps better first to state how impossible such a description is.
Take Hasheesh Land, for instance, the land of enormous extensions of time
and space. In past years I have made two memorable journeys into that
far land. My adventures there are seared in sharpest detail on my brain.
Yet I have tried vainly, with endless words, to describe any tiny
particular phase to persons who have not travelled there.
I use all the hyperbole of metaphor, and tell what centuries of time and
profounds of unthinkable agony and horror can obtain in each interval of
all the intervals between the notes of a quick jig played quickly on the
piano. I talk for an hour, elaborating that one phase of Hasheesh Land,
and at the end I have told them nothing. And when I cannot tell them
this one thing of all the vastness of terrible and wonderful things, I
know I have failed to give them the slightest concept of Hasheesh Land.
But let me talk with some other traveller in that weird region, and at
once am I understood. A phrase, a word, conveys instantly to his mind
what hours of words and phrases could not convey to the mind of the
non-traveller. So it is with John Barleycorn's realm where the White
Logic reigns. To those untravelled there, the traveller's account must
always seem unintelligible and fantastic. At the best, I may only beg of
the untravelled ones to strive to take on faith the narrative I shall
relate.
For there are fatal intuitions of truth that reside in alcohol. Philip
sober vouches for Philip drunk in this matter. There seem to be various
orders of truth in this world. Some sorts of truth are truer than
others. Some sorts of truth are lies, and these sorts are the very ones
that have the greatest use-value to life that desires to realise and
live. At once, O untravelled reader, you see how lunatic and blasphemous
is the realm I am trying to describe to you in the language of John
Barleycorn's tribe. It is not the language of your tribe, all of whose
members resolutely shun the roads that lead to death and tread only the
roads that lead to life. For there are roads and roads, and of truth
there are orders and orders. But have patience. At least, through what
seems no more than verbal yammerings, you may, perchance, glimpse faint
far vistas of other lands and tribes.
Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal. What is normal is
healthful. What is healthful tends toward life. Normal truth is a
different order, and a lesser order, of truth. Take a dray horse.
Through all the vicissitudes of its life, from first to last, somehow, in
unguessably dim ways, it must believe that life is good; that the
drudgery in harness is good; that death, no matter how
blind-instinctively apprehended, is a dread giant; that life is
beneficent and worth while; that, in the end, with fading life, it will
not be knocked about and beaten and urged beyond its sprained and
spavined best; that old age, even, is decent, dignified, and valuable,
though old age means a ribby scare-crow in a hawker's cart, stumbling a
step to every blow, stumbling dizzily on through merciless servitude and
slow disintegration to the end--the end, the apportionment of its parts
(of its subtle flesh, its pink and springy bone, its juices and ferments,
and all the sensateness that informed it) to the chicken farm, the
hide-house, the glue-rendering works, and the bone-meal fertiliser
factory. To the last stumble of its stumbling end this dray horse must
abide by the mandates of the lesser truth that is the truth of life and
that makes life possible to persist.
This dray horse, like all other horses, like all other animals, including
man, is life-blinded and sense-struck. It will live, no matter what the
price. The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and
though all lives lose the game in the end. This is the order of truth
that obtains, not for the universe, but for the live things in it if they
for a little space will endure ere they pass. This order of truth, no
matter how erroneous it may be, is the sane and normal order of truth,
the rational order of truth that life must believe in order to live.
To man, alone among the animals, has been given the awful privilege of
reason. Man, with his brain, can penetrate the intoxicating show of
things and look upon the universe brazen with indifference toward him and
his dreams. He can do this, but it is not well for him to do it. To
live, and live abundantly, to sting with life, to be alive (which is to
be what he is), it is good that man be life-blinded and sense-struck.
What is good is true. And this is the order of truth, lesser though it
be, that man must know and guide his actions by with unswerving certitude
that it is absolute truth and that in the universe no other order of
truth can obtain. It is good that man should accept at face value the
cheats of sense and snares of flesh and through the fogs of sentiency
pursue the lures and lies of passion. It is good that he shall see
neither shadows nor futilities, nor be appalled by his lusts and
rapacities.
And man does this. Countless men have glimpsed that other and truer
order of truth and recoiled from it. Countless men have passed through
the long sickness and lived to tell of it and deliberately to forget it
to the end of their days. They lived. They realised life, for life is
what they were. They did right.
And now comes John Barleycorn with the curse he lays upon the imaginative
man who is lusty with life and desire to live. John Barleycorn sends his
White Logic, the argent messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis
of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as
absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and
unforgettable fact. John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream, the
liver live. He destroys birth and death, and dissipates to mist the
paradox of being, until his victim cries out, as in "The City of Dreadful
Night": "Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss." And the feet of
the victim of such dreadful intimacy take hold of the way of death.