Back to personal experiences and the effects in the past of John
Barleycorn's White Logic on me. On my lovely ranch in the Valley of the
Moon, brain-soaked with many months of alcohol, I am oppressed by the
cosmic sadness that has always been the heritage of man. In vain do I
ask myself why I should be sad. My nights are warm. My roof does not
leak. I have food galore for all the caprices of appetite. Every
creature comfort is mine. In my body are no aches nor pains. The good
old flesh-machine is running smoothly on. Neither brain nor muscle is
overworked. I have land, money, power, recognition from the world, a
consciousness that I do my meed of good in serving others, a mate whom I
love, children that are of my own fond flesh. I have done, and am doing,
what a good citizen of the world should do. I have built houses, many
houses, and tilled many a hundred acres. And as for trees, have I not
planted a hundred thousand? Everywhere, from any window of my house, I
can gaze forth upon these trees of my planting, standing valiantly erect
and aspiring toward the sun.
My life has indeed fallen in pleasant places. Not a hundred men in a
million have been so lucky as I. Yet, with all this vast good fortune,
am I sad. And I am sad because John Barleycorn is with me. And John
Barleycorn is with me because I was born in what future ages will call
the dark ages before the ages of rational civilisation. John Barleycorn
is with me because in all the unwitting days of my youth John Barleycorn
was accessible, calling to me and inviting me on every corner and on
every street between the corners. The pseudo-civilisation into which I
was born permitted everywhere licensed shops for the sale of soul-poison.
The system of life was so organised that I (and millions like me) was
lured and drawn and driven to the poison shops.
Wander with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadness into which
one is plunged by John Barleycorn. I ride out over my beautiful ranch.
Between my legs is a beautiful horse. The air is wine. The grapes on a
score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain
wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy
sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with
dreams and mysteries. I am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalised,
organic. I move, I have the power of movement, I command movement of the
live thing I bestride. I am possessed with the pomps of being, and know
proud passions and inspirations. I have ten thousand august
connotations. I am a king in the kingdom of sense, and trample the face
of the uncomplaining dust....
And yet, with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder about
me, and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I cut in this
world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without
me. I remember the men who broke their hearts and their backs over this
stubborn soil that now belongs to me. As if anything imperishable could
belong to the perishable! These men passed. I, too, shall pass. These
men toiled, and cleared, and planted, gazed with aching eyes, while they
rested their labour-stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets,
at the autumn glory of the grape, and at the fog-wisps stealing across
the mountain. And they are gone. And I know that I, too, shall some
day, and soon, be gone.
Gone? I am going now. In my jaw are cunning artifices of the dentists
which replace the parts of me already gone. Never again will I have the
thumbs of my youth. Old fights and wrestlings have injured them
irreparably. That punch on the head of a man whose very name is
forgotten settled this thumb finally and for ever. A slip-grip at
catch-as-catch-can did for the other. My lean runner's stomach has
passed into the limbo of memory. The joints of the legs that bear me up
are not so adequate as they once were, when, in wild nights and days of
toil and frolic, I strained and snapped and ruptured them. Never again
can I swing dizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to a
single rope-clutch in the driving blackness of storm. Never again can I
run with the sled-dogs along the endless miles of Arctic trail.
I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has been dying
since I was born I carry a skeleton, that under the rind of flesh which
is called my face is a bony, noseless death's head. All of which does
not shudder me. To be afraid is to be healthy. Fear of death makes for
life. But the curse of the White Logic is that it does not make one
afraid. The world-sickness of the White Logic makes one grin jocosely
into the face of the Noseless One and to sneer at all the phantasmagoria
of living.
I look about me as I ride and on every hand I see the merciless and
infinite waste of natural selection. The White Logic insists upon
opening the long-closed books, and by paragraph and chapter states the
beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility and dust. About me is
murmur and hum, and I know it for the gnat-swarm of the living, piping
for a little space its thin plaint of troubled air.
I return across the ranch. Twilight is on, and the hunting animals are
out. I watch the piteous tragic play of life feeding on life. Here is
no morality. Only in man is morality, and man created it--a code of
action that makes toward living and that is of the lesser order of truth.
Yet all this I knew before, in the weary days of my long sickness. These
were the greater truths that I so successfully schooled myself to forget;
the truths that were so serious that I refused to take them seriously,
and played with gently, oh! so gently, as sleeping dogs at the back of
consciousness which I did not care to waken. I did but stir them, and
let them lie. I was too wise, too wicked wise, to wake them. But now
White Logic willy-nilly wakes them for me, for White Logic, most valiant,
is unafraid of all the monsters of the earthly dream.
"Let the doctors of all the schools condemn me," White Logic whispers as
I ride along. "What of it? I am truth. You know it. You cannot combat
me. They say I make for death. What of it? It is truth. Life lies in
order to live. Life is a perpetual lie-telling process. Life is a mad
dance in the domain of flux, wherein appearances in mighty tides ebb and
flow, chained to the wheels of moons beyond our ken. Appearances are
ghosts. Life is ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse,
permeate each the other and all the others, that are, that are not, that
always flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as
other appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of countless
appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know is mirage. You
know mirages of desire. These very mirages are the unthinkable and
incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you
out of the past, and that sweep you on into dissemination into other
unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances to people the ghost
land of the future. Life is apparitional, and passes. You are an
apparition. Through all the apparitions that preceded you and that
compose the parts of you, you rose gibbering from the evolutionary mire,
and gibbering you will pass on, interfusing, permeating the procession of
apparitions that will succeed you."
And of course it is all unanswerable, and as I ride along through the
evening shadows I sneer at that Great Fetish which Comte called the
world. And I remember what another pessimist of sentiency has uttered:
"Transient are all. They, being born, must die, and, being dead, are
glad to be at rest."
But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest. He is
a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian. He takes his
hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of
life. I am food to him, and shelter, and existence. He has toiled like
a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their
deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks.
One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled
claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable
specimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly.
"His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition," the
White Logic chuckles to me. "He is sense-drunk. He is the slave of the
dream of life. His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and
obsessions. He believes in a transcendent over-world. He has listened
to the vagaries of the prophets, who have given to him the sumptuous
bubble of Paradise. He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with
self-conjured non-realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself
titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars.
Beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made
for him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the immaterial
and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of
semblance and deception.
"But you, who have opened the books and who share my awful
confidence--you know him for what he is, brother to you and the dust, a
cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that arose out of
the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable
great toes. He is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He
thumps his chest in anger, and roars and quivers with cataleptic
ferocity. He knows monstrous, atavistic promptings, and he is composed
of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts."
"Yet he dreams he is immortal," I argue feebly. "It is vastly wonderful
for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the
eternities."
"Pah!" is the retort. "Would you then shut the books and exchange places
with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire, a marionette of
the belly and the loins?"
"To be stupid is to be happy," I contend.
"Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in a
tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh?"
Oh, the victim cannot combat John Barleycorn!
"One step removed from the annihilating bliss of Buddha's Nirvana," the
White Logic adds. "Oh well, here's the house. Cheer up and take a
drink. We know, we illuminated, you and I, all the folly and the farce."
And in my book-walled den, the mausoleum of the thoughts of men, I take
my drink, and other drinks, and roust out the sleeping dogs from the
recesses of my brain and hallo them on over the walls of prejudice and
law and through all the cunning labyrinths of superstition and belief.
"Drink," says the White Logic. "The Greeks believed that the gods gave
them wine so that they might forget the miserableness of existence. And
remember what Heine said."
Well do I remember that flaming Jew's "With the last breath all is done:
joy, love, sorrow, macaroni, the theatre, lime-trees, raspberry drops,
the power of human relations, gossip, the barking of dogs, champagne."
"Your clear white light is sickness," I tell the White Logic. "You lie."
"By telling too strong a truth," he quips back.
"Alas, yes, so topsy-turvy is existence," I acknowledge sadly.
"Ah, well, Liu Ling was wiser than you," the White Logic girds. "You
remember him?"
I nod my head--Liu Ling, a hard drinker, one of the group of bibulous
poets who called themselves the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and who
lived in China many an ancient century ago.
"It was Liu Ling," prompts the White Logic, "who declared that to a
drunken man the affairs of this world appear but as so much duckweed on a
river. Very well. Have another Scotch, and let semblance and deception
become duck-weed on a river."
And while I pour and sip my Scotch, I remember another Chinese
philosopher, Chuang Tzu, who, four centuries before Christ, challenged
this dreamland of the world, saying: "How then do I know but that the
dead repent of having previously clung to life? Those who dream of the
banquet, wake to lamentation and sorrow. Those who dream of lamentation
and sorrow, wake to join the hunt. While they dream, they do not know
that they dream. Some will even interpret the very dream they are
dreaming; and only when they awake do they know it was a dream.... Fools
think they are awake now, and flatter themselves they know if they are
really princes or peasants. Confucius and you are both dreams; and I who
say you are dreams--I am but a dream myself.
"Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering
hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was
conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was
unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awaked, and there
I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming
I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."