"Come," says the White Logic, "and forget these Asian dreamers of old
time. Fill your glass and let us look at the parchments of the dreamers
of yesterday who dreamed their dreams on your own warm hills."
I pore over the abstract of title of the vineyard called Tokay on the
rancho called Petaluma. It is a sad long list of the names of men,
beginning with Manuel Micheltoreno, one time Mexican "Governor,
Commander-in-Chief, and Inspector of the Department of the Californias,"
who deeded ten square leagues of stolen Indian land to Colonel Don
Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo for services rendered his country and for
moneys paid by him for ten years to his soldiers.
Immediately this musty record of man's land lust assumes the
formidableness of a battle--the quick struggling with the dust. There
are deeds of trust, mortgages, certificates of release, transfers,
judgments, foreclosures, writs of attachment, orders of sale, tax liens,
petitions for letters of administration, and decrees of distribution. It
is like a monster ever unsubdued, this stubborn land that drowses in this
Indian summer weather and that survives them all, the men who scratched
its surface and passed.
Who was this James King of William, so curiously named? The oldest
surviving settler in the Valley of the Moon knows him not. Yet only
sixty years ago he loaned Mariano G. Vallejo eighteen thousand dollars on
security of certain lands including the vineyard yet to be and to be
called Tokay. Whence came Peter O'Connor, and whither vanished, after
writing his little name of a day on the woodland that was to become a
vineyard? Appears Louis Csomortanyi, a name to conjure with. He lasts
through several pages of this record of the enduring soil.
Comes old American stock, thirsting across the Great American Desert,
mule-backing across the Isthmus, wind-jamming around the Horn, to write
brief and forgotten names where ten thousand generations of wild Indians
are equally forgotten--names like Halleck, Hastings, Swett, Tait, Denman,
Tracy, Grimwood, Carlton, Temple. There are no names like those to-day
in the Valley of the Moon.
The names begin to appear fast and furiously, flashing from legal page to
legal page and in a flash vanishing. But ever the persistent soil
remains for others to scrawl themselves across. Come the names of men of
whom I have vaguely heard but whom I have never known. Kohler and
Frohling--who built the great stone winery on the vineyard called Tokay,
but who built upon a hill up which other vineyardists refused to haul
their grapes. So Kohler and Frohling lost the land; the earthquake of
1906 threw down the winery; and I now live in its ruins.
La Motte--he broke the soil, planted vines and orchards, instituted
commercial fish culture, built a mansion renowned in its day, was
defeated by the soil, and passed. And my name of a day appears. On the
site of his orchards and vine-yards, of his proud mansion, of his very
fish ponds, I have scrawled myself with half a hundred thousand
eucalyptus trees.
Cooper and Greenlaw--on what is called the Hill Ranch they left two of
their dead, "Little Lillie" and "Little David," who rest to-day inside a
tiny square of hand-hewn palings. Also, Cooper and Greenlaw in their
time cleared the virgin forest from three fields of forty acres. To-day
I have those three fields sown with Canada peas, and in the spring they
shall be ploughed under for green manure.
Haska--a dim legendary figure of a generation ago, who went back up the
mountain and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his
name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house, and planted
apple trees. And already the site of the house is undiscoverable, the
location of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration of the
landscape, and I am renewing the battle, putting in angora goats to
browse away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked
Haska's apple trees to death. So I, too, scratch the land with my brief
endeavour and flash my name across a page of legal script ere I pass and
the page grows musty.
"Dreamers and ghosts," the White Logic chuckles.
"But surely the striving was not altogether vain," I contend.
"It was based on illusion and is a lie."
"A vital lie," I retort.
"And pray what is a vital lie but a lie?" the White Logic challenges.
"Come. Fill your glass and let us examine these vital liars who crowd
your bookshelves. Let us dabble in William James a bit."
"A man of health," I say. "From him we may expect no philosopher's
stone, but at least we will find a few robust tonic things to which to
tie."
"Rationality gelded to sentiment," the White Logic grins. "At the end of
all his thinking he still clung to the sentiment of immortality. Facts
transmuted in the alembic of hope into terms of faith. The ripest fruit
of reason the stultification of reason. From the topmost peak of reason
James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that all is well and
will be well--the old, oh, ancient old, acrobatic flip of the
metaphysicians whereby they reasoned reason quite away in order to escape
the pessimism consequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason.
"Is this flesh of yours you? Or is it an extraneous something possessed
by you? Your body--what is it? A machine for converting stimuli into
reactions. Stimuli and reactions are remembered. They constitute
experience. Then you are in your consciousness these experiences. You
are at any moment what you are thinking at that moment. Your I is both
subject and object; it predicates things of itself and is the things
predicated. The thinker is the thought, the knower is what is known, the
possessor is the things possessed.
"After all, as you know well, man is a flux of states of consciousness, a
flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self another self, a myriad
thoughts, a myriad selves, a continual becoming but never being, a
will-of-the-wisp flitting of ghosts in ghostland. But this, man will not
accept of himself. He refuses to accept his own passing. He will not
pass. He will live again if he has to die to do it.
"He shuffles atoms and jets of light, remotest nebulae, drips of water,
prick-points of sensation, slime-oozings and cosmic bulks, all mixed with
pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises,
and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff builds himself an immortality to
startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He squirms on his
dunghill, and like a child lost in the dark among goblins, calls to the
gods that he is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is
destined to be as free as they--monuments of egotism reared by the
epiphenomena; dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when the dreamer
vanishes and are no more when he is not.
"It is nothing new, these vital lies men tell themselves, muttering and
mumbling them like charms and incantations against the powers of Night.
The voodoos and medicine men and the devil-devil doctors were the fathers
of metaphysics. Night and the Noseless One were ogres that beset the way
of light and life. And the metaphysicians would win by if they had to
tell lies to do it. They were vexed by the brazen law of the Ecclesiast
that men die like the beasts of the field and their end is the same.
Their creeds were their schemes, their religions their nostrums, their
philosophies their devices, by which they half-believed they would outwit
the Noseless One and the Night.
"Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies,
wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of
words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological
fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations--this is the stuff, the phantasms
of hope, that fills your bookshelves. Look at them, all the sad wraiths
of sad mad men and passionate rebels--your Schopenhauers, your
Strindbergs, your Tolstois and Nietzsches.
"Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget."
I obey, for my brain is now well a-crawl with the maggots of alcohol, and
as I drink to the sad thinkers on my shelves I quote Richard Hovey:
"Abstain not! Life and Love like night and day
Offer themselves to us on their own terms,
Not ours. Accept their bounty while ye may,
Before we be accepted by the worms,"
"I will cap you," cries the White Logic.
"No," I answer, while the maggots madden me. "I know you for what you
are, and I am unafraid. Under your mask of hedonism you are yourself the
Noseless One and your way leads to the Night. Hedonism has no meaning.
It, too, is a lie, at best the coward's smug compromise."
"Now will I cap you!" the White Logic breaks in.
"But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
Without the fear of waking after death."
And I laugh my defiance; for now, and for the moment, I know the White
Logic to be the arch-impostor of them all, whispering his whispers of
death. And he is guilty of his own unmasking, with his own genial
chemistry turning the tables on himself, with his own maggots biting
alive the old illusions, resurrecting and making to sound again the old
voice from beyond of my youth, telling me again that still are mine the
possibilities and powers which life and the books had taught me did not
exist.
And the dinner gong sounds to the reversed bottom of my glass. Jeering
at the White Logic, I go out to join my guests at table, and with assumed
seriousness to discuss the current magazines and the silly doings of the
world's day, whipping every trick and ruse of controversy through all the
paces of paradox and persiflage. And, when the whim changes, it is most
easy and delightfully disconcerting to play with the respectable and
cowardly bourgeois fetishes and to laugh and epigram at the flitting
god-ghosts and the debaucheries and follies of wisdom.
The clown's the thing! The clown! If one must be a philosopher, let him
be Aristophanes. And no one at the table thinks I am jingled. I am in
fine fettle, that is all. I tire of the labour of thinking, and, when
the table is finished, start practical jokes and set all playing at
games, which we carry on with bucolic boisterousness.
And when the evening is over and good-night said, I go back through my
book-walled den to my sleeping porch and to myself and to the White Logic
which, undefeated, has never left me. And as I fall to fuddled sleep I
hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it:
"I heard Youth calling in the night:
'Gone is my former world-delight;
For there is naught my feet may stay;
The morn suffuses into day,
It dare not stand a moment still
But must the world with light fulfil.
More evanescent than the rose
My sudden rainbow comes and goes,
Plunging bright ends across the sky--
Yea, I am Youth because I die!'"