TYRANNY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
Accord and discord between organs and acts.—Torses and sacred scarab.—The hand of man.—Mediocre fitness of sexual organs for copulation.—Origin of "luxuria."—The animal is a nervous system served by organs.—The organ does not determine the aptitude.—Man's hand inferior to his genius.—Substitution of one sense for another.—Union and rôle of the senses in love.—Man and animal under the tyranny of the nervous system.—Wear and tear of humanity compensated by acquisitions.—Man's inheritors.
It is a universal belief that nature or God, in their wisdom, have made the corporal organs in the best possible form: perfection of the eye, of the hand, of the paw-jaw of the mantis, of the sexual apparatus of man, of the bird or the scarab, the furnishing tarses of hymenoptera, the beaver's tail, the grasshopper's hams, the cicada's tambourine. It is sometimes true and very often false. It happens that there appears an exact concord between the organ and the act which it is to perform; but it happens also, and that not rarely, that the organs seem in no way fashioned for the deed they must accomplish: most of them are indeed chance tools, with which the creature manages, as he can, the acts which he wants to, or should, do.
The forefeet of scarabs are so little destined for modelling and rolling mud-balls that their tarses are worn out in the process, as human fingers would perhaps be worn if they had to knead the raw clay and mortar. In considering the scarab one has to think of a humanity lacking fingers, having lost them by a long and slow diminution of nails, bones, flesh. The scarab is a modeller, nothing would be more useful to him than fingers; instead of losing them by use, he ought to have grown them longer and more supple. He has lost them, and it is with the arm stumps that he turns the little balls which are to be food for himself or his offspring. This insect is condemned to a labour that will become increasingly difficult as the species grows increasingly older. It remains to know whether the ancestors of the sacred scarab had tarses. Horus Apollo grants them as many fingers as the month has days, that is thirty, which corresponds quite well with the six feet and five tarses of the scarab. If he was a good observer, the question is answered, but a single testimony is insufficient, and moreover it is unlikely that so great a wearing-away would have occurred in so small a number of centuries. Horus, and a savant like Latreille himself, have been the dupes of symmetry; if either has looked closely at a scarab, and if he has seen the forefeet lacking tarses, he has put this down to chance or to accident. Fabre has at least noted one indisputable fact, it is that neither as nymph nor adult has the scarab tarses on his forefeet. If it ever had them, our reasoning draws new vigour from the negation, for then less than ever is it possible to find the least logical concordance between the insect's stumps and the need of modelling and turning to which nature condemns it.
This scarab is a type to which one can relate a great number of other examples: purveyor hymenoptera are wholly deprived of tools adapted to their work as quarry-men and well-diggers: thus, at the end of their labours the greater part of these fragile insects are very much damaged. One knows the beaver's constructions, but who without the certitude we have gained by observation, would have dared to attribute them to these great rats?
Eighteenth century philosophers set themselves the question: Is man man because he has hands; or has he hands because he is man? One may answer boldly, that man's hands marvellous as they appear to us, add almost nothing to his intelligence. One does not see that they are indispensable for anything save for playing the piano. What constitutes man is his intelligence, his nervous system. The exterior organ is secondary: no matter what exterior organ, beak, prehensile tail, teeth, proboscis, paws would have done the work of the hands. There are birds' nests which no manual cleverness could weave.
The reproductive organs are no better adapted to their purpose than are the working organs. Doubtless they attain very often their end, but at the cost of efforts which a better disposition would have attenuated or eliminated altogether. The interior mechanism is, or seems, marvellous; the external mechanism is rudimentary and gives no result, save, as they say, thanks to the ever-renewed ingenuity of the couples. Instinct, in one of its most necessary acts, is often put to difficult proof. The plausible adventure of Daphnis has been presumably often repeated, even though the limberness of the human form is well suited to coition; but who has not been surprised to see a heavy bull leap clumsily onto a lowing cow, bending his useless hocks along her back, panting, and often not succeeding save thanks to the good offices of a farm hand? Among beavers, says A. de Quatrefages (Orbigny's "Dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle"), the external orifice of the generative organs opens in a cloaca so placed under the tail that one hardly understands how the coupling takes place.
Certain matings are sheer tours de force, and the animal whether it be the scutilary, a tiny insect, or the elephant, a colossus, is compelled to take positions absolutely different from its normal postures. Nature who firmly intends the perpetuity of the species, has not yet found a simple and unique means thereto; or else, having found it, in budding, she has cast it aside to adopt the diversity of organs, means, and movements. There are none, even to those of our own specie which man may not criticize, even though he prize them; he has criticized, and his criticism has been to diversify them still further, which simplifies a fated necessity in making it pleasanter. Morals term this diversification "luxure."[1] This term is a pejorative which may be applied also to the exercise of our other senses. All is but luxuria. Luxuria, the variety of foods, their cooking, their seasoning, the culture of special garden plants; luxuria: the exercises of the eye, decoration, the toilet, painting; luxuria, music; luxuria, the marvellous exercises of the hand, so marvellous that direct hand work can be mimicked by a machine but never equalled; luxuria, flowers, perfumes; luxuria, rapid voyages; luxuria, the taste for landscape; luxuria, all art, science, civilization; luxuria, also the diversity of human gestures, for the animal in his virtuous sobriety has but one gesture for each sense, and that gesture unvarying; or if the gesture, as probable, undergoes a change, it is but a slow, invisible change, and there is at the end but one gesture. The animal is ignorant of diversity, of the accumulation of aptitudes; man alone is "luxurieux," is libidinous.
There is a principle which I will call the individualism of species. Each specie is an individual which profits as best it may, for its useful ends, by the instruments which have devolved to it. A specie of hymenoptera feels itself obliged to protect its eggs from new enemies, by digging holes in the ground; it makes use of the tools which it has, without taking count of the fact that these tools have not been made for excavation; it acts thus at pressure of necessity, as man climbs trees in a flood, or gets onto the roof in case of fire. The need is independent of the organ; it precedes it, and does not always create it. In the sexual act, need commands the gesture: the animal adapts itself to positions which are strange to it, and very difficult. Coupling is nearly always a grimace. One would say that nature has set the male organ here, and the female there, and left to specific ingenuity the care of effecting the junction.
It is, I think, permitted us to conclude from the mediocre fitness of animals to milieu, and of organs to acts, that it is not the milieu which absolutely fashions, or the organs which absolutely govern, the acts. One then feels oneself inclined to reaccept Bonald's definition of man, and even to find it admirable, just, and strict: An intelligence served by organs. Not "obeyed," not always, but served, service implying imperfection, a discord between the order and its fulfillment. But the phrase applies not to man only, and its spiritualistic origin in no way diminishes its aphoristic value; it qualifies every animal. The animal is a nervous centre, served by the different tools in which its branches terminate. It commands, and the tools, good or bad ones, obey. If they were incapable of performing their work, at least the essential parts of it, the animal would perish. There are forms of parasitism which seem to be the consequence of a general renunciation of organs; impotent to enter into direct relations with the outer world, unmanned by the softness of the muscles, the nervous system brings the skiff it was piloting into some harbour or other, and beaches it.
Fabre says, thinking particularly of insects: "The organ does not determine the aptitude." And this most aptly confirms Bonald's manner of seeing. Thrown in at the end of a chapter, with scarcely anything directly to justify it, this affirmation but gains in value. It is the conclusion, not of a dissertation, but of a long sequence of scientific observations. As for the facts that one can set inside it, they are innumerable; one would group them under two heads: The animal serves himself as best he can with the organs he possesses; he does not always make use of them. The flying-stag, the best armed of all our insects, is inoffensive; while the carabe, of peaceful appearance, is a formidable beast of prey. Apropos of the pill in which the scarab shuts its egg, the skill with which it is worked up and felted, in a dark hole by a stump-armed insect, Fabre says simply: "It gave me the idea of an elephant wanting to make lace." But in what insect will we see perfect accord of work and organ? In the bee? It would scarcely seem so. The bee uses for building, modelling, waxing, bottling honey, exactly the same organs that her sisters, the ammophile, bembex, sphex, ant, chalicodome, use for hollowing earth, excavating sand, making cellars, mud houses. The libellule does nothing with the hooks which render the termite dangerous, and she loafs, while her industrious brother, also neuroptera and nothing more, builds Himalayas.
The mole-cricket is so well organized for digging with her short powerful bow legs that she could cut sandstone: she frequents only the soft soil of gardens. The antophore, on the other hand, with no instruments save her mediocre mandibles, her velvet paws, forces the cement which holds the stone walls together, and bores the hardened earth of the slopes by the roadside.
Insects, like man, moreover, ask nothing better than to do nothing and to let their tools sleep; the xylocope, that fine violet bumble-bee, who ought to bore into wood, a gallery twice a hand's length wherein to lay her eggs, if she finds a suitable hole ready made, confines herself to the meagerest possible works of accommodation. In sum, the insects who like the saw-fly (tenthredes) use a precise instrument for a precise job, are almost rare.
Man's hand, to come back to this point, is useful to him because he is intelligent. In itself the hand is nothing. Proof, in the monkeys and rodents who use their hands only to climb trees, louse themselves, and crack nuts. Our five fingers! Really nothing is more broadcast in nature, where they are only a sign of age: the saurians have them, and are not a bit more clever thereby. It is without fingers, without hands, without members that the larvæ of insects construct for themselves marvellous mosaic shells, weave themselves tents in silk-floss, exercise the trades of plasterer, miner, and carpenter. But this hand of man, become the world's marvel, how inferior to his genius, and how he has had to lengthen it, refine it, complicate it, in order to obtain obedience to the increasingly precise orders of his intelligence. Has the hand created machines? Man's intelligence immeasureably surpasses his organs, and submerges them; it demands of them the impossible and the absurd: hence the railway, the telegraph, the microscope and everything which multiplies the power of organs which have become rudimentary in the face of the brains' exigence, the brain being our master, who has demanded also of the sexual organs more than they were able to give: it is to satisfy these orders that the bed of love has been scattered with so many dreams and rose-leaves.
It is difficult to make people understand that the eye sees, not because it is an eye, but because it is situated at the tip of some filaments of nerve which are sensitive to light. At the end of filaments sensitive to sound, the eye would hear. Doubtless it is adapted to its function, as the ear is to hearing, but this function is an effect, not a cause. Insects' eyes are very different from ours. One has spoken of the experiments of a German savant who wished to throw visual images on the brain without the eye's intervention. This is suspicious, but not absurd: insects are gifted certainly with the power to smell, but one has never been able to discover the organ in any single one of them; and, also, the rôle of the antennæ which seems very considerable in their life, remains very obscure, since the removal of these appendices has not always a measurable effect on their activity.[2]
Organs, evidently the most useful, are sometimes placed in a position which diminishes their value. Notice a resting horse, and another horse coming toward him (observation can be made quite easily in the streets of Paris), what is he to do to gauge the danger, and reconnoitre the movement? Look at the other horse? No. His eyes are made to look sideways, not forward. He uses his long ears, raises them, shifts their open side toward the noise. Reassured he lets them fall, and re-establishes his calm. The horse looks with his ears. The blinkers by which people pretend to make him look forward, merely blind him, and perhaps, thereby diminish his impressionability. Blind horses moreover do the same work as the others.
The senses, as one knows, are substitutable one for the other, in a certain degree; but in the normal state they seem rather to reinforce each other mutually, and lend each other a certain support. One does not shut the eyes to hear better, save when one has determined the source of the sound. And even then, is it to hear better? Is it not rather to reflect and to hear at the same time, to manage an interior concentration with which the eye, essentially an explorative organ, would interfere?
It is in love that this alliance of all the senses is most intimately exercised. In superior animals, as well as in man, each sense, together or in groups, comes to reinforce the genital sense. None remain inactive, eye, ear, scent, touch, even taste come into play. Thus one explains the gleam of plumage, the dance, song, sexual odours. The female eye, in birds, is more sensitive than the male eye; the contrary is true of humanity; but female birds and women are particularly moved by song or words. The two sexes in dogs have, equally, recourse to scent; sight seems to play but an insignificant rôle in their sexual access, since minuscule canine beasts do not fear to address themselves to monsters, which for man would be in proportion more than that of a mammoth. Insects before mating often caress each other with their mysterious antennæ; the male is sometimes given a sounding apparatus: cricket and grasshopper drum to charm their companions.
It is not necessary to explain how in humans, especially in the male, all the senses concur in the amour, at least when moral and religious prejudices do not stop their impetus. It should be so, in an animal so sensitive, and of so complex and multiple a sensibility. The abstention of a single sense from the coupling is enough to enfeeble the pleasure very greatly. The coldness of many women may proceed less from a diminution of their genital sense, than from the general mediocrity of their senses. Intelligence, being but the ripe fruit of the general sensibility, its intensity is very often found to be in a certain relation with the sexual sensibility. Absolute coldness might signify stupidity. There are, however, too many exceptions for one to generalize in this matter. It happens indeed that intelligence instead of being the sum total of the sensibility, is, so to speak, the deviation or transmutation. There remains very little sensibility; it is nearly all turned into intelligence.
Every organized animal has a master: its nervous system; and there is, doubtless, no real life save where a nervous system exists, be it the magnificent infinitely branching tree of mammals and birds, be it the double, knotted cord of the mollusks, or the nail head which is planted, in ascides, between the buccal and anal orifice. As soon as this new matter appears, it reigns despotically, and the unforeseen appears in the world. One would say a conqueror, or rather an intruder, a parasite come in by stealth, and lifting itself into the royal rôle.
Animals bear this tyranny better than man. Their master asks fewer things. Often it only asks one: to create a being in its exact likeness. The animal is sane, that is to say, ruled; man is mad, that is to say, out of rule: he has so many orders to execute at once, that he scarcely does any one well. In civilized countries he can hardly reproduce himself and the specie is in danger. It would disappear, if the means of protecting it did not compensate the sterility.
One can not say that humanity has attained its intellectual limits, although its physical evolution seems completed; but as superior human specimens are nearly always sterile, or capable of only mediocre posterity, it is found that, alone among values, intelligence is not transmitted by generation. Then the circle closes and the same effort ends ceaselessly in the same recommencement. However, even here, artificial means intervene, and the transmission of the acquisitions of intelligence is relatively assured by all sorts of instruments. This mechanism, much inferior to carnal generation, permits us, if the most exquisite forms of intelligence disappear as fast as they flower, to preserve at least part of their contents. Notions are transmitted, that is a result, even though most of them are vain, in default of sensibilities sufficiently powerful to assimilate them and make a real life of them.
Finally, if man ought to abdicate, which seems unlikely, animality is rich enough to raise up an inheritor. The candidates for humanity are in great number, and they are not those whom the crowd supposes. Who knows if our descendants may not some day find themselves faced with a rival, strong and in the flower of youth. Creation has not gone on strike, since man appeared: since making this monster, nature has continued her work: the human hazard might reproduce itself on the morrow.
[1] The Latin luxuria and French luxure have no exact English equivalent; our "luxury," is the French luxe; the phrase "the exercise of pleasant lusts" is perhaps as near as I can come to a definition of luxure.—Translator.
[2] Fabre's experiments on mason bees, the shaggy ammophile, and great-peacock moth.
[TRANSLATOR'S POSTSCRIPT]
"Il y aurait peut-être une certain correlation entre la copulation complète et profonde et le développement cérébral."
Not only is this suggestion, made by our author at the end of his eighth chapter, both possible and probable, but it is more than likely that the brain itself, is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve; at first over the cervical ganglion, or, earlier or in other species, held in several clots over the scattered chief nerve centres; and augmenting in varying speeds and quantities into medulla oblongata, cerebellum and cerebrum. This hypothesis would perhaps explain a certain number of as yet uncorrelated phenomena both psychological and physiological. It I would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images. Species would have developed in accordance with, or their development would have been affected by, the relative discharge and retention of the fluid; this proportion being both a matter of quantity and of quality, some animals profiting hardly at all by the alluvial Nile-flood; the baboon retaining nothing; men apparently stupefying themselves in some cases by excess, and in other cases discharging apparently only a surplus at high pressure; the gateux, or the genius, the "strong-minded."
I offer an idea rather than an argument, yet if we consider sider that the power of the spermatozoide is precisely the power of exteriorizing a form; and if we consider the lack of any other known substance in nature capable of growing into brain, we are left with only one surprise, or rather one conclusion, namely, in face of the smallness of the average brain's activity, we must conclude that the spermatozoic substance must have greatly atrophied in its change from lactic to coagulated and hereditarily coagulated condition. Given, that is, two great seas of this fluid, mutually magnetized, the wonder is, or at least the first wonder is, that human thought is so inactive.
Chemical research may have something to say on the subject, if it be directed to comparison of brain and spermatophore in the nautilus, to the viscous binding of the bee's fecundative liquid. I offer only reflections, perhaps a few data. Indications of earlier adumbrations of an idea which really surprises no one, but seems as if it might have been lying on the study table of any physician or philosopher.
There are traces of it in the symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoide charging, head-on, the female chaos. Integration of the male in the male organ. Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.
Without any digression on feminism, taking merely the division Gourmont has given (Aristotelian, if you like), one offers woman as the accumulation of hereditary aptitudes, better than man in the "useful gestures," the perfections; but to man, given what we have of history, the "inventions," the new gestures, the extravagance, the wild shots, the impractical, merely because in him occurs the new up-jut, the new bathing of the cerebral tissues in the residuum, in la mousse of the life sap.
Or, as I am certainly neither writing an anti-feminist tract, nor claiming disproportionate privilege for the spermatozoide, for the sake of symmetry ascribe a cognate rôle to the ovule, though I can hardly be expected to introspect it. A flood is as bad as a famine; the ovular bath could still account for the refreshment of the female mind, and the recharging, regracing of its "traditional aptitudes;" where one woman appears to benefit by an alluvial clarifying, ten dozen appear to be swamped.
Postulating that the cerebral fluid tried all sorts of experiments, and, striking matter, forced fit; into all sorts of forms, by gushes; we have admittedly in insect life a female predominance; in bird, mammal and human, at least an increasing male prominence. And these four important branches of "the fan" may be differentiated according to their apparent chief desire, or source of choosing their species.
Insect, utility; bird, flight; mammal, muscular splendour; man, experiment.
The insect representing the female, and utility; the need of heat being present, the insect chooses to solve the problem by hibernation, i.e., a sort of negation of action. The bird wanting-continuous freedom, feathers itself. Desire for decoration appears in all the branches, man exteriorizing it most. The bat's secret appears to be that he is not the bird-mammal, but the mammal-insect: economy of tissue, hibernation. The female principle being not only utility, but extreme economy, woman, falling by this division into a male branch, is the least female of females, and at this point one escapes from a journalistic; sex-squabble into the opposition of two principles, utility and a sort of venturesomeness.
In its subservience to the money fetish our age returns to the darkness of medievalism. Two osmies may make superfluous egg-less nests, but do not kill each other in contesting which shall deposit the supererogatory honey therein. It is perhaps no more foolish to go at a hermit's bidding to recover an old sepulchre than to make new sepulchres at the bidding of finance.
In his growing subservience to, and adoration of, and entanglement in machines, in utility, man rounds the circle almost into insect life, the absence of flesh; and may have need even of horned gods to save him, or at least of a form of thought which permits them.
Take it that usual thought is a sort of shaking or shifting of a fluid in the viscous cells of the brain; one has seen electricity stripping the particles of silver from a plated knife in a chemical bath, with order and celerity, and gathering them on the other pole of a magnet. Take it as materially as you like. There is a sort of spirit-level in the ear, giving us our sense of balance. And dreams? Do they not happen precisely at the moments when one has tipped the head; are they not, with their incoherent mixing of known and familiar images, like the pouring of a complicated honeycomb tilted from its perpendicular? Does not this give precisely the needed mixture of familiar forms in non-sequence, the jumble of fragments each coherent within its own limit?
And from the popular speech, is not the sensible man called "level-headed," has he not his "head well screwed on" or "screwed on straight;" and are not lunatics and cranks often recognizable from some peculiar carriage or tilt of the head-piece; and is not the thinker always pictured with his head bowed into his hand, yes, but level so far as left to right is concerned? The upward-jaw, head-back pose has long been explained by the relative positions of the medulla and the more human parts of the brain; this need not be dragged in here; nor do I mean to assert that you can cure a lunatic merely by holding his head level.
Thought is a chemical process, the most interesting of all transfusions in liquid solution. The mind is an up-spurt of sperm, no, let me alter that; trying to watch the process: the sperm, the form-creator, the substance which compels the ovule to evolve in a given pattern, one microscopic, minuscule particle, entering the "castle" of the ovule.
"Thought is a vegetable" says a modern hermetic, whom I have often contradicted, but whom I do not wish to contradict at this point. Thought is a "chemical process" in relation to the organ, the brain; creative thought is act like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed, but given that cast, that ejaculation, I am perfectly willing to grant that the thought once born, separated, in regard to itself, not in relation to the brain that begat it, does lead an independent life much like a member of the vegetable kingdom, blowing seeds, ideas from the paradisal garden at the summit of Dante's Mount Purgatory, capable of lodging and sprouting where they fall. And Gourmont has the phrase "fecundating a generation of bodies as genius fecundates a generation of minds."
Man is the sum of the animals, the sum of their instincts, as Gourmont has repeated in the course of his book. Given, first a few, then as we get to our own condition, a mass of these spermatozoic particles withheld, in suspense, waiting in the organ that has been built up through ages by a myriad similar waitings.
Each of these particles is, we need not say, conscious of form, but has by all counts a capacity for formal expression: is not thought precisely a form-comparing and form-combining?
That is to say we have the hair-thinning "abstract thought" and we have the concrete thought of women, of artists, of musicians, the mockedly "long-haired," who have made everything in the world. We have the form-making and the form-destroying "thought," only the first of which is really satisfactory. I don't wish to be invidious, it is perfectly possible to consider the "abstract" thought, reason, etc., as the comparison, regimentation, and least common denominator of a multitude of images, but in the end each of the images is a little spoiled thereby, no one of them is the Apollo, and the makers of this kind of thought have been called dry-as-dust since the beginning of history. The regiment is less interesting as a whole than any individual in it. And, as we are being extremely material and physical and animal, in the wake of our author, we will leave old wives' gibes about the profusion of hair, and its chance possible indication or sanction of a possible neighbouring health beneath the skull.
Creative thought has manifested itself in images, in music, which is to sound what the concrete image is to sight. And the thought of genius, even of the mathematical genius, the mathematical prodigy, is really the same sort of thing, it is a sudden out-spurt of mind which takes the form demanded by the problem; which creates the answer, and baffles the man counting on the abacus.
I query the remarks about the sphex in Chapter XIX, "que le sphex s'est formé lentement," I query this with a conviction for which anyone is at liberty to call me lunatic, and for which I offer no better ground than simple introspection. I believe, and on no better ground than that of a sudden emotion, that the change of species is not a slow matter, managed by cross-breeding, of nature's leporides and bardots, I believe that the species changes as suddenly as a man makes a song or a poem, or as suddenly as he starts making them, more suddenly than he can cut a statue in stone, at most as slowly as a locust or long-tailed Sirmione false mosquito emerges from its outgrown skin. It is not even proved that man is at the end of his physical changes. Say that the diversification of species has passed its most sensational phases, say that it had once a great stimulus from the rapidity of the earth's cooling, if one accepts the geologists' interpretation of that thermometric cyclone.
The cooling planet contracts, it is as if one had some mud in a tin pail, and forced down the lid with such pressure that the can sprung a dozen leaks, or it is as if one had the mud in a linen bag and squeezed; merely as mechanics (not counting that one has all the known and unknown chemical elements cooling simultaneously), but merely as mechanics this contraction gives energy enough to squeeze vegetation through the pores of the imaginary linen and to detach certain particles, leaving them still a momentum. A body should cool with decreasing speed in measure as it approaches the temperature of its surroundings; however, the earth is still, I think, supposed to be warmer than the surrounding unknown, and is presumably still cooling, or at any rate it is not proved that man is at the end of his physical changes. I return to homed gods and the halo in a few paragraphs. It is not proved that even the sort of impetus provided by a shrinking of planetary surface is denied one.
What is known is that man's great divergence has been in the making of detached, resumable tools.
That is to say, if an insect carries a saw, it carries it all the time. The "next step," as in the case of the male organ of the nautilus, is to grow a tool and detach it.
Man's first inventions are fire and the club, that is to say he detaches his digestion, he finds a means to get heat without releasing the calories of the log by internal combustion inside his own stomach. The invention of the first tool turned his mind (using this term in the full sense); turned, let us say, his "brain" from his own body. No need for greater antennæ, a fifth arm, etc., except, after a lapse, as a tour de force, to show that he is still lord of his body.
That is to say the langouste's long feelers, all sorts of extravagances in nature may be taken as the result of a single gush of thought. A single out-push of a demand, made by a spermatic sea of sufficient energy to cast such a form. To cast it as one electric pole will cast a spark to another. To exteriorize. Sometimes to act in this with more enthusiasm than caution.
Let us say quite simply that light is a projection from the luminous fluid, from the energy that is in the brain, down along the nerve cords which receive certain vibrations in the eye. Let us suppose man capable of exteriorizing a new organ, horn, halo, Eye of Horns. Given a brain of this power, comes the question, what organ, and to what purpose?
Turning to folk-lore, we have Frazer on homed gods, we have Egyptian statues, generally supposed to be "symbols," of cat-headed and ibis-headed gods. Now in a primitive community, a man, a volontaire, might risk it. He might want prestige, authority, want them enough to grow horns and claim a divine heritage, or to grow a cat head; Greek philosophy would have smiled at him, would have deprecated his ostentation. With primitive man he would have risked a good deal, he would have been deified, or crucified, or possibly both. Today he would be caught for a circus.
One does not assert that cat-headed gods appeared in Egypt after the third dynasty; the country had a long memory and such a phenomenon would have made some stir in the valley. The horned god would appear to have persisted, and the immensely high head of the Chinese contemplative as shown in art and the China images is another stray grain of tradition.
But man goes on making new faculties, or forgetting old ones. That is to say you have all sorts of aptitudes developed without external change, which in an earlier biological state would possibly have found carnal expression. You have every exploited "hyper-æsthesia," i.e., every new form of genius, from the faculty of hearing four parts in a fugue perfectly, to the ear for money (vide Henry James in "The Ivory Tower" the passages on Mr. Gaw). Here I only amplify what Gourmont has indicated in Chapter XX. You have the visualizing sense, the "stretch" of imagination, the mystics,—for what there is to them—Santa Theresa who "saw" the microcosmos, hell, heaven, purgatory complete, "the size of a walnut;" and you have Mr. W., a wool-broker in London, who suddenly at 3 a.m. visualizes the whole of his letter-file, three hundred folios; he sees and reads particularly the letter at folder 171, but he sees simultaneously the entire contents of the file, the whole thing about the size of two lumps of domino sugar laid flat side to flat side.
Remains precisely the question: man feeling this protean capacity to grow a new organ: what organ? Or new faculty; what faculty?
His first renunciation, flight, he has regained, almost as if the renunciation, so recent in terms of biology, had been committed in foresight. Instinct conserves only the "useful" gestures. Air provides little nourishment, and anyhow the first great pleasure surrendered, the simple ambition to mount the air has been regained and regratified. Water was never surrendered, man with sub-aqueous yearnings is still, given a knife, the shark's vanquisher. The new faculty? Without then the ostentation of an organ. Will? The hypnotist has shown the vanity and Blake the inutility of willing trifles, and black magic its futility. The telepathic faculty? In the first place is it new? Have not travellers always told cock and bull stories about its existence in savage Africa? Is it not a faculty that man has given up, if not as useless, at any rate as of a very limited use, a distraction, more bother than it is worth? Lacking a localizing sense, the savage knowing, if he does, what happens "somewhere" else, but never knowing quite where. The faculty was perhaps not worth the damage it does to concentration of mind on some useful subject. "Instinct preserves the useful gestures."
Take it that what man wants is a capacity for clearer understanding, or for physical refreshment and vigour, are not these precisely the faculties he is forever hammering at, perhaps stupidly? Muscularly he goes slowly, athletic records being constantly worn down by millimetres and seconds.
I appear to have thrown down bits of my note somewhat at random; let me return to physiology. People were long ignorant of the circulation of the blood; that known, they appeared to think the nerves stationary; Gourmont speaks of "circulation nerveuse," but many people still consider the nerve as at most a telegraph wire, simply because it does not bleed visibly when cut. The current is "interrupted." The school books of twenty years ago were rather vague about lymph, and various glands still baffle physicians. I have not seen the suggestion that some of them may serve rather as fuses in an electric system, to prevent short circuits, or in some variant or allotropic form. The spermatozoide is, I take it, regarded as a sort of quintessence; the brain is also a quintessence, or at least "in rapport with" all parts of the body; the single spermatozoide demands simply that the ovule shall construct a human being, the suspended spermatozoide (if my wild shot rings the target bell) is ready to dispense with, in the literal sense, incarnation, en-fleshment. Shall we postulate the mass of spermatozoides, first accumulated in suspense, then specialized?
Three channels, hell, purgatory, heaven, if one wants to follow yet another terminology: digestive excretion, incarnation, freedom in the imagination, i.e., cast into an exterior formlessness, or into form material, or merely imaginative visually or perhaps musically or perhaps fixed in some other sensuous dimension, even of taste or odour (there have been perhaps creative cooks and perfumers?).
The dead laborious compilation and comparison of other men's dead images, all this is mere labour, not the spermatozoic act of the brain.
Woman, the conservator, the inheritor of past gestures, clever, practical, as Gourmont says, not inventive, always the best disciple of any inventor, has been always the enemy of the dead or laborious form of compilation, abstraction.
Not considering the process ended; taking the individual genius as the man in whom the new access, the new superfluity of spermatozoic pressure (quantitative and qualitative) up-shoots into the brain, alluvial Nile-flood, bringing new crops, new invention. And as Gourmont says, there is only reasoning where there is initial error, i.e., weakness of the spurt, wandering search.
In no case can it be a question of mere animal quantity of sperm. You have the man who wears himself out and weakens his brain, echo of the orang, obviously not the talented sieve; you have the contrasted case in the type of man who really can not work until he has relieved the pressure on his spermatic canals.
This is a question of physiology, it is not a question of morals and sociology. Given the spermatozoic thought, the two great seas of fecundative matter, the brain lobes, mutually magnetized, luminous in their own knowledge of their being; whether they may be expected to seek exterior "luxuria," or whether they are going to repeat Augustine hymns, is not in my jurisdiction. An exterior paradise might not allure them "La bêtise humaine est la seule chose qui donne une idée de l'infini," says Renan, and Gourmont has quoted him, and all flesh to grass, a superior grass.
It remains that man has for centuries nibbled at this idea of connection, intimate connection between his sperm and his cerebration, the ascetic has tried to withhold all his sperm, the lure, the ignis fatuus perhaps, of wanting to super-think; the dope-fiend has tried opium and every inferior to Bacchus, to get an extra kick out of the organ, the mystics have sought the gleam in the tavern, Helen of Tyre, priestesses in the temple of Venus, in Indian temples, stray priestesses in the streets, un-uprootable custom, and probably with a basis of sanity. A sense of balance might show that asceticism means either a drought or a crowding. The liquid solution must be kept at right consistency; one would say the due proportion of liquid to viscous particles, a good circulation; the actual quality of the sieve or separator, counting perhaps most of all; the balance of ejector and retentive media.
Perhaps the clue is in Propertius after all:
Ingenium nobis ipsa puella fecit.
There is the whole of the XIIth century love cult, and Dante's metaphysics a little to one side, and Gourmont's Latin Mystique; and for image-making both Fenollosa on "The Chinese Written Character," and the paragraphs in "Le Problème du Style." At any rate the quarrel between cerebralist and viveur and ignorantist ends, if the brain is thus conceived not as a separate and desiccated organ, but as the very fluid of life itself.
EZRA POUND
June 21, 1921.
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