The Voice of the Machines / An Introduction to the Twentieth Century

by Gerald Stanley Lee

The machines of the world are all practically engaged in manufacturing the same thing. They are all time-and-space-machines. They knit time and space. Hundreds of thousands of things may be put in machines this very day, for us, before night falls, but only eternity and infinity shall be turned out. Sometimes it is called one and sometimes the other. If a man is going to be infinite or eternal it makes little difference which. It is merely a matter of form whether one is everywhere a few years, or anywhere forever. A sewing machine is as much a means of communication as a printing press or a locomotive. The locomotive takes a woman around the world. The sewing machine gives her a new world where she is. At every point where a machine touches the life of a human being, it serves him with a new measure of infinity.

This would seem to be a poetic thing for a machine to do. Traditional poetry does not see any poetry in it, because, according to our traditions poetry has fixed boundary lines, is an old, established institution in human life, and infinity is not.

No one has wanted to be infinite before. Poetry in the ancient world was largely engaged in protecting people from the Infinite. They were afraid of it. They could not help feeling that the Infinite was over them. Worship consisted in propitiating it, poetry in helping people to forget it. With the exception of Job, the Hebrews almost invariably employed a poet—when they could get one—as a kind of transfigured policeman—to keep the sky off. It was what was expected of poets.

The Greeks did the same thing in a different way. The only difference was, that the Greeks, instead of employing their poets to keep the sky off, employed them to make it as much like the earth as possible—a kind of raised platform which was less dreadful and more familiar and homelike and answered the same general purpose. In other words, the sky became beautiful to the Greek when he had made it small enough. Making it small enough was the only way a Greek knew of making it beautiful.

Galileo knew another way. It is because Galileo knew another way—because he knew that the way to make the sky beautiful, was to make it large enough—that men are living in a new world. A new religion beats down through space to us. A new poetry lifts away the ceilings of our dreams. The old sky, with its little tent of stars, its film of flame and darkness burning over us, has floated to the past. The twentieth century—the home of the Infinite—arches over our human lives. The heaven is no longer, to the sons of men, a priests’ wilderness, nor is it a poet’s heaven—a paper, painted heaven, with little painted paper stars in it, to hide the wilderness.

It is a new heaven. Who, that has lived these latter years, that has seen it crashing and breaking through the old one, can deny that what is over us now is a new heaven? The infinite cave of it, scooped out at last over our little naked, foolish lives, our running-about philosophies, our religions, and our governments—it is the main fact about us. Arts and literatures—ants under a stone, thousands of years, blind with light, hither and thither, racing about, hiding themselves.

But not long for dreams. More than this. The new heaven is matched by a new earth. Men who see a new heaven make a new earth. In its cloud of steam, in a kind of splendid, silent stammer of praise and love, the new earth lifts itself to the new heaven, lifts up days out of nights to It, digs wells for winds under It, lights darkness with falling water, makes ice out of vapor, and heat out of cold, draws down Space with engines, makes years out of moments with machines. It is a new world and all the men that are born upon it are new widemoving, cloud and mountain-moving men. The habits of stars and waters, the huge habits of space and time, are the habits of the men.

The Infinite, at last, which in days gone by hung over us—the mere hiding place of Death, the awful living-room of God—is the neighborhood of human life.

Machinery has poetry in it because in expressing the soul it expresses the greatest idea that the soul of man can have, namely, the idea that the soul of man is infinite, or capable of being infinite.

Machinery has poetry in it also not merely because it is the symbol of infinite power in human life, or because it makes man think he is infinite, but because it is making him as infinite as he thinks he is. The infinity of man is no longer a thing that the poet takes—that he makes an idea out of—Machinery makes it a matter of fact.