What, then, shall man do? Weep for that? Shall he despair and call life a failure and a torment? Shall he say that it is limited, that there is no opportunity for progress, or that the sweetness of those things defined as love, charity, mercy, neighborliness and race sociability are by such a governing condition destroyed? Not at all. Wherein is the temperament of Nature Herself, Her sweetness, if such there be; Her romance, if such there be; Her beauty, if such there be, altered by this? Life is as it is—active, dancing, changeful, beautiful, at once brutal and tender—regardless of how our theories would seek to make it seem, and though it does as it chooses at times, or appears to, and invents or assumes various guises of perfection, it is as it has always been, both good and bad, yet held in a kind of equational vise or harmony—neither too good nor too bad—or we would not now be here at all, any of us, to tell the tale. As it is, and well within its equational swing or law, there is room for the will to superiority in the super-man as well as the trembling fears of the least of created creatures. Nor is it impossible for man, with his puny strength or with such force as he may gather, to attempt to upset this very equation and so rule all; or, on the contrary, choose to live in sweetest peace with his neighbor, if he can. He may, and great will be the wonder and charm of his existence if he no more than try. But that he should succeed in permanently so doing is not within his scope unless he should grow to be the universe itself. On the other hand, under this same controlling equation, a man may be a Colossus and bestride the world without upsetting the equation ultimately. Like Alexander, he may sigh for more worlds to conquer; or, like Hannibal, take refuge in despair and death. Or, better yet, like some forceful and yet humble laborer at some small task, he may seek to hide himself away in some simple peaceful realm, free of the storms which rock these greater worlds, and still be secure in one of those minor equilibriums which in the shadow of some of the greater ones are always holding somewhere in part. For, roughly, equation is always holding in one or many forms—dependent equations, which consist of many, many equations or balances, joined in some still greater one or synthesis—and apparently always will. Who shall say? To our present senses the ultimate facts of life are not altering; although that is not for petty man to know.
On the other hand, I should say that the condition of equation which is everywhere evident does not deny or belie any elements of softness, color, beauty or art which now sweeten, or seem, to, a picture which must seem to many inherently grim. God, Good, Nature, Force, is not now, and never has been apparently, without some of these aspects in part, nor bare of the easing limitations indicated by the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule and the Beatitudes. For before these were it was, and if they are or ever were true they still are so, for they took their rise out of it and so must be and remain in it, forever and ever, emanations or adjustments (equation, no doubt) suggested by the desire for expression on the part of the cosmos as a whole. Yet the knowledge that they are the result of a condition or equation which the universe, the life force itself, cannot escape, is or should be most encouraging. Nature must let many things live in reasonable equation or peace, for it is in them and they in it. “I am in the Father; the Father is in me.”
If, then, man is savage he is also tender, inherently so apparently, for by what measure would he measure savageness if not by its contrary? And if he is avid, centripetal, individual, is he not somewhat of their contrary also? In truth, somewhere in the scheme of things is implanted a love of beauty and order as well as their contraries, which can only find expression via equation, and this it is, chemical, inherent awareness of it no doubt, which eases the ache of existence for us all (God, man, devil). For if life loves change, movement, difference, contest, it also plainly loves their contraries, for these exist, and we could not know the one without the other. Order exists as a half of its opposite, disorder, and the one could not well be without the other, and peace exists, if at all, as the complement or antithesis of what is not peaceful. Yet through all and all, and in all and all, are the sting and gayety of change and the consciousness of it, and these remain, possibly forever and ever, outside Nirvana, which Nature may never wish to see or know. It may be impossible for Her to die or be still.
Equation, then, is that which is involved in the lust of the lover for his sweetheart, and her acceptance; the husband for his wife, and her faith; the mother for her child, and its love; the citizen for his neighbor; the individual for his friend. Art, the love of life for itself, is nothing more than a synthesis of many equations whereby many lovely harmonies and their opposites are expressed or implied. Hunger, balanced against satiation, creates more beauty. Life builds and wills far beyond the ken of man or his companion animals, and all that he can know is the chemic thrill of life, its joys, the necessity of equation and so-called fair play, or rhythm and balance. For, behold, life is ever dancing and does not will to be still. Not to want too much, because one cannot get too much; not to seek to devour the whole world, because one cannot; not to threaten, because of vanity and self-appreciation, all else with extermination, because one cannot possibly exterminate all else without disturbing the general balance and so bring the weight, the conditioning and crushing force of equation itself upon oneself, is to say what may offend the individual life-lover but which nevertheless produces the only condition in which the general totality in all its glittering variety, which it appears to crave, can best express itself outside Nirvana. And this it is which should drive the fog of religious theory out of our minds.
For why pray in beggarly fashion for that which will be, whether we pray or not—which, as the mechanists believe and show cannot escape its own destiny? Rather sing and be joyful, I should say, for one’s unescapable share in so great a spectacle. The game is open, free, a thrashing, glorious scene. Our God, if we have one, is not a namby-pamby, milk-and-water solution, suitable for the stomachs and optics of still more namby-pamby men, but a vast somewhat which offers a splendid universe-eating career to the giant, if he wills, an opportunity to thrive and grow to even the most spindling of beginners. Our God, if we have one, is a vast somewhat too great for the perception or understanding or destruction or solution of any minor portion of Him, such as we are. He is a creator of spectacles, a slinger of thunder-bolts, a breather of fire, a master of cataclysm. His, or Its, least breath is storm. Its sigh is earthquake or orbital derangement. No attributes such as man can conceive can apply—neither good nor evil, virtue or its opposite—for these apply only as mild suggestions at moments of equation in one minor part of the great whole or another. Our God is tragedy and comedy, terror and delight. He is limitless opportunity and endless opposition and destruction, for His way is extremes in equation, and nothing more and nothing less.
What then? Despair over that? Is there not, in all conscience, under a loose equation (loose and operative only in extremes) room for all the lusts, the terrors, the wonders, the simplicities of the greatest as well as the least? Alexander may yet be again, or the devil himself in all his power and lurid glory, before he is crushed and set aside, for the time being, by his inherent antithesis, the thing which is not devil.
And as for the religionist, may not Jesus, St. Francis, St. Simon Stylites come again? Let man fight for their return if he will. Who is to gainsay him?—not God, Force, the Universal Substance. Obviously it does not care how it expresses itself, so long as it achieves avid, forceful, artistic expression.
PHANTASMAGORIA.
CHARACTERS:
THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE
BEAUTY
AMBITION
PITY
LOVE
HATE
DESPAIR
REASON
HOPE
FEAR
GREED