The Voice of the Machines. Gerald Stanley Lee
century. If the hill be beautiful, so is the locomotive that conquers a hill. So is the telephone, piercing a thousand sunsets north to south, with the sound of a voice. The night is not more beautiful, hanging its shadow over the city, than the electric spark pushing the night one side, that the city may behold itself; and the hour is at hand—is even now upon us—when not the sun itself shall be more beautiful to men than the telegraph stopping the sun in the midst of its high heaven, and holding it there, while the will of a child to another child ticks round the earth. “Time shall be folded up as a scroll,” saith the voice of Man, my Brother. “The spaces between the hills, to ME,” saith the Voice, “shall be as though they were not.”
The voice of man, my brother, is a new voice.
It is the voice of the machines.
II
AS SEEN THROUGH A HATCHWAY
In its present importance as a factor in life and a modifier of its conditions, the machine is in every sense a new and unprecedented fact. The machine has no traditions. The only way to take a traditional stand with regard to life or the representation of life to-day, is to leave the machine out. It has always been left out. Leaving it out has made little difference. Only a small portion of the people of the world have had to be left out with it.
Not to see poetry in the machinery of this present age, is not to see poetry in the life of the age. It is not to believe in the age.
The first fact a man encounters in this modern world, after his mother’s face, is the machine. The moment be begins to think outwards, he thinks toward a machine. The bed he lies in was sawed and planed by a machine, or cast in a foundry. The windows he looks out of were built in mills. His knife and fork were made by steam. His food has come through rollers and wheels. The water he drinks is pumped to him by engines. The ice in it was frozen by a factory and the cloth of the clothes he wears was flashed together by looms.
The machine does not end here. When he grows to years of discretion and looks about him to choose a place for himself in life, he finds that that place must come to him out of a machine. By the side of a machine of one sort or another, whether it be of steel rods and wheels or of human beings’ souls, he must find his place in the great whirling system of the order of mortal lives, and somewhere in the system—that is, the Machine—be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt, or spindle under infinite space, ordained for him to be from the beginning of the world.
The moment he begins to think, a human being finds himself facing a huge, silent, blue-and-gold something called the universe, the main fact of which must be to him that it seems to go without him very well, and that he must drop into the place that comes, whatever it may be, and hold on as he loves his soul, or forever be left behind. He learns before many years that this great machine shop of a globe, turning solemnly its days and nights, where he has wandered for a life, will hardly be inclined to stop—to wait perchance—to ask him what he wants to be, or how this life of his shall get itself said. He looks into the Face of Circumstance. (Sometimes it is the Fist of Circumstance.) The Face of Circumstance is a silent face. It points to the machine. He looks into the faces of his fellow-men, hurrying past him night and day—miles of streets of them. They, too, have looked into the Face of Circumstance. It pointed to the Machine. They show it in their faces. Some of them show it in their gait. The Machine closes around him, with its vast insistent murmur, million-peopled and full of laughs and cries. He listens to it as to the roar of all Being.
He listens to the Machine’s prophet. “All men,” says Political Economy, “may be roughly divided as attaching themselves to one or the other of three great classes of activity—production, consumption or distribution.”
The number of persons who are engaged in production outside of association with machinery, if they could be gathered together in one place, would be an exceedingly small and strange and uncanny band of human beings. They would be visited by all the world as curiosities.
The number of persons who are engaged in distribution outside of association with machinery is equally insignificant. Except for a few peddlers, distribution is hardly anything else but machinery.
The number of persons who are engaged in consumption outside of association with machinery is equally insignificant. So far as consumption is concerned, any passing freight train, if it could be stopped and examined on its way to New York, would be found to be loaded with commodities, the most important part of which, from the coal up, have been produced by one set of machines to be consumed by another set of machines.
So omnipresent and masterful and intimate with all existence have cogs and wheels and belts become, that not a civilized man could be found on the globe to-day, who, if all the machines that have helped him to live this single year of 1906 could be gathered or piled around him where he stands, would be able, for the machines piled high around his life, to see the sky—to be sure there was a sky. It is then his privilege, looking up at this horizon of steel and iron and running belts, to read in a paper book the literary definition of what this heaven is, that spreads itself above him, and above the world, walled in forever with its irrevocable roar of wheels.
“No inspiring emotions,” says the literary definition, “ideas or conceptions can possibly be connected with machinery—or ever will be.”
What is to become of a world roofed in with machines for the rest of its natural life, and of the people who will have to live under the roof of machines, the literary definition does not say. It is not the way of literary definitions. For a time at least we feel assured that we, who are the makers of definitions, are poetically and personally safe. Can we not live behind the ramparts of our books? We take comfort with the medallions of poets and the shelves that sing around us. We sit by our library fires, the last nook of poetry. Beside our gates the great crowding chimneys lift themselves. Beneath our windows herds of human beings, flocking through the din, in the dark of the morning and the dark of the night, go marching to their fate. We have done what we could. Have we not defined poetry? Is it nothing to have laid the boundary line of beauty? … The huge, hurrying, helpless world in its belts and spindles—the people who are going to be obliged to live in it when the present tense has spoiled it a little more—all this—the great strenuous problem—the defense of beauty, the saving of its past, the forging of its future, the welding of it with life-all these? … Pull down the blinds, Jeems. Shut out the noises of the street. A little longer … the low singing to ourselves. Then darkness. The wheels and the din above our graves shall be as the passing of silence.
Is it true that, in a few years more, if a man wants the society of his kind, he will have to look down through a hatchway? Or that, if he wants to be happy, he will have to stand on it and look away? I do not know. I only know how it is now.
They stay not in their hold
These stokers,
Stooping to hell
To feed a ship.
Below the ocean floors,
Before their awful doors
Bathed in flame,
I hear their human lives
Drip—drip.
Through the lolling aisles of comrades
In and out of sleep,
Troops of faces
To and fro of happy feet,
They haunt my eyes.
Their murky faces beckon me
From the spaces of the coolness of the sea
Their fitful bodies away against the skies.
III
SOULS OF MACHINES