paradox of being, until his victim cries out, as in “The City of
Dreadful Night”: “Our life’s a cheat, our death a black abyss.”
And the feet of the victim of such dreadful intimacy take hold of
the way of death.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Back to personal experiences and the effects in the past of John
Barleycorn’s White Logic on me. On my lovely ranch in the Valley
of the Moon, brain-soaked with many months of alcohol, I am
oppressed by the cosmic sadness that has always been the heritage
of man. In vain do I ask myself why I should be sad. My nights
are warm. My roof does not leak. I have food galore for all the
caprices of appetite. Every creature comfort is mine. In my body
are no aches nor pains. The good old flesh-machine is running
smoothly on. Neither brain nor muscle is overworked. I have
land, money, power, recognition from the world, a consciousness
that I do my meed of good in serving others, a mate whom I love,
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children that are of my own fond flesh. I have done, and am
doing, what a good citizen of the world should do. I have built
houses, many houses, and tilled many a hundred acres. And as for
trees, have I not planted a hundred thousand? Everywhere, from any
window of my house, I can gaze forth upon these trees of my
planting, standing valiantly erect and aspiring toward the sun.
My life has indeed fallen in pleasant places. Not a hundred men
in a million have been so lucky as I. Yet, with all this vast
good fortune, am I sad. And I am sad because John Barleycorn is
with me. And John Barleycorn is with me because I was born in
what future ages will call the dark ages before the ages of
rational civilisation. John Barleycorn is with me because in all
the unwitting days of my youth John Barleycorn was accessible,
calling to me and inviting me on every corner and on every street
between the corners. The pseudo-civilisation into which I was
born permitted everywhere licensed shops for the sale of soul-
poison. The system of life was so organised that I (and millions
like me) was lured and drawn and driven to the poison shops.
Wander with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadness
into which one is plunged by John Barleycorn. I ride out over my
beautiful ranch. Between my legs is a beautiful horse. The air
is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with
autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are
stealing. The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky. I have
everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreams
and mysteries. I am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalised,
organic. I move, I have the power of movement, I command movement
of the live thing I bestride. I am possessed with the pomps of
being, and know proud passions and inspirations. I have ten
thousand august connotations. I am a king in the kingdom of
sense, and trample the face of the uncomplaining dust….
And yet, with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder
about me, and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I
cut in this world that endured so long without me and that will
again endure without me. I remember the men who broke their
hearts and their backs over this stubborn soil that now belongs to
me. As if anything imperishable could belong to the perishable!
These men passed. I, too, shall pass. These men toiled, and
cleared, and planted, gazed with aching eyes, while they rested
their labour-stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets,
at the autumn glory of the grape, and at the fog-wisps stealing
across the mountain. And they are gone. And I know that I, too,
shall some day, and soon, be gone.
Gone? I am going now. In my jaw are cunning artifices of the
dentists which replace the parts of me already gone. Never again
will I have the thumbs of my youth. Old fights and wrestlings
have injured them irreparably. That punch on the head of a man
whose very name is forgotten settled this thumb finally and for
ever. A slip-grip at catch-as-catch-can did for the other. My
lean runner’s stomach has passed into the limbo of memory. The
joints of the legs that bear me up are not so adequate as they
once were, when, in wild nights and days of toil and frolic, I
strained and snapped and ruptured them. Never again can I swing
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109
dizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to a single
rope-clutch in the driving blackness of storm. Never again can I
run with the sled-dogs along the endless miles of Arctic trail.
I am aware that within this disintegrating body which has been
dying since I was born I carry a skeleton, that under the rind of
flesh which is called my face is a bony, noseless death’s head.
All of which does not shudder me. To be afraid is to be healthy.
Fear of death makes for life. But the curse of the White Logic is
that it does not make one afraid. The world-sickness of the White
Logic makes one grin jocosely into the face of the Noseless One
and to sneer at all the phantasmagoria of living.
I look about me as I ride and on every hand I see the merciless
and infinite waste of natural selection. The White Logic insists
upon opening the long-closed books, and by paragraph and chapter
states the beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility and
dust. About me is murmur and hum, and I know it for the gnat-
swarm of the living, piping for a little space its thin plaint of
troubled air.
I return across the ranch. Twilight is on, and the hunting
animals are out. I watch the piteous tragic play of life feeding
on life. Here is no morality. Only in man is morality, and man
created it–a code of action that makes toward living and that is
of the lesser order of truth. Yet all this I knew before, in the
weary days of my long sickness. These were the greater truths
that I so successfully schooled myself to forget; the truths that
were so serious that I refused to take them seriously, and played
with gently, oh! so gently, as sleeping dogs at the back of
consciousness which I did not care to waken. I did but stir them,
and let them lie. I was too wise, too wicked wise, to wake them.
But now White Logic willy-nilly wakes them for me, for White
Logic, most valiant, is unafraid of all the monsters of the
earthly dream.
“Let the doctors of all the schools condemn me, “White Logic
whispers as I ride along. “What of it? I am truth. You know it.
You cannot combat me. They say I make for death. What of it? It
is truth. Life lies in order to live. Life is a perpetual lie-
telling process. Life is a mad dance in the domain of flux,
wherein appearances in mighty tides ebb and flow, chained to the
wheels of moons beyond our ken. Appearances are ghosts. Life is
ghost land, where appearances change, transfuse, permeate each the
other and all the others, that are, that are not, that always
flicker, fade, and pass, only to come again as new appearances, as
other appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of
countless appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know
is mirage. You know mirages of desire. These very mirages are
the unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances that
crowd in upon you and form you out of the past, and that sweep you
on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable
congeries of appearances to people the ghost land of the future.
Life is apparitional, and passes. You are an apparition. Through
all the apparitions that preceded you and that compose the parts
of you, you rose gibbering from the evolutionary mire, and
gibbering you will pass on, interfusing, permeating the procession
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110
of apparitions that will succeed you.”
And of course it is all unanswerable, and as I ride along through
the evening shadows I sneer at that Great Fetish which Comte
called the world. And I remember what another pessimist of
sentiency has uttered: “Transient are all. They, being born, must
die, and, being dead, are glad to be at rest.”
But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest.
He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian.
He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I
am to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, and