house, and planted apple trees. And already the site of the house
is undiscoverable, the location of the stone walls may be deduced
from the configuration of the landscape, and I am renewing the
battle, putting in angora goats to browse away the brush that has
overrun Haska’s clearing and choked Haska’s apple trees to death.
So I, too, scratch the land with my brief endeavour and flash my
name across a page of legal script ere I pass and the page grows
musty.
“Dreamers and ghosts,” the White Logic chuckles.
“But surely the striving was not altogether vain,” I contend.
“It was based on illusion and is a lie.”
“A vital lie,” I retort.
“And pray what is a vital lie but a lie?” the White Logic
challenges. “Come. Fill your glass and let us examine these
vital liars who crowd your bookshelves. Let us dabble in William
James a bit.”
“A man of health,” I say. “From him we may expect no
philosopher’s stone, but at least we will find a few robust tonic
things to which to tie.”
“Rationality gelded to sentiment,” the White Logic grins. “At the
end of all his thinking he still clung to the sentiment of
immortality. Facts transmuted in the alembic of hope into terms
of faith. The ripest fruit of reason the stultification of
reason. From the topmost peak of reason James teaches to cease
reasoning and to have faith that all is well and will be well–the
old, oh, ancient old, acrobatic flip of the metaphysicians whereby
they reasoned reason quite away in order to escape the pessimism
consequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason.
John Barleycorn
114
“Is this flesh of yours you? Or is it an extraneous something
possessed by you? Your body–what is it? A machine for converting
stimuli into reactions. Stimuli and reactions are remembered.
They constitute experience. Then you are in your consciousness
these experiences. You are at any moment what you are thinking at
that moment. Your I is both subject and object; it predicates
things of itself and is the things predicated. The thinker is the
thought, the knower is what is known, the possessor is the things
possessed.
“After all, as you know well, man is a flux of states of
consciousness, a flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self
another self, a myriad thoughts, a myriad selves, a continual
becoming but never being, a will-of-the-wisp flitting of ghosts in
ghostland. But this, man will not accept of himself. He refuses
to accept his own passing. He will not pass. He will live again
if he has to die to do it.
“He shuffles atoms and jets of light, remotest nebulae, drips of
water, prick-points of sensation, slime-oozings and cosmic bulks,
all mixed with pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities,
frightened surmises, and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff
builds himself an immortality to startle the heavens and baffle
the immensities. He squirms on his dunghill, and like a child
lost in the dark among goblins, calls to the gods that he is their
younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is destined to be as
free as they–monuments of egotism reared by the epiphenomena;
dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when the dreamer
vanishes and are no more when he is not.
“It is nothing new, these vital lies men tell themselves,
muttering and mumbling them like charms and incantations against
the powers of Night. The voodoos and medicine men and the devil-
devil doctors were the fathers of metaphysics. Night and the
Noseless One were ogres that beset the way of light and life. And
the metaphysicians would win by if they had to tell lies to do it.
They were vexed by the brazen law of the Ecclesiast that men die
like the beasts of the field and their end is the same. Their
creeds were their schemes, their religions their nostrums, their
philosophies their devices, by which they half-believed they would
outwit the Noseless One and the Night.
“Bog-lights, vapours of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies,
wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues
of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings,
ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations–this is the
stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your bookshelves. Look
at them, all the sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels–
your Schopenhauers, your Strindbergs, your Tolstois and
Nietzsches.
“Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget.”
I obey, for my brain is now well a-crawl with the maggots of
alcohol, and as I drink to the sad thinkers on my shelves I quote
Richard Hovey:
John Barleycorn
115
“Abstain not! Life and Love like night and day
Offer themselves to us on their own terms,
Not ours. Accept their bounty while ye may,
Before we be accepted by the worms,”
“I will cap you,” cries the White Logic.
“No,” I answer, while the maggots madden me. “I know you for what
you are, and I am unafraid. Under your mask of hedonism you are
yourself the Noseless One and your way leads to the Night.
Hedonism has no meaning. It, too, is a lie, at best the coward’s
smug compromise ”
“Now will I cap you!” the White Logic breaks in.
“But if you would not this poor life fulfil,
Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
Without the fear of waking after death.”
And I laugh my defiance; for now, and for the moment, I know the
White Logic to be the arch-impostor of them all, whispering his
whispers of death. And he is guilty of his own unmasking, with
his own genial chemistry turning the tables on himself, with his
own maggots biting alive the old illusions, resurrecting and
making to sound again the old voice from beyond of my youth,
telling me again that still are mine the possibilities and powers
which life and the books had taught me did not exist.
And the dinner gong sounds to the reversed bottom of my glass.
Jeering at the White Logic, I go out to join my guests at table,
and with assumed seriousness to discuss the current magazines and
the silly doings of the world’s day, whipping every trick and ruse
of controversy through all the paces of paradox and persiflage.
And, when the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfully
disconcerting to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeois
fetishes and to laugh and epigram at the flitting god-ghosts and
the debaucheries and follies of wisdom.
The clown’s the thing! The clown! If one must be a philosopher,
let him be Aristophanes. And no one at the table thinks I am
jingled. I am in fine fettle, that is all. I tire of the labour
of thinking, and, when the table is finished, start practical
jokes and set all playing at games, which we carry on with bucolic
boisterousness.
And when the evening is over and good-night said, I go back
through my book-walled den to my sleeping porch and to myself and
to the White Logic which, undefeated, has never left me. And as I
fall to fuddled sleep I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it:
“I heard Youth calling in the night:
John Barleycorn
116
‘Gone is my former world-delight;
For there is naught my feet may stay;
The morn suffuses into day,
It dare not stand a moment still
But must the world with light fulfil.
More evanescent than the rose
My sudden rainbow comes and goes,
Plunging bright ends across the sky–
Yea, I am Youth because I die!'”
CHAPTER XXXVIII
The foregoing is a sample roaming with the White Logic through the
dusk of my soul.
To the best of my power I have striven to give the reader a
glimpse of a man’s secret dwelling when it is shared with John
Barleycorn. And the reader must remember that this mood, which he
has read in a quarter of an hour, is but one mood of the myriad
moods of John Barleycorn, and that the procession of such moods
may well last the clock around through many a day and week and
month.
My alcoholic reminiscences draw to a close. I can say, as any
strong, chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive to-
day on the planet is my unmerited luck–the luck of chest, and
shoulders, and constitution. I dare to say that a not large
percentage of youths, in the formative stage of fifteen to
seventeen, could have survived the stress of heavy drinking that I
survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years; that a not
large percentage of men could have punished the alcohol I have
punished in my manhood years and lived to tell the tale. I
survived, through no personal virtue, but because I did not have
the chemistry of a dipsomaniac and because I possessed an organism
unusually resistant to the ravages of John Barleycorn. And,
surviving, I have watched the others die, not so lucky, down all