Читать книгу The Hive - Will Levington Comfort - Страница 8

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THE STUFF OF COMRADES

I wonder if I can make clearer, by turning a few different facets in this chapter, what we mean by friends, comrades, the spirit of things, and love not as an emotion but as a cosmic force. Many days I have faced a Chapel, as I face this day's work, longing to bring in closer the dream of the new social order, yet dismayed by the limitations of words and my own mind, trained so long in the life of the old.... I would begin to talk, drawing the young minds to mine through an intimate revelation of the heart, then presently lose the sense of effort, even the sense of thought—and an hour would pass in the joy of communal blessedness, because we were one.

Man is not getting larger, though he is continually holding more. The human brain, after it reaches a certain age and size, may gain thereafter a conception of the universe without altering the size of the hat-band. There is a continual condensation at work within us mentally and physically. We take the cream of the thing, and throw the rest away. The wiser and the more inclusive we become, the more we take just the spirit of a thing, and leave the bulk and weight behind.

This is true in our every refinement, in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read and the friends we gather together. We become harder and harder to suit, because bulk and weight are common, but the spiritual extract of anything is slow to appear for us. The wiser the man, the more fastidious he is, and this does not mean that he is a crank. The excellence of fastidiousness is not in eccentricity but in inclusiveness. In the spirit of the thing, he sees all. From the spirit of the thing, he expresses in his own way any part. He can array whole hierarchies of facts from the spirit of the whole, but mainly he leaves the facts in reference-libraries, where they belong and are quickly available, and stores away in his working faculties just a drop of the oil of a subject or a breath from its essence.

There are those who believe that the soul of man is made up of essences of experiences of thousands of lives—yet the refinement of the soul is so spiritualised that the best surgeon cannot find the little organ. He knows the brain, which is made up of the stored experiences of but one life, but because the soul is so small or so diffused, the surgeon is very apt to say that there is no such organ. And yet, we all know there is knowledge and power behind us, which drives us, in our greater moments, to utterances and action entirely without the scope of the brain. We may call this the soul, or the nth power, or the fourth dimension—the name doesn't matter.... Listen, if I write well to-day—I mean well for me—if I rise to the opportunity at all, it will be because I am writing things which my brain doesn't know.

I yearn to make this still clearer.... The rose, which is the highest evolved of flowers, includes all the evolution of plant-life of its line beneath; the same with gold among the minerals. The fact that each is the highest necessitates that. In the same way, man includes Nature and the lower creatures, in that he is the highest. This is easily proven to you when you recall that a child in the womb passes through all states of creature evolution. That period is, in a wonderful way, a review of the evolution of the world.

The mere fact that the higher one climbs, the farther one can see, proves it again. This is a law. The scent of a rose is the sublimate of all plant odours; and the spirit of man is the refinement of all knowledge and experience beneath.

The higher man ascends, the more inclusive. To heal another, the physician must be able to include the other. Evolution is continual refinement—the drawing unto ourselves of the spirit of bulks of matter. I stood upon a bluff overlooking the ocean recently, and a breath of the south wind awakened in my mind the story of one whole summer; others have listened to forest trees or the humming roar of a distant city, or the rush of a great river, and found in them the aggregate of all Nature's sounds in one tone. This is the magic of the spirit of things.

In all philosophy, there is no difference of opinion as to one fact, that man is unfolding a microcosm within himself, including in his consciousness more and more the Idea of the Universe. The cosmic consciousness, which a few have attained, is the actual perception of the externals of the Plan.

The cream of anything includes all the parts. The cosmic mind must include the essence of all arts and experiences and facts. Just as the rose and the man and the grain of dust are potential with all beneath, the highest man, the cosmic intelligence, is potentially the cosmos in containing the Idea of it.

This idea may be contained in and expressed outwardly by some great single, all-including, all-mastering emotion—such as love. And now we are in a region where there can be no difference of opinion; at least I have never heard disputed what is the greatest thing in the world.

There are all kinds of love. The simple man loves simply—himself, his woman, his children and his animals. The love of the cosmic consciousness breaks forth in a deluge upon the race, because it comprehends and includes all beneath. This great outpouring is formed of earth, air, water, fire, sunlight and all winds, all facts, all experiences, all arts, light of the moon and stars and all glowing things under the sun, all sounds and scents and pictures, all ardours, and sympathies and tolerances. Its outpouring is action, and is of itself creative. This is the OM. Such a love leavens and impregnates all things, because it understands and includes all things. It unifies all separateness; it enfolds all intelligence with intuition; it unites all parts.

This brings us to that ancient and unassailable premise of all religions—that God includes every part of the universe in being the spirit of it; that His idea of creativeness is expressed in one great single, all-mastering and including emotion,—which is love. We hear the little children saying it, "God is love."

... We awaken the Ideal in ourselves first by imitating the virtues of others. In the earlier days when to me courage meant physical action, men passed in different fields, leaving an imperishable remembrance. I have often seen the expressions of those I loved and idealised as a boy, live again in the faces of my own children. John T. McCutcheon in Luzon, filling a reel of films, under a volley of fire at Binan, on his knees, working the camera with a whole brigade sprawled behind—gave me one of the finest early building blocks for the courage among men. He also gave me an ideal of cleanliness: One evening, after a vicious day's march, and we were all ravenous, John T. left camp to find a river. There he bathed with government bouquet,—made himself right with himself, even to shaving, before meat and drink. His constraint looked like mastery to me then. Grant Wallace was a big star of that service—ideal in performance of friendship.... Young men at hand now are different. Not one of them lack in grip and grit. They reveal the new thing in courage, the courage that begins where the courage of the soldier ends. These have gone far into the mystery of their own kingdoms—rapidly becoming kings of themselves.

The world doesn't understand them. The Abbot[3] is a sensation in literary matters at Columbia, but unplaced. The Dakotan[3] was said to be unfit for a soldier because he was twenty pounds under weight for his height. He can leap five feet six, run or hike indefinitely, exhaust a cement-mixer, say "stick" in all tongues and "quit" in none. He has the will and wisdom to make himself a new man over night—and yet his Government wants him served up just so, in pounds. There isn't any one loves America more than the Dakotan, whom we now call Steve. Even the young military surgeons will know before long that endurance is a matter of spiritual culture, that courage is spirit—that a man is well because of cleanliness of body and thought and organised will; that he doesn't fail in a pinch because he is evolved; that all the higher forms of life call for speed rather than strength, the levitating force of spirit rather than the gravitating force of flesh, for brain rather than brute.... Comrade stuff is the stuff of souls.... I've studied them long and devotedly. I build my days upon the things these boys show me. Less and less are we different from those who call to our hearts.

These young men do not think themselves out; they are not troubled by misses or personal discrepancies. They simply are themselves. I have perceived that men of dreams and genius and action are in the larger sense free from themselves. The main part of their day's performance is a lifting out of the tangle of emotion and desire, into a large, unrestricted area full of calm daylight, where events and movements are seen in their relation to one another, not in separateness and one at a time, an area also where inspiration is momentarily expected to strike. They do not analyse themselves. They do not hear their own voices. They are not dismayed if they falter or drop from the key. The things that most men do with care, and that occupy so much of the days these young men perform automatically.

My own path was upward through an intense self-consciousness—the American, not the oriental way. I lived with myself all the route. I observed outward conditions and events, domestic, civic and cosmic; but at the same time observed their effects upon myself. I did not know until I was adult that there is a big receptivity of consciousness above this—where intuitions play and weave causes and effects together—where the mind is more like a child's than a man's, or more like a giant's, perhaps—where the big faith comes, and the warm laugh comes, and man surpasses himself, but does not know until afterward, if at all.

Warmth flooded into me as I touched this larger consciousness. It became clear as daylight—that a man is at his best only when out of himself. I saw much of my misery and depression was the result of self-analysis. I was a better man when I let myself go utterly. And this was exactly the thing that happened in moments of danger, moments of romance and friendship, moments of the self hurling itself outward. Capacity for these moments makes the Comrade, and indicates that love which is not a sentiment, but a cosmic force.

Again, you cannot describe a spiritual thing with these little tools and materials in black and white—just intimations.... If we are sweet enough inside, something of the song will come to us.... Two words suggest it best. The first is Comrade, which has become a silliness in a military sense, yet has a high and holy meaning to all reconstructionists.... I remember when the word first came to me with a thrill, as a young lad going off to Cuban wars. It was burned out of me a few days afterward in a Sibley tent full of regular army soldiers.... I remember the scorn with which I used the word all the years—or avoided using it—until slowly, smilingly, its new dimension opened, hard as a diamond, and as clear—its meaning in work and world and women, its new meaning to Russia and India and China and America.

It seems to say Equality. It's a kind of deep drink of spirit together, a word spoken at the last moment between men—an inner-shrine word, spoken with a smile, and a glimpse into the eternal indestructibility of the human heart. It expresses the love of the world, not as it is felt in the brain, but in the breast of the soul. The New Race has already washed it clean. It goes with a Cause fit to die for. It belongs to men and women who can look at each other with a kind of prayer in their eyes and face death alone and laugh at it.

There's a fury, too, in the word—fury against the world, against things as they are. It stands against the world-darkness now, and for the day that is to be. It means love for the poor, a love for the peasants, a passion to serve and be tender to them, not to drive them into the pits of death—a readiness to die for them without cant, a readiness also to dare to live for them.

Comrade—there's vision in it to strip off the masks of decadent nations, to open wide the sepulchres where the priests are still plotting to crucify the King; its strong magic will uncover the monotonous crimes of commerce.... It signifies the spirit of the young men and women who have already begun with gladness and fire to clear the débris for the building of the New Age.

They will begin with the soil; they will know and love their own hard part. They will begin with the grass, with the rice, with the millet and the wheat, the clean things, the simple and holy things that the peasants love, with the songs that the peasants sing, the songs of the soil and the rivers and snows—to build upon them the new heaven and the new earth.... Above all, there's a laugh in the word—the laugh of youth and power.

The other word is Democracy.