"NOW I HAVE a theory that our existence is a hermaphrodite –
Or the unproductivity of it, in the sense that the beings, and seas, and houses, and trees, and the fruits of trees, its "immortal truths", and "rocks of ages" that it seems to produce are only flutters that seem to be real productions to us, because we see them very slow-motioned.
My interpretation of theology is that, though mythologically much confused, it is an awareness of the wholeness of one existence – perhaps one of countless existences in the cosmos – and that its distortions are founded upon intuitive knowledge of the unproductive state of this one existence, as a whole – and so its visions of a divine sterility, which are illustrated with figures of blonde hermaphrodites. Of course there are stray legends of male angels, but such stories are symbols of the inconsistency that co-exists with the consistency of all things phenomenal –
Or that parthenogenesis is the essential principle of all things, beings, thoughts, states, phenomenal.
I'd be queried, if I should say, of the consummation of any human romance, that it is parthenogenetic: but humanity, regarded as a whole, is sustained by self-fertilization. Except for occasional, vague stories of external enrichments, there are no records of invigorations imparted to the human kind from gorillas, hyenas, or swine. Elephants fertilize elephants. I conceive of no bizarre, little love story, with a fruitful outcome, of the attractions of a rhinoceros to a humming bird. Though I have a venerable, little story – account sent to me by Mr. Ernest Doerfler, Bronx, N.Y. – of an eighteenth-century scientist, whose theory it was that human females can be pollinated., and who experimented, by exposing a buxom female to the incidence of the east wind, and of course was successful in establishing his theory, I have no other datum of human and vegetable unions: so this reported occurrence must be considered one of the marvels from which this book of not uncommon events holds aloof.
The parthenogenetic triumphs of the human intellect are circular stupidities. The mathematicians, in their intuitions of the state of a whole, have represented what to the devout is divinity, with the circle, which, to them the "perfect figure," symbolizes getting nowhere.
Much of the argument in this book will depend upon our acceptance that nothing in our existence is real. The Whole may be Realness. Out of its phenomena, it may be non-phenomenally producing offspring-realnesses. That is not our present subject. But up comes the question: If nothing phenomenal is real, is everything phenomenal really unreal? ...But, if I accept that nothing is real, in phenomenal existence, I cannot accept that anything, therein, is really unreal. So my acceptance, in accordance with our general philosophy of the hyphen, is that all things perceptible to us are real-unreal, varying from the direction of one extreme to the other, according to whatever may be the degree of their appearance of individuality. If anybody has the notion that he is a real being – and by realness I mean individuality, or call it entity, or unrelatedness – let him try to tell why he thinks he exists, in a real sense. Recall the most celebrated of the parthenogenetic attempts to make this demonstration:
I think: therefore I am.
We have to accept that in order to think, the thinker must be of existence prior to the thought.
Why do I think? Because I am.
Why am I? Because I think.
The noblest triumphs of the human intellect are about as sublime as would be the description of a house in terms of its roof, whereas the description would be equally sublime, if in terms of the cellar, or the bath room. That is Newtonism – or a description of things in terms of one of its aspects, or gravitation. It is Darwinism – a description of all life in terms of selection, one of its aspects. Gravitation is only another name for attraction. Sir Isaac Newton's contribution to the glories of human knowledge is that an apple falls because it drops. All living things are selected by environment, said Darwin. Then, according to him, when he shifted aspects, all things constituting living environment are selected. Darwinism – that selection selects.
The materialists explain all things, except what they deny, or disregard, in terms of the material. The immaterialists, such as the absolute and the subjective idealists, explain all things in terms of the immaterial. My expression is in terms of the continuity of the material and the immaterial – or that one of these extremes is only an accentuation on one side, and the other only an accentuation on the other side, of the hyphenated state of material-immaterial.
I am a being who thinks: therefore I am a being who thinks. In this circular stupidity there is a simple unity that commends it to conventional lovers of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
I do not think. I have never had a thought. Therefore something or another. I do not think, but thoughts occur in what is said to be "my" mind – though, instead of being "in" it, they are it – just as inhabitants do not occur in a city, but are the city. There is a governing tendency among these thoughts, just as there is among people in any community, or as there is in the movements of the planets, or in the arrangements of cells constituting a plant, or an animal. So far as goes any awareness of "mine," "I" have no soul, no self, no entity, though at times of something like a harmonization of "my" elements, "I" approximate to a state of unified being.
When I see – as for convenience "I" shall say, even though there is no I that is other than a very imperfectly co-ordinated aggregation of experience-states, sometimes ferociously antagonizing one another, but mostly maintaining a kind of civilization – but when I see that my thoughts are ruled by tendencies, such as to harmonize, organize, or co-ordinate: that they tend to integrate, segregate, nucleate, equilibrate – I am conscious of mere mechanical processes that mean no more in the arrangements of my ideas than they mean in the arrangements of my bones. I'd no more think of offering my ideas as immortal truth than I'd think of publishing X-ray photographs of my bones, as eternal. But the organizing tendency implicit in all things – along with the disorganizing tendency implicit in all things – has admirably expressed itself in the design that is my skeleton. I think so. I have no reason to think that my skeleton is in any way inferior to anybody else's skeleton. I feel that if I could arrange my ideas with the art that has arranged my bones, I'd have, for writing a book, the justification that all writers feel the need of, trying to excuse themselves for writing books.
But I do not think that mechanism is all that there is in our existence. Only the old-fashioned absolutist conceives, or says he conceives, of our existence as absolutely mechanical. There is an individuality in things that is not of mechanical relations, because individuality is unrelatedness. I conceive of our existence as positive-negative, or as mechanical-immechanical.
But my methods are the largely mechanical methods of everybody, and of everything, that harmonizes, or organizes. One of these methods is classification. I am impelled to arrange my materials under headings – quite as a wind arranges fallen leaves, of various sizes, into groups – as a magnet makes selections from a pile of various things. So, again, when I see that my thoughts are coerced by conventional processes, I can think of my thoughts as nothing but the products of coercions. I'd not do these slaves the honor of believing them. They impose upon me only to the degree of temporary acceptance of some of them.
[...]
BUT WHY this everlasting attempt to solve something? – whereas it is our acceptance that, in a final sense, there is, in phenomenal affairs, nothing – or that there is only the state of something-nothing – so that all problems are only soluble-insoluble – or that most of the social problems we have, today, were at one time conceived of as solutions of preceding problems – or that every Moses leads his people out of Egypt into perhaps a damn sight worse – Promised Lands of watered milk and much-adulterated honey – so why these everlasting attempts to solve something?
...Robert Browning's conception was to take three sounds, and make, not a fourth, but a star.
Out of seven colors, not to lay on daubs, but to paint a picture.
Out of seven million Americans, Russians, Germans, Irishmen, Italians, and on, or so long as geography holds out, not to pile a population, but to organize – more or less – into New York City.
Sulphur and lava in a barren plain, and a salty block of stone, shaped roughly like a woman – signs of erosion on rocks far above water-level – a meteor that had set a bush afire – the differences of languages of peoples – and all the other elements that organized into Genesis.
Data of variations and heredity and adaptations; of multiplications and of checks and of the doctrine of Malthus; of acquired characters and of transmissions – and they organized into The Origin of Species –
Just as, once upon a time, minerals that had affinity for one another came together and took on geometrical appearances. But a crystal is not supposed to be either a prohibition or an anti-prohibition argument. I know of a crystal of quartz that weighs several hundred pounds. But it has not been mistaken for propaganda –
Or all theories – theological, scientific, philosophical – and that they represent the same organizing process – but that self-conscious theorists, instead of recognizing that thought-forms were appearing in their minds, as in wider existence have appeared crystalline constructions, have believed that it was immortal Truth that they were conceiving.
Oxygen and sulphur and carbon –
...Or let's have just a little, minor expression, or organization, a small composition, arranging the data of poltergeist girls. The elements of this synthesis are moving objects, fires, girls in strange surroundings, youth and the atavism of youth.
..."Adoption" is a good deal of a disguise for getting little girls to work for not much more than nothing. It is not so much that so many poltergeist girls have been housemaids and "adopted daughters", as that so many of them have been not in their own homes; lost and helpless youngsters, under hard task-masters, in strange surroundings –
Or the first uncertain and precarious appearances of human beings upon this earth – and a need for them, and a fostering, a nurturing, a protection, far different from conditions in these swarming times, when the need is for eliminations –
A lost child in primordial woods – and the value of her, which no genius, king, or leveller of kings, has today –
That objects moved in her presence – fruits of trees that came down from the trees and set themselves beside her – the shaking of bushes that cast, to her, berries – then night and coldness – faggots joining twigs, and dancing around her – heaping – the crackling of flames to warm her –
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