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Scientifictionist, issue 2, after 1945

Page 14

Engineering belongs not to the multiverses of the fog but to the universe of the sun. A great bridge, building, or road, or dam, is not a subjective fog-dream of one man's own little whimsical cell of mist; it is a communal, lucid, concrete, shareable and shared integration. It takes each one of us out of his own little limited ambulant nightmare of a worldlet, and into the shared and objective co-consciousness of the world. A bridge is there; it stands up and takes the morning; it is not a moment's aberration and fantasy of some man's whim. It says like God, 'I am what I am.' It abides and endures. If it were surrealism or abstract art, the second man to walk on it would fall down into the implacable river below and drown. It is an integrity.

Here and now, great and growing, the very spirit and dynamic of our most modern world, is the very thing we need. If there is to be any future, it will be the future of Technocracy: the statesmanship of machinery! The prophet, the saint, the poet, the hero, -- today all these must be fused and kindled into the true superman, who will be a very usual and human and real man, painting his masterpieces upon the canvas of a continent.

Technocracy alone will bring life into the clear objectivity of the universe of the sun. No other alternative can do it.

What men really need and want is a clear, objective, shared and shareaole, universe of the sun. Men tire of the multiverse of their invididual little cults; they tire of the wider, yet universe denying, multiverses of the social mists -- communism, democracy, fascism; they want the definite, concrete structural integrity that builds a Continental commonwealth as engineers build a dam, and store the waters, and gather the spun lightning, and pour the rivers of energy and light down to turn man's night into day, man's toil into play. Only such engineering will satisfy both man's most sordid need -- and man's highest dream. Only such engineering will restore man to his lost unity in a clear objective world.

How can man find this? Two things are necessary: a personal re-integration; a social re-integration.

Each man must break the hard husk of his ego, as the grain of corn breaks its stubborn shell; each man should find the soft strong living plasm of himself as the broken seed finds the stalk, the filmy blade, the wind and sun, the perfect corn. To reiterate that we are 'the stuffed man, the hollow man' is to shut ourselves up in the hard pettiness of the hopeless ego; we should know, rather, that within the hollow men, even in them, lies the longing and the power for the 'lightnings and great deeds'. Let them only turn their inner forces outward. Forget whether you are modern or ancient, clever, disillusioned, happy or unhappy, smart or a yokel, a humanist or an Oxford Grouper or a Trotskyite or a damn fool. All such things are unimportant, because they are unreal. Find yourself rather, in the outward universe of the sun that does not narrow you into a hard shell of ego but widens you into plastic growth in a shared world. Begin with very simple things -- with the catalogue of loves that Rupert Brooke knew: touch 'the cold graveness of iron', watch 'the keen unpassioned beauty of a great machine', stare at 'blue-massing clouds', smell 'the reek of last year's ferns', feel 'the cool kindness of sheets that soon smooth away trouble' or 'rough male kisses of blankets', and taste 'the strong crust of friendly bread'. Bathe with Whitman in the ocean that will 'cushion you soft, rock you in billowy drowse'. Notice the coral atolls of the blossoming peach trees; run your fingers over the apple-glazed smoothness of the new-plowed furrow; bathe in the ocean-bath of the turmoil of cities; find the objective richness even of 'million-foot-ed Manhatten' or of Chicago shaking like a dinosaur, with delirium tremens. See in a stubby pipe, or the flame of sunflowers, the sacrament that Van Gogh saw.

Thus you will leave the world of the ego-dreams into which men should retire only at night, and you will enter the universe of the world-dream that all men share (or can share) at waking.

page 14

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Engineering belongs not to the multiverses of the fog but to the universe of the sun. A great bridge, building, or road, or dam, is not a subjective fog-dream of one man's own little whimsical cell of mist; it is a communal, lucid, concrete, shareable and shared integration. It takes each one of us out of his own little limited ambulant nightmare of a worldlet, and into the shared and objective co-consciousness of the world. A bridge is there; it stands up and takes the morning; it is not a moment's aberration and fantasy of some man's whim. It says like God, 'I am what I am.' It abides and endures. If it were surrealism or abstract art, the second man to walk on it would fall down into the implacable river below and drown. It is an integrity. Here and now, great and growing, the very spirit and dynamic of our most modern world, is the very thing we need. If there is to be any future, it will be the future of Technocracy: the statesmanship of machinery! The prophet, the saint, the poet, the hero, -- today all these must be fused and kindled into the true superman, who will be a very usual and human and real man, painting his masterpieces upon the canvas of a continent. Technocracy alone will bring life into the clear objectivity of the universe of the sun. No other alternative can do it. What men really need and want is a clear, objective, shared and shareaole, universe of the sun. Men tire of the multiverse of their invididual little cults; they tire of the wider, yet universe denying, multiverses of the social mists -- communism, democracy, fascism; they want the definite, concrete structural integrity that builds a Continental commonwealth as engineers build a dam, and store the waters, and gather the spun lightning, and pour the rivers of energy and light down to turn man's night into day, man's toil into play. Only such engineering will satisfy both man's most sordid need -- and man's highest dream. Only such engineering will restore man to his lost unity in a clear objective world. How can man find this? Two things are necessary: a personal re-integration; a social re-integration. Each man must break the hard husk of his ego, as the grain of corn breaks its stubborn shell; each man should find the soft strong living plasm of himself as the broken seed finds the stalk, the filmy blade, the wind and sun, the perfect corn. To reiterate that we are 'the stuffed man, the hollow man' is to shut ourselves up in the hard pettiness of the hopeless ego; we should know, rather, that within the hollow men, even in them, lies the longing and the power for the 'lightnings and great deeds'. Let them only turn their inner forces outward. Forget whether you are modern or ancient, clever, disillusioned, happy or unhappy, smart or a yokel, a humanist or an Oxford Grouper or a Trotskyite or a damn fool. All such things are unimportant, because they are unreal. Find yourself rather, in the outward universe of the sun that does not narrow you into a hard shell of ego but widens you into plastic growth in a shared world. Begin with very simple things -- with the catalogue of loves that Rupert Brooke knew: touch 'the cold graveness of iron', watch 'the keen unpassioned beauty of a great machine', stare at 'blue-massing clouds', smell 'the reek of last year's ferns', feel 'the cool kindness of sheets that soon smooth away trouble' or 'rough male kisses of blankets', and taste 'the strong crust of friendly bread'. Bathe with Whitman in the ocean that will 'cushion you soft, rock you in billowy drowse'. Notice the coral atolls of the blossoming peach trees; run your fingers over the apple-glazed smoothness of the new-plowed furrow; bathe in the ocean-bath of the turmoil of cities; find the objective richness even of 'million-foot-ed Manhatten' or of Chicago shaking like a dinosaur, with delirium tremens. See in a stubby pipe, or the flame of sunflowers, the sacrament that Van Gogh saw. Thus you will leave the world of the ego-dreams into which men should retire only at night, and you will enter the universe of the world-dream that all men share (or can share) at waking. page 14