The telepathic faculty? In the first place is it new? Have not travellers always told cock
and bull stories about its existence in savage Africa? Is it not a faculty that man has
given up, if not as useless, at any rate as of a very limited use, a distraction, more
bother than it is worth? Lacking a localizing sense, the savage knowing, if he does, what
happens "somewhere" else, but never knowing quite where. The faculty was perhaps
not worth the damage it does to concentration of mind on some useful subject.
"Instinct preserves the useful gestures."
Take it that what man wants is a capacity for clearer understanding, or for physical
refreshment and vigour, are not these precisely the faculties he is for ever hammering at,
perhaps stupidly? Muscularly he goes slowly, athletic records being constantly worn down
by millimetres and seconds.
I appear to have thrown down bits of my note somewhat at random; let me return to
physiology. People were long ignorant of the circulation of the blood; that known, they
appeared to think the nerves stationary; Gourmont speaks of "circulation
nerveuse", but many people still consider the nerve as at most a telegraph wire,
simply because he does not bleed visibly when cut. The current is "interrupted".
The school books of twenty years ago were rather vague about lymph, and various glands
still baffle physicians. I have not seen the suggestion that some of them may serve rather
as fuses in an electric system, to prevent short circuits, or in some variant or
allotropic form. The spermatozoid is, I take it, regarded as a sort of quintessence; the
brain is also a quintessence, or at least "in rapport with" all parts of the
body; the single spermatozoid demands simply that the ovule shall construct a human being,
the suspended spermatozoid (if my wild shot rings the target bell) is ready to dispense
with, in the literal sense, incarnation, enmeshment. Shall we postulate the mass of
spermatozoids, first accumulated in suspense, then specialized?
Three channels, hell, purgatory, heaven, if one wants to follow yet another
terminology: digestive excretion, incarnation, freedom in the imagination, i.e. cast into
an exterior formlessness, or into form material, or merely imaginative visually or perhaps
musically or perhaps fixed in some other sensuous dimension, even of taste or odour
(there have been perhaps creative cooks and perfumers?).
The dead laborious compilation and comparison of other men’s dead images, all this is
mere labour, not the spermatozoic act of the brain.
Woman, the conservator, the inheritor of past gestures, clever, practical, as Gourmont
says, not inventive, always the best disciple of any inventor, has been always the enemy
of the dead or laborious form of compilation, abstraction.
Not considering the process ended; taking the individual genius as the man in whom the
new access, the new superfluity of spermatozoic pressure (quantitative and qualitative)
upshoots into the brain, alluvial Nile-flood, bringing new crops, new invention. And as
Gourmont says, there is only reasoning where there is initial error, i.e. weakness of the
spurt, wandering search.
In no case can it be a question of mere animal quantity of sperm. You have the man who
wears himself out and weakens his brain, echo of the orang, obviously not the talented
sieve; you have the contrasted case in the type of man who really cannot work until he has
relieved the pressure on his spermatic canals.
This is a question of physiology, it is not a question of morals and sociology. Given
the spermatozoic thought, the two great seas of fecundative matter, the brain lobes,
mutually magnetized, luminous in their own knowledge of their being; whether they may be
expected to seek exterior "luxuria", or whether they are going to repeat
Augustine hymns, is not in my jurisdiction. An exterior paradise might not allure them
"La b?tise humaine est la seule chose qui donne une id?e de l’infini", says
Renan, and Gourmont has quoted him, and all flesh is grass, a superior grass.
It remains that man has for centuries nibbled at this idea of connection, intimate
connection between his sperm and his cerebration, the ascetic has tried to withhold all
his sperm, the lure, the ignis fatuus perhaps, of wanting to super-think; the dope-fiend
has tried opium and every inferior to Bacchus, to get an extra kick out of the organ, the
mystics have sought the gleam in the tavern, Helen of Tyre, priestesses in the temple of
Venus, in Indian temples, stray priestesses in the streets, unuprootable custom, and
probably with a basis of sanity. A sense of balance might show that asceticism means
either a drought or a crowding. The liquid solution must be kept at right consistency; one
would say the due proportion of liquid to viscous particles, a good circulation; the
actual quality of the sieve or separator, counting perhaps most of all; the balance and
retentive media.
Perhaps the clue is in Propertius after all:
Ingenium nobis ipsa puella fecit.
There is the whole of the twelfth century love cult, and Dante’s metaphysics a little
to one side, and Gourmont’s Latin Mystique; and for image-making both Fenollosa on The
Chinese Written Character, and the paragraphs in Le Probl?me du Style. At any
rate the quarrel between cerebralist and viveur and ignorantist ends, if the brain is thus
conceived not as a separate and desiccated organ, but as the very fluid of life itself.