for one sad century
machines have triumphed, rolled us hither and thither,
shaking the lark’s nest till the eggs have broken.
Shaken the marshes, till the geese have gone
and the wild swans flown away singing the swan-song of us.
Hard, hard on the earth the machines are rolling,
But through some hearts they will never roll.
The lark nests in his heart
and the white swan swims in the marshes of his loins,
and through the wide prairie of his breast a young bull herds his cows,
lambs frisk among the daisies of his brain.
And at last
all these creatures that cannot die, driven back
into the uttermost corners of the soul,
will send up the wild cry of despair.
The trilling lark in a wild despair will trill down arrows from the sky,
the swan will beat the waters in rage, white rage of an enraged swan,
even the lambs will stretch forth their necks like serpents,
like snakes of hate, against the man in the machine:
even the shaking white poplar will dazzle like splinters of glass against him.
And against this inward revolt of the native creatures of the soul
mechanical man, in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine
will be powerless, for no engine can reach into the marshes and depths of a man.
So mechanical man in triumph seated upon the seat of his machine
will be driven mad from within himself, and sightless, and on that day
the machines will turn to run into one another
traffic will tangle up in a long-drawn-out crash of collision
and engines will rush at the solid houses, the edifice of our life
will rock in the shock of the mad machine, and the house will come down.
Then, far beyond the ruin, in the far, in the ultimate, remote places
the swan will lift up again his flattened, smitten head
and look round, and rise, and on the great vaults of his wings
will sweep round and up to greet the sun with a silky glitter of a new day
and the lark will follow trilling, angerless again,
and the lambs will bite off the heads of the daisies for very friskiness.
But over the middle of the earth will be the smoky ruin of iron
the triumph of the machine.
SEA-BATHERS
Oh the handsome bluey-brown bodies, they might just as well be gutta-percha,
and the reddened limbs red india-rubber tubing, inflated,
and the half-hidden private parts just a little brass tap, robinetto,
turned on for different purposes.
They call it health; it looks like nullity.
Only here and there a pair of eyes, haunted, stares out as if asking:
Where then is life?
Men Like Gods
Men wanted to be like gods
so they became like machines
and now even they’re not satisfied.
MAN AND MACHINE
Man invented the machine
and now the machine has invented man.
God the Father is a dynamo
and God the Son a talking radio
and God the Holy Ghost is gas that keeps it all going.
And men have perforce to be little dynamos
and little talking radios
and the human spirit is so much gas, to keep it all going.
Man invented the machine
so now the machine has invented man.
OH WONDERFUL MACHINE!
Oh wonderful machine, so self-sufficient, so sufficient unto yourself!
You who have no feeling of the moon as she changes her quarters!
You who don’t hear the sea’s uneasiness!
You to whom the sun is merely something that makes the thermometer rise!
Oh wonderful machine, you who are man’s idea of godliness,
you who feel nothing, who know nothing, who run on absolved
from any other connection!
Oh you godly and smooth machine, spinning on in your own Nirvana,
turning the blue wheels of your own heaven
almighty machine
how is it you have to be looked after by some knock-kneed wretch at two pounds a week?
Oh great god of the machine
what lousy angels and archangels you have to surround yourself with!
And you can’t possibly do without them!
ROBOT FEELINGS
It is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street
is a robot, and incapable of love
he is capable of an endless grinding, nihilistic hate:
that is the only strong feeling he is capable of;
and therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the men in the street,
they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably.
ROBOT-DEMOCRACY
In a robot-democracy, nobody is willing to serve
even work is unwilling, the worker is unwilling,
unwilling.
The great grind of unwillingness, the slow undergrind of hate
and democracy is ground into dust
then the mill-stones burst with the internal heat of their own friction.
WELLSIAN FUTURES
When men are made in bottles
and emerge as squeaky globules with no bodies to speak of,
and therefore nothing to have feelings with,
they will still squeak intensely about their feelings
and be prepared to kill you if you say they’ve got none.
* * * *
Copyright © 1932 by D. H. Lawrence. Reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli.
MINA LOY
(1882–1966)
A poet, actress, visual artist, and avante-garde feminist, Mina Loy fought against early twentieth-century gender expectations in both her life and her work. Born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London, she left school at age seventeen to study painting in Munich. Four years later she married a fellow art student, changed her last name to Loy (which rhymed with her husband’s name) and moved to Paris to paint and then to Florence. There she had three children (one of whom died as an infant), and began wrting as well as painting. After a dispute with the editor of Poetry magazine, she helped found Others in 1915, which prominantly featured Loy’s “Love Songs.”
By this time her marriage had deteriorated; she and her husband lived separate lives and had separate lovers. Leaving her children in the care of a nurse, Loy moved to the U.S. in 1916 and joined the Provincetown players. In 1917, while waiting for her divorce to be finalized, she met Arthur Cravan, a poet-boxer who had run an avant-garde journal in France, but was now on the run from conscription officials. They were together briefly in the U.S., ran away to Mexico where they were married, and stayed there earning money from his boxing matches. When she got pregnant, they decided to leave Mexico. He sailed off, then she followed to Buenos Aires, but he wasn’t there and was never heard from again. She moved back to England to have the baby, then returned to Florence (where her other two children were still living with her nurse). There Loy resumed writing and sculpting and making glass novelties, in between fruitless searches for Cravan’s body. Her first book, Lunar Baedecker, was published in 1923. She moved back to New York City before World War II (her father was Jewish, so Europe was becoming increasingly dangerous). Late in life, she ended up in Colorado. She continued to write poetry and sculpt, creating visual art out of found objects. Loy considered herself primarily a sculptor, and despite her success as a writer said that she “never was a poet.”
Baedeker was a famous publisher of travel guides beginning in the 1820s but especially prominent in the early twentieth century. The word “baedeker” came to refer to any travel guide, but was misspelled by Loy�
��s publisher in the book Lunar Baedecker.
LUNAR BAEDEKER, by Mina Loy
First published in Lunar Baedecker, 1923
A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia
To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies
Peris is livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues
Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah’s tombstones
lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous
the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts
Stellectric signs
WING SHOWS ON STARWAY
ZODIAC CAROUSEL
Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis
From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe the flight
of Eros obsolete
And “Immortality”
mildews
in the museums of the moon
NOCTURNAL CYCLOPS
CRYSTAL CONCUBINE
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes
* * * *
Copyright © 1923 by Mina Loy.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
(1809–1849)
While Edgar Allan Poe is most well known as a founding author of the horror and gothic genres and for his mysteries, he also made substantial contributions to science fiction.
Born in Boston in 1809 into an unstable home life, Poe was orphaned, and was adopted early on by John and Frances Allan. Throughout his adolescence Poe had a shaky relationship with the emotionally unavailable John Allan, quitting both the University of Virginia and West Point and racking up huge gambling debts at least in part in an act of revenge against him. Despite his literary renown today, Poe was destitute during much of his lifetime, just barely able to make a living from his writing and editing. Poe held positions at such journals as the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, Graham’s Magazine, the Evening Mirror, and the Broadway Journal. Although publishing Poe’s short stories and poems helped elevate their readerships, none elevated the writer’s financial situation.
During his lifetime Poe traveled all over the east coast from Baltimore to New York City for different writing and editing work, eventually settling down in a marriage with his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm in 1835. Ten years later, Poe’s writing hit its climax with the publication of his acclaimed poem, “The Raven,” which obtained him notable fans among SF writers Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, but didn’t actually help his financial postion much.
Poe’s works often revolve around death. The death of his elder brother Henry in 1831 and of young wife Virginia in 1847 contributed to Poe’s preoccupation with the subject, as well as his own orphaned status, and helped transform the ardent writer into the uniquely morbid character he became.
Poe’s death was not glamorous. Found delirious, ill, and in someone else’s clothes outside a polling center in 1849, he succumbed to what may have been effects of his drinking problem, though all documents relating to Poe’s death have since been lost.
In 1833, Poe was awarded a prize for his short story “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a tale of sea adventures told through the voice of an anonymous sailor adrift. The story was popular, and the style appealed to Poe so much, that he later produced “Mellonta Tauta,” written from a similar standpoint but with added science fictional elements.
MELLONTA TAUTA, by Edgar Allan Poe
First published in Godey’s Lady’s Book, February 1849
TO THE EDITORS OF THE LADY’S BOOK:
I have the honor of sending you, for your magazine, an article which I hope you will be able to comprehend rather more distinctly than I do myself. It is a translation, by my friend, Martin Van Buren Mavis, (sometimes called the “Poughkeepsie Seer”) of an odd-looking MS. which I found, about a year ago, tightly corked up in a jug floating in the Mare Tenebrarum—a sea well described by the Nubian geographer, but seldom visited now-a-days, except for the transcendentalists and divers for crotchets.
Truly yours,
EDGAR A. POE
ON BOARD BALLOON “SKYLARK”
April, 1, 2848
Now, my dear friend—now, for your sins, you are to suffer the infliction of a long gossiping letter. I tell you distinctly that I am going to punish you for all your impertinences by being as tedious, as discursive, as incoherent and as unsatisfactory as possible. Besides, here I am, cooped up in a dirty balloon, with some one or two hundred of the canaille, all bound on a pleasure excursion, (what a funny idea some people have of pleasure!) and I have no prospect of touching terra firma for a month at least. Nobody to talk to. Nothing to do. When one has nothing to do, then is the time to correspond with ones friends. You perceive, then, why it is that I write you this letter—it is on account of my ennui and your sins.
Get ready your spectacles and make up your mind to be annoyed. I mean to write at you every day during this odious voyage.
Heigho! when will any Invention visit the human pericranium? Are we forever to be doomed to the thousand inconveniences of the balloon? Will nobody contrive a more expeditious mode of progress? The jog-trot movement, to my thinking, is little less than positive torture. Upon my word we have not made more than a hundred miles the hour since leaving home! The very birds beat us—at least some of them. I assure you that I do not exaggerate at all. Our motion, no doubt, seems slower than it actually is—this on account of our having no objects about us by which to estimate our velocity, and on account of our going with the wind. To be sure, whenever we meet a balloon we have a chance of perceiving our rate, and then, I admit, things do not appear so very bad. Accustomed as I am to this mode of travelling, I cannot get over a kind of giddiness whenever a balloon passes us in a current directly overhead. It always seems to me like an immense bird of prey about to pounce upon us and carry us off in its claws. One went over us this morning about sunrise, and so nearly overhead that its drag-rope actually brushed the network suspending our car, and caused us very serious apprehension. Our captain said that if the material of the bag had been the trumpery varnished “silk” of five hundred or a thousand years ago, we should inevitably have been damaged. This silk, as he explained it to me, was a fabric composed of the entrails of a species of earth-worm. The worm was carefully fed on mulberries—kind of fruit resembling a water-melon—and, when sufficiently fat, was crushed in a mill. The paste thus arising was called papyrus in its primary state, and went through a variety of processes until it finally became “silk.” Singular to relate, it was once much admired as an article of female dress! Balloons were also very generally constructed from it. A better kind of material, it appears, was subsequently found in the down surrounding the seed-vessels of a plant vulgarly called euphorbium, and at that time botanically termed milk-weed. This latter kind of silk was designated as silk-buckingham, on account of its superior durability, and was usually prepared for use by being varnished with a solution of gum caoutchouc—a substance which in some respects must have resembled the gutta percha now in common use. This caoutchouc was occasionally called Indian rubber or rubber of twist, and was no doubt one of the numerous fungi. Never tell me again that I am not at heart an antiquarian.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 36