In the Humanisphere, the few labors that appeared to me to be repugnant by nature nevertheless found workers to carry them out with pleasure, and the cause of hat was the conditions in which they were exercised. The different shifts of workers were recruited voluntarily, as the men at a barricade are recruited, and are entirely free to remain there as long as they wish, or to pass on to another shift or another barricade. There is no entitled or appointed leader. The person who has the most knowledge or aptitude for that work naturally directs the others. Everyone takes the initiative mutually, in accordance with his recognized capacities. By turns, each of them gives advice or receives it. There is an amicable understanding, there is no authority. Furthermore, it is rare for there not to be a mixture of men and women among the workers in a shift Thus, the work is done in conditions too attractive, however repulsive it might be in itself, for there not to be a certain charm in carrying it out.
Then there is the nature of the result to be obtained. If the work is, in fact, indispensable, those who find it the most repugnant and who abstain from it will be delighted that others have taken charge of it and will subsequently render them, in affabilities and laborious attentions, compensation for the service that has been rendered to them.
It ought not to be thought that among the Humanispherians, the heaviest labors are the share of inferior intelligences; on the contrary, it is the superior intelligences, the luminaries of science and the arts, who most often take pleasure in shouldering those burdens. The more exquisite the delicacy of a man is, the more developed his moral sensibility is, and the more apt he is, at certain moments, to rude labors, especially when those labors are a sacrifice offered to the love of humanity.
I have seen, during the June transportation, at the Fort du Homet in Cherbourg, delicate natures who would have been able, in return for a few coins, to have a co-detainee take their turn on fatigues—and it was filthy work empting the buckets of ordure—but who, to give satisfaction to their moral enjoyment and internal testimony to their fraternity with their fellows, preferred to do that work themselves and spend at the canteen, with and for their shift-companions, the money that could have served to free them from it. The veritably human man, the egotistically good man, is happier doing something for the benefit it procures others than dispensing with it in view of an immediate and entirely personal satisfaction. He knows that it is a seed sown in good earth, from which he will sooner or later obtain an ear of corn.
Egotism is the source of all the virtues. The first Christians, those who lived in community and fraternity in the catacombs, were egotists; they placed their virtues at usurious interest in the hands of God in order to obtain the premiums of celestial immortality. The humanispherians place their good actions in an annuity with Humanity, in order to enjoy, from birth to death, the benefits of mutual assurance. Humanly, one can only purchase individual happiness at the price of universal happiness.
I have not yet talked about the costume of the humanispherians. There is nothing uniform about it; everyone dresses as they wish. There is no particular fashion. Elegance and simplicity are its general characteristics. The distinction is primarily in the cut and equality of the fabrics. A blouse, with pagoda sleeves, linen for work, woolen or silk for leisure; Breton culottes or trousers, wide or tight-fitting but always narrow at the bottom, with boots lined above the trousers or light buskins in varnished leather; a round felt hat with a simple ribbon or a single feather, or a turban; the neck bare as in the Middle Ages; and the decorations of the chemise protruding from the blouse at the neck and the wrists: such is the costume most commonly adopted.
The color, the nature of the fabric, the cut and the accessories are essentially different. One person allows the blouse to float, another wears a sash around the waist, or a pouch in leather or cloth suspended from a steel chain or a leather strip, dangling over the thigh. In winter, one man envelops himself in a cloak, another a burnoose.
Men and women wear the same costume indifferently, except that women generally substitute a skirt for the trousers, ornament their blouse or tunic with lace, their wrists and neck with artistically sculpted jewelry, and devise hairstyles that show of their facial features to their best advantage—but none of them think it graceful to pierce their nose or their earlobes order to pass gold or silver rings through them or attach precious stones thereto. A considerable number wear long dresses whose multiplicity of forms is infinite. They do not seek to imitate one another but to differentiate themselves from one another.
It is the same for the men. Men generally wear a full beard and long hair with a parting on top of the head. They find it no more natural or less ridiculous to shave the chin as the head; and in their old age, when the snow of age has blanched their head and blurred their sight, they no more pull out the white hairs than they pluck out their eyes.
They also wear many variant costumes, those of the Louis XIII era among others, but none of the masculine costumes of our era. The balloons in which the women of our day navigate are reserved for the aerial steamers, and the stovepipes in linen or black silk that serve as head-dresses are the prerogative of chimneys. I do not know that there is a single man among the humanispherians who would want to make himself ridiculous in a frock-coat or bourgeois suit, the livery of the civilized. There, one wants to be free in one’s movements and that a costume should testify to the grace and liberty of its wearer. The majesty of a simple and lose pleat is preferred to the puffy stiffness of a crinoline ad the epileptic grimace of a frock-coat with the head of a cretin and the tail of a cod.
The habit, a proverb says, does not make the monk. That is true in the proverbial sense, but the society makes its habit, and a society that dresses like ours denounces, like the chrysalid in its shell, its ugliness as a caterpillar to the light of the eye. In the Humanisphere, humankind is far from being a caterpillar; it is no longer a prisoner in its cocoon; its wings have grown and it has donned the ample and graceful tunic, the charming coloration and the elegant wingspan of the butterfly.
Taken in the absolute sense, the envelope is the man; the physiognomy is never a mask for whomever knows how to interrogate it; the moral always pierces the physical—and the physique of the present society is not beautiful; how much uglier its morality is!
In my excursions, I had not seen a cemetery anywhere, and I was wondering where the dead went, when I had the opportunity to witness a burial.
The dead man was lying in an open coffin that had the form of a large cradle. He was not surrounded by any funereal appearance. The petals of natural flowers were strewn in the coffin and covered the body. The uncovered head rested on bouquets of roses that served it as a pillow. The coffin was placed in a carriage; those who had known the deceased particularly well took their places behind it. I followed suit.
Having arrived in the country, and a place where an iron machine was standing on granite steps, the train stopped. The machine in question had an appearance similar to that of a locomotive. A drum or cauldron was set on a blazing fire. The cauldron was surmounted by a long piston-cylinder. The cadaver was taken out of the coffin, wrapped in a shroud, and then slid through a drawer-like opening into the drum. The brazier was responsible for reducing it to powder. Each of the witnesses then threw a handful of rose-petals on to the flagstones of the monument. A hymn was sung to universal transformation. Then everyone went their separate ways. The dead man’s ashes were subsequently scattered like fertilizer on agricultural land.
The humanispherians claim that cemeteries are unsanitary, and that it is preferable to sow the dead in fields of wheat than tombs, given that wheat nourishes the living and marble crypts can only impede their regeneration. They do not understand funerary prisons any more cellular tombs, the detention of the dead any more than the detention of the living. It is not superstition that makes the law among them, but science. They have only reason, and no prejudices. For them, all matter is animate; they do not believe in the duality of the soul and the body; they only
recognize the unity of substance—except that the substance acquires thousands upon thousands of forms, more or less coarse, more or less purified, more or less solid or more or less volatile.
Even if the soul were distinct from the body, they say—which everything denies—it would still be an absurdity to believe in its individual immortality, in its eternally compact personality, its indestructible immobilization. The law of composition and decomposition that rules bodies, which is the universal law, must also be the law of souls.
In the same way that the heat of the caloric of water vapor condenses in the brain of a locomotive a constitutes what might be called its soul, in the hearth of the human body, the seething of our sensations, condensing in vapor inside our skull, constitutes our thought and sets in motion, with all the electric force of our intelligence, the gears of our corporeal mechanism. But does it follow that the locomotive, a finite and in consequence perishable form, has a soul more immortal than its envelope? Certainly, the electricity that animates does not disappear in the impossible nothingness, any more than the palpable substance in which it is clad disappears—but at the moment of death, as at the moment of existence, neither the boiler nor the vapor can conserve their exclusive personality.
Rust corrodes iron, vapor evaporates; bodies and souls are incessantly transformed and disperse in the entrails of the earth or on the wings of the wind, in as many particles as the metal or fluid contained molecules—which is to say, infinitely, the molecule being for the infinitesimal what the terrestrial globe is for humans: an inhabited world in movement, an aggregation animated by imperceptible beings susceptible of attraction and repulsion, and in consequence of formation and dissolution.
What makes life, or, which is the same thing, movement, is the condensation and dilatation of the substance elaborated by the chemical action of nature. It is the alimentation and ejection of vapor in the locomotive, of thought in the human being, that activates the pendulum of the body. But the body is worn away by friction; the locomotive goes to the scrap-yard, the human to the tomb. That is what is called death, which is only a metamorphosis, since nothing is lost and everything takes on new form under the incessant manipulation of attractive forces.
It is recognized that the human body renews itself every seven years; it replaces us molecule by molecule. From the soles of the feet to the ends of the hair, everything has been destroyed, particle by particle. And one would like the soul, which is nothing but the summary of our sensations, something like their living mirror—a mirror in which the evolutions of that world of the infinitely small whose whole is called a human being is reflected—not to be renewed from year to year, and from instant to instant; that it should lose nothing of its individuality in exhaling itself without, and acquire nothing of the individuality of others in respiring their emanations? And when death, extending its breath over the physical, a finite form, comes to disperse the debris to the winds and distribute the dust in the furrows, like a semen that bear within itself the germ of new crops, one would like—what vanity and absurd inconsequence on our part!—that breath of destruction to be unable to break the human soul, a finite form, and disperse its dust over the world?
In truth, when one hears the civilized boasting about the immortality of their soul, one is tempted to ask whether one is confronted by knaves or brutes, and one ends up concluding that they are both.
We throw the ashes of the dead, say the humanispherians, as pasture to our cultivated fields, in order to incorporate the more rapidly in the form of aliment and this have them reborn more promptly to the life of humankind. We would regard it as a crime to relegate a part of ourselves to the depths of the earth, thus to retard the advent of the light. As there is no doubt that the earth exchanges emanations with other globes, and in the most subtle form, that of thought, we have the certainty that the purer human thought is, the more apt it is to exhale toward the spheres of superior worlds. That is why we do not want what belongs to humanity to be lost to humanity, in order that those residues should pass once again into the alembic of human life, an alembic ever more perfected, acquiring a more etheric property and passing thus from the human circulus to a more elevated circulus, and from circulus to circulus to the universal circulation.
The Christians, the Catholics, eat God for love of the divinity. The humanispherians take the love of humanity as far as anthropophagy; they eat humans after their death, but in a form that has nothing repulsive about it, in the form of a host—which is to say, in the form of bread and wine, meat and fruits, in the form of aliments. It is the communion of human to human, the resurrection of cadaveric remains to human existence.
It is better, they say, to revive the dead than to weep for them. And they activate the clandestine work of nature, abridging the phases of the transformation, the peripeties of the metempsychosis. And they salute death, like birth, the two cradles of a new life, with celebratory songs and perfumes of flowers. Immortality, they affirm, has nothing immaterial about it. The human being, a body of flesh, luminous with thought, like all suns, dissolves when it has furnished its career. The flesh is filtered and returned to flesh; and the thought, light projected by it, radiates toward its ideal, decomposes in its radiation and adheres thereto.
Human being sows human being, harvests it, kneads it and appropriates it by nutrition. Humanity is the sap of humanity, and it blossoms within it and exhales it, a cloud of thought or incense that roses up toward better worlds.
Such is their pious belief, a scientific belief based on induction and deduction, on analogy. They are not, to tell the truth, believers, but seers.
I traveled all the continents, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania. I saw many diverse physiognomies, but I only saw one and the same race everywhere. The universal crossing of Asiatic, European, African and American (the red-skinned) populations; the multiplication of all by all, has leveled all the asperities of color and language. Humankind is one.
There is in the gaze of any humanispherian a mixture of softness and pride that has a strange charm. Something akin to a cloud of magnetic fluid surrounds his entire person and illuminates a phosphorescent aureole about his head. One senses oneself drawn toward him by an irresistible attraction. The grace of his movements adds something more to the beauty of his form. The speech that flows from his lips, imprinted with suave thoughts, is like a perfume that he emanates. Statuary could not model the animate contours of his body and his visage, which borrow from that animation harms that re ever renewed. Painting could not reproduce his eyes and the enthusiastic and limpid thought therein, full of languor or energy, mobile aspects of thought that vary like the mirror of a clear stream in its calm or rapid course, and always picturesque. Music could not model his speech, because it could not attain its indescribable melody. He is the idealized human being, bearing in his form and movement, in his gesture and gaze, in his speech and thought, the imprint of the most utopian perfectibility.
In a word, he is a human being become human.
Thus has appeared to me the ulterior world; thus has unfurled before my eyes the sequence of time; thus has harmonic anarchy been revealed to my mind: the libertarian society, the egalitarian and universal human family.
O Liberty! Ceres of anarchy, you who labor the bosom of modern civilizations with our heel and sow revolt there, you who prune the savage instincts of contemporary societies and graft on to their stems the utopian thoughts of a better world, hail, universal fecundatrix, glory to you! Liberty, who bears in your hands the sheaves of tomorrow’s crops, the basket of the flowers and the fruits of the Future, the horn of plenty of social progress, hail and glory to you, Liberty!
And you, Idea, thank you for having permitted me the contemplation of that human paradise, that humanitarian Eden. Idea, lover always beautiful, mistress full of grace, houri, enchantress, for whom my heart and my voice quiver, for whom my eye and my thought only have amorous gazes; Idea, whose kisses are the spasms of happiness, of, let me live and die and live again in your con
tinual embraces; let me take root in the world that you have evoked; let me develop in the midst of that human flower-bed; let me bloom among all those flowers of men and women; let me collect myself there and exhale the scents there of universal felicity!
Idea, pole of amour, magnetic star, attractive beauty, oh, remain attached to me, don’t abandon me; don’t plunge me back from the future dream into the present reality, from the sun of library into the darkness of authority; enable me no longer to be only a spectator but an actor in the anarchic romance of which you have given me the spectacle. O you, by whom miracles are operated, make the curtain of the centuries fall back behind me, and let me live my life in the Humanisphere and humanispherity!
Child, Idea says to me, I cannot grant you what you desire. Time is time, and there are distances that thought alone can cross. Feet adhere to the ground that has seen them born; the law of gravity dictates that. Remain, therefore, on the ground of civilization like a calvary; it is necessary. Be one of the messiahs of social regeneration. Make your speech shine like a sword; plunge it, naked and sharp, into the bosom of corrupt societies, and strike at the heart of the ambulant cadaver of Authority.
The Humanisphere Page 15
