Mammon and the Black Goddess by Robert Graves
Mammon is a merciless god and a cruel master; yet I have found him a good domestic servant if treated firmly and generously and never spied upon. If ever I get into serious trouble, he has always responded to my considera?tion for his feelings by coming at once to my rescue: for instance on Christmas Day, 1924, when I was living in an Oxfordshire cottage with my wife and three children, on a small wound pension, occasional book reviews, and the sale of my library. I had twenty-five shillings in my pocket, and none in the bank, but I gave five shillings as a Christmas box to Mr Launchbury the postman who brought me a batch of Christmas cards and a registered letter. 'I hope it's a hundred pounds, sir,' he said smiling, as I signed for the letter, 'and a merry Christmas to you!' It was a hundred-pound note, sent me by a man whom I had met, casually, once or twice: William Kiddier, a brush manufacturer from Nottingham. He wrote: 'I have had a good year, I like your poems, and I hear you are in difficulties. Please show your friendship by accepting this. And a merry Christmas to you.' Kiddier's gift saved the situation, and although (until about six years ago) I never had saved enough to allow for more than six months' sub?sistence, Mammon never failed me, because (as my mother would have said) I 'put him upon his good behaviour . . .' Chief among Mammon's agents was T. E. Lawrence who believed, as I did, that, after one's own reasonable necessities and obligations had been taken care of, money should be at the disposal of one's friends.
A common fallacy held by idealist philosophers, religious fanatics and liberal politicians is that everyone can love everyone else. Sometimes an enforced neighbourliness, especially in wartime, will extend the circle of love to include people with whom as a rule one has nothing in common; but once the danger has passed it soon shrinks again to a few shining names. I dislike organized charities. Too high a percentage of what is collected goes to pay the organizers; nor can I feel genuine love for the nameless beneficiaries, or expect any from them. . . . The hungry children of Central Europe, on whose account, in 1920, I sold my gold watch and a few wedding presents, had grown into brawny Nazis by the nineteen-forties and were taking their revenge on me and my family for Lloyd George's and Clemenceau's mercilessness.
There is no more ironical story in the whole Bible than Jesus' praise of the jiqor widow who gave her last two mites to the Temple Treasury. Two days later, Judas's thirty pieces of silver came out of this very collection, most of which went to support a priesthood whom Jesus had just condemned as traitors; while the rest paid for further barbaric embellishment of a Temple whose imminent destruction he had already prophesied. . . .
I carry no life assurance?not only because the real value of money has been falling for the last fifty years, so that one gets back far less than one puts in?but because it shows a lack of trust in my servant Mammon. Mammon has treated me honestly, despite my ambiguous dealings with Mr Bloodsucker, and never heaped my lap with such superfluity of riches that I felt tempted to stop working even one day in seven, or to take vacations. I do not (as I say) keep accounts, leaving that to my bank and literary agents; so long as I know roughly what reserves I have, personal accounts are a waste of time and would hamper my spending and giving. William Kiddier's hundred pounds has never been out of my mind: he honoured me by trusting that I would accept it without embarrassment, as he himself would have done had our positions been reversed. Nor can I forget how T. E. Lawrence, when I was lured into an unlucky trading venture, sent me four chapters of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom to sell to an American magazine, explaining that honour would not let him touch any money the book might make?and he never did?but that these two hundred pounds should put me straight.
I would be the last to force on any one of you a view of money that runs counter to his upbringing. I admit my individual disregard of common economic practice; and spend money only where my heart lies or need calls. Mammon will always honour the calm conviction of financial stability which is called 'credit', and appear when called.
I never read economic text-books, but the general trend seems clear enough. There will always be more money tomorrow than yesterday, and it will always be worth less; food will become progressively more insipid; goods progressively more expendable, which means less lovable. All surviving hand-made objects of merit will be collected in museums (and thus withdrawn from circula?tion). Mammon's metallic coinage will cease, and so will poets; and, on attaining complete automation?the econ?omist's ne plus ultra?mankind, then crowded on the earth's surface, at least a hundred souls per acre (at different levels under and above ground, that is), will be faced with the fearful problem of how to while away its leisure time except in perfect sameness of experience, and look wistfully back at these hectic days of disorganized unbrotherliness. Unless, of course, a philanthropic virus intervenes and reduces the bemused survivors to a simpler economy.
Nine Hundred Iron Chariots
Arthur Dehon Little Memorial Lecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, May 14, 1963
Nine Hundred Iron Chariots
Since my election to the venerable Oxford Chair of Poetry, I have often been mistaken for a respectable public figure, and four American universities have recently wanted to make me their guest poet. I declined politely. Though my Oxford obligations are no great burden, and can be annu?ally settled in two months or less, I grudge every hour spent away from my home among the rocks and olives of Majorca, except on important business. Yet among my lutest preoccupations has been a wish to discover the mystique behind modern science: so, on being invited to spend two weeks on the M.I.T. campus as the Arthur D. Little Lecturer, I thought: 'This is it! Nowhere in the world can a more massive concentration of scientific thought be found than at M.I.T. Let me pretend for once that I am a respectable public figure, and investigate.'
I understand that back in the dark days of this Institute many senior technologists had been reluctant to admit the Humanities as a serious element in M.I.T. and I quite see their point. It must have seemed a dangerous con?cession to an unworthily haphazard way of thinking: how could any Humanity side compare in its dedicated organi?zation of purpose with the Scientific side? Last June I heard the American Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, make an off-the-record after-dinner speech at St John's College, Oxford?of which we both are members?to the effect i hat at no major American university do the Humanities keep abreast in thought with Science.
M.I.T. is different?I have visited a dozen or more American universities in the last few years and I recognize this difference. It did something altogether new early in the present century, when a close integration was made between the two sides by a rule that no student could become a technologist without spending a large part of his time at work among the humanists and vice versa. M.I.T. has a strong social conscience, as was borne in upon me last week when I was allowed to attend a session of the Zacharias Committee which plans new educational skills. But though there are at least three professors here who can think in poetic terms, the Humanities are still no more than the steadying tail of the technological kite now being carried up far out of sight on an endless weightless irrefragable string.
Your most advanced technologists remind me of a school picnic, when an adventurous young gang runs off through the woods, blazing no trail, taking with them all the Coca-Cola, and thoughtlessly leaving their friends miles behind to lug along the baskets of beef-sandwiches, cookies and blueberry pie. Yes, you want to explore; and I won't pretend that love of exploration has not been one of my own main motive forces. But the very first rule for explorers should be: keep touch with slower members of the group?at any rate with those in charge of the picnic basket!
It is politely assumed here that scientists have souls as well as minds. A non-denominational chapel is available for your convenience, and you are invited to meditate there peacefully in the intervals between religious ser?vices. A beautifully technological derrick is provided to hoist the necessary religious symbol into a commanding position. The aisles are tranquil en
Tree-magic, according to Oriental and Occidental mys?tics alike, favours meditation. But 'magic' is a poetic, not n scientific, term; modern science was established to guard rational man against a superstitious acceptance of magic and old wives' tales. And if, using technological terms, I suggest that in an anthropo-dendroid symbiosis certain tree-radiations beneficially affect man's meditative facul?ties, you must suspend judgment on my theory until it has been subjected to controlled experiment involving num?erous imponderables. You will have first to decide in what precise region of the brain these peculiar faculties operate, and then you will have to choose a theme for simultaneous meditation by a number of human controls: thus circum?scribing or negating the magic.
Here is a simple proposition. The poet and the scientist, who evidently stand at opposite extremes of contemporary thought, are both men. Sometimes, even, they are born in the same bed, eat at the same table, attend the same school, sing in the same choir. . . . But soon they grow mentally alienated; never later, in my experience, than the age of twelve. I don't think we need disagree on what we mean by 'scientists' or what we mean by 'poets'. Granted, there are casual labourers, clerks and petty officials by the hun?dred thousand listed on the pay-roll of Science, who might just as well be hewing coal, selling lingerie, or supervising children's playgrounds. Granted, also, countless volumes of new verse are published every year, though only two or three have the root of poetry in them. Let us therefore concentrate on the dedicated scientist and the dedicated poet, whose work seems to themselves the main justifica?tion for their existence, and who have earned the grudging respect of their fellows by the way they set about it.
The difference is, roughly, that the scientist concen?trates on analysis and classification of external fact even if fact be beautifully . disguised as mathematic relation; whereas the poet concentrates on discovery of internal truth. To a poet, analysis and factual classification are a reputable pursuit only so long as they serve a natural human need?which they often do in medicine, geology, or botany; not when they become obsessive and inhuman. I applaud, for instance, Dr Norbert Wiener's brilliant use of severed nerve-ends to give a man whose leg has been amputated control of an artificial one. To a scientist, 'internal truth' makes no sense because it defies analysis: that is to say, no factual question on the subject of internal truth, requiring a factual answer, or even a hypothetical question requiring a hypothetical answer, can be fed even tQjm electronic computer. So when the poet insists on internal truth, the scientist must rebuff him with: 'This is, I fear, a concept to discuss with a theologian or meta?physician.' Scientific treatises on such subjects as the com?parative density of astral bodies, or the microscopic analysis of a cheese-mite's digestive system, are of small interest to a poet, who foresees no immediate contact with either phenomenon; and the scientist himself is interested in them only as pieces missing from a very small corner of the trillion-dollar jigsaw puzzle that will never, by defini?tion, be completed. Poetry means little to a scientist, because the receiving apparatus of his brain is no longer attuned, if it ever was, to the emotional wave-length on which poems are carried; indeed, a fundamental labora?tory rule forbids the admittance of emotion into any experiment, lest it should misinterpret fact. Yet scientists will agree, if pressed, that a marked physical effect may be produced on readers by certain rhythmic arrangements of words, though one neither quantitatively nor qualitatively predictable even in readers of uniform age and back?ground. Too many imponderables again.
These contrastive preoccupations?the scientist's with fact, and the poet's with truth?give them a different atti?tude to environment. The scientist prefers what is neat, organized, and stable; the poet, what is unique and im?ponderable. Young scientists can readily be recruited and trained with the help of public money. I forget the name of the Ionian Greek meteorologist who first suggested the financial exploitation of science by predicting a severe winter (which would naturally cause a bumper olive crop, after several poor ones) and then buying up the olive presses in proof of his conviction. Politicians and indus?trialists have never forgotten this lesson. They house tech?nologists like silkworms in perforated cigar boxes, supply fresh mulberry leaves once a week, and leave them to spin silk. The dependence of M.I.T. on the automobile in?dustry is well known and acknowledged. Poets keep themselves, and are virtually unemployable.
Nowadays, the richer a nation grows, the greater its de?mand on scientists for new industrial techniques, means of communication and transport, armaments. These re?quire experimental apparatus far beyond the individual's purse: hence the ever-expanding universities and techno?logical institutes. A scientist no longer works at home; even if he can keep abreast of the copious multi-lingual literature which concerns his special field, he must join a university or technological institute. There he must con?form to a particular way of life, which will accentuate his purely scientific outlook. The poet avoids conformity. If he has solved the problem of how to support himself outside academic, governmental or commercial institutions, he makes his home either in real country, or in the asphalt jungle of a. city's warehouse district where almost any?thing may happen and where almost nothing repeats itself.
To the scientist, all phenomena are ideally of equal interest. Yet he recognizes that the ratiocinatory, electric?ally-propelled organism which he calls 'me'?cogito, ergo sum?has to be handled with care. In short, he must eat, drink, sleep, take regular exercise, not stint his sexual appetite, allow himself a modicum of social intercourse and an occasional vacation; but he must subordinate these extra-curricular activities?even chess and classical music ?to his obsession for classifying facts and, when he grad?uates from facts, to his curiosity about pure physics. So he is, in general, healthy, sober, co-operative, reliable, indus?trious; though with little perception of the magical, and emotionally underdeveloped.
Here, for the record, let me distinguish between magic and sorcery. Sorcery is an attempt to formalize magic and use it for personal ends against whoever lacks the self- confidence to combat the attack. The ideal scientist, of covtrse, is proof against sorcerers, since he does not recog?nize magic and has, besides, studied the technique of hyp?nosis, which is the main weapon of sorcerers. His modest, almost monastic, self-sufficiency served him well in the palmy days of classical science, when all observable pheno?mena conformed closely enough to Nature's Iron Laws, and when the answers supplied by the abacus made im?mediate sense. Yet these Laws now show an increasingly limited relevance to certain new-found aspects of the microcosm and macrocosm; and some answers given by the latest computers to the latest questions make merely cos?mic sense?that is to say, they can no longer be imagina?tively grasped by the human brain in any predictable stage of development, and refer to processes, not to phenomena.
I need not labour this very serious point. That you have broken through to a region of non-sense?whether you spell it with a hyphen or without, does not make much odds in the long run?is an open secret. The adventurous gang who ran off into the woods, grabbing the Coca-Cola and leaving behind the beef-sandwiches, cookies and blue?berry pie, are not Indians, or even boy scouts; and when they see their compass needle whirling madly around, wonder what on earth to do next. But they share out the Coca-Cola, sing a song of spacemanship to restore t
They are not likely to meet a poet in those wilds; and even if they do, the sole exchange of greetings can be a polite 'Hi!' Yet if a stray anthropologist happens to cross their path, they would be wise to consult him. Anthropo?logists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science. To understand how savages think and act, the thesis that there are such things as magic, oracular prophecy and divine possession has to be conceded. But soon these field- workers stop putting quotation marks around these phenomena when taking notes; and once they have joined in the ceremonial rites, so as to get a subjective picture of them, they are cotched. I know two women anthropolo?gists who, having been enstooled as queen-mothers of different tribes in West Africa, are now no more scientists than I am. Each talks of 'my people' with the mystical seriousness that, for example, enhanced two very run-of- the-mill English naval officers, George V and George VI ?neither of them born heir to the throne?into real kings by the Grace of God. Yes, I know, the British Constitution limits sovereignty to what appears a mere parade of outworn magnificence; but the less executive power a sovereign has, the stronger the magic?especially with a queen. (If Queen Victoria had been reigning in 1776, instead of her mad grandfather. . . . But neither you nor I can afford to speculate on historical hypotheses.)