The Absolute at Large/Chapter 14
Chapter XIV
The Land of Plenty
It has often happened to the chronicler (and surely to many of his readers) that when for any reason whatever he has gazed at the night sky and the stars, and realized with mute amazement their prodigious number and their inconceivable distance and dimensions, and told himself that each of those glittering dots was a gigantic flaming world or a whole living planetary system, and that there were possibly billions, say, of such dots; or when he has looked down to a far horizon from a high mountain (it happened to me in the Tatras), and has seen beneath him fields and woods and mountains, and right in front of him dense forest and grass lands, all of it more than luxuriant, running riot, life exuberant and alarming in its richness—and when he has noted in the grass myriads of blossoms, tiny beetles, and butterflies, and has mentally multiplied this mad profusion by the vast expanses stretching away before him to Heaven knows where, and has added to these expanses the millions of other expanses equally crowded and luxuriant, which compose the surface of our earth; at such a moment it has often happened that the chronicler has bethought him of the Creator, and has said to himself: "If someone made or created all this, then we must admit that it is a terrible waste. If anyone wanted to show his power as a Creator, there was no need to create such an insane quantity of things. Excess is chaos, and chaos is something like insanity or drunkenness. Yes, the human intellect is staggered by the over-profusion of this creative achievement. There is simply too much of it. It's boundlessness gone mad. Of course, He who is Infinite from His very birth is accustomed to huge proportions in everything, and has no proper standard (for every standard implies finiteness) or, rather, has no standard whatsoever."
I beg you not to regard this as blasphemy; I am only endeavouring to set forth the disproportion between human ideas and this cosmic superabundance. This wanton, purposeless, well-nigh feverish excess of everything that exists appears to the sober human eye more like creativeness run wild than conscientious and methodical creation. That is what I wish to say, with all due respect, before we return to our story.
You are already aware that the process of perfect combustion invented by Marek practically proved the presence of the Absolute in every form of matter. One might put it this way (only as a hypothesis, of course), that before the creation of all things the Absolute existed in the form of an Infinite Free Energy. For some cogent physical or moral reason, this Free Energy began to be creative. It became Working Energy, and following the laws of inversion, it was transformed into a state of Infinite Imprisoned Energy. It lost itself somehow in its own handiwork, i.e. in created matter, and remained there latent, as if under a spell. And if this is hard to understand, I cannot help you.
And now, apparently as a result of the perfect combustion effected by Marek's atomic motors, this imprisoned energy was liberated, freed of the fetters of matter which had held it fast. It became once more Free Energy or active Absolute, as free as it was before the Creation. It was the sudden release of that same inscrutable and unresting power which had already manifested itself once in the Creation of the World.
If the whole cosmos at once were to undergo complete combustion, the first act of creation might be repeated; for that would indeed be the end of the world, a complete liquidation which would make possible the establishment of a new world-firm, Cosmos the Second. Meanwhile, as you know, Marek's Karburators were only burning up the material world by kilogrammes at a time. Being thus released in small quantities only, the Absolute either did not feel sufficiently strong to begin creating again at once, or perhaps did not wish to repeat itself. Anyhow, it decided to express itself in two ways, one of them to some extent traditional and the other distinctly modern.
The traditional manner in which it began to exert itself was, as you already know, the religious one. This embraced all varieties of illumination, conversion, moral effects, miracles, levitations, ecstasies, predictions, and, above all, religious faith. Here the Absolute burst into the personal and social life of the people over paths already well trodden, but to an extent hitherto unheard of. After a few months of its activity there was practically not a single person on earth who had not experienced, if only for a moment, that religious shock by which the Absolute made known its presence to his soul. We will return to the subject of this psychological onset of the Absolute later on, when it will be necessary to depict its catastrophic consequences.
The other form of manifestation of the existence of the Absolute at large was something entirely new. The Infinite Energy which had once busied itself with the creation of the world apparently took cognizance of the altered conditions, and flung itself into manufacture. It did not form something out of nothing, but it made finished goods out of raw material. Instead of indulging in pure creation, it took its place at the machines. It became the Infinite Artisan.
Suppose that some factory or other, say a place where tacks were manufactured, had installed a Perfect Karburator in place of a steam-engine as the cheapest form of plant. The Absolute constantly emanating from the atomic motor learnt the whole process of manufacture in a single day, by virtue of its innate intelligence, and flung itself with all its uncontrollable energy or, perhaps, ambition into this occupation. It began to manufacture tacks on its own account. Once it started, nothing could stop it. Without anyone in control of it, the machine vomited forth tacks. The supplies of iron ready to be manufactured into tacks raised themselves of their own accord; one piece after another, thrust themselves through the air, and inserted themselves in the proper machines. It was at first an uncanny thing to see. When these supplies were exhausted, iron sprouted out of the earth, the ground round the factory exuded pure iron as if it were being drawn by suction from the depths of the earth. This iron then raised itself into the air to the height of about one metre and slid jerkily into the machinery as if it were being pushed in. Please note this carefully; I may have said "the iron raised itself" or "the iron slid," but all eye-witnesses give it as their impression that the iron was lifted by sheer force by an inexorable but invisible power, and with a might so manifest and concentrated that they were seized with horror. It was plain to the eye that it was being done by the exercise of terriffic effort.
Probably some of you have toyed with spiritualism and have seen something of "table-lifting." If so, you will bear me out in this—that the table certainly did not rise as though it had lost its material weight, but rather moved with a sort of spasmodic effort; it creaked in all its joints, and quivered, and fairly reared, until finally it leaped up in the air as if lifted by a power which was struggling with it for mastery.
But how am I to describe the frightful, silent struggle which forced iron to raise itself from the depths of the earth, which pressed it into bars, threw these into the machines, and smashed them up into tacks? The bars twisted like withies, fought against the motion that pushed them forward, rattled and grated amid the silence of that which wrestled with them, soundless and substanceless. All contemporary reports speak of the horror of the scene. It was a very miracle, but do not imagine that a miracle is something fabulously easy and effortless; it rather seems that the performance of a genuine miracle entails intense and exhausting exertions. But though the labours of the Absolute might make a great call upon its powers, the most astounding thing about its new activities was the copiousness of its output. Thus, to keep to the department already mentioned, the one solitary tack factory which the Absolute had in its power poured forth night and day so many tacks that they were piled up in mountains in the yard, and eventually broke down the fences and blocked up the street.
Let us stick to this instance of the tacks for the time being. It shows you the whole nature of the Absolute, just as inexhaustible and extravagant as it was at the time of the Creation. Once it had thrown itself into production, it did not trouble about distribution, consumption, market, or ultimate object; it did not trouble about anything: it simply devoted its gigantic energy to pouring forth tacks. Being itself infinite in essence, it knew neither measure nor limitation in anything, even in the matter of tacks.
You can well imagine how the workmen in such a factory were startled by the performances of the new motive power. For them it was a case of wholly unexpected and unfair competition, something that made their labour altogether superfluous; and they would quite rightly have protected themselves against this assault of the capitalism of the Manchester School on the working classes by at least demolishing the factory and hanging its proprietors, if the Absolute had not surprised and overpowered them by its first method of attack, religious illumination of every form and degree. Meantime they experienced levitations, prophecies, miracle-working, visions, supernatural cures, sanctification, love for their neighbours, and other conditions equally unnatural, not to say miraculous.
On the other hand, you can easily guess how the proprietor of such a tack-factory would greet this divine mass-production. He might certainly rejoice, discharge all his workmen, with whom he was in any case well-nigh worried to death, and rub his hands over the volcanic gush of tacks which it cost not a penny to produce. But on the one hand, he himself was sure to fall a victim to the psychic effects of the Absolute, and hand over the whole factory on the spot to his workmen, his brothers in God, as their common property; while on the other hand he very soon realized that those mountains of tacks were utterly valueless because he would find no market for them.
It is true that the workmen no longer had to stand at the machines and carry bars of iron, and were part-proprietors of the factory besides. But in a few days' time it became evident that it was necessary to get rid, somehow or other, of the hundred-ton mountains of tacks which had ceased to be saleable goods. At first some attempts were made to send the tacks off in wagon-loads to imaginary addresses; later on, there was nothing for it but to cart them off to huge dumps outside the city. This removal of the tacks kept all the workmen busy for a full fourteen hours a day, but they did not grumble, being illuminated by the divine spirit of love and of mutual service.
Forgive me for spending so much time over these tacks. The Absolute was ignorant of industrial specialization. It invaded the spinning-mills with equal ardour, and there not only performed the miracle of making sand into ropes, but even spun it into thread. In the weaving and fulling mills and in the stocking factories it laid hold on the entire textile department, and reeled off without pause millions of kilometres of everything that can be cut with scissors. It took possession of the iron works, the rolling mills, the foundries, the factories for agricultural machinery, the sawmills, timber works, rubber works, sugar-mills, chemical works, fertilizer works, nitrogen and naphtha plants, printing works, paper-mills, dye works, glass works, potteries, boot and shoe factories, ribbon works, forges, mines, breweries, distilleries, creameries, flour-mills, mints, motor works, and grinding plants. It wove, spun, knitted, forged, cast, erected, sewed, planed, cut, dug, burned, printed, bleached, refined, cooked, filtered, and pressed for twenty-four to twenty-six hours a day. Harnessed to agricultural machines in the place of tractors, it ploughed, sowed, harrowed, weeded, cut, harvested and threshed. In every department it augmented the raw material and multiplied the output hundreds of times. It was inexhaustible. It simply squandered its activity. It had found a quantitative expression for its own infinitude: over-production.
The miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes in the desert was repeated on a colossal scale in the miraculous multiplication of tacks, boards, nitrates, pneumatic tyres, rolls of paper, and manufactured articles of every kind.
Thus there ruled in the world a state of boundless plenty of all that men could need. But men need everything, everything but boundless plenty.