Are these all the aims of Anarchism? They are just the beginning. They
are an outline of what is demanded for the material producer. If as a
worker, you think no further than how to free yourself from the horrible
bondage of capitalism, then that is the measure of Anarchism for you.
But you yourself put the limit there, if there it is put. Immeasurably
deeper, immeasurably higher, dips and soars the soul which has come out
of its casement of custom and cowardice, and dared to claim its Self.
Ah, once to stand unflinchingly on the brink of that dark gulf of
passions and desires, once at last to send a bold, straight-driven gaze
down into the volcanic Me, once, and in that once, and in that once
_forever_, to throw off the command to cover and flee from the knowledge
of that abyss,--nay, to dare it to hiss and seethe if it will, and make
us writhe and shiver with its force! Once and forever to realize that
one is not a bundle of well-regulated little reasons bound up in the
front room of the brain to be sermonized and held in order with
copy-book maxims or moved and stopped by a syllogism, but a bottomless,
bottomless depth of all strange sensations, a rocking sea of feeling
wherever sweep strong storms of unaccountable hate and rage, invisible
contortions of disappointment, low ebbs of meanness, quakings and
shudderings of love that drives to madness and will not be controlled,
hungerings and moanings and sobbing that smite upon the inner ear, now
first bent to listen, as if all the sadness of the sea and the wailing
of the great pine forests of the North had met to weep together there in
that silence audible to you alone. To look down into that, to know the
blackness, the midnight, the dead ages in oneself, to feel the jungle
and the beast within,--and the swamp and the slime, and the desolate
desert of the heart's despair--to see, to know, to feel to the
uttermost,--and then to look at one's fellow, sitting across from one in
the street-car, so decorous, so well got up, so nicely combed and
brushed and oiled and to wonder what lies beneath that commonplace
exterior,--to picture the cavern in him which somewhere far below has a
narrow gallery running into your own--to imagine the pain that racks him
to the finger-tips perhaps while he wears that placid ironed-shirt-front
countenance--to conceive how he too shudders at himself and writhes and
flees from the lava of his heart and aches in his prison-house not
daring to see himself--to draw back respectfully from the Self-gate of
the plainest, most unpromising creature, even from the most debased
criminal, because one knows the nonentity and the criminal in
oneself--to spare all condemnation (how much more trial and sentence)
because one knows the stuff of which man is made and recoils at nothing
since all is in himself,--this is what Anarchism may mean to you. It
means that to me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account