The Daily Worker Newspaper, January 8, 1927, Page 9

The Doctor Faces the Social System - (Fragment from a new novel, “The Healers,) William had hard times. But during all those times none of the patients who had so often said that he had saved their lives and that they were forever devoted to him, none came to see him. They followed the crowd and the gossip. Nobody asked him whether he had his rent or food. He struggled on passively, wait- ing for better days. His situation improved when a few Jewish pa- tients found the way to his office. But they were difficult to deal with, They were not as quiet and resigned and submissive as his previous non-Jewish clientele,. They were nervous, often on the verge of insanity, questioning every one of his orders and wanting to know the reasons for everything. How often did he have to treat those who had just come over from Europe and were suffering from the terrors of the great war and from the shocks of the antisem@tic pogroms! Their fright- ened eyes were wide open and they gazed around themselves with a constant fear of an impending danger. There were the women who had seen hor: rors, base, cowardly rapes for the act that the peo- pie ealled-love. They still felt on their feeble bod- ies the creeping fingers of strong men, drunk with rut and vodka, the caress of the bloody tyrants, the “knights” and “heroes” of the war. And some were yet pallid and attenuated from the recent op- eration by which they had gotten rid of the fruits of this rape which was grown by imperturable, bru- tal, amoral nature. Like the office of every physician, whether he was aware of it or not, William’s was full of sounds from outside. It reverberated the suffering and pain from the street, the houses, the working places. It received the wrecks, the flotsam and jetsam of life. Its walls heard the cries, the sobbing, the sighs of the wounded world—a repercussion of its endless misery, He had to repair, to fix human organs and minds, to put them in shape for further use and abuse. Now that his practice was changing he was deal- ing more and more with working neople. And alas! that was the most ungrateful work for the physi- cian. No sooner had he improved the body of a workman and sent him back to Iabor than he re- turned to the doctor’s broken in spirit and with dis- turbed functions. There was a continuous flow be- tween the factory and the consulting room. Often William said to himself: use?” “What is the Heavy ort (Continued from page 2) The rich man’s king whom our plight could not : soften; Who took our last penny by taxes and cheats, And lets us be shot like dogs in the streets, We weave, we are weaving,” ring with challenge that is little felt in our poetry today. The poet who merely shrieks at the hideous ‘hells we call factories, or wants to dynamite them like Yank in The Hairy Ape, or scrap them like the humanitarians of the nineteenth century, is not a poet of the revolution. A poet of the revolution must see in the factories the growth of man’s con- trol, in machinery the mastery of nature which must be mastered by men. Out of ugliness must come beauty, by transformation of control and ideal, and not by destruction of substance and skill. _The ma- chine must be an ally and not a foe. It is the way the machine is controlled that embodies it with so much horror and destructiveness. Modern art has discovered in the lines of the machine the es- sence of exquisite form. Modern society must find in the machine the sesame to a future freedom of the toil and torture of our present life, ; Revolutionary poetry, then, must embody an ide- Ology entirely different from the one that has pre- vailed. Poetry of protest, as we have said, is not poetry of revolution. Revolutionary poetry involves a whole, life as a connected, coherent, synthetic faith in a new order. It is not one phase of life that it sings, one segment of experiences, but life as a whole, like as a connected, coherent, synthetic thing, that it desires to express, Its vision should be inclusive. A mew economic life, a nw social life, a new sex-life, a new art life, a new scientific life—ell these should be part of its vision. Revo- lution is not a simple, single thing, with simple, single manifestations. Its basis which is economic eventually comprehends every other experience, The revolutionary poet must acquire the complete ness of this conception. ! In the final analysis, poets, must come to learn their place and function in society. With the as- cendancy of the bourgeoisie, the artist has become an exalted curiosity in the social world. He must come to learn, as Lowell aptly expressed it in his essay on Nationality in Literature in 1849, that “Poets, however valuable in their own esteem, are not, after. all, the most important production of a nation” xd pie) teil Poetry and Revolution When one of his friends once greeted him: “How ig the mender of bodies?” he replied sadly: “Sorry, I am not even that. In the best case a patching-up cobbler—and he is more efficient than I am.” Modern industry with its deadly means and dis- regard of human lives caused disease at every step, acute and chronic. It maimed and killed. It took the young human animal, sometimes before ten, in the most favorable case the undeveloved youngster of fifteen or so, when he still needed play and much leisure and in the adolescent yYars, during his greatest crisis and subjected him to work and worry, the fire of which it was impossible to withstand without damage. It surrounded him with all sorts of poisons which, added to hig abominable home environment and acquired injurious habits, destroyed his health with the utmost certainty. No wonder then that lung tuberculosis, if it did not kill the patient in babyhood, throve between six- teen and twenty-six. It was an industrial disease mainly. And no wonder that those who escaped it developed constitutional troubles at an age when their resistance had reached the limit and died between forty-five and fifty-five. William sighed: “That is called living! What am I doing here, what are we doctors all doing?” Dusts—of wool, feathers, flour, stone, wood, ivory, paper—cut, stung, irritated the fine lung tissues. Chemical poisons as solids, liquids, gases deterior- ated the heart, blood, nerves, digestive tract. In- human postures for hours at a time bent, distorted, deformed, misshaped, marred the limbs the spine, produced aches and pains, accelerated or slowed up the disturbed internal plumbing. Prolonged expos- ure to an excess of cold and heat, light and dark- ness ,attacked the senses and indirectly the essen- tial organs. Fatigue without sufficient compensat- ing rest, monotony at machine work, combined with worry and wrong living at home, wrecked the mus- cles and nerves. And at the same time the indus- trial accidents amputated and injured hands, legs, eyes. Indeed, there were few workers in possession of all their fingers and perfect limbs or who were not mutilated in some way. Inasmuch as the workers’ health had improved in the last, years, including the decline of tubercu- losis it was due not to medical care, but to the ameloriation in their living conquered with difficulty through organization, solidarity, strikes. But how few in number were the physicians whe understood that! Most of them treated a backache, a knee-pain due to work, with their usual remedies that did not rem- wet Aad aie tat Tale oft tof and also that, to continue to quote from Lowell: “If we can frame a commonwealth in which it shall not be a misfurtune to be born, in which there shall never be a pair of hands nor a mouth too much, we shall be ag usefully em- ployed as if we should flower with a Dante or so, and remain a bony stalk forever after.” When the poet realizes that, after all, he is not an independent creation, but part of a social organ- ism that his work must inevitably express and to which organism he owes a social obligation—then the new attitude of revolutionary poetry will have begun its rapid evolution. Then the poet will see in his old individualism, his elevation of personal eccentricity and vain caprice, motivations that are minor and insignificant. Then he will see in him- self and in his work part of the process of social change and revolution, and will realize that in the greater realities of our social world are themes for the greater poetry of our new era, By B. Lieber edy. As if the patient had fallen down from the moon and had no connection with surrounding. out- side life, with his environment. William felt like calling to his colleagues: “Broth ers, we're on the wrong track. Let’s give it upl Let’s resign! Not we are needed, not we can be the doctors. A greater physician than all of us put together is wanting. Mankind itself must right ite wrongs if it wishes to be healthy. Or let’s all unite, go to mankind and at least try to pull it out into the sunshine, teach it how to live in present condi- tions and close the factories in time to give it rest...” Then he thought: “How can we do it—we our selves are unprepared? How indeed? Health ts mot even our trade, What do we know about health and prevention of sickness? ... So let’s be honest and quit!... And ag to healing disease, cam we really do it under today’s circumstances? ... No, we cannot, we cannot so long as you do not reform your living socially and individually. And if you do, you'll need us but little... I for one. 2 But he asked himself: class and the rich?” No, they were not healthier. They had the physical illnesses and mental shortcomings of their castes. There were diseases due to idleness and excesses and what was called the good things of life, as there were diseases of poverty and labor. Worry and fear were general causes of sickness that did not distinguish between classes. The only difference was the kind of worry, the reason for fear. But the fear of disease was a universal obses- sion that brought and aggravated sickness in all sections of society. fe Nobody had seen a rich man living two hundred years because of his wealth. Wealth was not syn- onymous with health. Nor did it engender more beauty. The most beautiful specimens of human beings were not to be found among the well-to-do. As a whole they lacked beauty about as much as the overworked majority. Uglimess had become @ common human trait, but there was an ugliness of the rich and one of the poor, cf The great knaves, the thiefs of human felicity were punished by their own rapacity. They acquir- ed power and momentary pleasure, but that did not make them happy and healthy. It was a civilized anthropophagy where the victims’ blood was drain- ed and sucked indirectly, but, as it was sick and unclean, it was converted in the body of the canni- bals into new venoms and diseases. “How about the middle- maw i Invocation. O let me greatly live and die Who am so base and meek of soul; Give all this coward flesh the lie, Resistless sweep me to the goal. Thou song of songs, sweet Liberty, Strengthen, uplift, inspire me! - When men build barricades from woe And man them with the heart of hope; When Misery would strike a blow Surging from slum, from mill, from stope Of darkest mine—O bid me rise And voice thy noble ecstasies! Scented with wine, and silver clad, Voluptuous, passion-breathing lutes; Strung cords vibrating to the mad Lust after strange forbidden fruits, “The art for Art’s sake”—let him be— He cannot rise and follow thee. But I so base and humble, I, This six-score ten of coward flesh, Would greatly live and greatly die, Would slip the thong and loose the leash, Would sweep with thee to life or death, Thy wild sweet music on my breath. —Henry George Weiss, To a Certain Massachusetts Judge What shall the future’s children speak of you, You bought and paid for tool of tyranny, You bloody Jeffreys of New England’s Greed? You cringing, servile lackey, they shall spew The thought of you forth from their memory As something loathsome, vile in history No words could pen the depths of, infamy Too black to fill! the minds of people freed. Crawl on your belly while you live, and lick The pudgy hand of wealth that fills your purse; Employ every artifice and trick To doom the brave ... We name you with a curse, Corrupt, debased, swine of a tinselled sty, Our hate shall haunt your sleep unti you die, —Henry George Weiss.