I took home from a bookshop one day not long ago, after reading an article about it by Professor James Harvey Robinson in the _Atlantic_, Mr. Alexander"s quite extraordinary book, which after starting off with an introduction by Professor John Dewey, of Columbia, leads one into a new world, to the edge, almost the precipitous edge of a new world.
I am inclined to believe that the deepest and most penetrating knowledge of that curious and delicate blend of spirit and clay we call a human being, and the most masterful technique for getting conscious control of it and of the helpless civilization in which it still is trying to live, are going to be found before many years to be in the brain and the hand of Mathias Alexander. It is hard to keep from writing a book about him when one thinks of him, but as I cannot write a book about him in the middle of this one, I am going to touch for a moment on the principle Alexander employs in breaking through new brain tracks in persons, and then try to apply the same principles to breaking through new brain tracks for a nation.
What Mr. Alexander does with people I have already hinted at in what I have said about our having a new profession in America--the profession of being a lawyer backward. Of course Mr. Alexander could not say of himself that he was in the profession of being a lawyer backward, but he does practically the same thing in his field that a lawyer backward would do.
He makes it his business to change people"s minds for them instead of petting their minds and he does the precise thing I have in mine except that he confines himself in doing it to what he calls psycho-mechanics--to a single first relation in which a man"s mind needs to be changed--the relation of a man"s mind to his body.
If a man"s mind gets his body right, it will not need to be changed about many other things in which it is wrong. The first thing a man"s mind should be changed about usually is his body.
This is the principle upon which Mathias Alexander in the very extraordinary work he is doing in London, proceeds.
When you are duly accepted as a client and have duly given credentials or shown signs that you want all the truth about yourself that you can get no matter how it hurts, or how it looks, you present yourself at the appointed time in Alexander"s office, or studio, or laboratory, or operating room--whatever the name may be you will feel like calling it by, before you are finished, and Alexander stands you up before the back of a chair. Then he takes you in his hands--his very powerful, sensitive and discerning hands and begins--quite literally begins reshaping you like Phidias. You begin to feel him doing you off as if you were going to be some new beautiful living statue yourself before very long probably.
Then he stands off from you a minute, takes a long deep critical gaze at you--just as Phidias would, studies the poise and the stresses of your body, X-rays down through you with a look--through you and all your inner workings from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.
Then he lays hands on you once more and works and you feel him working slowly and subtly on you once more, all the while giving orders to you softly not to help him, not to b.u.t.t in soul and body on what he is doing to them with your preconceived ideas--ideas he is trying to cure you of, of what you think you think when you are thinking with what you suppose is your mind, and what you suppose you are doing with what you suppose is your body. In other words, he gives you most strenuously to understand that the one helpful thing that you can do with what you call your mind or what you call your body is to back away from them both all you can. As it is you and your ideas mostly that are what is the matter with your mind and body, and with the way you admit they are not getting on together, Alexander"s first lessons with you you find are largely occupied in getting your mind--your terrible and beautiful mind which does such queer things to you, to back away. What he really wants of you is to have you let him make a present to you outright of certain new psycho-physical experiences, which he cannot possibly get in, if you insist on slipping yours in each time instead. So he keeps working on you, you all the while trying to help in soul and body by being as much like putty--a kind of transcendental putty as you can, or as you dare, without falling apart before your own eyes. Then when you have removed all obstructions and preconceptions in your own mind--and will stop preventing him from doing it, he places your body in an entirely new position and subjects you to a physical experience in sitting, standing and walking, you have never dreamed you could have before.
This goes on for as many sittings as are necessary and until you walk out of the studio or the operating room during the last lessons feeling like somebody else--like somebody else that has been lent to you to be--somebody else strangely and inextricably familiar that you will be allowed to wear or be or whatever it is for the rest of your life.
Incidentally you are somewhat taller, your whole body is hung on you in a new way, a mile seems a few steps, stairs are like elevators, you find yourself believing ideas you believed were impossible before, liking people you thought were impossible before--even including very conveniently much of the time, yourself. He has changed your mind about your body. You are no longer fooled about what you are actually doing with your subconscious or what it is actually doing with you.
It is not a psychic process ignoring mechanical facts in the mind, nor a purely physical process ignoring the psychic facts in the body. It is a putting of the facts in a man"s mind and the facts in his body inextricably together in his consciousness--as they should be, in that he is no longer letting himself be fooled by his subconsciousness, swings free, and feels able to stop when he is being fooled about himself.
I have been reading over this chapter and all I can say to my readers is, as a subst.i.tute for leaving it out, that I hope it sounds to them like a fairy story. I like to think when I am going on from chapter to chapter in a book--I like to keep thinking of my readers how rational they are.
The principles underlying what Mr. Alexander does with new brain tracks and what I am trying to do can be discussed in this book. The facts can be looked up and are suitable subjects not for books but for affidavits.
VI
REFLECTIONS ON THE STAIRS
It is a not unfamiliar experience for a man to go to a dentist, get into a chair and point to a toothache in the upper right or northeast corner of his mouth and have the dentist tell him that the toothache he thinks he is having there is really in the root of a tooth in the right lower or southwest corner. Then he pulls the southwest corner tooth and the northeast corner toothache is over.
(These figures or rather points of the compa.s.s may not be literally right, but the fact that they point to is.) Nearly every man has had things happen to him not very different from this. You have a bad lameness in your right knee and the wise man you go to, tells you that you are deceived about the real trouble being in your right knee, calls your attention to a place three and a half feet off way up on the other side of you, says you should have a gold filling put in a tooth there and your right knee will get well.
What seems to be true of people is that though in a less glaring and more subtle fashion, there are very few of us who are not subject either all or part of the time to more or less important and quite unmanageable illusions about things with which we are supposed to be--if anybody is--the most intimately acquainted. One keeps hearing every few days almost, lately, of how people"s inner organs are not doing what they think they are, of how very often--even the most important of them have been mislaid--a colon for instance being allowed to do its work three inches lower than it ever ought to be allowed to try, and all manner of other mechanical blunders that are being made, grave mechanical inconveniences which are being daily put up with by people, when they move about or when they lie down, of which they have not the slightest idea.
The sensory impressions of what is really happening to us, of where it is happening and how and why are full--in many people of glaring and not infrequently dangerous illusions, but these physical illusions which we have are reflected automatically in our spiritual and intellectual ones.
All kinds of false ideas people have about one another which we are not seeing about us on every hand, false philosophies and religions, heresy trials, lockouts and strikes--all the irrational things people say and do to each other thousands of miles away are being produced by the way people are being fooled by their own precious insides. Each man is doing things that are unfair and wrong thousands of miles away, because he is off on his facts as to what is going on the first few feet off, because the first hundred and fifty pounds of consciousness which have been a.s.signed to him to know about personally and attend to personally he is letting himself be fooled with every day.
A man who is being fooled near by, regularly all the time, fooled from the sole of his poor tired feet to the poor helpless nib at the top of him which he calls his head, is naturally hard to argue with about the immortality of the soul, or the League of Nations. Reforms and reformers which overlook these facts must not be surprised if they seem to some of us a little superficial.
Of course the moral of all this is--as regards changing society or persuading and convincing persons, get down to first principles. Stop flourishing around with fine and n.o.ble philosophies and phrases on the surface of men"s souls. See that their souls and their bodies are both intricately divinely stupendously blended together and get at them both together. If you are arguing with a man and do not make much headway, stop arguing with him. Cut out his tonsils.
Or it may be something else. Or send him to Alexander and have his back ironed out, if necessary so that his tonsils will work as they are.
Then argue with him afterwards and quote Shakespeare and the Bible to him, stroke his soul and see how it works.
VII
HELPING OTHER PEOPLE UP THE CELLAR STAIRS
It is getting almost dangerous to talk to me. I lay violent hands on people, when they disagree with me and send them to Alexander.
Everybody, anybody, my wife, my pastor, every now and then an editor, whole shoals of publishers.... I think what it would be like for us all, to ship The United States Senate in a body to him. On every side it keeps coming to me that the short, quick and thorough way for me to install my idea, to get my idea started and to install my idea of new brain tracks, new ways for this nation to get its way and deserve its way, is to have people the minute they don"t agree with me, alexandered, at once.
Here is this book for instance. The proper course for me to take to get a man to accept the new brain track in it, is to send him a copy of the book to say yes or no to. Then if he does not agree with me and I am tempted to argue with him, I will drop the matter with him at once, send him to Alexander, have Alexander set him in a chair, tap him on the back, poke him thoughtfully, psycho-mechanically in the ribs, unlimber his mind from his body, untangle him psycho-physically, put him in shape so that he can think free, listen without obsessions and mental automatism--that is, get him so that he can set his mind on a subject instead of setting his stomach on it, and then I will ask him to read my book again.
In the meantime, of course, I should be going to Alexander and rewriting the book.
By the time the gentleman was cured I would have a cured book to send him, we would both be in a position to believe what we don"t want to believe, to listen to each other indefinitely and we would be in a position to do team work together at once and take steps to install new brain tracks for nations immediately.
This brings me to the two horns of my dilemma.
In installing new brain tracks for nations it is not practicable for me to take up people who disagree with me--say a hundred million people or so and ship them to Alexander in London and have them done over by Alexander.
What is the best possible subst.i.tute arrangement that can be made for having a whole nation put into perfect psycho-mechanical shape by Alexander so that it will take the first new brain tracks kindly?
The principles for giving people new brain tracks toward their own bodies which Mr. Alexander has so successfully demonstrated, are the same principles which I have been trying for a long time to express and apply to ideas and to all phases of the personal and the national life.
Where I have been studying for years as an artist, the art of changing my own mind and other people"s about ideas, of working out new spiritual experiences for myself and other people, Alexander in his workroom in London has been engaged in changing people"s minds toward their bodies, in giving men new brain tracks toward their own bodies.
It is obvious that these principles--Alexander"s principles for installing new physical experiences and mine for installing new spiritual ones, must be if they are fundamental or are worth anything, the same.
My own feeling is that if anybody can go to Alexander and can be done over by Alexander personally in London that is the best thing to do. But it is inconvenient for a hundred million people to crowd into Alexander"s office in London, and it is comparatively convenient and roomy for a hundred million people if they want to, to crowd into a book. Before giving the principles, I would like to state the question--What are the steps we all can use--those of us who are not Alexander--to install new brain tracks in this nation?
The principles upon which, as it seems to me, new brain tracks for this nation should be installed and which I would like to deal with are these:
First. Get people first to recognize with regard to new brain tracks, the fact that they do not want them.
Second. Get their attention to what people with new brain tracks seem to be able to do in the way of getting in our present moving world, the things they want. People go to Alexander and ask him for new brain tracks. Something corresponding to this has to be got from people before offering them new brain tracks in a convention or in a book.
Third. Pick out the people next to the people the proposed new brain tracks are for, who seem to be the particular kind of people best calculated to make the necessary excavations in their brains, to loosen up ideas, or any hard gray matter there may be there, so that something can be put in.
The fourth step when we recognize that we want the facts against ourselves and see what we can do with them, is to ask people to let us have them.
VIII
HELPING A NATION UP THE CELLAR STAIRS