VOLUME III, SEMESTER 4, PART I
The Foundation of the Whole Picture
This semester has one thing to do: to join the four things three semesters took apart into one picture. But before the joining, the foundation must be laid full. These three chapters, nine sections, do just this one thing: they stand one word firm, and that word is at once. Whether the four really run at once—if this layer does not stand, then the coexistence, the common growth, the common dwelling, the common sharing, the check and balance, the upper storey, the soil, all the ten chapters to come speak of, are empty words.
This book does not start from a definition; it starts from a picture. The first chapter walks into a shop that makes chairs on the edge of town, and looks at one of its mornings. Half past six the cutting hand comes, seven o’clock twenty-odd people come through the door, ten million of flow across a year runs out grid by grid. What is to be seen is not that account; it is that the rules measuring that account are more than one. Four million in wages, that is the rule measuring what is put in. The three months the woman on the line rests for her child, the sum for the old hand laid up in hospital, the pension reaching the retired worker by the month, that is the rule measuring what is needed. The man who lies down at night still running next month’s numbers, that is the rule measuring risk. And if there is a three-year contract forbidding a man to go elsewhere, a debt that comes down the moment he lifts his foot, that is the shadow of the wall. Four things, one day, one room, one account.
Having stood firm that the four are all there, the first chapter unties a knot: the queue heard from childhood—first a slave society, then feudal, then capitalist, then socialist and communist, one taking the place of the next. This book does not rub that line out; it owns first the real thing in it. Change is real: slavery turned from the open face to the dark, need spread from one house and clan to a city and a country. But it asks one thing: on that line, what is it that moves? What moves is the proportion and the form, not the being or not being. The one step too many is reading before-and-after as taking-the-place-of. Cross that step, and a time label gets pasted on each, backward at the front and advanced at the back, and slavery is taken to belong to the past and to vanish of itself, and a ranking of seats gets set. Walk back to the era of the Salt and Iron quarrel and look close, and forced service, wage, stake, and relief are all four present. The first chapter sets its third layer last: the four rules measure four different things—what is put in, what is needed, risk, the forced hand. Swap their positions about, take the wage sheet to a three-month baby, take the rule of need to those who put out strength, take the rule of risk to the seeing of a doctor, four wrong fits and four costs.
The second chapter pushes the lens from the shop to one person, for the line four running at once, landing on a society, is still far. It walks a day with a thirty-eight-year-old. Before light at his mother’s bed, boiling gruel, setting out medicine. Half past eight under the appraisal sheet, the one who takes the constraint. Half past ten writing the appraisal of three subordinates, the one who lays it. The tenth of each month a mortgage pinning him. And the housing fund he pays, in the market raising another’s shop. Four things, one person, one day. Then it goes to look at the man who looks the freest, and counts five ropes on him: the timber, the client, the bank, the old hand of nineteen years, the order and the law. These five no one designed; they grew out of the position itself: want one thing and take one constraint. The first semester’s line takes force a second time: the slave-master is a slave too; the higher the position, the more the constraint. And the second chapter sets straight the line most easily read crooked: position is not identity. Read it as identity and two ills come—one hating men, curse one down and put another up and those five ropes are still five; one bowing to fate, taking a position that can be changed for a fate that cannot.
The third chapter pulls the rule out longer, not a day but a life. The first three years the yield is zero and no one reckons the account. A dozen years of school, a society keeping a batch who make nothing and not pressing them once. The last stretch, the pension not the sum he saved young but the sum paid in now by the batch at work now, one generation holding up the next. The two ends together near half a life. The middle thirty and forty years labor keeps the house, one person holding up three ends that press down in one and the same month. And the hardest place, the gaps dropped in the middle of a sudden, the forty-year-old weaver whose cloth of a sudden no one buys, caught by three hands—the family, the society, the market—and the measure: to catch is not to hold in the arms.
The stance of this book is the stance of the three books to come. Wherever a thing is spoken of, set the position first, pass no judgment. The four rules have no ranking of seats. Need is not to be lifted quietly to the highest, the last, the best, and capital is not to be called a needed evil, and slavery is not to be called a born wickedness. This book does not hand the reader a ready finding; it hands him first an eye: walk up close and look, look down into what is under it, and what you see is a position, not good or evil. With the foundation of these nine sections in hand, the three books to come speak of how the four dwell together, how they push up an upper storey, and on what soil they grow, and at every place the reader can tell at a glance which layer of this foundation the thing lands on.
PART ONE CONTENTS
Chapter Forty, Four Elements, Not Four Stages
Chapter Forty-One, Four Things Living at Once in One Person’s Day
Chapter Forty-Two, Four Things Holding Up One Person’s Whole Life
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.