THE DEAD LIFT

BY STEWART EDWARD WHITE

I

THERE is at the very beginning a dead lift to all personal achievement. We have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps; and nothing is going to help us. Once we have made even a small start, plenty of forces rush to our aid; but until we have made that small start we can almost imagine them as intelligences waiting to see if we are worth helping. More prosaically, the powers of growth are always ready; but before they can operate we must at least rouse ourselves to prepare a plot and plant a seed. Nobody is going to do that for us.

There is no use in talking about it, the human race is ineradicably conservative by instinct. Even the most convinced of us is very reluctant to set about anything new that implies real exertion. That goes for little things and for big things too. After we have got things nicely settled, we do hate to disturb them. Why do we, as a whole, remain quite calm over the claims and counter-claims as to Relativity, for example; and froth at the mouth and run in circles over the claims of the Spiritists? Simply because we can acknowledge the one without having to do anything about it; but if we admit the other we shall have to take hold and upset and reform our whole scheme of living. In other words, one is no trouble to us; and the other is. You will notice that those people the scientists-to whom Relativity is a trouble raise enough row about it; just as they have in the past raised a row about Darwin's theories, or Pasteur's, or Mesmer's, or Lodge's, and as many others as you please. These people all made trouble for the neatly established; caused it to be remodelled, sometimes torn down and built up again.

Of course we know the fellow who goes singing to his work. Indeed, a good many of us, perhaps most of us, are fond of our work. But when we have arrived at the singing stage, it has

We have been at it for some time.

The

ceased to be new work. period of the first dead lift is past. We have our alliance and are on our way; at least as far as that particular thing is concerned. But bluff we as we may, the most of us are reluctant to tackle anything new; very reluctant. We tear the leaf off the calendar; we sharpen the pencils; we tinker with the typewriter key that really does not require tinkering; we raise or lower the window a trifle; we allow ourselves to be momentarily deflected by welcome trivialities. By the time we have settled down we have given an excellent imitation of an old mallard duck circling his pond almost interminably before alighting; or of a small boy postponing his inevitable plunge into cold water. "It takes us a little time to warm up," say we in extenuation. Perhaps.

Or if we have a serious book we really want to read; or a particularly long letter we must write, we shy off from it as long as we decently can. We do so even though we know we are going to enjoy it when once we get into it. Some of us, with consciences, or with a humorous appreciation of ourselves, overcome this instantly and plunge in. A whole lot of us stand shivering on the bank so long that we never do go in at all. We return the serious and overdue book to its owner with a few vague generalizations which we hope may get by; and we never write the letter at all. Those of us who do go at it promptly, do so not from any inner and spiritual grace that exempts us from this universal human characteristic, but because long experience has taught us that “eventually, why not now?" is a sound motto. I remember a notoriously lie-abed man unexpectedly agreeing without argument to get up at four o'clock in the morning for some purpose or other. Somebody expressed surprise at the readiness of his acquiescence.

“Oh, I'd just as soon get up at four as at eight," said he. “I hate just as much to get up at eight as at four; there's no difference!"

II

This fundamental laziness demands a definite small effort in the overcoming, even in the trivial matters of everyday life. It becomes a sweating dead lift when we address ourselves to any

thing of major importance, especially if it is something new, and a little strange to us, and outside our usual channels of thought and activity. But there is no sense in worrying about it, or lashing our consciences with it, or depreciating or despising ourselves as worthless lazy creatures. We are lazy because we are creatures, but that does not make us worthless. Let us acknowledge that all creatures are naturally lazy, and let it go at that. The point is, are we grown up enough to admit the fact; and to make the dead lift? It is failing to make the dead lift that constitutes the worthlessness.

Being lazy is the natural state of physical being. We are lazy because we insist on identifiying ourselves too completely with our physical sides. We talk of the physical self as Me instead of Mine. We say that I am sick, instead of that a thing belonging to me called my stomach is sick. We do not, however, remark that I am out of order, when the motor car develops a knock. As a matter of fact, I am not sick at all; unless I believe what my stomach clamorously informs me. Darwin possessed a most cantankerously ailing body, but there are very few evidences that he was ever personally ill.

For, and here is the important point, the physical body has a very definite zone of action of its own; just as definite a zone of action as quicksand, or social life, or another personality, or the conventional world at large, or any of the other things we have been talking about. Within that zone of action it is very powerful; and anything that comes within its periphery, unless insulated, must be affected. In that aspect it differs in no wise from any other thing or force. The only difference is that while we can, if we wish to do so and think it wise, avoid many of the zones of action of these other things, we can in no manner avoid that of our physical bodies. Indeed, we leave it so rarely that we have, as we have seen, come to identify it with ourselves.

And strangely enough, though we may appreciate the necessity of insulating ourselves against other people and other things; though we may come to an understanding of these other zones of action and how to fortify ourselves against them, it never occurs to us that it might be advisable to insulate also against this one. Or only vaguely; and without system or understanding.

For it is a curious thing how much we will stand from this bodyindividual of ours that we would not stand from anybody else in the world. No matter how reprehensibly jelly-fishy or mushy we are in character, there are limits to what we will stand in the way of complaints or demands or boredom. The worm will turn at last. But this body thing of ours seems to be an especially privileged character. It is a spoiled child. We turn the whole spotlight of our minds on it whenever it is pleased to demand our attention. What is the result? What is the result in the case of any other spoiled child? Instantly it takes to itself altogether too much importance. It is no longer merely one of the lesser occupants of the room wherein grown-ups hold converse on grave matters of importance: it makes itself the center, and everybody has to stop talking to listen more or less politely to its babbling, and must forego doing things in deference to the limitations of its intelligence and the length of its legs. And the more attention we give to it, the more attention it demands. When it has exhausted legitimate means, it invents things to call to our notice, it exaggerates them, and insists upon them; it imposes a supersignificance upon its own small affairs; it tries-and to a great extent succeeds-to regulate the whole conduct of life according to its own standards. Like other spoiled children, it ends by thinking it is the whole family; and it comes near to making us think so, too.

We can, at a pinch, send the real spoiled child to the nursery; or flee its presence at a pace it cannot emulate; or even, if we are desperate enough and our moral natures have been sufficiently shattered, murder it. But we have to live with that other spoiled child of the body. It has that one great advantage. Furthermore, our situation is complicated by the fact that at the very first, when we were babies, and for a considerable time thereafter, it was the whole family. We were the body. To all practical intents and purposes, and for a long time, the child is its body or the body is the child. Its necessities and its demands are paramount to all others. We had first of all to be assured of physical existence before we could go on to any other. And the body will not let us forget that fact. Only very reluctantly does it relinquish its dominance. Why not? That is nature. In a manner

of speaking, primary development might be considered the emergence of self, the ego, from purely physical dominance.

The

Now any emergence from dominance implies a conflict. thing getting out from under is struggling to do so: the thing dominating naturally wants to hold its job. There is an objection, a resistance. The spoiled child's natural instinct is to continue to be the whole show if possible: and when he finds people turning their attention elsewhere, he will kick and howl and generally make himself disagreeable in order to draw notice back to himself. He will continue to impose his own ideas and ideals just as long as he can.

III

The merely physical ideas and ideals are very worthy ones, but they are limited in scope. They have chiefly to do with being fed and warmed. Beyond that they want to be comfortable. If we remain within their zone of action, and permit ourselves to be wholly influenced by it, we are living within very narrow limits. All we—as well as our body-will want then, will be to eat and sleep and to get just enough exercise to keep our functions going. The various lower forms of life exhibit this ideal most gracefully and completely. That is the sort of thing the body is.

But as we move up into the higher forms of life, we find even though only in embryo-an expanding, outreaching quality which we call ambition. The animal moves about much more than the plant because he has certain incentives which are lacking in the plant. The plant is getting along all right, but the animal wants to get along a trifle better, and he is willing to do a little migrating and experimenting.

Sometimes he experiments rather uncomfortably, undergoing hardships in the following of this instinct to be better fed and warmer and more secure. At the body's immediate expense he undertakes new things. It must of course be pointed out that these very incentives are most often imposed by the body's make-up. He is warmer blooded than the plant, and his food often moves about or varies in abundance; but the incentive is real for all that. The manner of its imposition is relatively unimportant. Now our ambitions or incentives are of