Chapter I

To introduce my puppets, and the Wild Body, the generic puppet of all, I must look back to a time when the antics and solemn gambols of these wild children filled me with triumph.

The fascinating imbecility of the creaking men-machines, some little restaurant or fishing-boat works, is the subject of these studies. The boat’s tackle and dirty little shell keeps their limbs in a monotonous rhythm of activity. A man gets drunk with his boat as he would with a merry-go-round. Only it is the staid, everyday drunkenness of the normal real. We can all see the ascendance a “carrousel” has on men, driving them into a set narrow intoxication. The wheel at Carisbrooke imposes a set of movements on the donkey inside it, in drawing water from the well, that it is easy to grasp. But in the case of a fishing-boat the variety is so great, the scheme so complex, that it passes as open and untrammeled life. This subtle and wider mechanism merges, for the spectator, in the general variety of Nature. Yet we have in most lives a spectacle as complete as a problem of Euclid.

Moran, Bestre and Brobdingnag are essays in a new human mathematic. But they are each simple shapes, little monuments of logic. I should like to compile a book of forty of these propositions, one deriving from and depending on the other.

These intricately moving bobbins are all subject to a set of objects or one in particular. Brobdingnag is fascinated by one object, for instance; one at once another vitality. He bangs up against it wildly at regular intervals, blackens it, contemplates it, moves round it and dreams. All such fascination is religious. Moran’s damp napkins are the altar-cloths of his rough illusion. Julie’s bruises are the markings on an idol.

These studies of rather primitive people are studies in a Savage worship and attraction. Moran rolls between his tables ten million times in a realistic rhythm that is as intense and superstitious as the figures of a war-dance. He worships his soup, his damp napkins, the lump of flesh that rolls everywhere with him called Madam Moran.

All religion has the mechanism of the celestial bodies, has a dance. When we wish to renew our idols, or break up the rhythm of our naivety, the effort postulates a respect which is the summit of devoutness.