Chapter 4
The Phantom Captain
2‘‘What is that, mother?’’
3 ‘‘It’s a man, darling.’’
4 ‘‘What’s a man?’’
5 Man?
6 A self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped; an electrochemical reduction-plant, integral with segregated stowages of special energy extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent actuation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps, with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries; millions of warning signal, railroad and conveyor systems; crushers and cranes (of which the arms are magnificent 23-jointed affairs with self-surfacing and lubricating systems, and a universally distributed telephone system needing no service for 70 years if well managed); the whole, extraordinarily complex mechanism guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range finders, a spectroscope, et cetera, the turret control being closely allied with an air conditioning intake-and-exhaust, and a main fuel intake.
7 Within the few cubic inches housing the turret mechanisms, there is room, also, for two sound-wave and sound-direction-finder recording diaphragms, a filing and instant reference system, and an expertly devised analytical laboratory large enough not only to contain minute records of every last and continual event of up to 70 years’ experience, or more, but to extend, by computation and abstract fabrication, this experience with relative accuracy into all corners of the observed universe. There is, also, a forecasting and tactical plotting department for the reduction of future possibilities and probabilities to generally successful specific choice.
8 Finally, the whole structure is not only directly and simply mobile on land and in water, but, indirectly and by exquisite precision of complexity, mobile in air, and, even in the intangible, mathematically sensed electrical ‘‘world,’’ by means of the extension of the primary integral mechanism to secondary mechanical compositions of its own devising, operable either by a direct mechanical hook-up with the device, or by indirect control through wired or wire-less electrical impulses.
9 ‘‘A man,’’ indeed! Dismissed with the appellation Mr. ‘‘Jones’’!
10 Common to all such ‘‘human’’ mechanisms—and without which they are imbecile contraptions—is their guidance by a phantom captain.
11 This phantom captain has neither weight nor sensorial tangibility, as has often been scientifically proven by careful weighing operations at the moment of abandonment of the ship by the phantom captain, i.e., at the instant of ‘‘death.’’ He may be likened to the variant of polarity dominance in our bipolar electric world which, when balanced and unit, vanishes as abstract unity I or O. With the phantom captains departure, the mechanism becomes inoperative and very quickly disintegrates into basic chemical elements.
12 This captain has not only an infinite self-identity characteristic but, also, an infinite understanding. He has, furthermore, infinite sympathy with all captains of mechanisms similar to his.
13 What is this UNDERSTANDING? It consists in an intuitive, non-graphable awareness of perfection, or of unity, or of eternity, or of infinity, or of truth. This awareness of perfection serves as a universal yardstick relative to which any sense experience may be measured, and by virtue of which CONSCIOUS SELECTION may be made.
14 (‘‘This is a better pair of shoes.’’ How does one know? Because it the more closely approximates a ‘‘perfect’’ pair—the ‘‘perfect’’ pair that will never hurt, wear out, become dirty, or have weight. ‘‘Perfect,’’ though impossible of demonstration, is nonetheless the criterion of selection. ‘‘Perfect’’ is not only a direction, but a time direction, ‘‘perfection’’ being never in ‘‘reality’’ attainable. There is herein to be discerned the meaning of Never, Never Land. Children dream truly.)
15 By the process of conscious selection relative to sense of perfect, the segregation of such phenomena as sounds has developed, followed by the selective recomposition of the segregated sounds into specific sound-continuities, or ‘‘words’’ (sound symbols) provocative of basic understanding in others, adequate for the moment. No matter how relatively imperfect the articulation, or the receiver-conception, there is nonetheless some characteristic of ‘‘uniformity,’’ though not of ‘‘identity,’’ of understanding between sender and receiver. For instance, the word ‘‘cow,’’ (‘‘black-white,’’ ‘‘daisy’’ or ‘‘bossy’’ are inconsequential) conveys the concept of a mechanical process which is substantially understood as a composite ‘‘cow’’—the milk factory. Each phantom captain for himself, however, associates ‘‘cow’’ with the most vividly impressive cow of his particular experience, the speakers a Jersey, the listeners a Guernsey.
16 This infinite communicating code, based on processes and continuities and not on static fixation identities, enables the phantom captain to signal, via the complicated visual, aural and oral, tactile and olfactory systems of his machine, to captains of other machines, who receive the message through complementary mechanical systems of reception. The success of the transmission depends upon the relative degree of communicated understanding, i.e., upon how ‘‘time’’-rationalizing vs. statically-reflexing the receiving captain maybe.
17 Curiously, each captain is so impressed by the command of such an elaborate mechanism and one so excellently attuned to operation that it readily yields to his un-self-conscious guidance of its processes and instruments, that he feels himself thrillingly and virtually a part of it. Only when the parts are abused is there awareness of a seemingly separate presence of parts; for instance, when the tongue has been bitten or burned its motions are painful whereas normally it wags merrily, carelessly and unnoted.
18 Inevitably, the captain’s habitual association of his infinite self with his subconsciously subservient mechanisms has inclined him to a dual ‘‘presumption’’: (1) that this mechanism is an ACTUAL (by extension) part of his phantom self, whereas it is purely an electro-chemical combination of inanimate energy molecules that are intrinsically the ship the phantom captain commands, and (2) an attitude of ownership: the mechanism of ordination for his will is ‘‘his’’ permanent ‘‘possession,’’ whereas in reality it is only temporarily in his custody. This illusion of ‘‘possession’’ of the mechanism has been further extended, through accustomed relationship, to include ‘‘possession’’ of ones clothes, pencils, house in general, land, friends, wife and children, business, state, nation, world, and, finally, ‘‘God’’—the last named quite naturally being ‘‘pictured’’ in the exclusively original form of his ‘‘own’’ egotistically important, special mechanistic and chemical process arrangement.
19 As the ‘‘possessor’’ of all of his extensions, the phantom captain automatically evolves a myriad of illusory necessities for which he assumes a vain, egotistical responsibility. This false-possession and always innocuous myth (which is consumptive of the complete lifetime, from four years onward, of the vast majority of people) stone-blinds the possessor to the simple, delightful truth-trends that are everywhere and at all times about us. For unspoilt children and happily debunked, emancipated grown-ups, these trends make life’s courses as evident as a highway through a meadow. Ironically, the non-possession-blinded person’s citation of evident trends has always been fearfully hailed as witchcraft, mysticism and quackery by the still mystified, self-be-quackeried majority.
20 The phantom captain is but mildly shaken in his preoccupation, or possession obsession, by the intermittent necessity of replacement of ‘‘his’’ parts, or by the dissection from, or application to, his mechanism by other phantom-captained mechanisms of such service parts as crude gold inlays inserted in ‘‘his’’ raw fuel crushers, additional lenses or color-filters for ‘‘his’’ rangefinders, or an enema bag douching nozzle temporarily passed into ‘‘his’’ clogged canal. The inlay or the douche bag is, temporarily at least, as factually connected to self as a toe nail, tooth, hair, or eyeball.
21 This continual arrogation of ‘‘his’’ mechanisms is closely allied with the captain’s habitual assumption that all objects are ‘‘seen’’ at locations outside the phantom captain’s mechanism, whereas actually the captain ‘‘sees’’ them inside his turret through his peritelescopic range finders. A long history of mechanical reliability—attested by frequent accurate measurements of the deduced range of, and direction to, an object’s external location with the ability to move a crane grappler into an assumed location so that contact with the discovered object is provided, and further attested by the receipt in the turret of affirmative telephone reports, from several of the myriad contact alarms in the crane grappler—seems to justify the captain’s habit of thinking ‘‘I SEE IT OVER THERE.’’
22 The phantom captain’s habitual notion not only that he is part of ‘‘his’’ mechanisms but that the mechanisms are himself, is extended still further. He frequently confuses the surface characteristics of other ‘‘observed’’ mechanisms, similar to those he controls, with the identities of the phantom captains controlling them. Forgetting the true, infinite phantom character of the other captains, he ‘‘logically’’ evolves two additional illusions: One of these is that the commanded mechanism of the other captain is all that there is to that other phantom captain; the other is that the surface is all there is to that mechanism. In other words, he assumes that the tangible surface of the ‘‘other’’ ‘‘person’’ is that person’s phantom captain, and that this surface alone is ‘‘reality.’’ (This is the ‘‘reality’’ of the ‘‘practical’’ minded or materialism-dominated personality.) So he customarily interprets the behavior characteristics of the whole of another’s mechanism by surface clues only; there has actually developed a language in terms of surface reflexing.
23 To illustrate: If Mr. and Mrs. Murphy, out for a walk with baby Tim, were to see a plane flying overhead, they might readily exclaim to ‘‘darling,’’ ‘‘See that aviator!’’ They might easily be wrong. Planes are being ably controlled by radio without a human pilot on board.
24 An illuminating rationalization indicates that captains—being phantom, abstract, infinite, and bound to other captains by a bond of understanding as proven by their recognition of each other’s signals and the meaning thereof by reference to a common direction (toward ‘‘perfect’’)—are not only all related, but are one and the same captain. Mathematically, since characteristics of unity exist, they cannot be non-identical.
25 The phantom captain’s executive officer, yclept ‘‘brain,’’ is a mechanistic device similar to the metal ‘‘mike’’ of the Sperry gyroscope, whose gyroscopic directional-insistence, useful though it is while the captain is absent from the bridge is nonetheless provocative, if unwatched, of habit grooves of motion.
26 When the complexity of the metal ‘‘mike’’ currently used in aeroplanes and aboard ship in hands-off navigation is compared with that of the ‘‘mike’’ or ‘‘brain’’ of the human phantom-captained mechanism, it is as though one contrasted an Ingersoll watch and a battleship, in the matter of number of parts and precision of operation, except that the human ‘‘mike’’ is as small in relation to the metal ‘‘mike’’ as are the new complex seven-element, glass-lined metal radio tubes ‘‘small’’ in relation to their crude, large three-element forerunners.
27 The ‘‘mike’’ of the human ship may be ‘‘set’’ by the phantom captain to detect the slightest lack of balance, not only in every one of the ship’s external relationships but in all of its interior synchronizing mechanisms. So many settings does ‘‘mike’’ carry, at most times, that he seems ALIVE, and he is so satisfactory to the captain that the latter flies the human ship ‘‘hands-off’’ much of the time. This possibility of hands-off flying encourages the phantom captain to regard the ‘‘mikes’’ of other phantom captains, also, as almost alive—that is, animate rather than animated.
28 Such a mistaken assumption of surface clues for reality must inevitably lead to a myriad of misunderstandings and erroneous conclusions, into ‘‘blind alleys’’ and ‘‘dead end’’ streets. This is just what happens when (rationalization of an illusion being ipso facto impossible and illusion being no further extensible, on the occasion of ‘‘death’’ or the abandonment of a mechanism) those ‘‘individuals’’ whose captains are still at their posts and who are still confusing themselves with the mechanism they are directing, ceremoniously ‘‘bury’’ the abandoned, now disintegrating mechanism under the impression that it is the captain whom they ‘‘honor.’’ They might as well bury the can opener that ‘‘he’’ customarily used and which he regarded as ‘‘his.’’ Indeed, it would honor the phantom captain more to bury his can opener, since it is a device rationally objectivized by him and is, therefore, more directly creditable to him than the involuntary custody and management of the unit mechanism he had under ‘‘his’’ control. The cans he opened might, also, be honored by burial in dirt.
29 There are two main types of phantom-captained mechanisms, differing only in their machinery for the reproduction of miniature replicas of themselves (a manufacturing process). The union of these complementary types, or ‘‘plants,’’ allows the electro-chemical processing of raw materials into infinitely elaborate, replica structures and instrument ensembles.
30 There are, of course, innumerable subtypes of the male and female main types, varying widely in external color, size, smeh and textural characteristics. In fact, no two are physically identical, although they are miraculously uniform from a mechanical, chemical, structural, and process characteristic viewpoint, even to the maintenance of an identical thermal characteristic which, when the machine is in proper running order, is 98.60 E under most highly diversified exterior environment conditions.
31 When one of the phantom captains seeks a mechanism of the complementary type to join with his in the manufacture of an improved model replica of their mutual custody mechanisms, he misinterprets his un-self-conscious appraisal of the adequacy of the observed complement to his ‘‘own’’ half-plant as constituting suitable hook-up conditions in the terms of superficial or sensorial- surface-satisfactions. The result is often the peculiarly amusing selective sound-wave emission, through the major exit-entrance aperture of the turret, ‘‘BEAUTIFUL!’’
32 Phantom captains have fallen into such a careless mythology of surface words and nicknames, to excuse slothfulness in telegraphing accurately the observed external phenomena to the turret laboratories, that, although Murphys phantom captain meant by ‘‘beautiful’’ that he had noted in Julia a mechanism that was highly uniform, i.e., not deformed, and, therefore, so far as he was concerned one that was favorable for plant hook-up, he probably further elaborated inaccurately and meaninglessly, ‘‘Julia is the MOST BEAUTIFUL girl in the world!’’ (The writer does not mean to infer that he does not say ‘‘beautiful,’’ and believes that he means it, over and over again.) Murphy also probably would say, ‘‘My Julia is a PEARL!’’ and send her a ‘‘rose,’’ the latter being a broken-off portion of another highly intricate, phantom-captained mechanism, but of so relatively wide non-identity with the ‘‘Julia’’ mechanism as to allow of its becoming a ‘‘living’’ sacrifice on the altar of the Julia manufacturing plant worship.
33 Had Murphy failed at first to convince Julia of favorable conditions for plant hook-up, through surface clues observable by her, he would not have ceased his campaign. No, he would have sought to impose on Julia an illusion of satisfactory surface clues, by altering his surface conditions—such as adding to the size of his turret with a new ‘‘fedora,’’ or subtracting from its size by cutting off part of his hair—just as Julia, were the situation reversed, would have ‘‘dressed ship’’ in velvet ‘‘washed down’’ with attar of roses.
34 It has been but a step from false adornment and artificial surface extensions of the human body, in the matter of clothing, to shelter; and from shelter to the myriad of tools and instruments that were rationally evolved at an earlier time by the phantom captain in the extension of his own mechanism. The tools were born of the necessity to perform a specific function either with greater precision or with greater leverage than could be effected by the integral mechanism of the primary machine,—a tooth-pick, for instance, is better than a fingernail for tooth-picking and is more expeditiously replaceable.
35 The Murphys are not content, as their ‘‘wealth’’ (mechanical extensions) increases, with simple tooth-picks. Unless completely bereft of ‘‘hook-up’’ potentials, they will probably go in for gold toothpicks, even gold filigreed tooth-picks, ‘‘individualistic’’ tooth-picks; embroidered roofs and arches; tattooed everythings.
36 So pleased are human beings by the artifices with which they constantly attain self-satisfaction, despite bad hook-up conditions, that they experience a constant urge to evolve codes of morals, ethics and laws for the purpose of making permanent the conditions of self-satisfaction that they have attained by artificiality. Out of these morals, ethics, artifices and vanities have been evolved so many ‘‘mike’’ sayings or brainistic words, that, although they are utterly meaningless from the viewpoint of the true phantom captain, they constitute 99% of today’s broadcast, printed and person-to-person communication.
37 The artificial illusion extensions provided by the momentum of the gyroscopic ‘‘mike’’ display a wide range in various races variously located. For instance, when Doctor Jung, able student of psychology, made an extensive visit to Africa for the purpose of carrying on basic psychologic studies, he discovered that the primitive people there demonstrated a most interesting seemingly factual illusion extension from their simple experience memory storage. What had been regarded as purely ghost or demon fabrications, inherited through mythical tradition, proved to be none other than vivid memory concepts. When a leader or a parent died, the people had such simple, clear, visual memory pictures of the deceased that they were able satisfactorily to objectivize him as though still in bodily presence. In other words, they simply reversed our particular civilization’s assumption that we SEE objects at a point EXTERNAL to our self-mechanism, although, in fact, the seeing is done, not even in the eye but in the brain or reception end of the nervous system that records the exterior light reflections.
38 Jung found, also, that African primitives, in common with others throughout the world, have such a simple cosmic problem that they have only two categories of numbers, viz, ‘‘one’’ or ‘‘many.’’ Because they ‘‘SEE’’ either ‘‘one’’ or ‘‘many,’’ they have evolved fabulous legendary stories. They recognize that one stranger may be readily matched in physical combat, whereas two or more may be overpowering. So two or three or more strangers are ‘‘seen’’ as hordes, the fear instinct warning the beholder of the risk of being overcome. Combining this ‘‘seeing’’ of either ‘‘one’’ or ‘‘many’’ with the extension of a SEEN factual memory form of a father or leader calls forth the illusion of the close proximity of multitudes of fathers, leaders, demons, et cetera.
39 There is, also, a tracery of the simple number sense limitation in certain old cultures. In Chinese, for example, one carriage is a carriage, many carriages are ‘‘noise.’’ The Chinese symbol of ‘‘tree’’ is one tree; ‘‘two trees’’ equals ‘‘woods,’’ and ‘‘three trees’’ constitute a ‘‘forest’’—one, few, many.
40 Jung had the strange experience of noticing that, while he was endeavoring to understand primitive illusions, his own particular modern civilization’s illusion broke down to such an extent that he, too, began to ‘‘see’’ partially in terms of the primitive illusion and partially in his own earlier illusion, with the result that he seemed to himself almost to be crazy, for there was no reliability in any illusion.
41 In connection with the phantom captain’s illusion that the mechanisms of his survival are an intrinsic part of his abstract self, it is to be noted that every physical extension has been a matter of survival adequacy in the phantom captain’s command of specific animal and vegetable species. It might almost be said that a new ‘‘type’’ of human animal has developed in the United States and that this type is byway of being an advance demonstration of a world-wide type, inasmuch as the evidences are all in terms of scientific world trends. When a sufficient number of members of a species has become characterized by relatively identical extensions, these extensions may properly be called part and parcel of the ‘‘being’’-entity of that species.
42 If we will admit that a section of Julias hair is just as much Julias hair after it is cut off as it was when on her head—and it certainly is as much Julia as is the name ‘‘Julia,’’ which is a most arbitrary appendage—we must admit, also, that if Julia’s cut-off hair were woven into a fabric and worn on her head in the form of a hat, everything in the ensemble would still be ‘‘Julia.’’ This would apply equally to any other hat that Julia might don or to the pigment which, for improved hook-up allure, she might apply to her lips and cheeks. Everything that Julia uses in her sometimes by-seeming selection, and again by-inadvertence choice, is ‘‘Julia.’’
43 The phantom captain of the butterfly has a great variety of mechanical externals for survival, but the apparently different stages of moth-caterpillar-chrysalis-butterfly in no way alter the identity of the phantom captain, which persists as unity throughout. Similarly, at sea, the various ships that Captain ‘‘Smith’’ commands are known to his contemporary skippers simply as ‘‘Smith.’’ As Smith’s ship, the Mary, appears on the horizon they exclaim, ‘‘Here comes Smith!’’ Smith may change commands but the other skippers will continue to say, ‘‘Here comes Smith!’’ whenever they recognize the externals of the ship he happens currently to be commanding.
44 In the United States passenger automobiles number approximately one per family, and the head of the family is usually the driver thereof. So accelerated are the time-space characteristics of the auto in comparison to the time-space covering ability of the man on legs that every reflex characteristic of the phantom captain of the driver is amplified in direct proportion to the time-space differential between the car’s and the unmounted driver’s tactical maneuvering ability. People who are not recognized as nervous or physically unbalanced while walking and talking are often seen to be distinctly so in their operation of an automobile. The traffic manners and ethics of people while driving reveal their character as a whole far more readily than would their cultivated mannerisms and behavior while walking.
45 Holding the full significance of this thought in mind, one can suddenly comprehend, while driving along a heavy traffic artery, that the automobiles seen are extensions of their drivers, just as are the ‘‘drivers’ ’’ hats, coats, shoes and faces; it is the progression of boxes within boxes of childhood play. Accepting this rationalization of man’s unity extending into his automobile, it may be said that the average young working American man now weighs better than a ton, since the average automobile weighs 2800 lbs., and that the composite American extensible into his group mechanisms (aeroplane, railroad train, the Normandie, and Boulder Dam) is larger by millions of times than any historical animate organism. It is quite possible that Lewis Carroll was writing the poetry of this concept in Alice Through the Looking Glass.[CT95]
46 There is another interesting phase of the phantom captain phenomenon. There is to be distinguished in the current era—as differentiated from the early crafts period of individual survival without the aid of mechanical extensions—a set of mechanisms, such as the power dynamo in the city, mutually commanded by phantom captains. When either Julia or Murph’ pushes a certain button, the act serves to bring about a mechanical extension of the visual ability of both, although ‘‘seeing,’’ let us remember, occurs within the turret and not externally to the mechanism of the phantom captain. This introduces an extraordinary rationalization, namely: Industrial mechanisms so gargantuan as to be without warrant as an extension of any one person are justifiable as extensions of multitudes of persons, proving to mathematical satisfaction that all people, of a species characterized by participation in the use of such mutual extension mechanisms, are one and the same person at the time of such utilization.
47 This conception of the phantom captain leads to a viewpoint quite the opposite of the ‘‘mechanistic’’ bogey so fearfully heralded and decried in recent years because of an apprehension that the man-created machine will overpower man somewhat as would a Frankenstein monster.
48 The thrilling inference of the phantom captaincy conception is that it not only precludes the possibility of the operation of extended machinery without the volition of inner man, but that the unit mechanisms are doing for man what politics has consistently failed to accomplish.
49 Industrial man, being unit, can only be effective in the direction of his own best survival interest.