ROBERT GRAVES: Genius (From: "Difficult Questions, Easy Answers"

This is an embarrassing subject. Genius is so irregular, disputed and uncontrolled a phenomenon that writing about it is as difficult as discussing unidentified flying objects. To have seen a U.F.O. oneself does not make the task any easier, especially if it has landed in one's own garden and little green men with antennae have emerged. But at least geniuses silently recognize one another by the very way that they come into a room and sit down. 

The word genius in its modern sense first appeared in eighteenth-century England. This was presently exported to Germany, there blown up romantically and re-imported to England in the nineteenth century. It implied an incommunicable power of inventive thought found among a few, very unusual people who somehow did not depend on academic education for their discoveries or performances. Fielding first used the word so in his Tom Jones (1749): 'By the wonderful force of genius only, without the least assistance of learning. . . .' Genius in this sense is now contrasted with mere talent, which means the intelligent exploitation of discoveries made by genius.

Not long ago I overheard a group of American professors wondering about the small Greek State of fifth century B.C. Athens. It seemed impossible, they agreed, that an equal percentage of historically important figures could appear today in any part of the United States despite the recent massive increase of educational. facilities. But why? they wondered. One of them hopefully suggested that the title 'genius' is too grudgingly awarded nowadays; so that most of the numerous first class physicists working in the States, whose technical know-how would have staggered Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Alcibiades, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Anaxagoras, Zeno and all the other Athenian geniuses, are denied the title. But these professors seemed to me to be confusing historical importance with scientific talent, and scientific talent with the unfathomably original way of thought now associated with genius. For example Franklin, Watt, Marconi and Edison were men of unusual scientific talent, and attained considerable historical fame; whereas Clerk Maxwell, Rowan Hamilton, Thompson (of the genes) and Rutherford, whose work displayed all the signs of genius, remain almost unknown to the general public. Periclean Athens, of course, fascinates modern Americans. Pericles first democratized Athens by breaking the power of the ancient religious aristocracy and glorified his own name by an expansion of the Athenian fleet and colonial empire; also by fostering academic art, industry and commerce. 

Yet I associate genius with the Athens of Pericles largely in a negative sense. His mercilessly dictatorial government, however neatly disguised as democracy, implied the exploitation of a large, industrious slave class and the deliberate rejection of ancient religious myths which had hitherto guided the social conscience, in favour of an over-simplified political logic. He made Athens a loveless city of agnostics, famed for its prestige architecture, statuary and philosophy, and sadly lacking in political honour.

Plato, who was born two years before Pericles's death, proved himself a notorious enemy of genius by barring poets from his ideal republic: I suppose it was because poetry at its most intense and memorable transcends logic that he dismissed it as 'madness'. Even today the dead hand of Plato compels students to think logically; and as more and more universities are losing their independence through being financed by the State or business corporations, the more and more logical does the educational system become. This illiberal trend explains the marked decline in native American genius since the turn of the century; for Platonists hold that nothing which cannot be logically proved is true, and this includes genius.

The original sense of genius was a far simpler mystery to accept and handle than the present one. The word genius is not Greek but Latin. Other Latin words of the same formation are progenitor, generate, engender and genitals. But genius had a spiritual rather than a physical sense and implied the primitive creative power with which a man is born and which accompanies him throughout life as his highest spiritual self, his protector, his oracle. A Roman who behaved evilly or foolishly was said to have 'defrauded his genius'. Genius was his primitive male dignity, his sense of love, and his power of instinctive thought, the preservation of which was his constant duty. Because such genius was considered noble and inspiring, the adjective generous, which in Latin implied a family tradition of honourable dealing, was formed from it. A similar formation was genial, which implied the incessant and comforting radiations of genius on a man's equals and subordinates. Still another formation was genuine, meaning the authenticity of this power. Horatius's inspired defence of the Tiber bridge against the whole Etruscan army was quoted as a typical example of personal genius. The Greeks, however, rejected this concept by philosophically opposing the good genius with an evil one. The imported Greek notion of opposing demons fighting for the possession of a man's soul weakened the Roman's simple confidence in a mystic power which took possession of him in times of crisis. 

What we now call 'genius' cannot be wholly separated from its original Roman sense, even though the structure of modern society has become hostile to it. In a pluto-democracy such as the United States the government provides compulsory education of a logical, secular and wholly impersonal sort; all professors from the College Principal down have their knives into any student who cannot conceal his individualism; they are required to diagnose either a criminal tendency or mental ill-health.

Scientists have tended since the days of Lombroso (1836-1909) to equate genius with madness-a view natural to all who pride themselves on their logic and for whom madness means illogical thinking. But what after all is logic? In Greek, Logice meant no more than 'verbalization', the power of thinking in an ordered sequence of words rather than in direct imagery, sound and sensation, as animals do. Since, however, most words are no more than increasingly abstract generalizations, they can never convey the full, singular essence of any particular object, feeling or happening. Logic is to real thought as corned beef and canned beans are to the natural products. Moreover, Greek logic came to be used as a means of forcing opinions on the listener by arranging words in such a sequence that their conclusion seemed uncontradictable; not letting the victim realize how insecure these generalizations were if compared with whatever act, fact or experience they were verbalizing. From logic developed rhetoric; the art of persuading people by a deliberate slanting of logic that a good cause was a bad cause, or vice versa.

The concept of good and evil genius is a contradiction in terms. Genius implies truth and love naturally pursued. Evil is a talented logic which challenges love and truth by arguing that since all human beings are by nature selfish and fallible, any pursuit of virtue must be hypocrisy. Modern scientists incline towards evil by refusing to accept 'good', 'beautiful' or 'honourable' as acceptable scientific terms, or to offer more than a polite supercilious bow to Truth and Love. They do not even foster the natural beauty of their own bodies, as Pericles's Greeks did, and tend to think with a morbid logical intellect, never with the 'sane mind in a healthy body'. They hold that nothing has reality which cannot be recorded either in words or in conventional scientific symbols. This is precisely why the work of genius is never strictly logical. Geniuses when at work think largely in pictorial images" and the consequent exactness of their thought tempts logicians to dismiss them as liars, guessers or madmen.

But poetry is composed of words alone: is there then no genius in poetry? The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, ndeed, a defiance of logic. In art the equivalence of madness and genius is easier to defend, wherever the artistic impulse is symptomatic of schizophrenia. Vincent van Gogh, an untalented academic artist before he turned schizophrenic and thus lost what biologists call his 'colour compensation', became famous for his startling records of how schizophrenes see such common objects as chairs or sunflowers. But schizophrenia is a splitting of the mind and schizophrenic art in its later stages becomes wholly detached from reality; in genius the mind always retains its health and integrity.

Genius in its startling modern sense seems indeed, to imply genius in the Roman sense: confidence in a spiritual guardian which can foreknow and deliver the otherwise impossible and which goes straight to the answer without recourse to logical argument or its equivalent in mathematics or music. It appears that man in his gradual ascent from rudimentary forms of life has elaborated successive mechanisms of thought, the most recent and by no means the most effective of these being the logical use of cause and effect which is solidly linked with the cramping notion of measurable time and now rules the materialistic world.

In sleep, the mind reverts to primitive thought-mechanisms that occur on increasingly deeper levels, from light trances to so profoundly drugged a condition that its dreams convey images untranslatable to the waking intelligence. Sudden reversion in waking up to a pre-hominoid level of thought, as the result, for example, of shock caused by a block-busting explosion, can send a group of professional men scrabbling for escape on a tiled floor, rather than, as would happen under a lesser shock, merely running away or throwing hysterics. Some of us inherit primitive sensibility to signs of danger which evade our educated senses, but of which cats, dogs and horses are often conscious; others are from time to time granted clear visions of future events, ghosts of ancient history, or happenings at a distance, no doubt induced by an equally primitive thought-mechanism. Yet all such psychic phenomena are rejected by scientists because plainly not subject to repeatable experiment.

Below the rational level of consciousness, then, lie dream-levels. The deeper the sleep, the more difficult it is for the dreamer, on waking, to recall his dreams; their archaic imagery confuses him. It has now been agreed that the need to sleep is simply the need to dream: in other words the need to store up the day's conscious experience by translating it into dream language for one's memory files. When one sleeps on a problem and wakes up with a satisfactory answer, personal genius has obviously been at work and has diagnosed the situation. Bad dreams are warnings that danger is about; the genius has pricked up his ears at some element which the rational mind had missed. The trance into which a genius falls during the creative act gives him access to the whole treasure-house of personal and inherited memory. Since modern abstract painting began as an attempt to recover and record genuine dream-experience, a non-figurative painter is not necessarily the impostor that logicians assume. But neither do his paintings deserve to be described as 'pure art'-art being by tradition informative-if they record personal messages which have lost their coherence even for himself. Genius will thus include the power to interpret a dream that would seem absolute nonsense if told, out of context, at the breakfast table.

When Kekulé von Stradonitz (1828-96) made his most sensational chemical discovery it came to him in comic dream form. As I wrote in the Marmosite's Miscellany (London, 1925):

The maunderings of a maniac signifying nothing
I hold in respect; I hear his tale out.
Thought comes often clad in the strangest clothing:
So Kekulé the chemist watched the weird rout
Of eager atom-serpents writhing in and out
And waltzing tail to mouth. In that absurd guise
Appeared benzine and anilin, their drugs and their dyes.

Plato was worried by the logical crux that if we know the solution of a problem then there is no problem; whereas if we do not know the solution we do not know what to look for and therefore cannot expect to find it. After stating this in the Meno, Plato concluded that the solutions of problems involves memory of pre-incarnations in which the answers have already been found. How logical and now inept! The truth seems to be that genius is capable at some primitive thought-level of thinking in the fourth and fifth dimensions. In the fourth dimension one can explore the interior of a sealed chamber without breaching its walls. In the fifth, one is no longer bound by time but can see things happening in the past or future as easily as, for instance, if seated at ease in an aeroplane flying faster than clock time, one can watch the setting sun slowly rise again above the sea-horizon. One is also, it seems, capable of communing with other minds in the past, present or future. The creative act of poetry is fifth-dimensional in the sense that a poet catches at the nucleus of a poem, a single half-remembered phrase, and works at it until every line corresponds as nearly as possible with his foreknowledge of how the completed poem would be. Creative genius in dancing or music follows much the same principles.

In 1958 I visited the Weizmann Institute at Tel Aviv. Professor Sonnerschein asked me what I thought of his computer. I answered that we had not yet established any contact; it was busy with a spectroscopic job on helium rays. He assured me solemnly: 'This machine can do all that the human brain is capable of doing and better! '

It came into my mind to ask: 'Can it ordain cosmic coincidence?'

Professor Sonnerschein did not seem particularly taken aback by the question, but I had a suspicion that he did not quite understand what I meant. At any rate he answered politely: 'Not yet!'

I was asking, as matter of fact, whether this huge, complicated and costly dingbat could think in the fifth dimension, as geniuses can, discover the answer to a problem by proleptic thought and then discover the problem itself by analeptic thought. Cosmic coincidence is a simple fifth dimensional manipulation of time for making events concur against all statistical probability.

Mathematics as a field of abstract thought, rather than of Pythagorean magic, conveys so limited a sense of personal blessing and its adepts enter regions so far abstracted from common humanity that they tend to forfeit a necessary ingredient of genius, namely love.

Mathematic genius is also notoriously short-lasting - it reaches a peak at the age of about twenty-three and then declines-and is as a rule coloured by persistent emotional adolescence. Since advanced mathematicians are too easily enticed into the grey political underworld of nuclear physics, a remarkably high percentage of mental breakdowns among their wives is everywhere noted.

Psychopaths are often mistaken for geniuses. The most common psychopath is the confidence trickster. The prisons are full of con-men; so are politics. Their power to read a victim's mind and so take advantage of his weaknesses is fortunately counterbalanced by their megalomania. Every con-man or political rabble-rouser tricks himself in the end. Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Hitler have been hailed as geniuses; but all were psychopaths conning themselves with their own boastful legends until they ruined their own countries and died shamefully with no sons to succeed them. So also perhaps was golden-tongued Pericles, who savagely oppressed" his slaves, condoned outright massacre in the Greek island of Mytilene and elsewhere, and relying on his immensely powerful fleet, challenged the Spartans, his neighbours, to war. They began raiding Athenian territory, burning crops and huts, felling olive trees, driving away stock; and Pericles, all too logically, built the famous 'Long Walls' from the city down to the port of Piraeus, so that Athens became a secure and easily defended fortress. But one of his ships, trading in the East, brought back rats with bubonic plague. The crowded semi-siege conditions behind those famous 'Long Walls' fostered an epidemic which carried off a great part of the population, including (by what the tragedians would have called poetic justice) Pericles himself. Julius Caesar at least was no psychopath. He had a heart, courage, mercy, a sense of humour, Roman genius and remarkable humility; and though he fought with no holds barred when his life was threatened, kept faith with his real friends, had the future of his country at heart and knew its weaknesses.

Genius not only diagnoses a situation by non-logical thought but supplies the remedy. A horse-and-buggy doctor in the good old days would identify a disease first with his nose-one sniff was usually enough as he entered the sick-room-then with his ears, then with his eyes, then with his touch. He could as a rule dispense with a fever chart. Few of that breed survive. Today most general practitioners have lost the sense of smell from having spent so much of their medical training in cities where smell, taste and hearing soon degenerate. Though only the other day our Spanish village doctor cried out to a patient: 'Your breath smells of new-mown hay. That means pneumonia. To the hospital at once!' Diagnosis, for them, depends on text-books; yet as a rule these say nothing about that almost imperceptible twitch of an eyelid, that slight slurring in the patient's speech, that curiously sour whiff of sweat, which informed the horse-and-buggy doctor exactly what was amiss.

The mental deficients whom the French call idiots savants and who are classed as throwbacks to primitive hominoids, may have extraordinary mental gifts and, if they happen to inherit mathematic genes and are introduced to simple arithmetic will soon out-compute a computer. Being born, however, without any altruism or moral compunction, they resist training in humanity or in any work which brings them no immediate profit.

The Roman view of genius as guardian of the male creative process has much to commend it. Man's strongest concentration of mental power occurs when he falls in love. The gonad glands control this impulse, but in the course of millennia the power of love has become enormously extended and diversified. The first awareness of genius comes, it seems, with the common mystical experience of pre-puberty, in which a child is convinced that he knows everything or can do everything and keeps his illusion for some hours. Since this experience can be related to the first active awakening of his gonads, we may presume a continued relation between gonad and genius. The relation however, tends to weaken whenever genius is defrauded: for example by the discovery of how much easier it is to steal than to earn, to cheat than to work, to lie than to tell the truth and to do whatever one pleases rather than obey one's conscience. Yet a recollection of this mystical assurance of suprahuman powers and a belief in its basic reality will, I believe, support whoever dares make that sudden leap in the dark, that escape from the tyranny of time, which fifth-dimensional genius implies.

A remarkable contemporary genius, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, the Australian biologist, began his investigations by a poetic opposition of the self and the non-self. How does the self recognize non-self and expel it from the body? Sir Macfarlane Burnet's answer was that the self occasionally makes mistaken experiments that defraud its own genius and set chemical bodies acting against the body's component cells. This view has at last made such diseases as rheumatoid arthritis intelligible to biologists and led to a startling new concept of immunity. One can now study which cells control the self's defences, and how they do it. The non-self is not however a built-in evil genius, as the Greeks would have seen it, but, as the Romans would have seen it, an invader. The principle of immunity is, roughly, that the self despatches a cell to take stock of the non-self, find out what it is projecting, and then return and advise its fellow-cells exactly what chemical repellent to manufacture for spreading over these projections. They keep on at this task until they have manufactured enough for their purpose; which explains the two-to-three or seven-day period of an illness, followed by rapid recovery.

'Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is All Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.

Winston Churchill, whom I knew off and on, from 1916 until 1948, had escaped the educational routine that inhibited so many of his university trained fellow politicians. After a bad start at school, his family connections admitted him into the cavalry, where he educated himself. His was an inconsistent genius, frequently defrauded by political commitments; but his courage, humour, generosity and loyalty to his friends were beyond exception. I once met Lloyd George, Churchill's one-time colleague, and national hero of the first World War: a rabble-rouser with a golden voice and little personal honour who passed for a genius during the first World War. Having plotted against his colleague, Asquith, he seized power from him, kept the war going at enormous cost of life and treasure for two years longer than necessary, left his country all but bankrupt, and at Versailles helped to sow the seeds of a second, still more disastrous war.

After a brief glimpse of Einstein at Princeton in 1929, I could not doubt the early genius which corresponded with his later humility, kindliness and sense of humour. His theory of relativity had been classical and humane, and his Universe made good geometrical sense, however startling at the time. But science has broken through into a post-classical phase of algebraic thought so far l1eyond practical human apprehension that the cosmic observations summarized by computers make no intelligible terrestrial sense. Though this obviously wholesome limit set on human thought may one day encourage a reappraisal and reform of human society, at present it is tempting advanced scientists to despise all creative human values. How many of these ratiocinatory cosmonauts have defrauded their genius is shown by the shambles that they make of their private terrestrial

lives and their readiness to encourage terrestrial nuclear warfare. That warfare is a natural human function need not be disputed-most young men are pugnacious - yet I agreed with T. E. Lawrence when he told me that war ceased to be human at the battle fought at Crecy in August 1346, where the English first used artillery on a battlefield. Military genius has now come to be a contradiction in terms; all modern wars are fought with pitiless logistics, with scientific poisoning of the enemy's land and water, and with a singular absence even of military talent. 

Student riots all over the world seem symptomatic of an approaching change in the modern way of life; since the focus of disorder is almost always the philosophic department of a university. They are a natural reaction against the growing control of education by the political machine, big business, and a body of docile scientists who conduct experiments on lines laid down by their directors. The students are protesting, however blindly, in the name of genius against its antonym, against

Logic, and in clear agreement with Plato's enemy the sophist Protagoras that 'man' (meaning, as he explained, man with an inborn sense of justice, nobility and holiness) 'is the measure of all things'. Also incidentally, the students are protesting against individualistic wars fought against ideal communism (which after all is no more than a different theory from ours as to who should direct the flow of money and control) and fought in direct contravention of international agreements about permissible means. Male students in these riots, now sporadic throughout the non-Communist world, are more active fighters than their girl friends who, as a rule, are content merely to incite. Yet lately in Mexico just before the Olympics opened, I learned that on four separate occasions, a couple of 'Bonnies' had assisted their 'Clydes' by the same stratagem. The pair would wait for the approach of a single unsuspecting police officer and then start ripping each other's clothes off, tearing out each other's hair and screaming abuse.

When he gallantly tried to separate them, out would come their daggers and slide into his lungs or stomach. Dirty work, but Jael, Delilah and Judith had set the Biblical precedent … It is indeed women who stand to lose most by a further strengthening of the mechanically directed and computed thought which tends to hasten men's physical impotence-a phenomenon now reported at an increasingly premature age among steady-going married executives.

Romans refused to credit women with an individual genius, on the grounds that they did not engender but parturiated: and held them, instead, to lie under the divine guidance of the goddess Juno Lucina. This implied that men were ruled by a male code, but women by a divinity which absolved them of obedience to any code at all, except that of being true to their own bodies. And though a patrician Roman's appetite might casually involve him with women from whom he declined to breed children, his social conscience opposed a similar instinct in his female relatives. Roman women at first accepted the practical value of this ban on their sleeping with men who lacked the generous tutelary power of patrician genius; but by Catullus's time female morals had noticeably relaxed. The goddess Juno Lucina, as he reminds us, was not only the wife of Almighty Jupiter and the protectress of women in childbirth; she was also, as her second name proved, the powerful, enchanting, lecherous, perpetually virgin Moon-goddess - huntress, prophetess and healer.

Western High Society still deprecates mésalliances, but wherever acceptable alliances are judged not merely by a man's wealth, influence and talents, but by his integrity, women too often make trouble by falling in love with outsiders whom their fellow men recognize as cads or crooks. The male proverb 'no woman is wise below the girdle' is, of course, a libellous exaggeration; but few married women like to be cheated of satisfaction in what the Romans called 'the genial couch', meaning the marriage bed. Moreover, in choosing their lovers, few women of spirit realize that a man who has forfeited his sense of honour by some disgraceful act can never be redeemed by even a perfect woman's love. That women themselves are infinitely redeemable makes it hard for them to realize that what the Romans called 'a lost man', meaning that he had assassinated his genius, is like a drinking glass, which however neatly repaired after breakage will never again ring clear when tapped with the finger nail. On the other hand, I wrote once about a woman-friend of mine:

She is no liar, yet she will wash away
Honey from her lips, blood from her shadowy hand,
And, dressed at dawn in clean white robes will say,
Trusting the ignorant world to understand:
'Such things no longer are; this is today.' 

That was written not in anger: I was merely echoing the text of Proverbs xxx, 20.

Under normal semi-civilized unmechanized conditions, a man's physical metabolism changed so little from the age of about fifteen to eighty that his genius was held to remain with him until he became incapable of generation, and took to the chimney-corner. Thus in Deuteronomy XXXIV, 7, Moses was extolled as having kept his virility and eyesight until he died on Mount Pisgah at the age of 120. By contrast, not only does a woman go through a dramatic change both at puberty and after reaching her menopause in middle age--Sarah who gave birth to Isaac at the age of ninety was a remarkable exception! -but during each pregnancy the presence of her unborn child, which has different genes from her own, will noticeably affect her character. However, even throughout her nubile period, any unspoilt woman is capable of using her mind in the timeless, nonchalant way characteristic of genius: which is to make extra¬ordinary complicated problems seem as simple as counting on one's fingers-by the manipulation of time. And women are granted the mystical pre-puberty experience of 'knowing everything' as often as boys; I have even known one who had it under an anaesthetic during the birth of her first daughter.

I once wrote of a woman genius:

If strange things happen where she is
So that men say that graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb and the unborn are shed,
Such portents are not to be wondered at,
Being tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.

In real love, as opposed to confused sexual groping or a simple decision to marry and settle down, genius is always present; and manifests itself with its usual supra-sensory bending of time into a manageable ring. Only a few advanced students have become aware of this phenomenon, which they account for in terms of a concept named Omega Minus, but of which being professionally free of the tender passion, they claim no personal experience. 

One thing more. If ever one is suddenly threatened by extreme danger while bed-ridden the protective genius should immediately come to his rescue. I am reminded of this by my great-uncle Dr. Robert Graves whose statue sits in marble in the Irish College of Physicians at Dublin. He was once confined by fever to his cabin in a small Greek ship as it was rounding the Peloponnese. A huge storm blew up. Hearing cries, curses and stampings overhead, he forced himself to climb on deck, and found that the crew had decided to abandon ship. His practised eye told him that the ship's boat which they were about to lower overboard could not possibly survive such a sea, so he picked up a cannon ball, lifted it high above his head and hurled it through the boat's side. The crew, thus forcibly deprived of escape, came to their senses and somehow brought the ship into harbour.

In the first World War trenches the protective power of genius was daily proved. I cannot recall a single man with a running nose or a cough, in spite of the fearful cold and damp and the lack of protective clothing. So long as morale was high-and it was my duty as a company officer to keep it high-danger kept us alert and in good health. Yet after six or seven months of continuous shelling our adrenalin glands over-compensated against the continuous nervous pressure of noise and we gradually lost our power of immediate reaction to danger. Although illness can result from distress at watching the oppressive effects of modern living on too many of our neighbours, sympathy with their sufferings should urge our genius into action-a cannon ball hurled through the boat-rather than keep us lying hopelessly on our bunks.