ycorn with the curse he lays upon the imaginative
man who is lusty with life and desire to live. John Barleycorn sends his
White Logic, the argent messenger of truth beyond truth, the antithesis
of life, cruel and bleak as interstellar space, pulseless and frozen as
absolute zero, dazzling with the frost of irrefragable logic and
unforgettable fact. John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream, the
liver live. He destroys birth and death, and dissipates to mist the
paradox of being, until his victim cries out, as in "The City of Dreadful
Night": "Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss." And the feet of
the victim of such dreadful intimacy take hold of the way of death.

CHAPTER XXXVI

Back to personal experiences and the effects in the past of John
Barleycorn's White Logic on me. On my lovely ranch in the Valley of the
Moon, brain-soaked with many months of alcohol, I am oppressed by the
cosmic sadness that has always been the heritage of man. In vain do I
ask myself why I should be sad. My nights are warm. My roof does not
leak. I have food galore for all the caprices of appetite. Every
creature comfort is mine. In my body are no aches nor pains. The good
old flesh-machine is running smoothly on. Neither brain nor muscle is
overworked. I have land, money, power, recognition from the world, a
consciousness that I do my meed of good in serving others, a mate whom I
love, children that are of my own fond flesh. I have done, and am doing,
what a good citizen of the world should do. I have built houses, many
houses, and tilled many a hundred acres. And as for trees, have I not
planted a hundred thousand? Everywhere, from any window of my house, I
can gaze forth upon these trees of my planting, standing valiantly erect
and aspiring toward the sun.

My life has indeed fallen in pleasant places. Not a hundred men in a
million have been so lucky as I. Yet, with all this vast good fortune,
am I sad. And I am sad because John Barleycorn is with me. And John
Barleycorn is with me because I was born in what future ages will call
the dark ages before the ages of rational civilisation. John Barleycorn
is with me because in all the unwitting days of my youth John Barleycorn
was accessible, calling to me and inviting me on every corner and on
every street between the corners. The pseudo-civilisation into which I
was born permitted everywhere licensed shops for the sale of soul-poison.
The system o