Briefing for a Descent into Hell Part 8

To make the flesh s.h.i.+ne whole again.

These are mine still, but only in the long

Cold reaches where the mind coils strong

To re-create in patience what the slow

Limbs, bound, knew simply as a song, but long ago.

I called to her, Conchita, Conchita, but she did not hear me, she was looking out over her sea, and now my bird had swept around and was heading back and soon we were over the sea's edge where I had landed, and then over the forests, and then we were on the cliff's edge again. The alighting of this great white bird frightened a number of monkeys that had been hiding where some bushes grew thickly. They went chattering off, and I sat myself in my usual place, and the bird sat with me a little in silence, and then sailed off again on its white wings into the dark of that night.

And so that night pa.s.sed, with the screams and the sound of the fighting going on behind me, but now I felt less oppressed by it, for I kept my mind on the long cool flight I had had on the great bird's sunwarmed back, and on my old love Conchita stammering her separate failure on her separate coast.

I did not go into the city's centre again for three days, but sat on the cliff hoping to see the bird, but he did not come, and at last I ventured in, and the fighting still went on, and so many had been killed that they could not either eat or dispose of the corpses, which lay in heaps everywhere. All the animals were exhausted from the long fighting. Their fighting had become more frightful and desperate and mechanical. They were very crazy now, and their eyes were reddened, and their fur and hide roughened and dirty. The Rat-dogs no longer attempted to stand upright, they ran about on all fours, killing the monkeys by random snapping bites with their sharp fangs. Again they took very little notice of me as I went across the square to see how I could prepare it for the full moon not much more than a week away now. I saw nothing hopeful, and so went back to my cliff again. Now I abandoned my dream of preparing the landing-ground, and I dreamed instead of returning to the sea, of letting myself slide into the fresh salt like a bird into the air. I sat there as the days and nights came and went, my eyes fixed on the distant ocean, wis.h.i.+ng I had slid off the bird's back into the healthful sea, and there found some plank or spar or fish or floating thing I could have clung to like a barnacle until perhaps the Crystal took pity on me and swept me up at last. And as I sat there on the morning three days before Full Moon, wondering if I should slide back down the gla.s.sy wall, and run down, down to the sea, the white bird came back and sat by me, greeting me with its friendly yellow eyes. Again it squatted as I climbed up on to it, and again sped down over the forests to the sea and again circled there just above the breaking waves. But now I understood why the bird had come to fetch me, for the sea was no longer the fresh cold salty well of sanity it had been. There was a sluggishness in its moving, as if it had thickened. There was a taint of decay. Bobbing on the waves I saw hundreds of corpses from the war on the plateau, which had been flung into the great chasm and had been carried by the stream over falls and cataracts to the sea's edge. And everywhere I saw fishes and sea creatures floating bellies up, and on the sea were patches of oil, dark and mineral-smelling. And over the sea, in patches, was a pale phosph.o.r.escence like an insidious decay made visible, and these were poisonous gases that had released themselves from the containers man had sunk them in to the sea's bottom, and elsewhere were sheets of light like a subtle electric fire which was radioactivity from the factories and plants on sh.o.r.es oceans or continents away. The bird swept me back and forth across miles of ocean in the frying sun, making me look at the sea's death, and even as we flew there, all the surface of the sea became choked with death, dead fishes and seaweeds and clams and porpoises and dolphins and whales, fish big and small, and all the plants of the sea, sea birds and sea snakes and seals-then my beautiful white bird lifted me up and up and up into the sky and sped back over the trees to the plateau, but now it circled down over the city with its roofless buildings and made me see how underneath me all the city, every building in it, was fouled by war, how everywhere lay the loads of corpses, how in every street groups of beasts fought each other, and now so crazed and weary were they that they fought within the species, without even the excuse of a difference in fur or hide or shape of muzzle or eye. They fought monkey with monkey, rat-beast with rat-beast. Fighting had become its own justification and they could not stop. And under every bush and in the corner of every house lay the wounded moaning and licking their wounds. Just as we came sweeping low in a final circuit, not twenty paces from my cliff's edge, I saw a female Rat-dog, with its sleek brown hide all bloodied and gashed, sitting up with its back to a wall, snapping at a couple of male Rat-dogs, and at the same time she was giving birth. Puppies tumbled out of her scarlet slit in a spout of blood and tissue, while she fought for her life. The two round mounds on her chest which were her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, were swollen and had been torn, so that blood and milk poured out together. Her sharp muzzle had hairy flesh hanging from her teeth, and as she snapped and bit at the two tall staggering males who menaced her, she became so crazed with fear and the need to help her puppies' birth, that even as she fought, she would give a deadly snap in front, at an antagonist, and then snap downwards at her young, and perhaps wound or kill one, and then another random desperate bite at an antagonist, and then snap downwards again, and then back at the pressing enemies, so that it looked as if she were fighting her puppies as much as the two males who were as mad with long fighting as she was, for notwithstanding they were trying to kill her (or at least acting in such a way that she had to defend herself) and indeed succeeding, for she sank down in her own blood as we swept past the group, their s.e.xual organs were swollen with excitement, and one of them attempted to mate with her even as she died. She died in a spasm that was as much a birth- as a death-spasm.

On the cliff's edge I tumbled off the bird's warm strong back, and lay face down, weeping. Now I believed that everything was ended, and there was no hope anywhere for man or for the animals of the earth.

But at last, when I lifted myself up, the white bird was still there, and it was looking at me with its golden eyes, its straight yellow beak bent towards me, in its severe but kindly way. It seemed to want me to attend to it, and when I was properly recovered and standing up, it began walking in through the houses of the city to the centre. Now I looked up and saw that the moon must be near full, and I could see the sheet of silver stretching up into the sky over the sea where the moon would rise. I wanted the bird to stop, for I was afraid this marvellous creature might be killed by the warring beasts. But it seemed as if they were quieter. The war had worked itself to its end. Scuffling and sparring went on; couples or small groups fought. But packs of both Rat-dogs and monkeys sat licking themselves and whining and moaning. And although they had all been fighting each other to the death for days, now they seemed almost indifferent to each other's presence, and monkeys licked the sores of Rat-dogs, and Rat-dogs accepted it as homage or submission.

The bird took to its wings and swooped low over the earth along the streets, inwards to the square. I followed. There the bird settled, folding its wings, and standing erect, its narrow yellow beak held stiffly down, with its usual effect of propriety. And just as my heart beat with terror that it would be killed, I saw that all the beasts were afraid of it. Everywhere over the great stone square, animals backed away, the monkeys gibbering and grimacing, and the Rat-dogs back on their feet again, retreating, squinting down one side of their faces and then the other-until they felt themselves safe, when they let themselves drop back on all fours and slunk away.

The bird stood quietly in the centre of the circle. And now I understood it was there to protect me. I began on the work of dragging away the dead animals as far as I could. As I did this, both races of animals came to these piles, and carried their dead right away, probably to the chasm where the river plunged in, or perhaps for a final cannibal feast-though it seemed as if they had lost their taste for flesh again and were tasting and trying the fruits as if these were a new sensation and not their proper food. But I had too much to do, and could not watch them any longer. When the square was clear of the dead animals, I again tore off branches and swept it. Then I had to clear water channels that were choked up with leaves and dirt and dung. And finally I again carried water in the hollow stone that once had been a mortar and I poured water everywhere, and swept that away with sweet-smelling branches. All that night I worked under the blazing white moon, and all the following day under a hot dry sun. There sat the companionable bird, white and glossy, its golden eyes watchful, its severe yellow beak kept in my direction. At the start, some animals came near in a decision to reclaim the square, but when they saw the bird they went away again. At last I realized that they were not in sight at all. Then, that I could not hear them. They had gone from the city's centre altogether. Perhaps they had even left the city. By the end of that day the square and the beautifully patterned and coloured circle it enclosed were clean and fresh, the air smelled of aromatic leaves and water, and as I stood quietly in the dusk I could hear the water running beneath my feet in its stonelined channels. The air was full of the scent of flowers. A last bird sang from a tree near the square.

Full Moon came straight up from the sea and laid silver light over Earth from the sea's edge to the towering mountains. The moon rose up through the stars and the white bird lifted its wings and soared up and up and up and away, back into the moon.

I walked in now from the edge of the square, and took up a waiting position at the outer edge of the circle, looking in towards the centre.

I hope it may now be conceded that this drug is contraindicated in this case. After an absence of five days I was shocked at the deterioration in the patient. When I saw him this morning it was clear that he has less grasp of reality than when he was admitted. From what nurse says I should diagnose that he is in coma a good part of the time.

DOCTOR Y.

This case was thoroughly discussed at the conference Thursday at which you were not present. This drug's effects are often not fully developed for three weeks, as I have already tried to explain. Patient has been on it for twelve days.

DOCTOR X.

There was a pressure of silence, which swirled me into a singing calm. I was inside the Crystal, whose vortex had gathered in all sensation as a dust devil gathers in dust and leaves from yards around, or as bath water spiralling its way down a hole exerts its pull on every part of the water in the bath. Looking outwards from it nothing that had been there remained-or so it seemed at first, for the beginning of my being absorbed into the Crystal was a darkness of mind coupled with a vividness of sense that only slowly I was able to balance. It seemed that the Crystal was having difficulty in absorbing my comparative crudeness. This fighting went on in me as well as in it, during the few moments of the beginning. I say "a few moments." But the very thing I became aware of first was that time had s.h.i.+fted gear and was vibrating differently, and it was this that was the first a.s.sault on my own habitual pattern of substance. To my eyes it seemed as if I was in a world of lucid gla.s.s, or perhaps better, of crystalline mist. My body felt a nausea which I became properly aware of as it began to abate, for it had been gripping me in a totality that was a basic-of which one is unaware. For instance, as we breathe ordinary air, our lungs are adapted to absorb a poisonous gas (poisonous to other visiting creatures, or to ourselves perhaps, once) called air. The nausea had been a tight vice, locking me in tension against it. It went at last and a delightful lightness took me over. The dragging pain of gravity had gone: this dimension was as free and delicious as a skater, or flight lying between the wings of a guardian bird. Yet I had a body. But it was of a different substance, lighter, finer, tenuous, though I recognised its likeness to my usual shape of matter. Slowly my senses, my new senses, steadied. I was inside a tinted luminosity, my new body, and this luminousness was part, like a flame in fire, of the swirl of the Crystal, and this burned whitely, an invisible dance, where the centre of the circle in the square had been-and still was, for I could see its outline, but it was the ghost of its outline. And, holding fast to the start or centre of my vision, or, rather, feeling, I let that vision-or perhaps the word was understanding, move out and around. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, allowed it to enlarge, as light spreads, and I saw that this city on this plateau did indeed exist in the new dimension, or level, of vibration. But, as my own body was now a shape in light, though not as fine and high a light as the substance of the Crystal itself, so too was the city: it was as if the city of stone and clay had dissolved, leaving a ghostly city, made in light, like an illuminated mist that has shadows or echoes held in it. Yet the city that rose everywhere about me in the same shape of the city I knew so well was thinner, more spa.r.s.e. It was a more delicately framed and upheld place. This is not to say that the houses or public buildings, delicately outlined, like a tracery in frost on a windowpane, all a patterning of stars or hexagons, were less firm and distinct than the shapes of the solid city built in stone, but that there were fewer houses and buildings in this shadow city than in the earthy one. As if this tenuous city, which was a pattern and a key and a blueprint for the outer city, only fitted certain parts or areas or individual buildings in the outer city. It seemed as if the delicately fine city "fitted" best over some public buildings and some houses. In between were areas where the mist lay blank, without shapes built into it. And yet I knew very well-since by now I did know so very well the real city where I had walked and watched and waited for weeks-that this "real" stone-built city had houses and buildings here and here and here and there-where there were none in the inner pattern, or template. I seemed to understand as I stood here in my new spritely shape that the areas of the city where the inner pattern was not strong enough to impose itself were where there was an extra heaviness and imperviousness in their substance. Whereas the parts of the city that were mirrored in the inner blueprint had as it were built into the stones a sample or portion of that fine inner light or substance.

And now it was plain to me that when walking in my normal shape through the stone city, and becoming conscious, as most people are at times, of a finer air in this or that house or hall or public place, what I was registering was the places or areas where the inner pattern lay vibrating on its self-spun thought.

Thought ... I was thinking ... the Crystal was a thought that pulsed and spiralled. My sympathies enlarged again, my mind washed out, and now I saw on the outskirts of this city moving spots or blobs of light. These were in groups or patches, and were moving away from the city. I saw that they were the troops of the Rat-dogs, and apes, but again they were fewer than I remembered, just as this new delicate city was thinner and spa.r.s.er than the outer one. In this inner atmosphere only some of the beasts were mirrored. My mind moved among them like a bird on wings, and I understood that among these poor beasts trapped in their frightful necessities, some sometimes snuffed this finer air, but that most did not. Most of them were as thick, heavy and unredeemed as the bulk of the stone and earth that had no crystalline air kneaded into it. Yet some did have a light in them. And this did not seem to match with any quality of group or pack morality. For instance, one sad little blob of faintly pulsing light which nevertheless was brighter than most in its constellation, belonged to a beast I was able to recognise-and he was one of the most violent, energetic and busy of them all; and another brave little pulse belonged to a clowning, jesting ape. And yet another marked an ape quite different from either, one much obsessed with her twin apelets, a fussy nagging nattering little animal, yet her star shone as bright as the two a.s.sertive male animals. These flocks of moving lights, or lit drops, like globules of gleaming wet in the swirl of a luminous mist, moved out and away. I understood that if I were to move out there now on my ordinary gravity-subjugated legs, the city would be clear and clean again. The warring and killing beasts had moved away beyond the suburbs of the city and beyond even the forest where I had seen the orgiastic women. This forest I now explored with the tentacles of my new senses and found a paradise of plant, leaf and pattern of branch all structured in light. A scene in the ordinary world nearest to it would be that in a forest after a light snowfall when it is the essential shape of branch and tree that is presented in white s.h.i.+mmering outline to eyes used to a confusion of green, lush, loving, lively detail. In this paradisical forest Felicity and Constance and Vera were not represented at all, yet as my thoughts hung over the memory of what had been there, a compulsion or pressure or need grew into them: a demand from the excluded, a claim. The memory of the nights I had drunk blood and eaten flesh with the women under the full moon struck my new mind, and there was a reeling and then a rallying of its structure, while I accepted and held the memory, and then I had moved out and beyond, but now the women were lodged in my mind, my new mind. I knew, though dimly enough at that time-for so many "knowings" began then, that those frightful nights when I had been compelled away from the city's centre to the murdering women had become a page in my pa.s.sport for this stage of the journey. As this thought came in, so did another-or, as I've said already, the beginnings of one, these were all beginnings, that the women were now faceted in my new mind like cells in a honeycomb, gleams of coloured light, and that my comrades, whom I had seen flickering, flaming and flowing inside the greater white blaze of the Crystal were also faceted with me, as I with them, in this inner structure, and that I had understood this from the moment the Crystal had swept me up into itself, which was why I had forgotten my search for them. In that dimension, minds lay side by side, fishes in a school, cells in honeycomb, flames in fire, and together we made a whole in such a way that it was not possible to say, Here Charles begins, here John or Miles or Felicity or Constance ends. And so with us all. But while this new swelling into understanding was taking place in my mind, a move outwards into comprehension, only possible at all because of my fusion with the people who were friends, companions, lovers and a.s.sociates, a wholeness because I was stuck like a bit of coloured gla.s.s in a mosaic-there was somewhere close all this time a great weight of cold. I realised that all the time there had been this weight, this pressure of freezing cold, but that I had not been aware of it as I had not been aware to begin with of my griping nausea. That had been total, and not to be isolated away from my overall condition. This terror of cold was like that. That was when I first became aware of it, or I think it was, for as I've said, in those early explorations of my new mode of feeling, it was only afterwards that I was able to trace strands back to a particular bud or start in my thought. But there was no doubt that about that time this knowledge became firmly lodged in me: the cold weight, a compulsion, a necessity, as it were, a menace only just held at bay by humanity, and always waiting there, the crocodile's jaws always there, just under the water. It was a grief and a fear too ancient for me, it was a sorrow bred into the essence of the race. I saluted it, and pa.s.sed on, for like the early all-pervading nausea, this was part of my living, kneaded into my fibres, a necessity like breathing and a.s.sociated with it: this cold, this weight, this pulling and dragging and compelling. It was too old a lodestone for any individual to fight away from, or even accurately to know and place. It was there.

The world was spinning like the most delicately tinted of bubbles, all light. It was the mind of humanity that I saw, but this was not at all to be separated from the animal mind which married and fused with it everywhere. Nor was it a question of higher or lower, for just as my having drunk blood and eaten flesh with the poor women had been a door, a key, and an opening, because all sympathetic knowledge must be that, in this spin of fusion like a web whose every strand is linked and vibrates with every other, the swoop of an eagle on a mouse, the eagle's cold exultation and the mouse's terror make a match in nature, and this harmony runs in a strengthened pulse in the inner chord of which it is a part. I watched a pulsing swirl of all being, continually changing, moving, dancing, a controlled impelled dance, held within its limits by its nature, and part of this necessity was the locking together of the inner pattern in light with the outer world of stone, leaf, flesh and ordinary light.

In this great enclosing web of always changing light, moved flames and tones and thrills of light that sang and sounded, on deeper and higher notes, so what I saw, or rather was part of, was neither light nor sound, but the place or area where these two ident.i.ties become one. The pulsing ball of light or sound was fitted to the earthy world it enclosed, and as I had seen before with the buildings of the city and with the troops of animals, those poor ravaging beasts, everywhere in the earthy world lay the cracks and seams of higher substance, a finer beat in time or light or sound, which formed channels for the higher enclosing sphere to feed its self into the lower. Lying there out in s.p.a.ce, as it might be within the great wings of a white bird, I could see through the coloured spinning membrane, as one can see through the spinning walls of a soap bubble as it hangs growing from a fine tube held in lips that blow air into it, and I saw how the coloured world we know, seas and soil, mountains and desert, was all in a spin of pressure of matter, and this creature hanging there in s.p.a.ce surrounded by its delicate outer envelope, was at a first and a very long look, empty, for mankind was not visible until one swooped in close, where his evidence, cities and conglomeration and workings, showed as lice show in seams and crevices. Mankind was a minute grey crust here and there on the earth. Within patches that seemed stationary, motionless, minute particles moved, but in set patterns, so that looking down at one fragment of this crust of matter, smaller than the tiniest of grains of sand or dust or pollen, it seemed that even the curve made by a journey of a group of such items from one continent to another was flicker of an oscillation in a great web of patterning oscillations and quiverings.

The earth hung in its weight, coloured and tinted here and there, for the most part with the blueish tint of water ... the great oceans had become not more than a film of slippery substance covering part of the globe's surface. Yes, all that drama of deep blue oceans that held their still unknown and secret life, and roaring storms and cras.h.i.+ng restless waves, and tides dragged about by the moon had become a thin smear of slippery substance on a toughly textured globe of matter, and humanity and animal life and bird life and reptile life and insect life-all these were variations in a little crust on this globe. Motes, microbes. And yet-it was mostly here that the enclosing web of subtle light touched the earth globe. It was for the most part through the motes or mites of humanity. Which, viewed from the vantage point of the enclosing web of light (inner or outer as one chose to view it) was not at all a question of individual ent.i.ties, as those ent.i.ties saw themselves, but a question of Wholes, large and small, for groups and packs and troops and crowds made ent.i.ties, made Wholes, functioning as Wholes. Bending closer in the web of understanding which was the nature of this enclosing bell of light I could see how the patterns of light, the colours, textures, pulses of faint or strong light, were not only similarity, but ident.i.ty. All over the globe ran these pulses or lines, linking groups of individuals, which groups were not necessarily nations or countries-I saw at moments how a patch of mould or lichen glowed up in a burst of colour (or sound) and this was a civil war or a burst of national emotion, but more often, when an area of colour moved and concentrated, singing on its own note, it was composed of sections of nations or countries that had left or detached themselves from their parent groups and were at war with each other, and it was noticeable how a flare-up of a tiny area was so often the coming together of two fragments or pulses, which then became the same colour, the same sound. But the lines or pulses running and darting everywhere over this globe that were most consistent were not the flareups of war but those that were the different professions, so that legislators over the earth were not merely "on the same wavelength" they were the same, part of the same organ, or function, even if in warring or opposing countries, and so with judges and farmers and civil servants and soldiers and talkers and moneymen and writers-each of these categories were one, and from this vantage point it was amusing to see how pa.s.sionate hatred, rivalries and compet.i.tions disappeared altogether, for the atoms of each of these categories were one, and the minute fragments that composed each separate pulse or beat of light (colour, sound) were one, so there was no such thing as judges, but only Judge, not soldiers, but Soldier, not artists, but Artist, no matter if they imagined themselves to be in violent disagreement. And on this map or plan that showed how myriads of ridiculously self-important ident.i.ties were reduced to a few, was another, different, but, in some places, matching pattern, of a stronger, rarer light (or sound) that varied and pulsed and changed like the rest but connected direct, made a link and a bridge, a feeding channel, between the outer (or inner, according to how one looked at it) web of thought or feeling, the pulsating bubble of subtle surrounding colour, and the solid earthy watery globe of Man. Not only a link or a bridge merely, since this strand of humanity was open like so many vessels open to the rain, but part of the s.h.i.+mmering web of fluid joyful being, which was why the scurrying, hurrying, scrabbling, fighting, restless, hating, wanting little patches of humanity, the crusts of lichen or fungi growing here and there on the globe, the sea's children, were, in spite of their distance from the outer s.h.i.+mmering web, nevertheless linked with it always, since at every moment the glittering tension of singing light flooded into them, into the earthy globe, beating on its own delicious pulse of joy and creation. The outer web of musical light created the inner earthy one and held it there in its dance of tension. And a scattering of people, a strand of them, a light webby tension of them everywhere over the globe, were the channels where the finer air went into the earth and fed it and kept it alive. And this delicate mesh imposed on (or stronger than) the other pulsing patterns had nothing to do with humanity's ethics or codes, the pack's morality, so that sometimes this higher, faster beat sang in the life of a soldier, sometimes a poet, sometimes a politician, and sometimes in a man who watched and mapped the stars, or another who watched and mapped the infinitesimal fluid pulses that make up the atom, which atom was as far from the larger atoms that make up that mould or growth, humanity, as humanity is from the stars. And the items of this connecting feeding mesh (like an electric grid of humanity) were one; just as there is no such thing as "soldiers" but only Soldier, and not "clerks" but Clerk, and Gardener, and Teacher. For since any category anywhere always beat on its own wavelength of sound/light, there could not be individuals in this nouris.h.i.+ng web. Together they formed one beat in the great dance, one note in the song. Everywhere and on every level the little individuals made up wholes, struck little notes, made tones of colour. On every level: even myself and my friends whom the Crystal had absorbed into a whole, unimportant gnats, and my women and my children and everyone I had known in my life-even someone pa.s.sed on a street corner and smiled at once-these struck a note, made a whole. And this was the truth that gave the utter insignificance of these motes their significance: in the great singing dance, everything linked and moved together. My mind was the facet of a mind, like cells in a honeycomb. Letting my mind lie dark there, quiescent, a mirror for light, I could feel or sense or recognise a pulse of individuality that I had known once as poor Charlie or Felicity or James or Thomas. Pulses of mind lay beating and absorbing beside my own little pulse, and together we were a whole, connecting within this wholeness with the myriad differing wholes that each of these people had formed in their lives, were continuously forming in every breath they took, and through this web, these webs, ran a finer beat, as water ran everywhere in the stone city through channels cut or built in rock by men who were able to grade the lift or the fall of the earth.

But yet, while I observed this, felt this, understood at last, I was conscious always of that old, that very ancient weight, the cold of grief I had become aware of so early on after my absorption into this new area of being. There it lay, just out of sight, deadly and punis.h.i.+ng, for its pulse was that of a cold heaviness, it had to be a counterweight to joy. There it was, close, always-I acknowledged it and in doing so moved out and on, since now everything was open to me and I floated deliciously, like a bubble in foam or as if lying at ease between a bird's stretched wings.

The corporal earth, like a round boulder, lay revolving erratically at about the distance it would take a shout or a hail to carry. It spun slowly about, wobbling badly. This spinning made a system of streaks, brown, blue and white, show on the surface of the globe, but I knew that these streaks were the seas and continents and icecaps in motion. The globe lay surrounded by its envelope of pulsing light, through which, however, I could see, as if I were peering through a thin opalescent cloud. I was seeing this earth spinning in a time that was not humanity's time. Somewhere behind me, or to one side, was the vast white blaze of the sun, and in this steady blaze the earth spun. I lay steady, a minuscule planet of the sun, watching the earth in its spin. Day and night were not visible except as a soft flicker, and the violent rocking back and forth that makes our seasons, seemed like a green flush that pa.s.sed in a wink, and a momentary thickening of the white streaks at North and South poles. At this speed all I could see was a whizzing around on its axis and a whirling around the sun-and there was the weight of cold grief present here too, the compulsion, but I did not now attend to this, for as I thought of the speed of the planet, it began to slow, and now it was turning no faster than needed for me to take in a pattern of earth and water before the pattern turned out of sight. Since I was now further away than before, when the chart of darting impulses had shown itself to me, I could examine in less detail but in more perspective how the illuminated envelope about the earth thrilled and glowed and changed and s.h.i.+vered in its dance, and I could see very clearly how this envelope which clung to the earth's surface like a white summer fog on a warm morning matched and spoke to the areas beneath. A continent, I saw, gave off the same subtlety of shade-not absolutely uniform all over, of course not, but enough to be a recognisable basis to whatever other currents then ran and danced over it in their netting of sympathetic movement. It seemed as if there was something, but I could not see what, which made, let's say, that ma.s.s of land which we call Russia, European Russia, give off a glow which did not change, and this shade was different from that shade which pervaded the ma.s.s we call Asia, and these were different, but steadily different, from other areas of the world. Each part of the globe's surface of course had its own distinctive physical shade, that was its vegetation (or its lack of it), its plant setting for its animal life, but as distinctive, as clearly differentiated as jungle and desert and swamp and highland was the light that lay above in the aerial map that was its mirror and its sister-its governor. In this map of the currents of the mind and sympathies and feelings, countries-that is, nations-were marked out, and held what was necessary and appropriate to them, and it mattered very much whether a concept "nation" matched with the physical area beneath it, and where these were in discord then there was a discord of light and sound. I had an old thought, or rather, an old thought was transplanted upwards into the keener swifter air of this realm, that no matter what changes of government or what names were given to a nation's system of organisation, there was always the same flavour or reality that remained in that place, that country, or area-and seen from where I was, where time was speeding so that one revolution of the globe was like a slow human breath, so that I was watching great movements of human events, but as I might, as a human, watch for an hour the change, growth, and sudden destruction of an anthill. I looked close in at little England, catching a quick glimpse as it turned past, and saw how it kept its own pulse, which was a colour, a condition, a note of sound-for all countries, every one, every crust of mould, or part of humanity, were held in laws that they could not change or upset. They were manipulated from above (or below) by physical forces that they did not even as yet suspect-or that they did not suspect at this moment of time because it was part of this little organism's condition to discover and forget and discover and forget-and this was a time when they had forgotten and were about again to discover. But their terrible bondage, the chains of necessity that grasped them-it was this thought that came in again, bringing the dreadful breath of cold, of grief.

As I thought that I would like to see the earth speed up a little, but not as fast as before, when a year's turn around the sun seemed like the spin of a coin, it did speed up-and now I saw other patterns of light, or colour, deepen and fade and marry and merge and move, and as I thought that all these patterns were no more than a composite of the slower individual pulses and currents I had seen earlier, and that they were making up the glowing coloured mist that was the envelope of the globe, it came into my mind that the glowing envelope of the globe seemed to be set, or held, by something else, just as it, in its place, held the rhythms of the earth, our earth. My mind made another outwards-going, outswelling, towards comprehension, and now I saw how lines and currents of force and sympathy and antagonism danced in a web that was the system of planets around the sun, so much a part of the sun that its glow of substance, lying all about it in s.p.a.ce, held the planets as intimately as if these planets were merely crystallizations or hardening of its vapourous stuff, moments of density in the solar wind. And this web was an iron, a frightful necessity, imposing its design.

Now I watched, as the earth turned fast, but still so that I could see the change and growth and dying away of patterns, how as the planets moved and meshed and altered and came closer to each other and went away again, exerting a pressure of forces on each other that bound them all, on the earth the little crusts of matter that were men, that were humanity, changed and moved. Just as the waters, the oceans (a little film of fluid matter on the big globe's surface) moved and swung under the compulsion of the sun and the moon, so did the life of man, oscillating in its web of necessity, in its place in the life of the planets, a minute crust on the surface of a thickening and becoming visible of the Sun's breath that was called Earth. Humanity was a pulse in the life of the Sun, which lay burning there in a vast white explosion of varying kinds of light, or sound, some stronger and thicker, some tenuous, but at all forces and strengths, which fluid lapped out into s.p.a.ce holding all these crumbs and drops and little flames in a dance-and the force that held them there, circling and whirling in their dance, was the Sun, the energy of the Sun, and that was the controlling governor of them all, beside whose strength, all the subsidiary laws and necessities were nothing. The ground and soul and heart and centre of this little solar system was the light and pulse and song of the Sun, the Sun was King. But although this central strength, this majestic core of our web, was an essence to the whole system, further out and away from the centre, where poor dark Pluto moved, perhaps it might be that the tug and pull and pressure of the planets seemed more immediate; perhaps out there, or further, the knowledge that the Sun is still the deep low organ note that underlies all being is forgotten-forgotten more even than on earth, spinning there so crooked and sorrowful and calamitous with its weight of cold necessity so close. And perhaps, or so I thought as I saw the dance of the sun and its attendants, Mercury the Sun's closest a.s.sociate was the only one which could maintain steadily and always the consciousness of the sun's underlying song, its need, its intention, Mercury whose name was, also, Thoth, and Enoch, Buddha, Idris, and Hermes, and many other styles or t.i.tles in the earth's histories, Mercury the Messenger, the carrier of news, or information from the Sun, the disseminator of laws from G.o.d's singing centre.

Yes, but farther out, on the third crookedly spinning planet, it is harder to keep that knowledge, the sanity and simplicity of the great Sun, and indeed poor Earth is far from grace, and so it was easy to see, for at that tempo of spin that enabled me to watch clearly the marrying of events on earth and in the rest of its fellow planets, I watched how wars and famines, and earthquakes and disasters, floods and terrors, epidemics and plagues of insects and rats and flying things came and went according to the pressures from the combinations of the planets and the sun-and the moon. For a swarm of locusts, a spreading of viruses, like the life of humanity, is governed elsewhere. The life of man, that little crust of matter, which was not even visible until one swooped down close as a bird might sweep in and out for a quick survey of a glittering shoal of fish that puckered a wave's broad flank, that pulse's intensity and size and health was set by Mercury and Venus, Mars and Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Ura.n.u.s, and Pluto, and their movements, and the Centre of light that fed them all. Man, that flicker of life, diminished in numbers and multiplied, was peace-loving or murderous-in bondage. For when a war flared up involving half the earth ma.s.ses of the globe, or when the earth's population doubled in a handful of years and for the first time in known history, or when in every place that men lived they rioted and fought and scuffled and screamed and killed and wept against their fate, it was because the balance of the planets had s.h.i.+fted, or a comet came too close-or the moon spoke, voicing the cold, the compulsion; and now, bending in as close as I dared to watch, I saw how the earth and its moon cycled and circled and how both earth and water pulsed and swelled and vibrated on Earth, as matter swelled and moved and vibrated on the Moon, on the cold moon, on the cold dead moon, the warm Earth's cold sister, the stepchild, the terrible moon who sucks and leeches and clutches on to the warm earth that was alive, for the moon wanted to live, the moon would live, the moon was like a poor sad still-born babe, but the baby would live, it fought to live, as eggs drag lime from hen's bones, and foetuses pull life from their mothers, the moon sucked and leeched and was like a dragging magnet of need that was the earth's first metronome in the dance of the planets, for it was nearest, it was the deprived and half-starved twin, the earth's other self, the Necessity.

Here was the frightful cold weight of sorrow that had lain on the edge of my mind since I had first been absorbed into the Crystal-the knowledge of the moon and its need. So close was the moon, so much part of earth, that it was earth-for seen even from that short distance they looked like a pair of brothers always in movement about each other. The moon was so very close, the always present force that is easiest overlooked when the tiny human mind looks for reasons and answers. Much easier to look out-right out, beyond even the furthest orbits of Ura.n.u.s and Pluto, out to Riga, even to that other mirror, far Andromeda and beyond that to ...

Oh yes, that's what our mind does most easily, but right here, in close, so close it is locked with us in a dance that moves waters and earth in tides twice a day, and swings in our veins and arteries and the tides of thought in our minds-close, flesh of our flesh, thought of our thought, Moon, Earth's stepchild, setting our stature, setting our growth, feeding appet.i.tes and making them. Moon spinning closer in to Earth makes animals and plants such and such a size and Moon lost or disintegrated or wandering further away changes animals, plants, the height of tides and probably the movement of land ma.s.ses and ice ma.s.ses, changes life as draconically as a sudden shower in a desert will change everything overnight. On the surface of the little Earth, a little green film, and part and parcel with this film, being fed by it, the crust of microbes, mankind, mad, moonmad, lunatic. To celestial eyes, seen like a broth of microbes under a microscope, always at war and destruction, this sc.u.m of microbes thinks, it can see itself, it begins slowly to sense itself as one, a function, a note in the harmony, and this is its point and function, and where the sc.u.mmy film transcends itself, here and here only, and never where these mad microbes say I, I, I, I, I, for saying I, I, I, I, is their madness, this is where they have been struck lunatic, made moon-mad, round the bend, crazy, for these microbes are a whole, they form a unity, they have a single mind, a single being, and never can they say I, I, without making the celestial watchers roll with laughter or weep with pity-since I suppose we are free to presume compa.s.sion and derisiveness in the guardians of the microbes; or at least we are free to imagine nothing else-compa.s.sion and amus.e.m.e.nt being our qualities, but who knows what sort of a colour or a sound laughter, tears, make there in that finer kind of air?

Some sort of a divorce there has been somewhere along the path of this race of man between the "I" and the "We," some sort of a terrible falling-away, and I (who am not I, but part of a whole composed of other human beings as they are of me) hovering here as if between the wings of a great white bird, feel as if I am spinning back (though it may be forwards, who knows?) yes, spinning back into a vortex of terror, like a birth in reverse, and it is towards a catastrophe, yes, that was when the microbes, the little broth that is humanity, was knocked senseless, hit for six, knocked out of their true understanding, so that ever since most have said, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, and cannot, save for a few, say, We.

Yes, but what awful blow or knock? What sent us off centre, and away from the sweet sanity of We? In a moment I'll know, I'm being sucked back like a mite revolving in the vortex of the bathwater, eddying into the millrace, back, back, and then, Cras.h.!.+ the Comet; it comes hurtling out of the dark s.p.a.ce, gives Earth a blow to midriff, and, deflected in its course, rushes off into the dark again, taking some of the atmosphere with it, and, leaving Earth no longer circling sane and steady, but wobbling back and forth, gyrating like a top, and all askew, which is when the seasons were born, beloved of poets, but worse, the air changed, the air that they breathed which kept them sane and healthy, saying We in love and understanding for the developing organ in a celestial body which they were. The air that had been the food of sane and loving understanding became a deadly poison, the lungs of these poor little animals laboured and changed and adapted, and their poor brains, all muddled and befuddled laboured to work at all, and worked badly, a machine all awry, but always teased and tormented by a queer half memory of the time before they became poisoned and spoiled and could not think and hated each other instead of loving. And there hung Earth, a casualty, all amiss, but soon they forgot, their newly-poisoned air became their normality, a forgetting by vanity, and ... but Crash, look, I'm on the other side of the Catastrophe, I'm before it. Though I'm free, too, to say "after," since like "up and down" it is interchangeable and entirely how you look at it, how you are situated, as is backwards and forwards. But man-wise, microbe-wise, I am before the Crash and in a cool, sweet, loving air that rings with harmony, is harmony, Is, yes, and here am I, voyager, Odysseus bound for home at last, the Seeker in home waters, spiteful Neptune outwitted and Jupiter's daughter my friend and guide.

All men make caves of shadow for their eyes

With hats and hands, sockets, lashes, brows,

So tender pupils dare look at the light.

In Northlands too where light lies shadowless

A man will lift his hand to guard his eyes;

It's a thing that I've seen done in strong moonlight.

At any blaze too fierce, that warden hand

Goes to its post, keeping a dark:

Like cats', men's eyes grow large and soft with night.

New eyes they are, and still not used to see,

Taking in facets, individual,

With no skill yet to use them round and right.

Think: beasts on all fours we were, low,

With horizontal gaze kept safely from

That pulsing flaming all eye-searing bright.

Yet had to come that inevitable day

A small brave beast raised up his paw to branch,

Pulled himself high-and staggered on his height.

Our human babes have shown us how it was.