Child and Country Part 22

The Dakotan is twenty. All summer he has been doing some original thinking on the subject of Sound. When I was his age, Tyndall was the big voice on this subject; yet we have come to think in all humbleness that Tyndall only touched his toes in the stream. The Dakotan has spent the last few years afield. He is a tramp, a solitaire, a student at the sources of life. Things have been made easier for him here. He took to this life with the same equableness of mind that he accepted the companions of hards.h.i.+p and drudgery on the open road. Throughout the last summer he has moved about field and wood and sh.o.r.e, between hours of expression at his machine, in a kind of unbroken meditation. I have found myself turning to him in hard moments. Some of our afternoons together, little was said, but much accomplished. A few paragraphs follow from the paper brought in on this particular night:

"Vibration is the law that holds the Universe together. Its energy is the great primal Breath. Vibration is life and light, heat and motion. Without it, there would be blackness and universal death. From the almost static state of rock and soil, we have risen steadily in vibration up through the first four senses, to Sound, the fifth. The scope of Sound-vibration yet to be experienced by us is beyond our wildest imagination.

"Sounds are the different rates of vibration in all things.

As yet we know Sound as we know most other things, merely on the dense physical plane. The next great discoveries in higher phenomena will be made in the realm of Sound. The most marvellous powers are to be disenchanted from vibrations as yet inaudible. The present enthusiasm over _telepathy_ is merely the start of far greater phenomena to come.

"It is my belief that over ninety per cent of the sounds we know and hear are injurious, lowering, disquieting and scattering to all higher thought, to intuition and all that is fine and of the spirit. There is not one human voice in a thousand that is of a quieting influence and friendly to higher aspirations. The voice is a filler, in lieu of shortages of intellect and intuition. More and more, among fine people explanations are out of order. A man is silent in proportion to what he knows of real fineness and aspiration.

Outside of that speech which is absolutely a man's duty to give out, one can tell almost to the ampere, the voltage of his inner being, or its vacantness and slavery, by the depth of his listening silences, or the aimlessness of his filling chatter. It is only those few who have come _to know_, through some annealing sorrow, sickness, or suffering, and draw away from the crowds and noises into the Silence, that become gifted with all-knowing counsels.

"There is a sound born from every thought, action, or aspiration of man, whether of a high or a low order, a sound not to be heard but felt, by any one fine and sensitive enough to receive the impression. From the collective, intuitive thoughts of attuned groups of men, thinking or working as one toward a high end, there arises a sound which is to be _felt_ as a fine singing tingle by all in the vicinity. The work here proves this. At times there is an exquisite singing in the air, not audible but plainly to be felt, and a kind of emanation of light in the Chapel. We all lean forward. The voice and thought of one has become the voice and thought of all; what is to be said is sensed and known before it is uttered; all minds are one.

"... There are moments in the soft, changing, growing, conceiving hours of dawn and sunset when Mother Nature heaves a long deep sigh of perfect peace, content and harmony. It is something of this that the wild birds voice, as they greet the sun at dawn, and again as they give sweet and melancholy notes at his sinking in the quiet of evening. Birds are impressed from without. They are reasonless, ecstatic, spontaneous, giving voice as accurately and joyously as they can to the vibrations of peace and harmony--to the _Sounds_, which they feel from Nature. Animals and birds are conscious of forces and creatures, we cannot see.... Unless we decide that birds generate their songs within; that they reason and study their singing, we must grant that they hear and imitate from Nature, as human composers do. The process in any case has not to do with intellect and reason, but with sensitiveness and spirit. One does not need to acquire intellect and reasoning, to have inspiration, sensitiveness, and spirit. It is the childlike and spontaneous, the sinless and pure-of-heart that attain to psychic inspiration.

"Have you ever seen at close range the rapt, listening, inspired look of the head of a wild bird in flight? Has anything fine and pure ever come to you from a deep look into the luminous eyes of a bird fresh from the free open?

"... Study the very voices of spiritual men. They are low-pitched, seeming to issue from deep within the man; one strains to catch what is said, especially if he be used to the far-carrying, sharp, metallic, blatant speech of the West. Certain ancients were better versed in the potency of sounds than we are to-day. Study in occult writings the magic p.r.o.nunciation of _Aum_, _Amitabha_, _Allah_, of certain chants and spirit-invoking incantations of old, and one draws a conception of the powers of friendly sounds and the injurious effects of discordant sounds, such as we are surrounded by....

"Many of us in the West, who are so used to din and broken rhythm, would call the _Vina_, that Oriental harp-string of the soul, a relic of barbaric times. But _Vina's_ magic cry at evening brings the very elementals about the player. The voices of Nature, the lapping of water, bird-song, roll of thunder, the wind in the pines--these are sounds that bring one some slight whit of the grandeur and majestic harmony of the Universe. These are the voice of _kung_, 'the great tone'

in Oriental music, corresponding somewhat to F, the middle note of the piano, supposed to be peace-invoking. In northern China the Buddhist priests sit out in evening, listening raptly to _kung_, the 'all-harmonious sound of the Hoang-ho rus.h.i.+ng by.' One longs to be the intimate of such meditations."

30

THE DAKOTAN (_Continued_)

I first heard of the Dakotan[3] at a time when I was not quite so interested in the younger generation. A woman friend out in his country wrote me, and sent on some of his work. I was not thrilled especially, though the work was good. She tried again, and I took the later ma.n.u.script to bed with me, one night when I was "lifted out," as the mason said. It did not work as designed. Instead of dropping off on the first page, I tossed for hours, and a letter asking him to come to Stonestudy was off in the first mail in the morning.

He is drawing entirely from his own centre of origins. That was established at once, and has been held. The only guiding required, since he is a natural writer, has been on the one point of preserving a childlike directness and clarity of expression. It is not that he wants the popular market; the quality of his _bent_ precludes that for the present. Moreover, he can live here on what thousands of men in America spend for cigars, but our ideal of writing has to do with the straight line between the thought and the utterance.

A man's style has little or nothing to do with the words, or the sentence, paragraph or even his native eccentricities of technique; a man's style has to do with the manner of his thinking. As for words and the implements of writing, the more nearly they are made to parallel the run of thought, the better the work.

One does not learn the Dakotan's kind in a day or a year. There is a continual changing and refining production about our truest friends--the same thing in a woman that a man can love in the highest--that quickens us always to higher vision and deeper humanity. The point is that we must change and increase to be worthy of our truest relations. One must always be restless and capacious. When our eyes rest on the horizon, and do not yearn to tear it apart; when the throb of the Quest sinks low in our breast--it is time to depart. You who in mid-life think you have _arrived somewhere_--in profession, in trade, in world-standing--know that death has already touched you, that the look of your face is dissolute.

I have said to the Dakotan and to the others here: "It was good for you to come--but the time may arrive, when it will be just as good for you to go.... When you see me covering old fields; when you come here for continual reviews of my little story; when your mind winces with the thought of what I am to do and say next, because you know it well already--arise and come no more, but in pa.s.sing, say to me, 'To-day we did not get out of the circle of yesterday....' I shall know what is meant, and it shall be good for you to tell me, since one forgets. It may be that there is still enough strength for another voyage--that I may be constrained to leave Telemachus and go forth to the edge of the land "where lights twinkle among the rocks and the deep moans round with many voices."

Recently the Dakotan told me of a dream, and I asked him to write it. I think he will draw nearer to you, if you read the story that he brought me:

"This is the latest and most complete of many under-water dreams that have come to me. In their thrall as a child I learned the deeps of fear. I do not know why dreams of mine are so often a.s.sociated with water, unless at some time, way back in the beginnings, the horror of a water-existence has been so stamped upon me that it has been retained in consciousness. As a child, water and strong winds drove me to tears. I can remember no other things that brought marked fear but these. One incident of wind, on a boat going to Block Island Light-house, off Newport, remains as vivid to this day as when it was enacted, and I was not yet five at the time. Every one wondered at these peculiar fears, but the explanation is plainer if one can look either back or beyond.

"Knowledge is but a glimmering of past experience. We are the condensed sum of all our past activities. Normal mind and memory are only of the immediate present, only as old as our bodies, but once in a long time we fall by chance into certain peculiar conditions of body, mind, or soul--conditions that are invoking to great reaches of consciousness back into the past. Normally our sh.e.l.l is too thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner man is ever a hushed whisper.

"The exceptionally low temperature of my body was the immediate cause of this dream. Here is a conviction that I brought up from it: I believe that any one by putting himself into a state of very low temperature and vibration, almost akin to hibernation, may be enabled to go back in consciousness toward the Beginnings. Evidently red blood is wholly of man, but in some way the white corpuscles of the blood seem to be related to the cold-blooded animals and hence to the past. Under conditions, such as sleeping on the ground or in a cold, damp place, these white corpuscles may be aided to gain ascendency over the heart, brain, and red corpuscles. This accomplished, the past may be brought back.

"It was a cold, rainy Fall night that the dream came. A bleak east wind blowing along the lake-sh.o.r.e, probed every recess of the 'Pontchartrain,' the tiny open-work cottage I used. The place was flushed like a sieve with wind and rain.

It leaked copiously and audibly, and there was no burrowing away from the storm. I sought the blankets early in a state of very low circulation. The last thing I was conscious of, as I drifted off, was the cold, the low sound of the wind, and the rain beating upon the roof....

"There was a cohering line through this dream, every detail stamped upon my consciousness so deeply that the memory of it upon awaking was almost as vivid as when I was immersed....

It began very slowly with a growing perception of a low monotonous lap and wash of water and a slight heaving, lifting sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and fro.

It was very cold, not the biting cold we know, but a dank, lifeless, penetrating cold of water and darkness.... The manner of my own form was not clear to me; I was of too low a consciousness to be aware of many exterior particulars. I merely knew I belonged to darkness and deep water. In fact, during the dream I had hardly a sense of _being_, except through the outer stimuli of cold and danger. These were horribly plain. That I was a creature of the depths and dark, a bleached single-cell, was doubtless a mental conclusion from the waking contemplation afterward. In the dream, I seemed of vast size, and I believe all little creatures do, since they fill their scope as tightly as we. The spark of consciousness, or life within, seemed so faint that part of the time my body seemed a dead, immovable bulk. No sense of self or body in comparison to outer things, was existent, except when a larger form instilled me with fear.

"My dream seemed a direct reversion back into the Beginnings, in form, consciousness, state of being, perception and instinct--everything--so that I actually lived, in infinitely dwindled consciousness, the terrible water-life.

"All was blackness. I possessed some slight volition of life that contracted in the cold. I was not in any keen suffering; I seemed too low and numbed to sense to the full the unpleasantness of my condition.... Presently there came a dawning light which gradually grew stronger. I did not seem to have eyes, but was conscious of the ray seemingly through the walls of my body. Slowly it increased, to a sickly wan filter of grey. It was light s.h.i.+ning through water, a light which would have been no light to a human being. To me it was intense and fearsome, seemed to reach centres of me that were sensitive beyond expression. Though I was a mere blob, boneless and quivering, the ray was foreign and I knew what it was to cringe.

"And now I find the difficulty of interpreting the dream exactly from the point of the Cell. These things that I write I could not know then, except in smallest measure. As our greater forces are diminished by pa.s.sing through the brain, these little affairs are increased by adjustment to man's waking faculties. From now, I shall give the picture as it appears to me from this distance:

"As the light increased, I contracted and sank slowly into the depths. The bottom was not far. I descended in a flowing, undulating fas.h.i.+on and settled softly on the water-bed, beside a large, up-jutting fang of rock. It was black in the depths. The cold penetrated all. Torpid and p.r.o.ne, I lay there numbed into absolute quiescence. It seemed that a torpid inertia, doomed to be everlasting, had settled upon me. I knew no want, no desire, had not the slightest will to move, to rest, to sleep, to eat, even to exist, just the dimmest sense of watchfulness and fear. It was perfect hibernation. I had descended into too low a degree of temperature and vibration to feel the need even of nourishment. I was becoming dead to the cold; everything was a pulseless void. I should never have generated an impulse to move again had not extraneous influences affected me after seeming ages had pa.s.sed.

"The bottom on which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it, or rather feel it--a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings of the life impulse. The tops and sides of the rocks were festooned with waving green fringes of growths, which trailed out into the water. Long, snakelike fronds and stems of whitish green, half-vegetable, half-animal, grew on the bottom. They were stationary at their bases, but were lithe and a-crawl with life in their stems, extending and contracting into the water at intervals, in a spiral, snakey manner. Their heads were like white-bleached flowers, with hairy lips, which contracted and opened constantly, engulfing the myriads of floating, microscopic forms.

"Upon the heads of some of the creepers were ghostly phosph.o.r.escent lights, which winked on and off at intervals as the stems waved gently to and fro. I did not have an instinctive fear of these. They seemed friendly. They lit up the black depths. They and I seemed of a similar bent; they feared the forms that I feared and contracted tight to the bottom when these enemies approached. There were certain permanent spots about me that gave off other lights at intervals. The whole bottom was a dim, vast region of many-coloured lights, or more properly, dim lambent glows, of blue, green and yellow, which winked and nodded on and off in the blackness. They seemed to be the decoys of the feeders that possessed them. Each glow lit up a circle in the depths and seemed to attract food to the watcher who waved it. They were all cold lights, mere phosph.o.r.escent gleams without the searching, penetrating qualities of the light I had first felt, and they did not bother me.

"... The ray was filtering down again. It was this that kept me alive. It increased until all above was a wan grey. One by one the many-coloured lights of the bottom winked off, the long feelers and contractile stems were drawn in, and the whole bottom became once more a motionless, dead-grey world.... Little sacks without eyes in that grey light, the gorging not begun, kept alive by the whip of fear. The low life would have gone on to death or dissemination had it not been for exterior forces which reached me in the shape of Fear. I shall never forget it--the Fear of the Black Bottoms.

"There was a long, hideous suspense, as the Ray held me, and the thing that I feared was not the Ray, but belonged with it. In the midst of a kind of freezing paralysis, the struggle to flee arose within me. Yet I was without means of locomotion. Through sheer intensity of panic I expanded. Then there was a thrusting forward of the inner vital centre against the forward wall of the sack. It was the most vital part of me that was thrust forward, the heart of a rudiment, so to speak. That which remained, followed in a kind of flow.

The movement was an undulation forward, brought about by the terror to escape.

"Fear is always connected with Behind. With the approach of Danger I had started _forward_. There had been no forward nor backward before, nor any sides or top to me. Now a back, a dorsal aspect, came into being, and the vital centre was thrust forward within the cell, so as to be farthest away from the danger. It is in this way that the potential centre of an organism came to be in the front, in the head, looking forward and always pointed away from the danger--protected to the last.

"As I flowed forward, the sticky fluid substance of my body sucked into the oozy bottom. I spatted myself as flat as possible, seeming to press the tenderest parts closest to the bottom. And it is in this way that the vital parts of organisms came to be underneath, on the ventral aspect, protected from above by the sides and back. As the Fear increased, I gained in strength and speed of locomotion, the same parts of my form protruding rhythmically, faster and easier, until I did not need to concentrate so intensely upon the moving-act. Doubtless I covered ages of evolution in the dream. It is in this way through the stimulus of Fear that the rudiments of organs of locomotion were begun. And they came in the Beginnings on the ventral side, because that side was pressed close to the earth. Every sense, volition, reasoning power--everything--was generated and fostered by Fear in the Beginnings. So Fear is really the Mother of our first overcoming of Inertia.

"I do not recall being devoured by that creature of the Ray; and yet it seems as if half the life in the Bottoms was clutched in the torture of that danger. The other half was gorging.... Gorge, gorge, with unappeased appet.i.te, body bulging to the bursting point, the Devourers all about me, the larger engulfing the smaller, not with mouths, but literally enclosing their prey with the walls of their bodies, so that the smaller flowed into the larger. And often the engulfed would be of greater length than the engulfer....

"There was a sound made by the gorging, a distinct sound born of gluttony, not audible, but to be felt by my sensitive surfaces, a sort of emanation, not from the gorgers, but born from the engrossing intensity of the gorging act. I shall always remember it, a distinct 'ummmmmmm,' constant, and rising and falling at times to a trifle faster or lower pitch.

"Always, as the Ray would cross above me, there would be a stoppage of the emanations from the gorgers, a sinking to the bottom, and a rising again. Also there were Shadows, sinister, flowing grey forms, that preyed about the rocky bottom. These were more felt by me than heard or seen, and instilled more deadly fear than the larger Shadows that pa.s.sed above. The drama of the feeding seemed doomed to go on and on forever. Repletion would never have come to the Gorgers. Only Fear broke the spell.

"I recall a last glimpse of that ghost-life of the depths.

About the rocks, the long snakelike stems and feelers were extended, and the luring decoys waved and glowed again at the ends of the stalks. With the cessation of the feeding, began the vaster, unquenchable feeding of the engulfing plants. It was steady, monotonous, inexhaustible--the winking and waving of the blue-green glows, the cl.u.s.tering of the senseless prey, a sudden extinguis.h.i.+ng of the light, devouring--then the nodding gleam again. No mercy, no feeling, no reason existed in this ghost-region of bleached and bloodless things. The law was the law of Fear and Gluttony. There was a thrall to the whole drama which I am powerless to express.

"... The embryo in the womb eats and a.s.similates, all unconscious. With life there is movement. The first movement takes the form of sucking-in that which prolongs life. Then there is the driving forward by Fear from without. Low life is a vibration between Fear and Gluttony. In every movement is the gain of power to make another movement. That is the Law of life.

"I opened my eyes. The wan grey light of morning was s.h.i.+ning In my face. I felt weak and unrested. There were puddles of water on the foot of the bed. The blankets lay heavily about my limbs, and circulation was hardly sufficient to hold consciousness. The effects of the dream oppressed me the rest of that day and for long afterward."

FOOTNOTES:

[3] H. A. Sturtzel.

31

THE HILL ROCKS