The dead, as the passionate necessity wears out, come into a measure of
freedom and may turn the impulse of events, started while living, in some
new direction, but they cannot originate except through the living. Then
gradually they perceive, although they are still but living in their
memories, harmonies, symbols, and patterns, as though all were being
refashioned by an artist, and they are moved by emotions, sweet for no
imagined good but in themselves, like those of children dancing in a ring;
and I do not doubt that they make love in that union which Swedenborg has
said is of the whole body and seems from far off an incandescence.
Hitherto shade has communicated with shade in moments of common memory
that recur like the figures of a dance in terror or in joy, but now they
run together like to like, and their Covens and Fleets have rhythm and
pattern. This running together and running of all to a centre and yet
without loss of identity, has been prepared for by their exploration of
their moral life, of its beneficiaries and its victims, and even of all
its untrodden paths, and all their thoughts have moulded the vehicle and
become event and circumstance.
X
There are two realities, the terrestrial and the condition of fire. All
power is from the terrestrial condition, for there all opposites meet and
there only is the extreme of choice possible, full freedom. And there the
heterogeneous is, and evil, for evil is the strain one upon another of
opposites; but in the condition of fire is all music and all rest. Between
is the condition of air where images have but a borrowed life, that of
memory or that reflected upon them when they symbolise colours and
intensities of fire, the place of shades who are "in the whirl of those
who are fading," and who cry like those amorous shades in the Japanese
play:
"That we may acquire power
Even in our faint substance,
We will show forth even now,
And though it be but in a dream,
Our form of repentance."
After so many rhythmic beats the soul must cease to desire its images, and
can, as it were, close its eyes.
When all sequence comes to an end, time comes to an end, and the soul puts
on the rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body and contemplates all
the events of its memory and every possible impulse in an eternal
possession of itself in one single moment. That condition is alone
animate, all the rest is phantasy, and from thence come all the passions,
and some have held, the very heat of the body.
Time drops in decay,
Like a candle burnt out,
And the mountains and the woods
Have their day, have their day.
What one, in the rout
Of the fire-born moods,
Has fallen away?