Separation from those who are "dead" had melted from me. Separation
from those who are living I saw to be a phantasm. It would last as
long as we chose to let it last; it would go away when we chose that
it should go away. Separation from those to come--they are
ourselves! We returning, we continuing, we the world's future as we
are its present and its past.
The task was for the small city, the small country, at present
calling itself Michael Forth, to realize into all that it yet held to
be without, into all that it must hold to be above. That was the
task, that was the desire ... desire that all cities and countries
waken to the mounting interest, the song, the lovers' meeting of
reality.
"Journeys end in lovers' meetings
Every wise man's son doth know--"
The rains were past. We were gone from the stream and the Pygmies'
village, and the grave of Mannheim beneath the palm. Maxwell and
Ferraro undertook care and furtherance of the naturalist's
collection, and, later, Llewellyn and I brought "Mannheim's Notes"
into order, and later yet saw to their publication.
We journeyed on through middle Africa. We encountered heated,
endless forests, and tribes, much alike, of men near the foot of the
ladder. Some had an uneasy stirring, looking toward the rung above.
We saw individuals who were climbing thither. And never, in Africa
nor anywhere else, did I see, have ever I seen, anything save
climbing stuff!
Time passed. At a certain village--capital of a king named
Tamewa--we were made and held prisoners for seven weeks. There were
days here when we confidently looked for death. There was a night
when we white men, and with us Ahasuerus, were bound with withes and
heard without the hut savage preparations for an execution, and saw
red, darting light of kindled fires. But when the cocks were crowing
came rescue. A man from among our carriers, stealing away, had gone
leagues through the forest, back to a friendly people from whose
village we had come to Tamewa's--had gone and come again with chiefs
and a considerable company of men and loud representations to Tamewa.
At last, after enormous discussion, entered agreement. Released from
bonds, we became fantastically honored guests--and yet might not go
from Tamewa's town until that seven weeks had passed.
The night that we were tied within the hut, seeing that there could
be no sleeping, and it was best there be no talking, each went,
doubtless, according to his own drawing into the inner country. I
was thinking....
A fact of communication between minds at a distance--space distance,
time distance, state of consciousness distance. An over-voice, as
written or printed words, as telephone or telegraph were
over-voices--but without pen, paper, mail-trains, poles and wires.
Transmitters and receivers, each both ... vastly subtler
telegraphing, telephoning, interhearing, interseeing,
interknowing.... Circulation of thought, circulation of emotion,
sensation; circulation of experience, understanding--forever flowing,
forever, as it turned upon itself, richer, wiser, than it had been
before. So, though it turned, it was not the same; so it became a
spiral movement, concentric rings, each including the earlier
turnings, each, in the long run, bettering those before....
Shoreless sea of energy, refining itself, transmuting forever its own
cold into fervor, its dark into light, changing forever less
knowledge for more, less love for more, less power and joy for more.
I thought it an absurdity if there be no deepening speech, no
farther-carrying vision, between part and part of a thing that as a
whole perpetually changed state for better state. As the whole grew
more richly conscious, every part must do so, too.... Or as every
part grew more richly conscious the whole must do so, too.... Put it
as you choose!
The immediate sharing of sensation or of knowledge.... In strong
concentration, in contemplation, there was no thought given to the
field through which, from "far" points, perception flashed. All was
lost in I-ness--One-ness--Continuousness. Distance in
space--distance in time--partialness in event--ceased their troubling.
By the light passage we were but ten minutes from the sun. The
universal draw of attraction took no time at all.
Ethereal--perfectly penetrative and penetrable.... Learn to use the
ether!
My mother spoke to me. "Michael, they are coming through the
forest--men to help. They will be here in an hour."
I said to the others: "The Bangala that we left are coming through
the forest. Zurti persuaded them. They will be here in an hour."
It happened so.... Sir Charles spoke to me, aside, the next day.
"How did you know that, Michael?"
"How do we know anything? It's all of a piece that can be unrolled,
which is to say, understood, further and further.... My mother told
me."
"Within you? You said on the mountain that all that was within you."
"Yes. But 'within you' opens into a great land. 'The Kingdom of
Heaven is within you.' It isn't a small kingdom."
"Tell me plainly," he said. "Do you think that your mother lives?"
"I do."
"But conscious--remembering--able to act?"
"Yes. Able to grow--that is, to increase in consciousness and power."
"And you expect to meet her?"
"I do meet her. I expect to meet her more completely. Far more
completely."
"I wish that I knew!" he said. "There are persons with whom I wish
to live again."
The time-water flowed over the time-wheel. This tribe, uncertain
between slaying and saving, let us go. We went on. Sometimes we
traveled through the forest. Sometimes--often indeed--we went in
boats, long distances down the full river in native boats. We
tarried in villages; we left the rubbing and beating of drums, the
chanting, the dancing, and we came in little time again to rubbing
and beating of drums, to chanting and dancing. We left idols and
came to idols. I felt no contemptuousness toward these. Idols are
divinities and have a kinship, or in their stage of True-God-on-High,
or in their stage of relegation.
Middle Africa--Africa sloping to the west, country of the Congo with
all its ancestors gathered in its bosom.... There began, as it were,
an inward murmuring of ocean, of England--America.
The ancient, imperfect, compounded ideation that we call these
bodies, these purposes and acts, this environment, situation,
circumstance, this earth under our poor two eyes, all the accustomed,
remembered, repeated, "living," flowed or stumbled quite enough as
usual. I was aware of certain differences. All outward matters must
finally change as changes the inward star. If the center strongly
shines the circumference will know it. If the center grows
lethargic, all the outland stiffens, darkens. I was aware that there
must be shining all along the way from the star. Light grew
intenser, colors more brilliant. Thorn hedges and hard walls
vanished, and there were richer wholes. There was sense of the
in-ness of things, and sometimes cause and effect were seen as one
form. The time sense, too, was changing.... But yet it was all but
one taste of the honey--
Llewellyn and I were moving in a boat up some arm of Congo,
volunteers to discover what lay beyond a certain sharp point of
shore. The negroes who rowed us had their own preoccupations. The
banks were somber, the stream deep and still and darkened by
overhanging clouds. We had been sitting in silence. Llewellyn broke
it. "I, too, have the historic sense," he said. "When you have that
very thoroughly you assume an individual and his acts. You can't say
him or her; it's both. Hermaphrodite, or some better word than that,
if you please! It is all right as long as you know that all sex and
no sex is there. You may call it This World, or Earth, or Planetary
Being, or Man, or what you please. But the inorganic must go in as
well as the organic, plant as well as animal, animal as well as
human, one kind as well as another kind! All the classes and castes.
Then This World thinks itself out, changing from power to power.
Hence Drama--its own. Narratives, Epics, Tragedies, Comedies, and
the hair balance between. Lyrical outbursts ...
Mnemosyne--Pythoness--Dionysos --Aphrodite--Apollo--Pallas--Zeus!
The wildest, greatest, most abandoned, most controlled drama in three
dimensions.... This world's a Genius!"
"More light than dark."
"I should hope so. At any rate, the light must be growing.... I
seem to see that it's had its infancy and childhood, and that now
it's in the strangest turmoil of adolescence. But infancy and
childhood--! My God! What resumes of what in our little way we call
Ancient Sin, Adult Wrong!"
We went on in silence for a time. I looked at the leaden sky.
Llewellyn had been thinking aloud, and now I, too, thought aloud.
"In the Confessions of Saint Augustine there is a page that well
gives what is coiled up, remembered, stored, in one's self as little
infant in a little cradle. It runs like this. 'Was it then good,
even for a while, to cry for what, if given, would hurt? bitterly to
resent that persons, free and its own elders, yea, the very authors
of its birth, served it not? that many besides, wiser than it, obeyed
not the nod of its good pleasure? to do its best to strike and hurt
because commands were not obeyed which had been obeyed to its hurt?
The weakness of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence. Myself
have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it
turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother.... Is that,
too, innocence, when the fountain of milk is flowing in rich
abundance, not to endure one to share it, though in extremest need?
... This age I am yet loath to count in this life of mine which I
live in this world. For no less than that which I spent in my
mother's womb is it hid from me in the shadows of forgetfulness....
But, I beseech thee, O my God, where, Lord, or when was I guiltless?'"
The banks were somber, the sky was a roof of whirling vapor. "And
elsewhere he says, 'Did my infancy succeed another age of mine that
died before it? Was it that which I spent within my mother's womb
... and what before that life again, O God my joy! was I anywhere or
anybody? For this I have none to tell me, neither father nor mother
nor experience of others, nor mine own memory.'"
The boat moved on. The forest was still, but the river voice carried
fathomless undertones. "What do you think there?" said Llewellyn.
"I think that some day we will take, unravel, and look at our cell
life, embryonic life, child life. Then will we know in our own
proper person, plane after plane, that past living that at each point
we called adult. Species-mind cognizing species-life. World-mind
cognizing world-life. Then shall we see where came in the
lethargies, mistakes, self-limitations, inhibitions, perversions,
mislikes, recoils, fears--that at last we must call thick ignorance,
hatred, terror, guilt..."
Beyond the point of shore we found a long, narrow reach of water, and
upon one bank a diminutive settlement, a very few thatched huts dwelt
in by a remnant of a tribe, wasted apparently by disease and war. By
now the clouds had broken in a downpour. The day was advanced and
our rowers unwilling to turn down-stream into wet and night. We were
armed, and we had with us beads and cloth for purposes of
propitiation and exchange. Standing off the bank, we made due
explanations and proffers of friendship to the men who had run from
the huts with bows and arrows and menacing shouts. Reassured, they
let us land. The shining beads and scarlet cloth worked as almost
always they worked. Presently we had food and shelter for the night.
Llewellyn and I lay in a fairly clean hut in thick darkness, with
river and wind for lullaby. We lay wakeful, in silence. "Well! Let
us go to sleep," he said at last, and turned.
I addressed myself to sleep--but instead of entering that land a
curtain parted and I was in another. Before I crossed the frontier I
was re-aware of a day at Restwell, two years ago. The river there--a
boat--Dorothea and I rowing beneath the willows. That hour had
extension and volume it had not seemed then to possess.... That
scene closed. I was over the frontier--no longer Michael Forth only,
but many-folded sensation, knowledge, passion, life.
Without more warning than the mood of this place and that flash of
association, I stumbled into the woe of the world.
"_So I returned and considered all the oppressions that are done
under the sun._"
It seemed to me that I should die....
The oppressions and the woe were my own. _Peine forte et dure_--and
I was the victim under the stone, and I was the weight that crushed,
and I was they who stretched me there and put the millstone on me.
And the misery of all three was the same.
"If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain--"
Woe and woe and double woe!
Into me drew, around, within me, whirled pain and guilt, the great
maelstrom.
Over and over the brain gave images--but it was that which touch gave
me, not that which sight gave.... Oh, God in me--my own hope in
me--raise hell to purgatory, purgatory to the beginning of wisdom!
Woe of the world--light-lack, love-lack.... As there can be no going
out, as never, never can we go out--where they lack, what can be but
aching want?
I ached--I ached.
It seemed recapitulation, it seemed also lateral sharing. All of us
down there in those moments--and all of us now in these moments. All
of us from pole to pole. All of us that were one and are one.
Mankind is one being. It feels the woe of head and the woe of foot,
the woe of the one hand and of the other hand. It is the worse for
the ice-bound heart, and the worse for the tattered, lack-thrift
brain that will not learn to use its wealth.
It longed for health--poor Mankind--poor God-that-would-be! with all
its members warring, with hardly a piece of tissue glimpsing the
truth!
Oh, long woe and sickness! Oh, tatters and dungeon of ignorance!
Oh, hearth where the fire is but a spark! ... Where shall we get fuel?
_Lay the little self there for fuel_.
... Time passed, though time passed slowly.... The wind and the rain
outside had ceased, there fell a great hush. In me, too, was now a
stillness. It was dark, but the air of it was not heavy--a clear
darkness, clean, with a taste of myrrh. This enlarged--there seemed
a firmament very deep and vast, still, pure, ineffable, though still
dark.... Then gathered from somewhere the sense of truth--and there
was a white and splendid star in the dark.