Some are Roman crosses, some St. Andrew's, some Maltese. This time we
are spared contact with the anthropologists and have geologists instead,
but I am afraid that the relief to our finer, or more nearly real,
sensibilities will not be very great. The geologists were called upon to
explain the "fairy crosses." Their response was the usual scientific
tropism--"Geologists say that they are crystals." The writer in
_Harper's Weekly_ points out that this "hold up," or this anaesthetic, if
theoretic science be little but attempt to assuage pangs of the
unexplained, fails to account for the localized distributions of these
objects--which make me think of both aggregation and separation at the
bottom of the sea, if from a wrecked ship, similar objects should fall
in large numbers but at different times.
But some are Roman crosses, some St. Andrew's, some Maltese.
Conceivably there might be a mineral that would have a diversity of
geometric forms, at the same time restricted to some expression of the
cross, because snowflakes, for instance, have diversity but restriction
to the hexagon, but the guilty geologists, cold-blooded as astronomers
and chemists and all the other deep-sea fishes--though less profoundly
of the pseudo-saved than the wretched anthropologists--disregarded the
very datum--that it was wise to disregard:
That the "fairy crosses" are not all made of the same material.
It's the same old disregard, or it's the same old psycho-tropism, or
process of assimilation. Crystals are geometric forms. Crystals are
included in the System. So then "fairy crosses" are crystals. But that
different minerals should, in a few different regions, be inspired to
turn into different forms of the cross--is the kind of resistance that
we call less nearly real than our own acceptances.
We now come to some "cursed" little things that are of the "lost," but
for the "salvation" of which scientific missionaries have done their
damnedest.
"Pigmy flints."
They can't very well be denied.
They're lost and well known.
"Pigmy flints" are tiny, prehistoric implements. Some of them are a
quarter of an inch in size. England, India, France, South
Africa--they've been found in many parts of the world--whether showered
there or not. They belong high up in the froth of the accursed: they are
not denied, and they have not been disregarded; there is an abundant
literature upon this subject. One attempt to rationalize them, or
assimilate them, or take them into the scientific fold, has been the
notion that they were toys of prehistoric children. It sounds
reasonable. But, of course, by the reasonable we mean that for which the
equally reasonable, but opposing, has not been found out--except that we
modify that by saying that, though nothing's finally reasonable, some
phenomena have higher approximations to Reasonableness than have others.
Against the notion of toys, the higher approximation is that where
"pygmy flints" are found, all flints are pygmies--at least so in India,
where, when larger implements have been found in the same place, there
are separations by strata. (Wilson.)
The datum that, just at present, leads me to accept that these flints
were made by beings about the size of pickles, is a point brought out by
Prof. Wilson (_Rept. National Museum_, 1892-455):
Not only that the flints are tiny but that the chipping upon them is
"minute."
Struggle for expression, in the mind of a 19th-century-ite, of an idea
that did not belong to his era:
In _Science Gossip_, 1896-36, R.A. Galty says:
"So fine is the chipping that to see the workmanship a magnifying glass
is necessary."
I think that would be absolutely convincing, if there were
anything--absolutely anything--either that tiny beings, from pickle to
cucumber-stature, made these things, or that ordinary savages made them
under magnifying glasses.
The idea that we are now going to develop, or perpetrate, is rather
intensely of the accursed, or the advanced. It's a lost soul, I
admit--or boast--but it fits in. Or, as conventional as ever, our own
method is the scientific method of assimilating. It assimilates, if we
think of the inhabitants of Elvera--
By the way, I forgot to tell the name of the giant's world:
Monstrator.
Spindle-shaped world--about 100,000 miles along its major axis--more
details to be published later.
But our coming inspiration fits in, if we think of the inhabitants of
Elvera as having only visited here: having, in hordes as dense as clouds
of bats, come here, upon hunting excursions--for mice, I should say: for
bees, very likely--or most likely of all, or inevitably, to convert the
heathen here--horrified with anyone who would gorge himself with more
than a bean at a time; fearful for the souls of beings who would guzzle
more than a dewdrop at a time--hordes of tiny missionaries, determined
that right should prevail, determining right by their own minutenesses.
They must have been missionaries.
Only to be is motion to convert or assimilate something else.
The idea now is that tiny creatures coming here from their own little
world, which may be Eros, though I call it Elvera, would flit from the
exquisite to the enormous--gulp of a fair-sized terrestrial animal--half
a dozen of them gone and soon digested. One falls into a brook--torn
away in a mighty torrent--
Or never anything but conventional, we adopt from Darwin:
"The geological records are incomplete."
Their flints would survive, but, as to their fragile bodies--one might
as well search for prehistoric frost-traceries. A little
whirlwind--Elverean carried away a hundred yards--body never found by
his companions. They'd mourn for the departed. Conventional emotion to
have: they'd mourn. There'd have to be a funeral: there's no getting
away from funerals. So I adopt an explanation that I take from the
anthropologists: burial in effigy. Perhaps the Elvereans would not come
to this earth again until many years later--another distressing
occurrence--one little mausoleum for all burials in effigy.
London _Times_, July 20, 1836:
That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits' burrows
in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur's Seat. In the
side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, which they
pulled out.
Little cave.
Seventeen tiny coffins.
Three or four inches long.
In the coffins were miniature wooden figures. They were dressed
differently both in style and material. There were two tiers of eight
coffins each, and a third tier begun, with one coffin.
The extraordinary datum, which has especially made mystery here:
That the coffins had been deposited singly, in the little cave, and at
intervals of many years. In the first tier, the coffins were quite
decayed, and the wrappings had moldered away. In the second tier, the
effects of age had not advanced so far. And the top coffin was quite
recent-looking.
In the _Proceedings of the Society of Antiquarians of Scotland_,
3-12-460, there is a full account of this find. Three of the coffins and
three of the figures are pictured.
So Elvera with its downy forests and its microscopic oyster shells--and
if the Elvereans be not very far-advanced, they take baths--with sponges
the size of pin heads--
Or that catastrophes have occurred: that fragments of Elvera have fallen
to this earth:
In _Popular Science_, 20-83, Francis Bingham, writing of the corals and
sponges and shells and crinoids that Dr. Hahn had asserted that he had
found in meteorites, says, judging by the photographs of them, that
their "notable peculiarity" is their "extreme smallness." The corals,
for instance, are about one-twentieth the size of terrestrial corals.
"They represent a veritable pygmy animal world," says Bingham.
The inhabitants of Monstrator and Elvera were primitives, I think, at
the time of their occasional visits to this earth--though, of course, in
a quasi-existence, anything that we semi-phantoms call evidence of
anything may be just as good evidence of anything else. Logicians and
detectives and jurymen and suspicious wives and members of the Royal
Astronomic Society recognize this indeterminateness, but have the
delusion that in the method of agreement there is final, or real
evidence. The method is good enough for an "existence" that is only
semi-real, but also it is the method of reasoning by which witches were
burned, and by which ghosts have been feared. I'd not like to be so
unadvanced as to deny witches and ghosts, but I do think that there
never have been witches and ghosts like those of popular supposition.
But stories of them have been supported by astonishing fabrications of
details and of different accounts in agreement.
So, if a giant left impressions of his bare feet in the ground, that is
not to say that he was a primitive--bulk of culture out taking the
Kneipp cure. So, if Stonehenge is a large, but only roughly geometric
construction, the inattention to details by its builders--signifies
anything you please--ambitious dwarfs or giants--if giants, that they
were little more than cave men, or that they were post-impressionist
architects from a very far-advanced civilization.
If there are other worlds, there are tutelary worlds--or that Kepler,
for instance, could not have been absolutely wrong: that his notion of
an angel assigned to push along and guide each planet may not be very
acceptable, but that, abstractedly, or in the notion of a tutelary
relation, we may find acceptance.
Only to be is to be tutelary.
Our general expression:
That "everything" in Intermediateness is not a thing, but is an endeavor
to become something--by breaking away from its continuity, or merging
away, with all other phenomena--is an attempt to break away from the
very essence of a relative existence and become absolute--if it have not
surrendered to, or become part of, some higher attempt:
That to this process there are two aspects:
Attraction, or the spirit of everything to assimilate all other
things--if it have not given in and subordinated to--or have not been
assimilated by--some higher attempted system, unity, organization,
entity, harmony, equilibrium--
And repulsion, or the attempt of everything to exclude or disregard the
unassimilable.
Universality of the process:
Anything conceivable:
A tree. It is doing all it can to assimilate substances of the soil and
substances of the air, and sunshine, too, into tree-substance: obversely
it is rejecting or excluding or disregarding that which it cannot
assimilate.
Cow grazing, pig rooting, tiger stalking: planets trying, or acting, to
capture comets; rag pickers and the Christian religion, and a cat down
headfirst in a garbage can; nations fighting for more territory,
sciences correlating the data they can, trust magnates organizing,
chorus girl out for a little late supper--all of them stopped somewhere
by the unassimilable. Chorus girl and the broiled lobster. If she eats
not shell and all she represents universal failure to positivize. Also,
if she does she represents universal failure to positivize: her ensuing
disorders will translate her to the Negative Absolute.
Or Science and some of our cursed hard-shelled data.
One speaks of the tutelarian as if it were something distinct in itself.
So one speaks of a tree, a saint, a barrel of pork, the Rocky Mountains.
One speaks of missionaries, as if they were positively different, or had
identity of their own, or were a species by themselves. To the
Intermediatist, everything that seems to have identity is only attempted
identity, and every species is continuous with all other species, or
that which is called the specific is only emphasis upon some aspect of
the general. If there are cats, they're only emphasis upon universal
felinity. There is nothing that does not partake of that of which the
missionary, or the tutelary, is the special. Every conversation is a
conflict of missionaries, each trying to convert the other, to
assimilate, or to make the other similar to himself. If no progress be
made, mutual repulsion will follow.
If other worlds have ever in the past had relations with this earth,
they were attempted positivizations: to extend themselves, by colonies,
upon this earth; to convert, or assimilate, indigenous inhabitants of
this earth.