Worlds in hordes--or beings--winged beings perhaps--wouldn't astonish me
if we should end up by discovering angels--or beings in
machines--argosies of celestial voyagers--
In 1783 and 1787, Herschel reported more lights on or near the moon,
which he supposed were volcanic.
The word of a Herschel has had no more weight, in divergences from the
orthodox, than has had the word of a Lescarbault. These observations are
of the disregarded.
Bright spots seen on the moon, November, 1821 (_Proc. London Roy. Soc._,
2-167).
For four other instances, see Loomis (_Treatise on Astronomy_, p. 174).
A moving light is reported in _Phil. Trans._, 84-429. To the writer, it
looked like a star passing over the moon--"which, on the next moment's
consideration I knew to be impossible." "It was a fixed, steady light
upon the dark part of the moon." I suppose "fixed" applies to luster.
In the _Report of the Brit. Assoc._, 1847-18, there is an observation by
Rankin, upon luminous points seen on the shaded part of the moon,
during an eclipse. They seemed to this observer like reflections of
stars. That's not very reasonable: however, we have, in the _Annual
Register_, 1821-687, a light not referable to a star--because it moved
with the moon: was seen three nights in succession; reported by Capt.
Kater. See _Quart. Jour. Roy. Inst._, 12-133.
_Phil. Trans._, 112-237:
Report from the Cape Town Observatory: a whitish spot on the dark part
of the moon's limb. Three smaller lights were seen.
The call of positiveness, in its aspects of singleness, or homogeneity,
or oneness, or completeness. In data now coming, I feel it myself. A
Leverrier studies more than twenty observations. The inclination is
irresistible to think that they all relate to one phenomenon. It is an
expression of cosmic inclination. Most of the observations are so
irreconcilable with any acceptance other than of orbitless, dirigible
worlds that he shuts his eyes to more than two-thirds of them; he picks
out six that can give him the illusion of completeness, or of all
relating to one planet.
Or let it be that we have data of many dark bodies--still do we incline
almost irresistibly to think of one of them as the dark-body-in-chief.
Dark bodies, floating, or navigating, in inter-planetary space--and I
conceive of one that's the Prince of Dark Bodies:
Melanicus.
Vast dark thing with the wings of a super-bat, or jet-black
super-construction; most likely one of the spores of the Evil One.
The extraordinary year, 1883:
London _Times_, Dec. 17, 1883:
Extract from a letter by Hicks Pashaw: that, in Egypt, Sept. 24, 1883,
he had seen, through glasses, "an immense black spot upon the lower part
of the sun."
Sun spot, maybe.
One night an astronomer was looking up at the sky, when something
obscured a star, for three and a half seconds. A meteor had been seen
nearby, but its train had been only momentarily visible. Dr. Wolf was
the astronomer (_Nature_, 86-528).
The next datum is one of the most sensational we have, except that there
is very little to it. A dark object that was seen by Prof. Heis, for
eleven degrees of arc, moving slowly across the Milky Way. (Greg's
Catalogue, _Rept. Brit. Assoc._, 1867-426.)
One of our quasi-reasons for accepting that orbitless worlds are
dirigible is the almost complete absence of data of collisions: of
course, though in defiance of gravitation, they may, without direction
like human direction, adjust to one another in the way of vortex rings
of smoke--a very human-like way, that is. But in _Knowledge_, February,
1894, are two photographs of Brooks' comet that are shown as evidence of
its seeming collision with a dark object, October, 1893. Our own wording
is that it "struck against something": Prof. Barnard's is that it had
"entered some dense medium, which shattered it." For all I know it had
knocked against merely a field of ice.
Melanicus.
That upon the wings of a super-bat, he broods over this earth and over
other worlds, perhaps deriving something from them: hovers on wings, or
wing-like appendages, or planes that are hundreds of miles from tip to
tip--a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that which
makes us useful.
He obscures a star. He shoves a comet. I think he's a vast, black,
brooding vampire.
_Science_, July 31, 1896:
That, according to a newspaper account, Mr. W.R. Brooks, director of the
Smith Observatory, had seen a dark round object pass rather slowly
across the moon, in a horizontal direction. In Mr. Brooks' opinion it
was a dark meteor. In _Science_, Sept. 14, 1896, a correspondent writes
that, in his opinion, it may have been a bird. We shall have no trouble
with the meteor and bird mergers, if we have observations of long
duration and estimates of size up to hundreds of miles. As to the body
that was seen by Brooks, there is a note from the Dutch astronomer,
Muller, in the _Scientific American_, 75-251, that, upon April 4, 1892,
he had seen a similar phenomenon. In _Science Gossip_, n.s., 3-135, are
more details of the Brooks object--apparent diameter about one-thirtieth
of the moon's--moon's disk crossed in three or four seconds. The writer,
in _Science Gossip_, says that, on June 27, 1896, at one o'clock in the
morning, he was looking at the moon with a 2-inch achromatic, power 44,
when a long black object sailed past, from west to east, the transit
occupying 3 or 4 seconds. He believed this object to be a bird--there
was, however, no fluttering motion observable in it.
In the _Astronomische Nachrichten_, No. 3477, Dr. Brendel, of
Griefswald, Pomerania, writes that Postmaster Ziegler and other
observers had seen a body about 6 feet in diameter crossing the sun's
disk. The duration here indicates something far from the earth, and also
far from the sun. This thing was seen a quarter of an hour before it
reached the sun. Time in crossing the sun was about an hour. After
leaving the sun it was visible an hour.
I think he's a vast, black vampire that sometimes broods over this earth
and other bodies.
Communication from Dr. F.B. Harris (_Popular Astronomy_, 20-398):
That, upon the evening of Jan. 27, 1912, Dr. Harris saw, upon the moon,
"an intensely black object." He estimated it to be 250 miles long and 50
miles wide. "The object resembled a crow poised, as near as anything."
Clouds then cut off observation.
Dr. Harris writes:
"I cannot but think that a very interesting and curious phenomenon
happened."
15
Short chapter coming now, and it's the worst of them all. I think it's
speculative. It's a lapse from our usual pseudo-standards. I think it
must mean that the preceding chapter was very efficiently done, and that
now by the rhythm of all quasi-things--which can't be real things, if
they're rhythms, because a rhythm is an appearance that turns into its
own opposite and then back again--but now, to pay up, we're what we
weren't. Short chapter, and I think we'll fill in with several points in
Intermediatism.
A puzzle:
If it is our acceptance that, out of the Negative Absolute, the Positive
Absolute is generating itself, recruiting, or maintaining, itself, via a
third state, or our own quasi-state, it would seem that we're trying to
conceive of Universalness manufacturing more Universalness from
Nothingness. Take that up yourself, if you're willing to run the risk of
disappearing with such velocity that you'll leave an incandescent train
behind, and risk being infinitely happy forever, whereas you probably
don't want to be happy--I'll sidestep that myself, and try to be
intelligible by regarding the Positive Absolute from the aspect of
Realness instead of Universalness, recalling that by both Realness and
Universalness we mean the same state, or that which does not merge away
into something else, because there is nothing else. So the idea is that
out of Unrealness, instead of Nothingness, Realness, instead of
Universalness, is, via our own quasi-state, manufacturing more Realness.
Just so, but in relative terms, of course, all imaginings that
materialize into machines or statues, buildings, dollars, paintings or
books in paper and ink are graduations from unrealness to realness--in
relative terms. It would seem then that Intermediateness is a relation
between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute. But the
absolute cannot be the related--of course a confession that we can't
really think of it at all, if here we think of a limit to the unlimited.
Doing the best we can, and encouraged by the reflection that we can't do
worse than has been done by metaphysicians in the past, we accept that
the absolute can't be the related. So then that our quasi-state is not a
real relation, if nothing in it is real. On the other hand, it is not an
unreal relation, if nothing in it is unreal. It seems thinkable that the
Positive Absolute can, by means of Intermediateness, have a
quasi-relation, or be only quasi-related, or be the unrelated, in final
terms, or, at least, not be the related, in final terms.
As to free will and Intermediatism--same answer as to everything else.
By free will we mean Independence--or that which does not merge away
into something else--so, in Intermediateness, neither free-will nor
slave-will--but a different approximation for every so-called person
toward one or the other of the extremes. The hackneyed way of expressing
this seems to me to be the acceptable way, if in Intermediateness,
there is only the paradoxical: that we're free to do what we have to do.
I am not convinced that we make a fetish of the preposterous. I think
our feeling is that in first gropings there's no knowing what will
afterward be the acceptable. I think that if an early biologist heard of
birds that grow on trees, he should record that he had heard of birds
that grow on trees: then let sorting over of data occur afterward. The
one thing that we try to tone down but that is to a great degree
unavoidable is having our data all mixed up like Long Island and Florida
in the minds of early American explorers. My own notion is that this
whole book is very much like a map of North America in which the Hudson
River is set down as a passage leading to Siberia. We think of
Monstrator and Melanicus and of a world that is now in communication
with this earth: if so, secretly, with certain esoteric ones upon this
earth. Whether that world's Monstrator and Monstrator's Melanicus--must
be the subject of later inquiry. It would be a gross thing to do: solve
up everything now and leave nothing to our disciples.