“Thou shalt not!” is crystallized in its frozen textbooks.
I have data upon data upon data of new lands that are not far away. I
hold out expectations and the materials of new hopes and new despairs
and new triumphs and new tragedies. I hold out my hands to point to the
sky—there is a hierarchy that utters me manacles, I think—there is a
dominant force that pronounces prisons that have dogmas for walls for
such thoughts. It binds its formulas around all attempting extensions.
But sounds have been heard in the sky. They have been heard, and it is
not possible to destroy the records of them. They have been heard. In
their repetitions and regularities of series and intervals, we shall
recognize perhaps interpretable language. Columns of clouds,
different-colored by sunset, have vibrated to the artillery of other
worlds like the strings of a cosmic harp, and I conceive of no buzzing
of insects that can forever divert attention from such dramatic
reverberations. Language has shone upon the dark parts of the moon:
luminous exclamations that have fluttered in the lunar crater
Copernicus; the eloquence of the starlike light in Aristarchus; hymns
that have been chanted in lights and shades upon Linné; the wilder,
luminous music in Plato—
But not a sound that has been heard in the sky, not a thing that has
fallen from the sky, not a thing that “should not be,” but that has
nevertheless been seen in the sky can we, with any sense of freedom,
investigate, until first we find out about the incubus that in the past
has suffocated even speculation. I shall find out for myself: anybody
who cares to may find out with me. A ship from a foreign world does, or
does not, sail in the sky of this earth. It is in accordance with
observations by hundreds of thousands of witnesses that this event has
taken place, and, if the time be when aeronautics upon this earth is of
small development, that is an important circumstance to consider—but
there is suffocation upon the whole occurrence and every one of its
circumstances. Nobody can give good attention to the data, if diverting
his mind is consciousness, altogether respectful, of the scientists who
say that there are no other physical worlds except planets, millions of
miles away, distances that conceivable vessels could not traverse. I
should like to let loose, in an opening bombardment, the data of the
little black stones of Birmingham, which, time after time, in a period
of eleven years, fell obviously from a fixed point in the sky, but such
a release, now, would be wasted. It will have to be prepared for. Now
each one would say to himself that there are no such fixed points in the
sky. Why not? Because astronomers say that there are not.
But there is something else that is implied. Implied is the general
supposition that the science of astronomy represents all that is most
accurate, most exacting, painstaking, semi-religious in human thought,
and is therefore authoritative.
Anybody who has not been through what I’ve been through, in
investigating this subject, would ask what are the bases and what is the
consistency of the science of astronomy. The miserable, though at times
amusing, confusions of thought that I find in this field of supposed
research word my inquiry differently—what of dignity, or even of
decency, is in it?
Phantom dogmas, with their tails clutching at vacancies, are coiled
around our data.
Serpents of pseudo-thought are stifling history.
They are squeezing “Thou shalt not!” upon Development.
New Lands—and the horrors and lights, explosions and music of them;
rabbles of hellhounds and the march of military angels. But they are
Promised Lands, and first must we traverse a desert. There is ahead of
us a waste of parallaxes and spectrograms and triangulations. It may be
weary going through a waste of astronomic determinations, but that
depends—
If, out of a dreary, academic zenith shower betrayals of frailty, folly,
and falsification, they will be manna to our malices—
Or sterile demonstrations be warmed by our cheerful cynicisms into
delicious little lies—blossoms and fruits of unexpected oases—
Rocks to strike with our suspicions—and the gush of exposures foaming
with new implications.
Tyrants, dragons, giants—and, if all be dispatched with the skill and
the might and the triumph over awful odds of the hero who himself tells
his story—
I hear three yells from some hitherto undiscovered, grotesque critter at
the very entrance of the desert.