want to offer an opinion in good spirit. I find the powerful impulse
running through your effort, as expressed in the papers I have read--to
play to commerce and the trade mind. This is developing fast enough
without bringing inner powers to work in the midst of these low forces.
They will work. They will master, but it seems to me that spiritual ruin
will result. For these forces which you show in operation are the real
vitalities of man, which used other than in the higher schemes of
life--call in the bigger devils for man to cope with. When one begins to
use the dimension of the inner life, before the lower phases of the self
are mastered, he becomes a peril to himself and to others. I feel that I
do not need to be explicit to psychologists. I want to be on record as
strongly urging you to be sure that the animal is caged before you loose
the angel. Also that I have a conviction that there are ten times too
many tradesmen in the world now; and that office-efficiency is not the
kind that America is in need of. I repeat that I know you are in the way
of real work, and that's why I venture to show my point of view; and
please believe me energetic only toward the final good of the receptive
surface you have set out to impress."
28
THE ABBOT DEPARTS
One day in March, the Abbot said:
"You know that woods I was telling you about?"
"Yes."
"Well, my father bought it the other day."
... Something rolled over me, or within. This was a pervading ache that
had to do with the previous summer. I had ridden several times to the
Perfect Lane. It cut a man's farm in two from north to south and was
natural; that is, the strip of trees had been left when the land was
cleared, and they had reached a venerable age. Oak, hickory and
beech--clean, vast, in-their-prime forest-men--with thorn and dogwood
growing between. It had been like a prayer to ride through that Lane.
The cattle had made a path on the clay and the grass had grown in soft
and blue-green in the shade. In sapling days, the great trees had woven
their trunks on either side of a rail-fence that had stood for a
half-century. It was an approach to the farm-house that an artist would
have named an estate after--or a province.
Then came the day that I rode toward a smudge in the sky, and found men
and boys at work burning and cutting. The superb aisle was down. I
turned the horse and rode back. I learned that in the fields on either
side of the lane a strip of land, fifty or sixty feet wide, had been too
much shaded so that the corn and oats had not prospered. Perhaps it was
there that the cruelty of the narrow-templed Order made its deepest
impression. God bless the fodder--but what a price to pay. They had
burned the thorn and dogwood, felled the giants; they would plough under
that sacred cattle-path.
Then I thought of the denuded lands of North America; the billions of
cubic feet of natural gas wasted; lakes of oil, provinces of pine and
hard-wood vanished; the vast preserves of game destroyed to the wolf and
the pig and the ostrich still left in man's breast. The _story_ of the
struggle for life on Mars came to me--how the only water that remains in
that globe of quickened evolution is at the polar caps, and that the
canals draw down from the meltings of the warm season the entire supply
for the midland zones. They have stopped wastage on Mars.
It was these things that came to me at the mere mention of the transfer
of the woodland property. If it were going to be cut, I was glad I
hadn't seen it, and certainly I didn't want to enter now.
"What's your father going to do with it?" I asked.
"Use it for a pasture."
"Isn't going to cut it--any of it?"
"No."
Always there had been something absolute about the Abbot's _No_ and
_Yes_. I took hope.
"Is it thin enough to pasture?"
"The main piece is. Better come and see."
A pair of rubber boots in the corner of the Chapel caught my eye and the
wan light of March outside.
"There's everything there--a virgin beech wood--a few acres of
second-growth stuff that has all the vines and trailers--then the stream
and the big hollow where the cattle move up and down."
"Did you have anything to do with keeping it unspoiled?" I asked.
"My father didn't intend to cut anything right away. He might have
thinned the pasture section a little. I asked him not to. When he saw
the way I felt about it, he said he would never cut it."
There was a healing in that _never_.... The Abbot was not the kind to
ask his father for unreasonable things. I had seen the two together, and
had studied their relation with some pleasure. In the main, the father
had merely to understand, to be at one with the boy.... It happened that
we were alone in the Chapel at that time. I reached for the
rubber-boots.
"I'll ride as far as town and put the horse up," said I. "Meet me at the
far-end in a half-hour and we'll start the hike from there."
He was off at once. Chillness was still in the air, the land grey,
clouds yellowish-grey and watery.
We slipped out behind the stores and outhouses to a field that had a
stream running across--a stream and a hill and a band of oaks that still
held fast to a few leaves on the lower limbs, where the winds could not
get at them so freely. You can't expect to get anything out of an
oak-tree without working for it. I have seen an oak-log softened to
punk, the bark gone, having lain in a woodland shadow, doubtless for
thirty or forty years, but still holding fast to its unmistakable grain
and formation, though you could rub it to powder between the fingers.
For quite a little way, we followed the stream which was swollen with
melting snows, and then straight toward the wooded horizon line, the
afternoon hastening so that we marched with it, hot under our sweaters,
presently getting the stride of fence and ditch. The sun appeared at
times milk-like and ghostly in the south-west.... That was the first
time I saw the Amphitheatre.
We had reached the edge of the woodland and the height of land and
looked over the wooded slope into a silent pasture-land, a stream
winding through the centre. The grass had been cropped to the last of
the Fall days, and in the recent thaws the stream had overrun the entire
bottom, so that the lowland pasture was not only tonsured, but combed
and washed. I looked up. A beech-tree was shivering on the slope beside
me, holding fast to her leaves of paper white on wide and pendent
branches; a smooth and beautiful trunk of bedford grey, with eyes like
kine carved upon it. Then I saw that this was but one of a
sisterhood--the mother-tree fallen. Across were oaks and hickories, and
through the naked branches, a log cabin.
An enumeration will not even suggest the picture. Sheep and cattle had
made it a grove of the earth-gods. We remembered the Spring by the
cabin, and crossed to it. Skimming the leaves from the basin, we watched
it fill with that easy purity of undisturbed Nature.... Now there was a
fine blowing rain in our faces, and the smell of the woods itself in the
moist air was a Presence. The cabin had been built for many
decades--built of white oak, hewn, morticed and tenoned. The roof and
floor was gone, but the walls needed only chinking. They were founded
upon boulders.... I saw in days to come a pair of windows opening to the
north, and a big open fireplace on the east wall, a new floor and a new
roof.... It would be a temple. I saw young men and children coming
there in the long years ahead.... Across the open field beyond was a
forest.
"The big beeches are there," the Abbot said.
"It can't be so perfect as this," I declared.
"It is different. This is a grove--thinned for pasture land. Over there
it is a forest of beech. To the west is a second growth of
woods--everything small but thick. You can see and take things right in
your hand----"
We did not go to the forest nor to the jungle that day, but moved about
the rim of that delved pasture-land, watching the creek from different
angles, studying the trees without their insignia. We knew the main
timbers only--beech, oak, elm, maple and hickory and ash, blue beech and
ironwood and hawthorn. There were others that I did not know, and the
Abbot seemed disturbed that he could not always help.
"It won't be so another Spring," he said.
Altogether it hushed us. I was holding the picture of the temple of the
future years--for those to come, especially for the young ones, who were
torn and wanted to find themselves for a time.
"You say he is not going to cut anything from the pasture-grove?" I
repeated.
"No."
There was ease in that again. We walked back with the falling
dusk--across a winter wheat field that lay in water like rice. The town
came closer, and we smelled it. The cold mist in the air livened every
odour. It is a clean little town as towns go, but we knew very well what
the animals get from us.... I was thinking also what a Chinese once said
to me in Newchwang. He had travelled in the States, and reported that it
was a long time before he could get accustomed to the aroma of the white
man's civilisation. Newchwang was long on the vine at that very moment,
but he did not get that. I did not tell him. That which we are, we do
not sense. Our surfaces are only open to that which we are not. We must
depart from our place and ourselves, in order to catch even a fleeting
glimpse, or scent, of our being. The Abbot and I lifted our noses high.
The post-office was thick with staleness that held its own, though
chilled. I was glad to have the horse feel as I did, and clear out for
the edge of the Lake where we belonged.
... We went many days that Spring. The town thought us quite bereft. We
were present for the hawthorn day; saw the ineffable dogwoods at their
highest best; the brief bloom of the hickories when they put on their
orchids and seemed displeased to be caught in such glory by human eyes.
I love the colour and texture of hickory wood, but it insists on
choosing its own place to live.... We saw the elms breaking another day,
and the beech leaves come forth from their wonderful twists of brown,
formed the Fall before. Everything about the beech-tree is of the
highest and most careful selection; no other tree seems so to have
forgotten itself; a noble nature that has lost the need of insisting its
demands and making its values known, having long since called unto
itself the perfect things.... There was one early May day of high
northwind, that we entered the beech-wood, and saw those forest lengths
of trunk swaying in a kind of planetary rhythm. Full-length the beeches
gave, and returned so slowly, a sweeping vibration of their own, too
slow and vast for us to sense. I thought of a group of the great women
of the future gathered together to ordain the way of life. There is no
holier place than a beech-wood....
The Abbot's father repaired the cabin for us--put in the fireplace and
the windows to the north. Many nights the Chapel kindred have spent
there, in part or as a party; and it is the centre of the wonderful days
of our Spring Questing, when humankind brings a thirst almost
intolerable for the resuming of the Mother's magic.... We want it a
place some day for many of the great little books of all time--the place
for the Stranger to lodge and for Youth to come into its own. The
Abbot's father who has made it all possible seems to like the dream,
too.
... But the Abbot has gone back to school. I think it is only
temporary.... He remained after the others some weeks ago, and said to
me quite coldly:
"They have decided to make me go back to school----"
"Sit down," I answered.
As I look back, I think that was said because I, too, felt the need of
sitting down. He had been with me nearly a year. I had found him at
first, immersed in brooding silence. In a way, that silence was chaotic;
full day was far from rising upon it. He is without ambition in the
worldly sense. Ambition is a red devil of a horse, but he gets you
somewhere. One overcomes Inertia in riding far and long on that mount.
He takes you to the piled places where the self may satisfy for the
moment all its ravishing greeds. This is not a great thing to do. One
sickens of this; all agony and disease comes of this. The red horse
takes you as far as you will let him, on a road that must be retraced,
but he gets you somewhere! Inertia does not. The point is, one must not
slay the red horse of ambition until one has another mount to ride.
The Abbot caught the new mount quickly. He seemed to have had his hand
on the tether when he came. The name of the red horse is Self. The white
breed that we delight to ride here might be called generically Others.
The Abbot was astride a fine individual at once--and away.... He is but
fifteen now. With utmost impartiality I should say that wonderful
things have happened to him.
They said at his home that he has become orderly; that he rises early
and regularly, a little matter perhaps, but one that was far from
habitual before. They told me that he works with a fiery zeal that is
new in their house; that he is good-tempered and helpful. I knew what he
was doing here from day to day, and that he was giving me a great deal
of that joy which cannot be bought, and to which the red horse never
runs.
But the town kept hammering at his parents' ears, especially his former
teachers, his pastor and Sabbath-school teacher, the hardware man. I
asked his father to bring the critics for a talk in the Study, but they
did not come. A friend of the family came, a pastor from Brooklyn. The
appointment was made in such a way that I did not know whether he was
for or against the Abbot's wish to remain in the work here. I told the
story of the Abbot's coming, of his work and my ideas for him; that I
would be glad to keep him by me until he was a man, because I thought he
was a very great man within and believed the training here would enable
him to get himself out.
My main effort with the Abbot, as I explained, was to help him develop
an instrument commensurate in part with his big inner energies. I told
them how I had specialised in his case to cultivate a positive and
steadily-working brain-grip; how I had sought to install a system of
order through geometry, which I wasn't equipped to teach, but that one
of the college men was leading him daily deeper into this glassy and
ordered plane.
The fact is, the Abbot had my heart because he loved his dreams, but I
used to tell him every day that a man is not finished who has merely
answered a call to the mountain; that Jesus himself told his disciples
that they must not remain to build a temple on the mountain of
Transfiguration. Going up to Sinai is but half the mystery; the gifted
one must bring stone tablets down. If in impatience and anger at men, he
shatter the tablets, he has done ill toward himself and toward men, and
must try once more.
It appears that I did most of the talking and with some energy,
believing that the Abbot had my best coming, since the hostility against
his work here had long been in the wind from the town.... It was the
next day that the boy told me that the decision had gone against us. I
cannot quite explain how dulled it made me feel. The depression was of a
kind that did not quickly lift. I was willing to let any one who liked
hold the impression that the obligation was all my way, but there was
really nothing to fight. I went to see the Abbot's father shortly
afterward. We touched just the edges of the matter. As I left he assured
me:
"The minister said that he didn't think the boy would come to any harm
in your Study."
There was no answer to that.... And yet, as I have said, we have come up
in different ways from the townspeople. The manuscripts that go forth
from this Study are not designed to simplify matters for them, and the
books we read in the main are not from the local library. One should
really rise to a smile over a matter like this. The fact is, I said to
the Abbot:
"Go and show them your quality. There's no danger of your falling into
competitive study. Show them that you can move in and around and through
the things they ask of you. We're always open when you want to come.
You're the first and always one of us. You've got the philosophy--live
it. This is just a mission. Take it this way, Abbot. Take it as an
honour--a hard task for which you are chosen, because you are ready.
Make your days interpret the best of you. Go to it with all your might.
Feel us behind you--rooting strong--and hurry back."
29
THE DAKOTAN
It was a rainy Fall night. The Dakotan came in barefooted with two large
bundles of copy. It was a bit cold to take the ground straight, but he
had walked along the bluff for some distance in absolute darkness, over
grassy hollows filled with water as well as bare patches of clay. One's
shelf of shoes is pretty well used up on a day like this, and one learns
that much labour can be spared by keeping his shoes for indoor use.
Incidentally, it is worth having a garden, walled if necessary, for the
joy of hoeing flowers and vegetables barefooted.... I had just about
finished the work of the evening. It would not have mattered anyway. The
Dakotan sat down on the floor before the fire and was still as a spirit.
He has no sense of time nor hurry; he would have waited an hour or two,
or passed along quite as genially as he came, without my looking up.
But one does not often let a friend go like this. These things are too
fine, of too pure a pleasantness. One does not learn the beauty of them
until one has come far through terror and turmoil. It is almost a
desecration to try to put such things into words; in fact, one cannot
touch with words the heart of the mystery. One merely moves around it
with an occasional suggestive sentence and those who know, smile warmly
over the writer's words.
The Study was red with firelight. Burning wood played with its tireless
gleam upon the stones, upon the backs of books, and into the few
pictures, bringing the features forth with restless familiarity. I left
the desk and came to the big chair by the fire. I was glad he was there.
I think I had been watching him intently for several seconds before he
looked up.... I had not been thinking of Thoreau; at least, not for
days, but it suddenly came to me that this was extraordinarily like
Thoreau, who had come in so silently through the darkness to share the
fire. I found that he had just been writing of the relations of men, the
rarer moments of them; and queerly enough, I found that night more of
the master of Walden in his work.
The Dakotan is twenty. All summer he has been doing some original
thinking on the subject of Sound. When I was his age, Tyndall was the
big voice on this subject; yet we have come to think in all humbleness
that Tyndall only touched his toes in the stream. The Dakotan has spent
the last few years afield. He is a tramp, a solitaire, a student at the
sources of life. Things have been made easier for him here. He took to
this life with the same equableness of mind that he accepted the
companions of hardship and drudgery on the open road. Throughout the
last summer he has moved about field and wood and shore, between hours
of expression at his machine, in a kind of unbroken meditation. I have
found myself turning to him in hard moments. Some of our afternoons
together, little was said, but much accomplished. A few paragraphs
follow from the paper brought in on this particular night:
"Vibration is the law that holds the Universe together. Its
energy is the great primal Breath. Vibration is life and
light, heat and motion. Without it, there would be blackness
and universal death. From the almost static state of rock and
soil, we have risen steadily in vibration up through the
first four senses, to Sound, the fifth. The scope of
Sound-vibration yet to be experienced by us is beyond our
wildest imagination.
"Sounds are the different rates of vibration in all things.
As yet we know Sound as we know most other things, merely on
the dense physical plane. The next great discoveries in
higher phenomena will be made in the realm of Sound. The most
marvellous powers are to be disenchanted from vibrations as
yet inaudible. The present enthusiasm over _telepathy_ is
merely the start of far greater phenomena to come.
"It is my belief that over ninety per cent of the sounds we
know and hear are injurious, lowering, disquieting and
scattering to all higher thought, to intuition and all that
is fine and of the spirit. There is not one human voice in a
thousand that is of a quieting influence and friendly to
higher aspirations. The voice is a filler, in lieu of
shortages of intellect and intuition. More and more, among
fine people explanations are out of order. A man is silent in
proportion to what he knows of real fineness and aspiration.
Outside of that speech which is absolutely a man's duty to
give out, one can tell almost to the ampere, the voltage of
his inner being, or its vacantness and slavery, by the depth
of his listening silences, or the aimlessness of his filling
chatter. It is only those few who have come _to know_,
through some annealing sorrow, sickness, or suffering, and
draw away from the crowds and noises into the Silence, that
become gifted with all-knowing counsels.
"There is a sound born from every thought, action, or
aspiration of man, whether of a high or a low order, a sound
not to be heard but felt, by any one fine and sensitive
enough to receive the impression. From the collective,
intuitive thoughts of attuned groups of men, thinking or
working as one toward a high end, there arises a sound which
is to be _felt_ as a fine singing tingle by all in the
vicinity. The work here proves this. At times there is an
exquisite singing in the air, not audible but plainly to be
felt, and a kind of emanation of light in the Chapel. We all
lean forward. The voice and thought of one has become the
voice and thought of all; what is to be said is sensed and
known before it is uttered; all minds are one.
"... There are moments in the soft, changing, growing,
conceiving hours of dawn and sunset when Mother Nature heaves
a long deep sigh of perfect peace, content and harmony. It is
something of this that the wild birds voice, as they greet
the sun at dawn, and again as they give sweet and melancholy
notes at his sinking in the quiet of evening. Birds are
impressed from without. They are reasonless, ecstatic,
spontaneous, giving voice as accurately and joyously as they
can to the vibrations of peace and harmony--to the _Sounds_,
which they feel from Nature. Animals and birds are conscious
of forces and creatures, we cannot see.... Unless we decide
that birds generate their songs within; that they reason and
study their singing, we must grant that they hear and imitate
from Nature, as human composers do. The process in any case
has not to do with intellect and reason, but with
sensitiveness and spirit. One does not need to acquire
intellect and reasoning, to have inspiration, sensitiveness,
and spirit. It is the childlike and spontaneous, the sinless
and pure-of-heart that attain to psychic inspiration.
"Have you ever seen at close range the rapt, listening,
inspired look of the head of a wild bird in flight? Has
anything fine and pure ever come to you from a deep look into
the luminous eyes of a bird fresh from the free open?
"... Study the very voices of spiritual men. They are
low-pitched, seeming to issue from deep within the man; one
strains to catch what is said, especially if he be used to
the far-carrying, sharp, metallic, blatant speech of the
West. Certain ancients were better versed in the potency of
sounds than we are to-day. Study in occult writings the
magic pronunciation of _Aum_, _Amitabha_, _Allah_, of certain
chants and spirit-invoking incantations of old, and one draws
a conception of the powers of friendly sounds and the
injurious effects of discordant sounds, such as we are
surrounded by....
"Many of us in the West, who are so used to din and broken
rhythm, would call the _Vina_, that Oriental harp-string of
the soul, a relic of barbaric times. But _Vina's_ magic cry
at evening brings the very elementals about the player. The
voices of Nature, the lapping of water, bird-song, roll of
thunder, the wind in the pines--these are sounds that bring
one some slight whit of the grandeur and majestic harmony of
the Universe. These are the voice of _kung_, 'the great tone'
in Oriental music, corresponding somewhat to F, the middle
note of the piano, supposed to be peace-invoking. In northern
China the Buddhist priests sit out in evening, listening
raptly to _kung_, the 'all-harmonious sound of the Hoang-ho
rushing by.' One longs to be the intimate of such
meditations."
30
THE DAKOTAN (_Continued_)