The Book of the Damned Part 49
That there may be a nearby world complementary to this world, where autumn occurs at the time that is springtime here.
Let some disciple have that.
But there may be a dip toward France, so that leaves that are borne high there, are more likely to be held in suspension than highflying leaves elsewhere. Some other time I shall take up Super-geography, and be guilty of charts. I think, now, that the Super-Sarga.s.so Sea is an oblique belt, with changing ramifications, over Great Britain, France, Italy, and on to India. Relatively to the United States I am not very clear, but think especially of the Southern States.
The preponderance of our data indicates frigid regions aloft.
Nevertheless such phenomena as putrefaction have occurred often enough to make super-tropical regions, also, acceptable. We shall have one more datum upon the Super-Sarga.s.so Sea. It seems to me that, by this time, our requirements of support and reinforcement and agreement have been quite as rigorous for acceptance as ever for belief: at least for full acceptance. By virtue of mere acceptance, we may, in some later book, deny the Super-Sarga.s.so Sea, and find that our data relate to some other complementary world instead--or the moon--and have abundant data for accepting that the moon is not more than twenty or thirty miles away.
However, the Super-Sarga.s.so Sea functions very well as a nucleus around which to gather data that oppose Exclusionism. That is our main motive: to oppose Exclusionism.
Or our agreement with cosmic processes. The climax of our general expression upon the Super-Sarga.s.so Sea. Coincidentally appears something else that may overthrow it later.
_Notes and Queries_, 8-12-228:
That in the province of Macerata, Italy (summer of 1897?) an immense number of small, blood-colored clouds covered the sky. About an hour later a storm broke, and myriad seeds fell to the ground. It is said that they were identified as products of a tree found only in Central Africa and the Antilles.
If--in terms of conventional reasoning--these seeds had been high in the air, they had been in a cold region. But it is our acceptance that these seeds had, for a considerable time, been in a warm region, and for a time longer than is attributable to suspension by wind-power:
"It is said that a great number of the seeds were in the first stage of germination."
20
The New Dominant.
Inclusionism.
In it we have a pseudo-standard.
We have a datum, and we give it an interpretation, in accordance with our pseudo-standard. At present we have not the delusions of Absolutism that may have translated some of the positivists of the nineteenth century to heaven. We are Intermediatists--but feel a lurking suspicion that we may some day solidify and dogmatize and illiberalize into higher positivists. At present we do not ask whether something be reasonable or preposterous, because we recognize that by reasonableness and preposterousness are meant agreement and disagreement with a standard--which must be a delusion--though not absolutely, of course--and must some day be displaced by a more advanced quasi-delusion. Scientists in the past have taken the positivist att.i.tude--is this or that reasonable or unreasonable? a.n.a.lyze them and we find that they meant relatively to a standard, such as Newtonism, Daltonism, Darwinism, or Lyellism. But they have written and spoken and thought as if they could mean real reasonableness and real unreasonableness.
So our pseudo-standard is Inclusionism, and, if a datum be a correlate to a more widely inclusive outlook as to this earth and its externality and relations with externality, its harmony with Inclusionism admits it.
Such was the process, and such was the requirement for admission in the days of the Old Dominant: our difference is in underlying Intermediatism, or consciousness that though we're more nearly real, we and our standards are only quasi--
Or that all things--in our intermediate state--are phantoms in a super-mind in a dreaming state--but striving to awaken to realness.
Though in some respects our own Intermediatism is unsatisfactory, our underlying feeling is--
That in a dreaming mind awakening is accelerated--if phantoms in that mind know that they're only phantoms in a dream. Of course, they too are quasi, or--but in a relative sense--they have an essence of what is called realness. They are derived from experience or from senes-relations, even though grotesque distortions. It seems acceptable that a table that is seen when one is awake is more nearly real than a dreamed table, which, with fifteen or twenty legs, chases one.
So now, in the twentieth century, with a change of terms, and a change in underlying consciousness, our att.i.tude toward the New Dominant is the att.i.tude of the scientists of the nineteenth century to the Old Dominant. We do not insist that our data and interpretations shall be as shocking, grotesque, evil, ridiculous, childish, insincere, laughable, ignorant to nineteenth-centuryites as were their data and interpretations to the medieval-minded. We ask only whether data and interpretations correlate. If they do, they are acceptable, perhaps only for a short time, or as nuclei, or scaffolding, or preliminary sketches, or as gropings and tentativenesses. Later, of course, when we cool off and harden and radiate into s.p.a.ce most of our present mobility, which expresses in modesty and plasticity, we shall acknowledge no scaffoldings, gropings or tentativenesses, but think we utter absolute facts. A point in Intermediatism here is opposed to most current speculations upon Development. Usually one thinks of the spiritual as higher than the material, but, in our acceptance, quasi-existence is a means by which the absolutely immaterial materializes absolutely, and, being intermediate, is a state in which nothing is finally either immaterial or material, all objects, substances, thoughts, occupying some grade of approximation one way or the other. Final solidification of the ethereal is, to us, the goal of cosmic ambition. Positivism is Puritanism. Heat is Evil. Final Good is Absolute Frigidity. An Arctic winter is very beautiful, but I think that an interest in monkeys chattering in palm trees accounts for our own Intermediatism.
Visitors.
Our confusion here, out of which we are attempting to make quasi-order, is as great as it has been throughout this book, because we have not the positivist's delusion of h.o.m.ogeneity. A positivist would gather all data that seem to relate to one kind of visitors and coldly disregard all other data. I think of as many different kinds of visitors to this earth as there are visitors to New York, to a jail, to a church--some persons go to church to pick pockets, for instance.
My own acceptance is that either a world or a vast super-construction--or a world, if red substances and fishes fell from it--hovered over India in the summer of 1860. Something then fell from somewhere, July 17, 1860, at Dhurmsalla. Whatever "it" was, "it" is so persistently alluded to as "a meteorite" that I look back and see that I adopted this convention myself. But in the London _Times_, Dec. 26, 1860, Syed Abdoolah, Professor of Hindustani, University College, London, writes that he had sent to a friend in Dhurmsalla, for an account of the stones that had fallen at that place. The answer:
"... divers forms and sizes, many of which bore great resemblance to ordinary cannon b.a.l.l.s just discharged from engines of war."
It's an addition to our data of spherical objects that have arrived upon this earth. Note that they are spherical stone objects.
And, in the evening of this same day that something--took a shot at Dhurmsalla--or sent objects upon which there may be decipherable markings--lights were seen in the air--
I think, myself, of a number of things, beings, whatever they were, trying to get down, but resisted, like balloonists, at a certain alt.i.tude, trying to get farther up, but resisted.
Not in the least except to good positivists, or the h.o.m.ogeneous-minded, does this speculation interfere with the concept of some other world that is in successful communication with certain esoteric ones upon this earth, by a code of symbols that print in rock, like symbols of telephotographers in selenium.
I think that sometimes, in favorable circ.u.mstances, emissaries have come to this earth--secret meetings--
Of course it sounds--
But:
Secret meetings--emissaries--esoteric ones in Europe, before the war broke out--
And those who suggested that such phenomena could be.
However, as to most of our data, I think of super-things that have pa.s.sed close to this earth with no more interest in this earth than have pa.s.sengers upon a steamship in the bottom of the sea--or pa.s.sengers may have a keen interest, but circ.u.mstances of schedules and commercial requirements forbid investigation of the bottom of the sea.
Then, on the other hand, we may have data of super-scientific attempts to investigate phenomena of this earth from above--perhaps by beings from so far away that they had never even heard that something, somewhere, a.s.serts a legal right to this earth.
Altogether, we're good intermediatists, but we can't be very good hypnotists.
Still another source of the merging away of our data:
That, upon general principles of Continuity, if super-vessels, or super-vehicles, have traversed this earth's atmosphere, there must be mergers between them and terrestrial phenomena: observations upon them must merge away into observations upon clouds and balloons and meteors.
We shall begin with data that we cannot distinguish ourselves and work our way out of mergers into extremes.
In the _Observatory_, 35-168, it is said that, according to a newspaper, March 6, 1912, residents of Warmley, England, were greatly excited by something that was supposed to be "a splendidly illuminated aeroplane, pa.s.sing over the village." "The machine was apparently traveling at a tremendous rate, and came from the direction of Bath, and went on toward Gloucester." The Editor says that it was a large, triple-headed fireball. "Tremendous indeed!" he says. "But we are prepared for anything nowadays."
That is satisfactory. We'd not like to creep up stealthily and then jump out of a corner with our data. This Editor, at least, is prepared to read--
_Nature_, Oct. 27, 1898:
A correspondent writes that, in the County Wicklow, Ireland, at about 6 o'clock in the evening, he had seen, in the sky, an object that looked like the moon in its three-quarter aspect. We note the shape which approximates to triangularity, and we note that in color it is said to have been golden yellow. It moved slowly, and in about five minutes disappeared behind a mountain.
The Editor gives his opinion that the object may have been an escaped balloon.
In _Nature_, Aug. 11, 1898, there is a story, taken from the July number of the _Canadian Weather Review_, by the meteorologist, F.F. Payne: that he had seen, in the Canadian sky, a large, pear-shaped object, sailing rapidly. At first he supposed that the object was a balloon, "its outline being sharply defined." "But, as no cage was seen, it was concluded that it must be a ma.s.s of cloud." In about six minutes this object became less definite--whether because of increasing distance or not--"the ma.s.s became less dense, and finally it disappeared." As to cyclonic formation--"no whirling motion could be seen."
_Nature_, 58-294:
That, upon July 8, 1898, a correspondent had seen, at Kiel, an object in the sky, colored red by the sun, which had set. It was about as broad as a rainbow, and about twelve degrees high. "It remained in its original brightness about five minutes, and then faded rapidly, and then remained almost stationary again, finally disappearing about eight minutes after I first saw it."
In an intermediate existence, we quasi-persons have nothing to judge by because everything is its own opposite. If a hundred dollars a week be a standard of luxurious living to some persons, it is poverty to others.