“Yes,” he said, “I’ll go on quick enough, provided you promise me one thing: and that is — to understand that Fechner does not regard the Earth as a sort of big human being. If a being at all, she is a being utterly different from us in kind, as of course we know she is in structure. Planetary beings, as a class, would be totally different from any other beings that we know. He merely protests at the presumption of our insignificant human knowledge in denying some kind of life and consciousness to a form so beautifully and marvelously organized as that of the earth! The heavenly bodies, he holds, are beings superior to men in the scale of life — a vaster order of intelligence altogether. A little two-legged man with his cocksure reason strutting on its tiny brain as the apex of attainment he ridicules. D’ye see, now?”
I gasped, I lit a big pipe — and listened. He went on. This time it was clearly a page from that Hibbert Lecture Stahl had mentioned — the one in which Professor James tries to give some idea of Fechner’s aim and scope, while admitting that he “inevitably does him miserable injustice by summarizing and abridging him.”
“Ages ago the earth was called an animal,” I ventured. “We all know that.”
“But Fechner,” he replied, “insists that a planet is a higher class of being than either man or animal— ‘a being whose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life.’”
“An inhabitant of the ether — ?”
“You’ve hit it,” he replied eagerly. “Every element has its own living denizens. Ether, then, also has hers — the globes. ‘The ocean of ether, whose waves are light, has also her denizens — higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they inhabit,’ sensitive to the slightest pull of one another’s attraction: beings in every way superior to us. Any imagination, you know,” he added, “can play with the idea. It is old as the hills. But this chap showed how and why it could be actually true.”
“This superiority, though?” I queried. “I should have guessed their stage of development lower than ours, rather than higher.”
“Different,” he answered, “different. That’s the point.”
“Ah!” I watched a shooting star dive across our thick, wet atmosphere, and caught myself wondering whether the flash and heat of that hurrying little visitor produced any reaction in this Collective Consciousness of the huge Body whereon we perched and chattered, and upon which later it would fall in finest dust.
“It is by insisting on the differences as well as on the resemblances,” rushed on the excited O’Malley, “that he makes the picture of the earth’s life so concrete. Think a moment. For instance, our animal organization comes from our inferiority. Our need of moving to and fro, of stretching our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only our defect.”
“Defect!” I cried. “But we’re so proud of it!”
‘“What are our legs,’” he laughed, “‘but crutches, by means of which, with restless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not inside ourselves? The Earth is no such cripple; why should she who already possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue, have limbs analogous to ours? What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach for? Of a neck with no head to carry? Of eyes or nose, when she finds her way through space without either, and has the millions of eyes of all her animals to guide their movements on her surface, and all their noses to smell the flowers she grows?’”
“We are literally a part of her, then — projections of her immense life, as it were — one of the projections, at least?”
“Exactly. And just as we are ourselves a part of the earth,” he continued, taking up my thought at once, “so are our organs her organs. ‘She is, as it were, eye and ear over her whole extent — all that we see and hear in separation she sees and hears at once.’” He stood up beside me and spread his hands out to the stars and over the trees and paths of the Park at our feet, where the throngs of men and women walked and talked together in the cool of the evening. His enthusiasm grew as the idea of this German’s towering imagination possessed him.
“‘She brings forth living beings of countless kinds upon her surface, and their multitudinous conscious relations with each other she takes up into her higher and more general conscious life.’”
He leaned over the parapet and drew me to his side. I stared with him at the reflection of London town in the sky, thinking of the glow and heat and restless stir of the great city and of the frantic strivings of its millions for success — money, power, fame, a few, here and there, for spiritual success. The roar of its huge trafficking beat across the night in ugly thunder to our ears. I thought of the other cities of the world; of its villages; of shepherds among the lonely hills; of its myriad wild creatures in forest, plain, and mountain…
“All this she takes up into her great heart as part of herself!” I murmured.
“All this,” he replied softly, as the sound of the Band beyond the Serpentine floated over to us on our roof; “ — the separate little consciousnesses of all the cities, all the tribes, all the nations of men, animals, flowers, insects — everything.” He again opened his arms to the sky. He drew in deep breaths of the night air. The dew glistened on the slates behind us. Far across the towers of Westminster a yellow moon rose slowly, dimming the stars. Big Ben, deeply booming, trembled on the air nine of her stupendous vibrations. Automatically, I counted them — subconsciously.
“And all our subconscious sensations are also hers,” he added, catching my thought again; “our dreams but half divined, our aspirations half confessed, our tears, our yearnings, and our — prayers.”
At the moment it almost seemed to me as if our two minds joined, each knowing the currents of the other’s thought, and both caught up, gathered ill, folded comfortably away into the stream of a Consciousness far bigger than either. It was like a momentary, specific proof of what he urged — a faint pulse-beat we heard of the soul of the earth; and it was amazingly uplifting.
“Every form of life, then, is of importance,” I heard myself thinking, or saying, for I hardly knew which. “The tiniest efforts of value — even the unrecognized ones, and those that seem futile.”
“Even the failures,” he whispered, “ — the moments when we do not trust her.”
We stood for some moments in silence. Presently, with a hand upon my shoulder, he drew me down again among our rugs against the chimney-stack.
“And there are some of us,” he said gently, yet with a voice that held the trembling of an immense joy, “who know a more intimate relationship with their great Mother than the rest, perhaps. By the so-called Love of Nature, or by some artless simplicity of soul, wholly unmodern of course, perhaps felt by children or poets mostly, they lie caught close to her own deep life, knowing the immense sweet guidance of her mighty soul, divinely mothered, strangers to all the strife for material gain — to that ‘unrest which men miscall delight,’ — primitive children of her potent youth … offspring of pure passion … each individual conscious of her weight and drive behind him—” His words faded away into a whisper that became unintelligible, then inaudible; but his thought somehow continued itself in my own mind.
“The simple life,” I said in a low tone; “the Call of the Wild, raised to its highest power?”
But he changed my sentence a little.
“The call,” he answered, without turning to look at me, speaking it into the night about us, “the call to childhood, the true, pure, vital childhood of the Earth — the Golden Age — before men tasted of the Tree and knew themselves separate; when the lion and the lamb lay down together and a little child could lead them. A time and state, that is, of which such phrases can be symbolical.”
“And of which there may be here and there some fearful exquisite survival?” I suggested, remembering Stahl’s words.
His eyes shone with the fire of his passion. “Of which on that little tourist ste
amer I found one!”
The wind that fanned our faces came perhaps across the arid wastes of Bayswater and the North-West. It also came from the mountains and gardens of this lost Arcadia, vanished for most beyond recovery….
“The Hebrew poets called it Before the Fall,” he went on, “and later poets the Golden Age; today it shines through phrases like the Land of Heart’s Desire, the Promised Land, Paradise, and what not; while the minds of saint and mystic have ever dreamed of it as union with their deity. For it is possible and open to all, to every heart, that is, not blinded by the cloaking horror of materialism which blocks the doorways of escape and prisons self behind the drab illusion that the outer form is the reality and riot the inner thought….”
The hoarse shouting of a couple of drunken men floated to us from the pavements, and crossing over, we peered down toward the opening of Sloane Street, watching a moment the stream of broughams, motors, and pedestrians. The two men with the rage of an artificial stimulant in their brains reeled out of sight. A big policeman followed slowly. The night-life of the great glaring city poured on unceasingly — the stream of souls all hurrying by divers routes and means toward a state where they sought to lose themselves — to forget the pressure of the bars that held them — to escape the fret and worry of their harassing personalities, and touch some fringe of happiness! All so sure they knew the way — yet hurrying really in the wrong direction — outwards instead of inwards; afraid to be — simple….
We moved back to our rugs. For a long time neither of us found anything to say. Soon I led the way down the creaking ladder indoors again, and we entered the stuffy little sitting-room of the tiny flat he temporarily occupied. I turned up an electric light, but O’Malley begged me to lower it. I only had time to see that his eyes were still aglow. We sat by the open window. He drew a worn notebook from his still more worn coat; but it was too dark for him to read. He knew it all by heart.
CHAPTER XVII
Some of Fechner’s reasons for thinking the Earth a being superior in the scale to ourselves, he gave, but it was another passage that lingered chiefly in my heart, the description of the daring German’s joy in dwelling upon her perfections — later, too, of his first simple vision. Though myself wholly of the earth, earthy in the ordinary sense, the beauty of the thoughts live in my spirit to this day, transfiguring even that dingy Insurance Office, streaming through all my dullest, hardest daily tasks with the inspiration of a simple delight that helps me over many a difficult weary time of work and duty.
“‘To carry her precious freight through the hours and seasons what form could be more excellent than hers — being as it is horse, wheels, and wagon all in one. Think of her beauty — a shining ball, sky-blue and sunlit over one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the heavens from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her mountains and windings of her valleys she would be a spectacle of rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her from her own mountain tops. Every quality of landscape that has a name would then be visible in her all at once — all that is delicate or graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. That landscape is her face — a peopled landscape, too, for men’s eyes would appear in it like diamonds among the dew-drops. Green would be the dominant color, but the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil — a veil the vapory, transparent folds of which the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and folding about herself anew.’
“She needs, as a sentient organism,” he continued, pointing into the curtain of blue night beyond the window, “no heart or brain or lungs as we do, for she is — different. ‘Their functions she performs through us! She has no proper muscles or limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other stars. To these her whole mass reacts by the most exquisite alterations in its total gait and by the still more exquisite vibratory responses in its substance. Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the clouds and snowfields combine them into white, the woods and flowers disperse them into colors…. Men have always made fables about angels, dwelling in the light, needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between ourselves and God. Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries between God and us, obeying His commands. So, if the heavens really are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels, for other creatures there are none. Yes! the Earth is our great common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.’
“And then,” whispered the Irishman, seeing that I still eagerly listened, “give your ear to one of his moments of direct vision. Note its simplicity, and the authority of its conviction:
“‘On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all things. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only a moment of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky, — only to find them nowhere.’”
Fire-engines, clanging as with a hurrying anger through the night, broke in upon his impassioned sentences; the shouts of the men drowned his last words….
Life became very wonderful inside those tight, confining walls, for the spell and grandeur of the whole conception lifted the heart. Even if belief failed, in the sense of believing — a shilling, it succeeded in the sense of believing — a symphony. The invading beauty swept about us both. Here was a glory that was also a driving power upon which any but a man half dead could draw for practical use. For the big conceptions fan the will. The little pains of life, they make one feel, need not kill true joy, nor deaden effort.
“Come,” said O’Malley softly, interrupting my dream of hope and splendor, “let us walk together through the Park to your place. It is late, and you, I know, have to be up early in the morning … earlier than I.”
And presently we passed the statue of Achilles and got our feet upon the turf beyond — a little bit of living planet in the middle of the heavy smothering London town. About us, over us, within us, stirred the awe of that immense idea. Upon that bit of living, growing turf we passed toward the Marble Arch, treading, as it were, the skin of a huge Body — the physical expression of a grand angelic Being, alive, sentient, conscious. Conscious, moreover, of our little separate individual selves who walked … a Being who cared; who felt us; who knew, understood, and — loved us as a mother her own offspring…. “To whom men could pray as they pray to their saints.”
The conception, even thus dimly and confusedly adumbrated, brought a new sense of life — terrific and eternal. All living things upon the earth’s surface were emanations of her mighty central soul; all — from the gods and fairies of olden time who knew it, to the men and women of Today who have forgotten it.
The gods — !
Were these then projections of her personality — aspects and facets of her divided self — emanations now withdrawn? Latent in her did they still exist as moods or Powers — true, alive, everlasting, but unmanifest? Still knowable to simple men and to Children of Nature?
Was this the giant truth that Stahl had built on Fechner?
Everything about us seemed to draw together into an immense and towering configuration that included trees and air and the sweep of open park — the looming and overwhelming beauty of
one of these very gods survived — Pan, the eternal and the splendid … a mood of the Earth-life, a projection clothed with the light of stars, the cloudy air, the passion of the night, the thrill of an august, extended Mood.
And the others were not so very far behind — those other little parcels of Earth’s Consciousness the Greeks and early races, the simple, primitive, childlike peoples of the dawn, divined the existence of, and labeled “gods” … and worshipped … so as to draw their powers into themselves by ecstasy and vision …
Could, then, worship now still recall them? Was the attitude of even one true worshipper’s heart the force necessary to touch that particular aspect of the mighty total Consciousness of Earth, and call forth those ancient forms of beauty? Could it be that this idea — the idea of “the gods” — was thus forever true and vital…? And might they be known and felt in the heart if not actually in some suggested form?
I only know that as we walked home past the doors of that dingy Paddington house where Terence O’Malley kept his dusty books and papers and so to my own quarters, these things he talked about dropped into my mind with a bewildering splendor to stay forever. His words I have forgotten, or how he made such speculations worth listening to at all. Yet, I hear them singing in my blood as though of yesterday; and often when that conflict comes ‘twixt duty and desire that makes life sometimes so vain and bitter, the memory comes to lift with strength far greater than my own. The Earth can heal and bless.
CHAPTER XVIII
Slowly, taking life easily, the little steamer puffed its way across the Ionian Sea. The pyramid of Etna, bluer even than the sky, dominated the western horizon long after the heel of Italy had faded, then melted in its turn into the haze of cloud and distance. No other sails were visible.
With the passing of Calabria spring had leaped into the softness of full summer, and the breezes were gentle as those that long ago fanned the cheeks and hair of Io, beloved of Zeus, as she flew southwards toward the Nile. The passengers, less lovely than that fair daughter of Argos, and with the unrest of thinner adventure in their blood, basked lazily in the sun; but the sea was not less haunted for those among them whose hearts could travel. The Irishman at any rate slipped beyond the confines of the body, viewing that ancient scene as she had done, from above. His widening consciousness expanded to include it.
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 67