Part 10
Furthermore, I find that whenever automatic, or at least semi-conscious, action is replaced by reasoned action--in plainer words, whenever I begin to think about my movements--I always blunder. It is only while I am thinking of other matters,--only while I am acting almost automatically,--that I can thread a dense crowd with ease. Indeed, my personal experience has convinced me that what pilots one quickly and safely through a thick press is not conscious observation at all, but unreasoning, intuitive perception. Now intuitive action of any kind represents inherited knowledge, the experience of past lives,--in this case the experience of past lives incalculable.
Utterly incalculable.... Why do I think so? Well, simply because this faculty of intuitive self-direction in a crowd is shared by man with very inferior forms of animal being,--evolutional proof that it must be a faculty immensely older than man. Does not a herd of cattle, a herd of deer, a flock of sheep, offer us the same phenomenon of mutual yielding? Or a flock of birds--gregarious birds especially: crows, sparrows, wild pigeons? Or a shoal of fish? Even among insects--bees, ants, termites--we can study the same law of intuitive self-displacement. The yielding, in all these cases, must still represent an inherited experience unimaginably old. Could we endeavor to retrace the whole course of such inheritance, the attempt would probably lead us back, not only to the very beginnings of sentient life upon this planet, but further,--back into the history of non-sentient substance,--back even to the primal evolution of those mysterious tendencies which are stored up in the atoms of elements. Such atoms we know of only as points of multiple resistance,--incomprehensible knittings of incomprehensible forces. Even the tendencies of atoms doubtless represent accumulations of inheritance----but here thought checks with a shock at the eternal barrier of the Infinite Riddle.
Gothic Horror
[Decoration]
I
LONG before I had arrived at what catechisms call the age of reason, I was frequently taken, much against my will, to church. The church was very old; and I can see the interior of it at this moment just as plainly as I saw it forty years ago, when it appeared to me like an evil dream. There I first learned to know the peculiar horror that certain forms of Gothic architecture can inspire.... I am using the word "horror" in a classic sense,--in its antique meaning of ghostly fear.
On the very first day of this experience, my child-fancy could place the source of the horror. The wizened and pointed shapes of the windows immediately terrified me. In their outline I found the form of apparitions that tormented me in sleep;--and at once I began to imagine some dreadful affinity between goblins and Gothic churches. Presently, in the tall doorways, in the archings of the aisles, in the ribbings and groinings of the roof, I discovered other and wilder suggestions of fear. Even the facade of the organ,--peaking high into the shadow above its gallery,--seemed to me a frightful thing.... Had I been then suddenly obliged to answer the question, "What are you afraid of?" I should have whispered, "_Those points!_" I could not have otherwise explained the matter: I only knew that I was afraid of the "points."
Of course the real enigma of what I felt in that church could not present itself to my mind while I continued to believe in goblins. But long after the age of superstitious terrors, other Gothic experiences severally revived the childish emotion in so startling a way as to convince me that childish fancy could not account for the feeling. Then my curiosity was aroused; and I tried to discover some rational cause for the horror. I read many books, and asked many questions; but the mystery seemed only to deepen.
Books about architecture were very disappointing. I was much less impressed by what I could find in them than by references in pure fiction to the awfulness of Gothic art,--particularly by one writer's confession that the interior of a Gothic church, seen at night, gave him the idea of being inside the skeleton of some monstrous animal; and by a far-famed comparison of the windows of a cathedral to eyes, and of its door to a great mouth, "devouring the people." These imaginations explained little; they could not be developed beyond the phase of vague intimation: yet they stirred such emotional response that I felt sure they had touched some truth. Certainly the architecture of a Gothic cathedral offers strange resemblances to the architecture of bone; and the general impression that it makes upon the mind is an impression of life. But this impression or sense of life I found to be indefinable,--not a sense of any life organic, but of a life latent and daemonic. And the manifestation of that life I felt to be in the _pointing_ of the structure.
Attempts to interpret the emotion by effects of altitude and gloom and vastness appeared to me of no worth; for buildings loftier and larger and darker than any Gothic cathedral, but of a different order of architecture,--Egyptian, for instance,--could not produce a like impression. I felt certain that the horror was made by something altogether peculiar to Gothic construction, and that this something haunted the tops of the arches.
"Yes, Gothic architecture is awful," said a religious friend, "because it is the visible expression of Christian faith. No other religious architecture symbolizes spiritual longing; but the Gothic embodies it. Every part climbs or leaps; every supreme detail soars and points like fire...." "There may be considerable truth in what you say," I replied;--"but it does not relate to the riddle that baffles me. Why should shapes that symbolize spiritual longing create horror? Why should any expression of Christian ecstasy inspire alarm?..."
* * * * *
Other hypotheses in multitude I tested without avail; and I returned to the simple and savage conviction that the secret of the horror somehow belonged to the points of the archings. But for years I could not find it. At last, at last, in the early hours of a certain tropical morning, it revealed itself quite unexpectedly, while I was looking at a glorious group of palms.
Then I wondered at my stupidity in not having guessed the riddle before.
II
The characteristics of many kinds of palm have been made familiar by pictures and photographs. But the giant palms of the American tropics cannot be adequately represented by the modern methods of pictorial illustration: they must be seen. You cannot draw or photograph a palm two hundred feet high.
The first sight of a group of such forms, in their natural environment of tropical forest, is a magnificent surprise,--a surprise that strikes you dumb. Nothing seen in temperate zones,--not even the huger growths of the Californian slope,--could have prepared your imagination for the weird solemnity of that mighty colonnade. Each stone-grey trunk is a perfect pillar,--but a pillar of which the stupendous grace has no counterpart in the works of man. You must strain your head well back to follow the soaring of the prodigious column, up, up, up through abysses of green twilight, till at last--far beyond a break in that infinite interweaving of limbs and lianas which is the roof of the forest--you catch one dizzy glimpse of the capital: a parasol of emerald feathers outspread in a sky so blinding as to suggest the notion of azure electricity.
* * * * *
Now what is the emotion that such a vision excites,--an emotion too powerful to be called wonder, too weird to be called delight? Only when the first shock of it has passed,--when the several elements that were combined in it have begun to set in motion widely different groups of ideas,--can you comprehend how very complex it must have been. Many impressions belonging to personal experience were doubtless revived in it, but also with them a multitude of sensations more shadowy,--accumulations of organic memory; possibly even vague feelings older than man,--for the tropical shapes that aroused the emotion have a history more ancient than our race.
One of the first elements of the emotion to become clearly distinguishable is the aesthetic; and this, in its general mass, might be termed the sense of terrible beauty. Certainly the spectacle of that unfamiliar life,--silent, tremendous, springing to the sun in colossal aspiration, striving for light against Titans, and heedless of man in the gloom beneath as of a groping beetle,--thrills like the rhythm of some single marvellous verse that is learned in a glance and remembered forever. Yet the delight, even at its vividest, is shadowed by a queer disquiet. The aspect of that monstrous, pale, naked, smooth-stretching column suggests a life as conscious as the serpent's. You stare at the towering lines of the shape,--vaguely fearing to discern some sign of stealthy movement, some beginning of undulation. Then sight and reason combine to correct the suspicion. Yes, motion is there, and life enormous--but a life seeking only sun,--life, rushing like the jet of a geyser, straight to the giant day.
III
During my own experience I could perceive that certain feelings commingled in the wave of delight,--feelings related to ideas of power and splendor and triumph,--were accompanied by a faint sense of religious awe. Perhaps our modern aesthetic sentiments are so interwoven with various inherited elements of religious emotionalism that the recognition of beauty cannot arise independently of reverential feeling. Be this as it may, such a feeling defined itself while I gazed;--and at once the great grey trunks were changed to the pillars of a mighty aisle; and from altitudes of dream there suddenly descended upon me the old dark thrill of Gothic horror.
Even before it died away, I recognized that it must have been due to some old cathedral-memory revived by the vision of those giant trunks uprising into gloom. But neither the height nor the gloom could account for anything beyond the memory. Columns tall as those palms, but supporting a classic entablature, could evoke no sense of disquiet resembling the Gothic horror. I felt sure of this,--because I was able, without any difficulty, to shape immediately the imagination of such a facade. But presently the mental picture distorted. I saw the architrave elbow upward in each of the spaces between the pillars, and curve and point itself into a range of prodigious arches;--and again the sombre thrill descended upon me. Simultaneously there flashed to me the solution of the mystery. I understood that the Gothic horror was a _horror of monstrous motion_,--and that it had seemed to belong to the points of the arches because the idea of such motion was chiefly suggested by the extraordinary angle at which the curves of the arching touched.
* * * * *
To any experienced eye, the curves of Gothic arching offer a striking resemblance to certain curves of vegetal growth;--the curves of the palm-branch being, perhaps, especially suggested. But observe that the architectural form suggests more than any vegetal comparison could illustrate! The meeting of two palm-crests would indeed form a kind of Gothic arch; yet the effect of so short an arch would be insignificant. For nature to repeat the strange impression of the real Gothic arch, it were necessary that the branches of the touching crests should vastly exceed, both in length of curve and strength of spring, anything of their kind existing in the vegetable world. The effect of the Gothic arch depends altogether upon the intimation of energy. An arch formed by the intersection of two short sprouting lines could suggest only a feeble power of growth; but the lines of the tall mediaeval arch seem to express a crescent force immensely surpassing that of nature. And the horror of Gothic architecture is not in the mere suggestion of a growing life, but in the suggestion of an energy supernatural and tremendous.
* * * * *
Of course the child, oppressed by the strangeness of Gothic forms, is yet incapable of analyzing the impression received: he is frightened without comprehending. He cannot divine that the points and the curves are terrible to him because they represent the prodigious exaggeration of a real law of vegetal growth. He dreads the shapes because they seem alive; yet he does not know how to express this dread. Without suspecting why, he feels that this silent manifestation of power, everywhere pointing and piercing upward, is not natural. To his startled imagination, the building stretches itself like a phantasm of sleep,--makes itself tall and taller with intent to frighten. Even though built by hands of men, it has ceased to be a mass of dead stone: it is infused with Something that thinks and threatens;--it has become a shadowing malevolence, a multiple goblinry, a monstrous fetish!
Levitation
[Decoration]
OUT of some upper-story window I was looking into a street of yellow-tinted houses,--a colonial street, old-fashioned, narrow, with palm-heads showing above its roofs of tile. There were no shadows; there was no sun,--only a grey soft light, as of early gloaming.
Suddenly I found myself falling from the window; and my heart gave one sickening leap of terror. But the distance from window to pavement proved to be much greater than I supposed,--so great that, in spite of my fear, I began to wonder. Still I kept falling, falling,--and still the dreaded shock did not come. Then the fear ceased, and a queer pleasure took its place;--for I discovered that I was not falling quickly, but only _floating_ down. Moreover, I was floating feet foremost--must have turned in descending. At last I touched the stones--but very, very lightly, with only one foot; and instantly at that touch I went up again,--rose to the level of the eaves. People stopped to stare at me. I felt the exultation of power superhuman;--I felt for the moment as a god.
Then softly I began to sink; and the sight of faces, gathering below me, prompted a sudden resolve to fly down the street, over the heads of the gazers. Again like a bubble I rose, and, with the same impulse, I sailed in one grand curve to a distance that astounded me. I felt no wind;--I felt nothing but the joy of motion triumphant. Once more touching pavement, I soared at a bound for a thousand yards. Then, reaching the end of the street, I wheeled and came back by great swoops,--by long slow aerial leaps of surprising altitude. In the street there was dead silence: many people were looking; but nobody spoke. I wondered what they thought of my feat, and what they would say if they knew how easily the thing was done. By the merest chance I had found out how to do it; and the only reason why it seemed a feat was that no one else had ever attempted it. Instinctively I felt that to say anything about the accident, which had led to the discovery, would be imprudent. Then the real meaning of the strange hush in the street began to dawn upon me. I said to myself:--
"This silence is the Silence of Dreams;--I am quite well aware that this is a dream. I remember having dreamed the same dream before. But the discovery of this power is not a dream: _it is a revelation!_ ... Now that I have learned how to fly, I can no more forget it than a swimmer can forget how to swim. To-morrow morning I shall astonish the people, by sailing over the roofs of the town."
Morning came; and I woke with the fixed resolve to fly out of the window. But no sooner had I risen from bed than the knowledge of physical relations returned, like a sensation forgotten, and compelled me to recognize the unwelcome truth that I had not made any discovery at all.
* * * * *
This was neither the first nor the last of such dreams; but it was particularly vivid, and I therefore selected it for narration as a good example of its class. I still fly occasionally,--sometimes over fields and streams,--sometimes through familiar streets; and the dream is invariably accompanied by remembrance of like dreams in the past, as well as by the conviction that I have really found out a secret, really acquired a new faculty. "This time, at all events," I say to myself, "it is impossible that I can be mistaken;--I _know_ that I shall be able to fly after I awake. Many times before, in other dreams, I learned the secret only to forget it on awakening; but this time I am absolutely sure that I shall not forget." And the conviction actually stays with me until I rise from bed, when the physical effort at once reminds me of the formidable reality of gravitation.
* * * * *
The oddest part of this experience is the feeling of buoyancy. It is much like the feeling of floating,--of rising or sinking through tepid water, for example;--and there is no sense of real effort. It is a delight; yet it usually leaves something to be desired. I am a low flyer; I can proceed only like a pteromys or a flying-fish--and far less quickly: moreover, I must tread earth occasionally in order to obtain a fresh impulsion. I seldom rise to a height of more than twenty-five or thirty feet;--the greater part of the time I am merely skimming surfaces. Touching the ground only at intervals of several hundred yards is pleasant skimming; but I always feel, in a faint and watery way, the dead pull of the world beneath me.
* * * * *
Now the experience of most dream-flyers I find to be essentially like my own. I have met but one who claims superior powers: he says that he flies over mountains--goes sailing from peak to peak like a kite. All others whom I have questioned acknowledge that they fly low,--in long parabolic curves,--and this only by touching ground from time to time. Most of them also tell me that their flights usually begin with an imagined fall, or desperate leap; and no less than four say that the start is commonly taken from the top of a stairway.
[Decoration]
For myriads of years humanity has thus been flying by night. How did the fancied motion, having so little in common with any experience of active life, become a universal experience of the life of sleep?
It may be that memory-impressions of certain kinds of aerial motion,--exultant experiences of leaping or swinging, for example,--are in dream-revival so magnified and prolonged as to create the illusion of flight. We know that in actual time the duration of most dreams is very brief. But in the half-life of sleep--(nightmare offering some startling exceptions)--there is scarcely more than a faint smouldering of consciousness by comparison with the quick flash and vivid thrill of active cerebration;--and time, to the dreaming brain, would seem to be magnified, somewhat as it must be relatively magnified to the feeble consciousness of an insect. Supposing that any memory of the sensation of falling, together with the memory of the concomitant fear, should be accidentally revived in sleep, the dream-prolongation of the sensation and the emotion--unchecked by the natural sequence of shock--might suffice to revive other and even pleasurable memories of airy motion. And these, again, might quicken other combinations of interrelated memories able to furnish all the incident and scenery of the long phantasmagoria.
But this hypothesis will not fully explain certain feelings and ideas of a character different from any experience of waking-hours,--the exultation of voluntary motion without exertion,--the pleasure of the utterly impossible,--the ghostly delight of imponderability. Neither can it serve to explain other dream-experiences of levitation which do not begin with the sensation of leaping or falling, and are seldom of a pleasurable kind. For example, it sometimes happens during nightmare that the dreamer, deprived of all power to move or speak, actually feels his body lifted into the air and floated away by the force of the horror within him. Again, there are dreams in which the dreamer has no physical being. I have thus found myself without any body,--a viewless and voiceless phantom, hovering upon a mountain-road in twilight time, and trying to frighten lonely folk by making small moaning noises. The sensation was of moving through the air by mere act of will: there was no touching of surfaces; and I seemed to glide always about a foot above the road.
* * * * *
Could the feeling of dream-flight be partly interpreted by organic memory of conditions of life more ancient than man,--life weighty, and winged, and flying heavily, _a little above the ground?_
Or might we suppose that some all-permeating Over-Soul, dormant in other time, wakens within the brain at rare moments of our sleep-life? The limited human consciousness has been beautifully compared to the visible solar spectrum, above and below which whole zones of colors invisible await the evolution of superior senses; and mystics aver that something of the ultra-violet or infra-red rays of the vaster Mind may be momentarily glimpsed in dreams. Certainly the Cosmic Life in each of us has been all things in all forms of space and time. Perhaps you would like to believe that it may bestir, in slumber, some vague sense-memory of things more ancient than the sun,--memory of vanished planets with fainter powers of gravitation, where the normal modes of voluntary motion would have been like the realization of our flying dreams?...
Nightmare-Touch
[Decoration]
I
WHAT _is_ the fear of ghosts among those who believe in ghosts?
All fear is the result of experience,--experience of the individual or of the race,--experience either of the present life or of lives forgotten. Even the fear of the unknown can have no other origin. And the fear of ghosts must be a product of past pain.
Probably the fear of ghosts, as well as the belief in them, had its beginning in dreams. It is a peculiar fear. No other fear is so intense; yet none is so vague. Feelings thus voluminous and dim are super-individual mostly,--feelings inherited,--feelings made within us by the experience of the dead.
What experience?
Nowhere do I remember reading a plain statement of the reason why ghosts are feared. Ask any ten intelligent persons of your acquaintance, who remember having once been afraid of ghosts, to tell you exactly why they were afraid,--to define the fancy behind the fear;--and I doubt whether even one will be able to answer the question. The literature of folk-lore--oral and written--throws no clear light upon the subject. We find, indeed, various legends of men torn asunder by phantoms; but such gross imaginings could not explain the peculiar quality of ghostly fear. It is not a fear of bodily violence. It is not even a reasoning fear,--not a fear that can readily explain itself,--which would not be the case if it were founded upon definite ideas of physical danger. Furthermore, although primitive ghosts may have been imagined as capable of tearing and devouring, the common idea of a ghost is certainly that of a being intangible and imponderable.[118]
[118] I may remark here that in many old Japanese legends and ballads, ghosts are represented as having power to _pull off_ people's heads. But so far as the origin of the fear of ghosts is concerned, such stories explain nothing,--since the experiences that evolved the fear must have been real, not imaginary, experiences.
Now I venture to state boldly that the common fear of ghosts is _the fear of being touched by ghosts_,--or, in other words, that the imagined Supernatural is dreaded mainly because of its imagined power to touch. Only to _touch_, remember!--not to wound or to kill.