The Book of the Damned Part 37

Unless:

The exceptional: the flux and vagary of all things.

Or that normally this earth's gravitation extends, say, ten or fifteen miles outward--but that gravitation must be rhythmic.

Of course, in the pseudo-formulas of astronomers, gravitation as a fixed quant.i.ty is essential. Accept that gravitation is a variable force, and astronomers deflate, with a perceptible hissing sound, into the punctured condition of economists, biologists, meteorologists, and all the others of the humbler divinities, who can admittedly offer only insecure approximations.

We refer all who would not like to hear the hiss of escaping arrogance, to Herbert Spencer's chapters upon the rhythm of all phenomena.

If everything else--light from the stars, heat from the sun, the winds and the tides; forms and colors and sizes of animals; demands and supplies and prices; political opinions and chemic reactions and religious doctrines and magnetic intensities and the ticking of clocks; and arrival and departure of the seasons--if everything else is variable, we accept that the notion of gravitation as fixed and formulable is only another attempted positivism, doomed, like all other illusions of realness in quasi-existence. So it is intermediatism to accept that, though gravitation may approximate higher to invariability than do the winds, for instance, it must be somewhere between the Absolutes of Stability and Instability. Here then we are not much impressed with the opposition of physicists and astronomers, fearing, a little mournfully, that their language is of expiring sibilations.

So then the fields of ice in the sky, and that, though usually so far away as to be mere blurs, at times they come close enough to be seen in detail. For description of what I call a "blur," see _Pop. Sci. News_, February, 1884--sky, in general, unusually clear, but, near the sun, "a white, slightly curdled haze, which was dazzlingly bright."

We accept that sometimes fields of ice pa.s.s between the sun and the earth: that many strata of ice, or very thick fields of ice, or superimposed fields would obscure the sun--that there have been occasions when the sun was eclipsed by fields of ice:

Flammarion, _The Atmosphere_, p. 394:

That a profound darkness came upon the city of Brussels, June 18, 1839:

There fell flat pieces of ice, an inch long.

Intense darkness at Aitkin, Minn., April 2, 1889: sand and "solid chunks of ice" reported to have fallen (_Science_, April 19, 1889).

In _Symons' Meteorological Magazine_, 32-172, are outlined rough-edged but smooth-surfaced pieces of ice that fell at Mana.s.sas, Virginia, Aug.

10, 1897. They look as much like the roughly broken fragments of a smooth sheet of ice--as ever have roughly broken fragments of a smooth sheet of ice looked. About two inches across, and one inch thick. In _Cosmos_, 3-116, it is said that, at Rouen, July 5, 1853, fell irregular-shaped pieces of ice, about the size of a hand, described as looking as if all had been broken from one enormous block of ice. That, I think, was an aerial iceberg. In the awful density, or almost absolute stupidity of the 19th century, it never occurred to anybody to look for traces of polar bears or of seals upon these fragments.

Of course, seeing what we want to see, having been able to gather these data only because they are in agreement with notions formed in advance, we are not so respectful to our own notions as to a similar impression forced upon an observer who had no theory or acceptance to support. In general, our prejudices see and our prejudices investigate, but this should not be taken as an absolute.

_Monthly Weather Review_, July, 1894:

That, from the Weather Bureau, of Portland, Oregon, a tornado, of June 3, 1894, was reported.

Fragments of ice fell from the sky.

They averaged three to four inches square, and about an inch thick. In length and breadth they had the smooth surfaces required by our acceptance: and, according to the writer in the _Review_, "gave the impression of a vast field of ice suspended in the atmosphere, and suddenly broken into fragments about the size of the palm of the hand."

This datum, profoundly of what we used to call the "d.a.m.ned," or before we could no longer accept judgment, or cut and dried condemnation by infants, turtles, and lambs, was copied--but without comment--in the _Scientific American_, 71-371.

Our theology is something like this:

Of course we ought to be d.a.m.ned--but we revolt against adjudication by infants, turtles, and lambs.

We now come to some remarkable data in a rather difficult department of super-geography. Vast fields of aerial ice. There's a lesson to me in the treachery of the imaginable. Most of our opposition is in the clearness with which the conventional, but impossible, becomes the imaginable, and then the resistant to modifications. After it had become the conventional with me, I conceived clearly of vast sheets of ice, a few miles above this earth--then the shining of the sun, and the ice partly melting--that note upon the ice that fell at Derby--water trickling and forming icicles upon the lower surface of the ice sheet. I seemed to look up and so clearly visualized those icicles hanging like stalact.i.tes from a flat-roofed cave, in white calcite. Or I looked up at the under side of an aerial ice-lump, and seemed to see a papillation similar to that observed by a calf at times. But then--but then--if icicles should form upon the under side of a sheet of aerial ice, that would be by the falling of water toward this earth; an icicle is of course an expression of gravitation--and, if water melting from ice should fall toward this earth, why not the ice itself fall before an icicle could have time to form? Of course, in quasi-existence, where everything is a paradox, one might argue that the water falls, but the ice does not, because the ice is heavier--that is, in ma.s.ses. That notion, I think, belongs in a more advanced course than we are taking at present.

Our expression upon icicles:

A vast field of aerial ice--it is inert to this earth's gravitation--but by universal flux and variation, part of it sags closer to this earth, and is susceptible to gravitation--by cohesion with the main ma.s.s, this part does not fall, but water melting from it does fall, and forms icicles--then, by various disturbances, this part sometimes falls in fragments that are protrusive with icicles.

Of the ice that fell, some of it enclosing living frogs, at Dubuque, Iowa, June 16, 1882, it is said (_Monthly Weather Review_, June, 1882) that there were pieces from one to seventeen inches in circ.u.mference, the largest weighing one pound and three-quarters--that upon some of them were icicles half an inch in length. We emphasize that these objects were not hailstones.

The only merger is that of k.n.o.bby hailstones, or of large hailstones with protuberances wrought by crystallization: but that is no merger with terrestrial phenomena, and such formations are unaccountable to orthodoxy; or it is incredible that hail could so crystallize--not forming by accretion--in the fall of a few seconds. For an account of such hailstones, see _Nature_, 61-594. Note the size--"some of them the size of turkeys' eggs."

It is our expression that sometimes the icicles themselves have fallen, as if by concussion, or as if something had swept against the under side of an aerial ice floe, detaching its papillations.

_Monthly Weather Review_, June, 1889:

That, at Oswego, N.Y., June 11, 1889, according to the Turin (N.Y.) _Leader_, there fell, in a thunderstorm, pieces of ice that "resembled the fragments of icicles."

_Monthly Weather Review_, 29-506:

That on Florence Island, St. Lawrence River, Aug. 8, 1901, with ordinary hail, fell pieces of ice "formed like icicles, the size and shape of lead pencils that had been cut into sections about three-eighths of an inch in length."

So our data of the Super-Sarga.s.so Sea, and its Arctic region: and, for weeks at a time, an ice field may hang motionless over a part of this earth's surface--the sun has some effect upon it, but not much until late in the afternoon, I should say--part of it has sagged, but is held up by cohesion with the main ma.s.s--whereupon we have such an occurrence as would have been a little uncanny to us once upon a time--or fall of water from a cloudless sky, day after day, in one small part of this earth's surface, late in the afternoon, when the sun's rays had had time for their effects:

_Monthly Weather Review_, October, 1886:

That, according to the Charlotte _Chronicle_, Oct. 21, 1886, for three weeks there had been a fall of water from the sky, in Charlotte, N.C., localized in one particular spot, every afternoon, about three o'clock; that, whether the sky was cloudy or cloudless, the water or rain fell upon a small patch of land between two trees and nowhere else.

This is the newspaper account, and, as such, it seems in the depths of the unchosen, either by me or any other expression of the Salvation Army. The account by the Signal Service observer, at Charlotte, published in the _Review_, follows:

"An unusual phenomenon was witnessed on the 21st: having been informed that, for some weeks prior to date, rain had been falling daily, after 3 P.M., on a particular spot, near two trees, corner of 9th and D streets, I visited the place, and saw precipitation in the form of rain drops at 4:47 and 4:55 P.M., while the sun was shining brightly. On the 22nd, I again visited the place, and from 4:05 to 4:25 P.M., a light shower of rain fell from a cloudless sky.... Sometimes the precipitation falls over an area of half an acre, but always appears to center at these two trees, and when lightest occurs there only."

14

We see conventionally. It is not only that we think and act and speak and dress alike, because of our surrender to social attempt at Ent.i.ty, in which we are only super-cellular. We see what it is "proper" that we should see. It is orthodox enough to say that a horse is not a horse, to an infant--any more than is an orange an orange to the unsophisticated.

It's interesting to walk along a street sometimes and look at things and wonder what they'd look like, if we hadn't been taught to see horses and trees and houses as horses and trees and houses. I think that to super-sight they are local stresses merging indistinguishably into one another, in an all-inclusive nexus.

I think that it would be credible enough to say that many times have Monstrator and Elvera and Azuria crossed telescopic fields of vision, and were not even seen--because it wouldn't be proper to see them; it wouldn't be respectable, and it wouldn't be respectful: it would be insulting to old bones to see them: it would bring on evil influences from the relics of St. Isaac to see them.

But our data:

Of vast worlds that are orbitless, or that are navigable, or that are adrift in inter-planetary tides and currents: the data that we shall have of their approach, in modern times, within five or six miles of this earth--

But then their visits, or approaches, to other planets, or to other of the few regularized bodies that have surrendered to the attempted Ent.i.ty of this solar system as a whole--

The question that we can't very well evade:

Have these other worlds, or super-constructions, ever been seen by astronomers?

I think there would not be much approximation to realness in taking refuge in the notion of astronomers who stare and squint and see only that which it is respectable and respectful to see. It is all very well to say that astronomers are hypnotics, and that an astronomer looking at the moon is hypnotized by the moon, but our acceptance is that the bodies of this present expression often visit the moon, or cross it, or are held in temporary suspension near it--then some of them must often have been within the diameter of an astronomer's hypnosis.

Our general expression:

That, upon the oceans of this earth, there are regularized vessels, but also that there are tramp vessels: