"I'll come along, if I may...?"
"Suture Self, as the Medical Students like to say."
One reason Humans remain young so long, compar'd to other Creatures, is that the young are useful in many ways, among them in providing daily, by way of the evil Creatures and Slaughter they love, a Denial of Mortality clamorous enough to allow their Elders release, if only for moments at a time, from Its Claims upon the Attention.
Indifferent to Visibility, wrapt in the melancholy Winds that choir all night long, persists an Obsession or Siege by something much older than anyone here, an injustice that will not cancel out. Men of Reason will define a Ghost as nothing more otherworldly than a wrong unrighted, which like an uneasy spirit cannot move on,— needing help we cannot usually give,— nor always find the people it needs to see,— or who need to see it. But here is a Collective Ghost of more than household Scale,— the Wrongs committed Daily against the Slaves, petty and grave ones alike, going unrecorded, charm'd invisible to history, invisible yet possessing Mass, and Velocity, able not only to rattle Chains but to break them as well. The precariousness to Life here, the need to keep the Ghost propitiated, Day to Day, via the Company's merciless Priesthoods and many-Volum'd Codes, brings all but the hardiest souls sooner or later to consider the Primary Questions more or less undiluted. Slaves here commit suicide at a frightening Rate,— but so do the Whites, for no reason, or for a Reason ubiquitous and unaddress'd, which may bear Acquaintance but a Moment at a Time. Mason, as he comes to recognize the sorrowful Nakedness of the Arrangements here, grows morose, whilst Dixon makes a point of treating Slaves with the Courtesy he is never quite able to summon for their Masters.
Mason, no less problematick indoors than out, being an uneasy sleeper, begins at about this time to dream of some Presence with a Krees or Malay Dagger, of indistinct speech, yet clear intention to Dowse for the Well-Spring of Mason's Blood. He wakes up screaming, repeatedly. At length Austra, expressing the will of both Houses, sends him to talk with a certain Toko, a Negritoe, or Asian Pygmy, of a Malay tribe call'd the Senoi. It is their belief that the world they inhabit in their Dreams is as real as their waking one. At breakfast each morning, families sit and report their Dreams to one another, offering advice and opinions passim, as if all the fantastical beings and events be but other villagers, and village Gossip.
"There is something irresistibly perverse," as the Revd then noted, "about a young white woman sitting upon a Stoep in the evening, among a steady coming and going of black servants meant, as in the Theater of the Japanese, to be read as invisible, whilst she poses all a-shine, she and her friends. According to which steps they sit upon, and which are then claim'd by the Feet of young Sparks who might wish to linger, the possible viewing-angles, for both Parties, are more or less multiplied, each combination of Steps having its own elaborate Codes for what is allow'd, and what transgresses, from Eye-play to the readjustment of skirts and underskirts, and the length of time 'tis consider'd proper to gaze. Some Belles like to 'boss' their male Slaves about in front of the young men, whilst others wish to be caught gazing after Girl-slaves with unconceal'd envy. Over the Range of their Desires, they are shameless, these Dutch girls of all ages, for they are the Girls of the end of the world, and the only reason for anyone to endure church all day Sunday is to be reminded of the Boundaries there to be o'erstepp'd. The more aware of their Sins as they commit them, the more pleas'd be these Cape folk,— more so than Englishmen, who tend to perish from the levels of Remorse attending any offense graver than a Leer."
Sirius, which Maskelyne remains here to observe, is the Island's Zenith-Star, as is Gamma Draconis for Greenwich. (Englishmen are born under the Dragon, St. Helenians under the Dog. At Bencoolen Mason and Dixon would have been under inconstant Mira, in the Whale. These signs are the Apocrypha of Astrology.)
The landlord, Mr. Blackner, is that extremity of Quidnunc which, given enough time, necessarily emerges upon a small Island surrounded by Ocean for thousands of Soul-less leagues in ev'ry direction, where the village-siz'd population have only one another to talk about, and anyone newly arriv'd is feasted upon with an eagerness match'd only in certain rivers of South America. Everyone comes to know what everyone else knows,— and the strange mind-to-mind Throb may be felt distinctly, not to mention apprehensively, by the New-comer.
Kepler said that Astrology is Astronomy's wanton little sister, who goes out and sells herself that Astronomy may keep her Virtue.
In fact, far from the Ogre or Troll his son makes him out to be, Charles Sr. is a wistful and spiritual person. He believes that bread is alive,— that the yeast Animalcula may unite in a single purposeful individual,— that each Loaf is so organized, with the crust, for example, serving as skin or Carapace,— the small cavities within exhibiting a strange complexity, their pale Walls, to appearance smooth, proving, upon magnification, to be made up of even smaller bubbles, and, one may presume, so forth, down to the Limits of the Invisible. The Loaf, the indispensible point of convergence upon every British table, the solid British Quartern Loaf, is mostly, like the Soul, Emptiness.
As both Teacher and resolute Rationalist, Pace Bourquelet and Nynauld, Emerson is convinc'd that the ancient popular belief in Were-Wolves, if it does not stem from, is at least reinforced by, the alarm'd reactions of mothers to the onset of Puberty in their sons. Once, at his first sight of it, he was alarm'd, too. Hair sprouting ev'rywhere, voices deepening, often to Growls, Boys who once went to bed early, now grown nocturnal. Mysterious absences occur. The family dog begins acting peculiar. Unusual Attention is paid to the Roast, just before it's popp'd in the Oven
There remains a residue of Belief, out to the Westward, that the mere presence of Glyphs and Signs can produce magickal Effects,— for of the essence of Magic is the power of small Magickal Words, to work enormous physical Wonders,— as of coded inscriptions in fables, once unlock'd, to yield up Treasure past telling. So, Seals become of primary Moment, and their precise descriptions, often, matters of Life and Death, for one letter misplaced can summon Destruction immediate and merciless.
"Hope to have your Company at the Bridge...," writes Benjamin Chew, to the Surveyors. He means Mary Janvier's, at Christiana Bridge,— where the Line Commissioners find merry Pretext to gather, gossip, swap quids and quos, play Whist, drink Madeira, sing Catches, sleep late, or else stay up till the north-bound Mail-coach wheels in at seven A.M., and the Passengers all come piling out for Breakfast at The Indian Queen. Never know whom you'll run into. An hour's pause in the journey, wherein early Risers may practise, each day, upon a diff 'rent set of Travelers. Flirting? Cards? Coffee and Chatter? the Hope is for a productive, when not amusing, Hour.
Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?— in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,— serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,— Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, mea-sur'd and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,— winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.
The Revd looks on with interest. The Frenchman fascinates him. With his recent animadversions upon the Lord's Supper, he is attending more to Food, and its preparation. "I thought I had put behind me," he writes, "the questions of whether the Body and Blood of Christ are consubstan-tiate with, or transubstantiated from, the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist,— preferring at last to believe, with Doctors such as Haimo of Halberstadt, that the outward Forms are given to bread and wine as an act of God's Mercy, for otherwise we should be repell'd by the sight of real human Flesh and Blood, not to mention the prospect of eating it. Thus to God's attributes must be added the skills of a master Chef, in so disguising a terrible reality. The question I cannot resolve is whether real Flesh and real Blood are themselves, in turn, further symbolick,— either of some mystickal Body of Christ, in which participants in the Lord's Supper all somehow,— mystickally, to be sure,— become One,— or of a terrible Opposite... some ultimate Carnality, some way of finally belonging to the doom'd World that cannot be undone,— a condition, I now confess, I once roam'd the Earth believing myself to be seeking, all but asphyxiated in a darkling innocence which later Generations may no longer fully imagine.
"But since those days of young hopes, illusory daybreaks, and the uncanny sureness of Nerve, I have been down into other quarters of the City of Earth, seen and smell'd at village Markets, hung amid the flies and street-dust with the other animal meat, Human Flesh, offer'd for sale.... In America some Indians believe that eating the flesh, and particularly drinking the blood, of those one has defeated in battle, will transfer the 'Virtues,' as theologians might call 'em, from one's late opponent, to oneself,— a mystickal Union between the Antagonists, which no one I have consulted is quite able to explain to me. It raises the possibility that Savages who appear to be Enemies are in fact connected somehow, profoundly, as in a Covenant of Blood, with War for them being thus a species of Sacrament. This being so, as a practical matter out here, the Warriors-Paths must be deem'd holy, and transgression of them serious, to a degree difficult to imagine in the common British Foot-path dispute. We must either change our notions of the Sacred, or come to terms with these Nations,— and sooner rather than later."
'tis Dixon's luck to discover The Rabbi of Prague, headquarters of a Kabbalistick Faith, in Correspondence with the Elect Cohens of Paris, whose private Salute they now greet Dixon with, the Fingers spread two and two, and the Thumb held away from them likewise, said to represent the Hebrew letter Shin and to signify, "Live long and prosper." The area just beyond the next Ridge is believ'd to harbor a giant Golem, or Jewish Automaton, taller than the most ancient of the Trees. As explain'd to Dixon, 'twas created by an Indian tribe widely suppos'd to be one of the famous Lost Tribes of Israel, who had somehow given up control of the Creature, sending it headlong into the Forest, where it would learn of its own gift of Mobile Invisibility.
"I have an enemy in these parts, I believe,— a certain Jesuit who does not wish me well." "French?" inquires Mason. "Spanish, I believe. Father Zarpazo, the Wolf of Jesus, as he is known in his native Land, though I had the misfortune to meet him in my own. He has his Training directly from those who persecuted Molinos and his followers,— he is accordingly sworn to destroy all who seek God without passing through the toll-gate of Jesus. The Molinistas, as do certain Buddhists of my own land, believ'd that the most direct Way to the Deity was to sit, quietly. If this meant using Jesus as but a stage on a journey, or even passing him by, why so be it. Buddhists speak of finding it necessary, if the Buddha be blocking one's Way, to kill him. Jesuits do not like to hear this sort of thing, of course, it puts far too much into question. If access to God need not be by way of Jesus, what is to become of Jesuits? And the sheer amount of Silence requir'd,— do you think they could ever abide that?
Ah, yes then Captain you were saying and how fascinating that you believe the Planet Earth to be a.. .living Creature? Hum?" "Exactly as the creatures Microscopic upon your skin believe you to be a Planet. They may be arguing even now about whether or not you are a form of Life. Each time you step into a Tub, there comes upon them another universal Flood, with its Animalcular Noah, and another Re-inhabiting, another Chain of Generations, to them how timeless, till the next Wash."
"To rule forever," continues the Chinaman, later, "it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call.. .Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,— to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,— 'tis the first stroke.— All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation."
A Virginia Boy, seven or eight or thereabouts, comes running up to quiz with them. "I can show you something no one has ever seen, nor will anyone ever see again." Mason squints in Thought. "There's no such thing." "Ha-ha!" The lad produces an unopen'd Goober Pea-Shell, exhibiting it to both Astronomers before cracking it open to reveal two red Pea-Nuts within,— "Something no-one has seen,"— popping them in his mouth and eating them,— "and no one will see again." The Gents, astonish'd, for a moment look like a match'd pair of Goobers themselves.
Watching an Indian slip back into the forest is like seeing a bird take wing,— each moves vertiginously into an Element Mason, all dead weight, cannot enter. The first time he saw it, it made him dizzy. The spot in the Brush where the Indian had vanish'd vibrated, as an eddying of no color at all. Contrariwise, watching an Indian emerge, is to see a meaningless Darkness eddy at length into a Face, and a Face, moreover, that Mason remembers.
One of the Enigmata of the Invisible World, is how a Voice unlocaliz'd may yet act powerfully as a moral Center.
The Driver's Whip is an evil thing, an expression of ill feeling worse than any between Master and Slave,— the contempt of the monger of perishable goods for his Merchandise,— in its tatter'd braiding, darken'd to its Lash-Tips with the sweat and blood of Drove after Drove of human targets, the metal Wires work'd in to each Lash, its purpose purely to express hate with, and Hate's Corollary,— to beg for the same denial of Mercy, should, one day, the r6les be revers'd. Gambling that they may not be. Or, that they may.
She sinks with a sidewise contraction of her body onto a Couch design'd more to encourage the Illusions of Youth, than to console the Certainties of Age.
Did he now include among his Enemies Maskelyne? The A.R. had shar'd with Mason his delight over the new Planet,— he had taken it for a Comet,— wishing Mr. Herschel joy of his great Accomplishment. Suddenly the family of Planets had a new member, tho' previously observ'd by Bradley, Halley, Flamsteed, Le Monnier, the Chinese, the Arabs, everyone it seem'd, yet attended to by none of them. 'Twas impossible to find an Astronomer in the Kingdom who was not wandering about in that epoch beaming like a Booby over the unforeseen enlargement of his realm of study. Yet to Mason was it Purgatory,— some antepenultimate blow. What fore-inklings of the dark Forces of Over-Throw that assaulted his own Mind came visiting?— small stinging Presences darting in from the periphery of his senses to whisper, to bite, to inject Venoms...Beings from the new Planet. Infesting— Mason has seen in the Glass, unexpectedly, something beyond simple reflection,— outside of the world,— a procession of luminous Phantoms, carrying bowls, bones, incense, drums, their Attention directed to nothing he may imagine, belonging to unknown purposes, flowing by thick as Eels, pauselessly, for how long before or after his interception, he could never know. There may be found, within the malodorous Grotto of the Selves, a conscious Denial of all that Reason holds true. Something that knows, unarguably as it knows Flesh is sooner or later Meat, that there are Beings who are not wise, or spiritually advanced, or indeed capable of Human kindness, but ever and implacably cruel, hiding, haunting, waiting,— known only to the blood-scented deserts of the Night,— and any who see them out of Disguise are instantly pursued,— and none escape, however long and fruitful be the years till the Shadow creeps 'cross the Sill-plate, its Advent how mute. Spheres of Darkness, Darkness impure,— Plexities of Honor and Sin we may never clearly sight, for when we venture near they fall silent, Murdering must be silent, by Potions and Spells, by summonings from beyond the Horizons, of Spirits who dwell a little over the Line between the Day and its annihilation, between the number'd and the unimagin'd,— between common safety and Ruin ever solitary....
"Sir, you have encounter'd Deists before, and know that our Bible is Nature, wherein the Pentateuch, is the Sky. I have found there, written ev'ry Night, in Astral Gematria, Messages of Great Urgency to our Time, and to your Continent, Sir."