Part 36

A man's style has little or nothing to do with the words, or the sentence, paragraph or even his native eccentricities of technique; a man's style has to do with the manner of his thinking. As for words and the implements of writing, the more nearly they are made to parallel the run of thought, the better the work.

One does not learn the Dakotan's kind in a day or a year. There is a continual changing and refining production about our truest friends--the same thing in a woman that a man can love in the highest--that quickens us always to higher vision and deeper humanity. The point is that we must change and increase to be worthy of our truest relations. One must always be restless and capacious. When our eyes rest on the horizon, and do not yearn to tear it apart; when the throb of the Quest sinks low in our breast--it is time to depart. You who in mid-life think you have arrived somewhere--in profession, in trade, in world-standing--know that death has already touched you, that the look of your face is dissolute.

I have said to the Dakotan and to the others here: "It was good for you to come--but the time may arrive, when it will be just as good for you to go.... When you see me covering old fields; when you come here for continual reviews of my little story; when your mind winces with the thought of what I am to do and say next, because you know it well already--arise and come no more, but in passing, say to me, 'To-day we did not get out of the circle of yesterday....' I shall know what is meant, and it shall be good for you to tell me, since one forgets. It may be that there is still enough strength for another voyage--that I may be constrained to leave Telemachus and go forth to the edge of the land "where lights twinkle among the rocks and the deep moans round with many voices."

Recently the Dakotan told me of a dream, and I asked him to write it. I think he will draw nearer to you, if you read the story that he brought me:

"This is the latest and most complete of many under-water dreams that have come to me. In their thrall as a child I learned the deeps of fear. I do not know why dreams of mine are so often associated with water, unless at some time, way back in the beginnings, the horror of a water-existence has been so stamped upon me that it has been retained in consciousness. As a child, water and strong winds drove me to tears. I can remember no other things that brought marked fear but these. One incident of wind, on a boat going to Block Island Light-house, off Newport, remains as vivid to this day as when it was enacted, and I was not yet five at the time. Every one wondered at these peculiar fears, but the explanation is plainer if one can look either back or beyond.

"Knowledge is but a glimmering of past experience. We are the condensed sum of all our past activities. Normal mind and memory are only of the immediate present, only as old as our bodies, but once in a long time we fall by chance into certain peculiar conditions of body, mind, or soul--conditions that are invoking to great reaches of consciousness back into the past. Normally our shell is too thick; we are too dense and too conscious of our present physical being and vitality, for the ancient one within us to interpret to the brain. Even in sleep, the brain is usually embroiled or littered with daily life matters. The brain has not yet become a good listener, and the voice of the inner man is ever a hushed whisper.

"The exceptionally low temperature of my body was the immediate cause of this dream. Here is a conviction that I brought up from it: I believe that any one by putting himself into a state of very low temperature and vibration, almost akin to hibernation, may be enabled to go back in consciousness toward the Beginnings. Evidently red blood is wholly of man, but in some way the white corpuscles of the blood seem to be related to the cold-blooded animals and hence to the past. Under conditions, such as sleeping on the ground or in a cold, damp place, these white corpuscles may be aided to gain ascendency over the heart, brain, and red corpuscles. This accomplished, the past may be brought back.

"It was a cold, rainy Fall night that the dream came. A bleak east wind blowing along the lake-shore, probed every recess of the 'Pontchartrain,' the tiny open-work cottage I used. The place was flushed like a sieve with wind and rain. It leaked copiously and audibly, and there was no burrowing away from the storm. I sought the blankets early in a state of very low circulation. The last thing I was conscious of, as I drifted off, was the cold, the low sound of the wind, and the rain beating upon the roof....

"There was a cohering line through this dream, every detail stamped upon my consciousness so deeply that the memory of it upon awaking was almost as vivid as when I was immersed.... It began very slowly with a growing perception of a low monotonous lap and wash of water and a slight heaving, lifting sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and fro. It was very cold, not the biting cold we know, but a dank, lifeless, penetrating cold of water and darkness.... The manner of my own form was not clear to me; I was of too low a consciousness to be aware of many exterior particulars. I merely knew I belonged to darkness and deep water. In fact, during the dream I had hardly a sense of being, except through the outer stimuli of cold and danger. These were horribly plain. That I was a creature of the depths and dark, a bleached single-cell, was doubtless a mental conclusion from the waking contemplation afterward. In the dream, I seemed of vast size, and I believe all little creatures do, since they fill their scope as tightly as we. The spark of consciousness, or life within, seemed so faint that part of the time my body seemed a dead, immovable bulk. No sense of self or body in comparison to outer things, was existent, except when a larger form instilled me with fear.

"My dream seemed a direct reversion back into the Beginnings, in form, consciousness, state of being, perception and instinct--everything--so that I actually lived, in infinitely dwindled consciousness, the terrible water-life.

"All was blackness. I possessed some slight volition of life that contracted in the cold. I was not in any keen suffering; I seemed too low and numbed to sense to the full the unpleasantness of my condition.... Presently there came a dawning light which gradually grew stronger. I did not seem to have eyes, but was conscious of the ray seemingly through the walls of my body. Slowly it increased, to a sickly wan filter of grey. It was light shining through water, a light which would have been no light to a human being. To me it was intense and fearsome, seemed to reach centres of me that were sensitive beyond expression. Though I was a mere blob, boneless and quivering, the ray was foreign and I knew what it was to cringe.

"And now I find the difficulty of interpreting the dream exactly from the point of the Cell. These things that I write I could not know then, except in smallest measure. As our greater forces are diminished by passing through the brain, these little affairs are increased by adjustment to man's waking faculties. From now, I shall give the picture as it appears to me from this distance:

"As the light increased, I contracted and sank slowly into the depths. The bottom was not far. I descended in a flowing, undulating fashion and settled softly on the water-bed, beside a large, up-jutting fang of rock. It was black in the depths. The cold penetrated all. Torpid and prone, I lay there numbed into absolute quiescence. It seemed that a torpid inertia, doomed to be everlasting, had settled upon me. I knew no want, no desire, had not the slightest will to move, to rest, to sleep, to eat, even to exist, just the dimmest sense of watchfulness and fear. It was perfect hibernation. I had descended into too low a degree of temperature and vibration to feel the need even of nourishment. I was becoming dead to the cold; everything was a pulseless void. I should never have generated an impulse to move again had not extraneous influences affected me after seeming ages had passed.

"The bottom on which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it, or rather feel it--a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings of the life impulse. The tops and sides of the rocks were festooned with waving green fringes of growths, which trailed out into the water. Long, snakelike fronds and stems of whitish green, half-vegetable, half-animal, grew on the bottom. They were stationary at their bases, but were lithe and a-crawl with life in their stems, extending and contracting into the water at intervals, in a spiral, snakey manner. Their heads were like white-bleached flowers, with hairy lips, which contracted and opened constantly, engulfing the myriads of floating, microscopic forms.

"Upon the heads of some of the creepers were ghostly phosphorescent lights, which winked on and off at intervals as the stems waved gently to and fro. I did not have an instinctive fear of these. They seemed friendly. They lit up the black depths. They and I seemed of a similar bent; they feared the forms that I feared and contracted tight to the bottom when these enemies approached. There were certain permanent spots about me that gave off other lights at intervals. The whole bottom was a dim, vast region of many-coloured lights, or more properly, dim lambent glows, of blue, green and yellow, which winked and nodded on and off in the blackness. They seemed to be the decoys of the feeders that possessed them. Each glow lit up a circle in the depths and seemed to attract food to the watcher who waved it. They were all cold lights, mere phosphorescent gleams without the searching, penetrating qualities of the light I had first felt, and they did not bother me.

"... The ray was filtering down again. It was this that kept me alive. It increased until all above was a wan grey. One by one the many-coloured lights of the bottom winked off, the long feelers and contractile stems were drawn in, and the whole bottom became once more a motionless, dead-grey world.... Little sacks without eyes in that grey light, the gorging not begun, kept alive by the whip of fear. The low life would have gone on to death or dissemination had it not been for exterior forces which reached me in the shape of Fear. I shall never forget it--the Fear of the Black Bottoms.

"There was a long, hideous suspense, as the Ray held me, and the thing that I feared was not the Ray, but belonged with it. In the midst of a kind of freezing paralysis, the struggle to flee arose within me. Yet I was without means of locomotion. Through sheer intensity of panic I expanded. Then there was a thrusting forward of the inner vital centre against the forward wall of the sack. It was the most vital part of me that was thrust forward, the heart of a rudiment, so to speak. That which remained, followed in a kind of flow. The movement was an undulation forward, brought about by the terror to escape.

"Fear is always connected with Behind. With the approach of Danger I had started forward. There had been no forward nor backward before, nor any sides or top to me. Now a back, a dorsal aspect, came into being, and the vital centre was thrust forward within the cell, so as to be farthest away from the danger. It is in this way that the potential centre of an organism came to be in the front, in the head, looking forward and always pointed away from the danger--protected to the last.

"As I flowed forward, the sticky fluid substance of my body sucked into the oozy bottom. I spatted myself as flat as possible, seeming to press the tenderest parts closest to the bottom. And it is in this way that the vital parts of organisms came to be underneath, on the ventral aspect, protected from above by the sides and back. As the Fear increased, I gained in strength and speed of locomotion, the same parts of my form protruding rhythmically, faster and easier, until I did not need to concentrate so intensely upon the moving-act. Doubtless I covered ages of evolution in the dream. It is in this way through the stimulus of Fear that the rudiments of organs of locomotion were begun. And they came in the Beginnings on the ventral side, because that side was pressed close to the earth. Every sense, volition, reasoning power--everything--was generated and fostered by Fear in the Beginnings. So Fear is really the Mother of our first overcoming of Inertia.

"I do not recall being devoured by that creature of the Ray; and yet it seems as if half the life in the Bottoms was clutched in the torture of that danger. The other half was gorging.... Gorge, gorge, with unappeased appetite, body bulging to the bursting point, the Devourers all about me, the larger engulfing the smaller, not with mouths, but literally enclosing their prey with the walls of their bodies, so that the smaller flowed into the larger. And often the engulfed would be of greater length than the engulfer....

"There was a sound made by the gorging, a distinct sound born of gluttony, not audible, but to be felt by my sensitive surfaces, a sort of emanation, not from the gorgers, but born from the engrossing intensity of the gorging act. I shall always remember it, a distinct 'ummmmmmm,' constant, and rising and falling at times to a trifle faster or lower pitch.

"Always, as the Ray would cross above me, there would be a stoppage of the emanations from the gorgers, a sinking to the bottom, and a rising again. Also there were Shadows, sinister, flowing grey forms, that preyed about the rocky bottom. These were more felt by me than heard or seen, and instilled more deadly fear than the larger Shadows that passed above. The drama of the feeding seemed doomed to go on and on forever. Repletion would never have come to the Gorgers. Only Fear broke the spell.

"I recall a last glimpse of that ghost-life of the depths. About the rocks, the long snakelike stems and feelers were extended, and the luring decoys waved and glowed again at the ends of the stalks. With the cessation of the feeding, began the vaster, unquenchable feeding of the engulfing plants. It was steady, monotonous, inexhaustible--the winking and waving of the blue-green glows, the clustering of the senseless prey, a sudden extinguishing of the light, devouring--then the nodding gleam again. No mercy, no feeling, no reason existed in this ghost-region of bleached and bloodless things. The law was the law of Fear and Gluttony. There was a thrall to the whole drama which I am powerless to express.

"... The embryo in the womb eats and assimilates, all unconscious. With life there is movement. The first movement takes the form of sucking-in that which prolongs life. Then there is the driving forward by Fear from without. Low life is a vibration between Fear and Gluttony. In every movement is the gain of power to make another movement. That is the Law of life.

"I opened my eyes. The wan grey light of morning was shining In my face. I felt weak and unrested. There were puddles of water on the foot of the bed. The blankets lay heavily about my limbs, and circulation was hardly sufficient to hold consciousness. The effects of the dream oppressed me the rest of that day and for long afterward."

FOOTNOTES:

H. A. Sturtzel.

THE HILL ROCKS