Part 56

By the way, I forgot to tell the name of the giant's world:

Monstrator.

Spindle-shaped world--about 100,000 miles along its major axis--more details to be published later.

But our coming inspiration fits in, if we think of the inhabitants of Elvera as having only visited here: having, in hordes as dense as clouds of bats, come here, upon hunting excursions--for mice, I should say: for bees, very likely--or most likely of all, or inevitably, to convert the heathen here--horrified with anyone who would gorge himself with more than a bean at a time; fearful for the souls of beings who would guzzle more than a dewdrop at a time--hordes of tiny missionaries, determined that right should prevail, determining right by their own minutenesses.

They must have been missionaries.

Only to be is motion to convert or assimilate something else.

The idea now is that tiny creatures coming here from their own little world, which may be Eros, though I call it Elvera, would flit from the exquisite to the enormous--gulp of a fair-sized terrestrial animal--half a dozen of them gone and soon digested. One falls into a brook--torn away in a mighty torrent--

Or never anything but conventional, we adopt from Darwin:

"The geological records are incomplete."

Their flints would survive, but, as to their fragile bodies--one might as well search for prehistoric frost-traceries. A little whirlwind--Elverean carried away a hundred yards--body never found by his companions. They'd mourn for the departed. Conventional emotion to have: they'd mourn. There'd have to be a funeral: there's no getting away from funerals. So I adopt an explanation that I take from the anthropologists: burial in effigy. Perhaps the Elvereans would not come to this earth again until many years later--another distressing occurrence--one little mausoleum for all burials in effigy.

London Times, July 20, 1836:

That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits' burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur's Seat. In the side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, which they pulled out.

Little cave.

Seventeen tiny coffins.

Three or four inches long.

In the coffins were miniature wooden figures. They were dressed differently both in style and material. There were two tiers of eight coffins each, and a third tier begun, with one coffin.

The extraordinary datum, which has especially made mystery here:

That the coffins had been deposited singly, in the little cave, and at intervals of many years. In the first tier, the coffins were quite decayed, and the wrappings had moldered away. In the second tier, the effects of age had not advanced so far. And the top coffin was quite recent-looking.

In the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquarians of Scotland, 3-12-460, there is a full account of this find. Three of the coffins and three of the figures are pictured.

So Elvera with its downy forests and its microscopic oyster shells--and if the Elvereans be not very far-advanced, they take baths--with sponges the size of pin heads--

Or that catastrophes have occurred: that fragments of Elvera have fallen to this earth:

In Popular Science, 20-83, Francis Bingham, writing of the corals and sponges and shells and crinoids that Dr. Hahn had asserted that he had found in meteorites, says, judging by the photographs of them, that their "notable peculiarity" is their "extreme smallness." The corals, for instance, are about one-twentieth the size of terrestrial corals. "They represent a veritable pygmy animal world," says Bingham.

The inhabitants of Monstrator and Elvera were primitives, I think, at the time of their occasional visits to this earth--though, of course, in a quasi-existence, anything that we semi-phantoms call evidence of anything may be just as good evidence of anything else. Logicians and detectives and jurymen and suspicious wives and members of the Royal Astronomic Society recognize this indeterminateness, but have the delusion that in the method of agreement there is final, or real evidence. The method is good enough for an "existence" that is only semi-real, but also it is the method of reasoning by which witches were burned, and by which ghosts have been feared. I'd not like to be so unadvanced as to deny witches and ghosts, but I do think that there never have been witches and ghosts like those of popular supposition. But stories of them have been supported by astonishing fabrications of details and of different accounts in agreement.

So, if a giant left impressions of his bare feet in the ground, that is not to say that he was a primitive--bulk of culture out taking the Kneipp cure. So, if Stonehenge is a large, but only roughly geometric construction, the inattention to details by its builders--signifies anything you please--ambitious dwarfs or giants--if giants, that they were little more than cave men, or that they were post-impressionist architects from a very far-advanced civilization.

If there are other worlds, there are tutelary worlds--or that Kepler, for instance, could not have been absolutely wrong: that his notion of an angel assigned to push along and guide each planet may not be very acceptable, but that, abstractedly, or in the notion of a tutelary relation, we may find acceptance.

Only to be is to be tutelary.

Our general expression:

That "everything" in Intermediateness is not a thing, but is an endeavor to become something--by breaking away from its continuity, or merging away, with all other phenomena--is an attempt to break away from the very essence of a relative existence and become absolute--if it have not surrendered to, or become part of, some higher attempt: