Part 70

That, according to a newspaper account, Mr. W.R. Brooks, director of the Smith Observatory, had seen a dark round object pass rather slowly across the moon, in a horizontal direction. In Mr. Brooks' opinion it was a dark meteor. In Science, Sept. 14, 1896, a correspondent writes that, in his opinion, it may have been a bird. We shall have no trouble with the meteor and bird mergers, if we have observations of long duration and estimates of size up to hundreds of miles. As to the body that was seen by Brooks, there is a note from the Dutch astronomer, Muller, in the Scientific American, 75-251, that, upon April 4, 1892, he had seen a similar phenomenon. In Science Gossip, n.s., 3-135, are more details of the Brooks object--apparent diameter about one-thirtieth of the moon's--moon's disk crossed in three or four seconds. The writer, in Science Gossip, says that, on June 27, 1896, at one o'clock in the morning, he was looking at the moon with a 2-inch achromatic, power 44, when a long black object sailed past, from west to east, the transit occupying 3 or 4 seconds. He believed this object to be a bird--there was, however, no fluttering motion observable in it.

In the Astronomische Nachrichten, No. 3477, Dr. Brendel, of Griefswald, Pomerania, writes that Postmaster Ziegler and other observers had seen a body about 6 feet in diameter crossing the sun's disk. The duration here indicates something far from the earth, and also far from the sun. This thing was seen a quarter of an hour before it reached the sun. Time in crossing the sun was about an hour. After leaving the sun it was visible an hour.

I think he's a vast, black vampire that sometimes broods over this earth and other bodies.

Communication from Dr. F.B. Harris (Popular Astronomy, 20-398):

That, upon the evening of Jan. 27, 1912, Dr. Harris saw, upon the moon, "an intensely black object." He estimated it to be 250 miles long and 50 miles wide. "The object resembled a crow poised, as near as anything." Clouds then cut off observation.

Dr. Harris writes:

"I cannot but think that a very interesting and curious phenomenon happened."

Short chapter coming now, and it's the worst of them all. I think it's speculative. It's a lapse from our usual pseudo-standards. I think it must mean that the preceding chapter was very efficiently done, and that now by the rhythm of all quasi-things--which can't be real things, if they're rhythms, because a rhythm is an appearance that turns into its own opposite and then back again--but now, to pay up, we're what we weren't. Short chapter, and I think we'll fill in with several points in Intermediatism.

A puzzle:

If it is our acceptance that, out of the Negative Absolute, the Positive Absolute is generating itself, recruiting, or maintaining, itself, via a third state, or our own quasi-state, it would seem that we're trying to conceive of Universalness manufacturing more Universalness from Nothingness. Take that up yourself, if you're willing to run the risk of disappearing with such velocity that you'll leave an incandescent train behind, and risk being infinitely happy forever, whereas you probably don't want to be happy--I'll sidestep that myself, and try to be intelligible by regarding the Positive Absolute from the aspect of Realness instead of Universalness, recalling that by both Realness and Universalness we mean the same state, or that which does not merge away into something else, because there is nothing else. So the idea is that out of Unrealness, instead of Nothingness, Realness, instead of Universalness, is, via our own quasi-state, manufacturing more Realness. Just so, but in relative terms, of course, all imaginings that materialize into machines or statues, buildings, dollars, paintings or books in paper and ink are graduations from unrealness to realness--in relative terms. It would seem then that Intermediateness is a relation between the Positive Absolute and the Negative Absolute. But the absolute cannot be the related--of course a confession that we can't really think of it at all, if here we think of a limit to the unlimited. Doing the best we can, and encouraged by the reflection that we can't do worse than has been done by metaphysicians in the past, we accept that the absolute can't be the related. So then that our quasi-state is not a real relation, if nothing in it is real. On the other hand, it is not an unreal relation, if nothing in it is unreal. It seems thinkable that the Positive Absolute can, by means of Intermediateness, have a quasi-relation, or be only quasi-related, or be the unrelated, in final terms, or, at least, not be the related, in final terms.

As to free will and Intermediatism--same answer as to everything else. By free will we mean Independence--or that which does not merge away into something else--so, in Intermediateness, neither free-will nor slave-will--but a different approximation for every so-called person toward one or the other of the extremes. The hackneyed way of expressing this seems to me to be the acceptable way, if in Intermediateness, there is only the paradoxical: that we're free to do what we have to do.

I am not convinced that we make a fetish of the preposterous. I think our feeling is that in first gropings there's no knowing what will afterward be the acceptable. I think that if an early biologist heard of birds that grow on trees, he should record that he had heard of birds that grow on trees: then let sorting over of data occur afterward. The one thing that we try to tone down but that is to a great degree unavoidable is having our data all mixed up like Long Island and Florida in the minds of early American explorers. My own notion is that this whole book is very much like a map of North America in which the Hudson River is set down as a passage leading to Siberia. We think of Monstrator and Melanicus and of a world that is now in communication with this earth: if so, secretly, with certain esoteric ones upon this earth. Whether that world's Monstrator and Monstrator's Melanicus--must be the subject of later inquiry. It would be a gross thing to do: solve up everything now and leave nothing to our disciples.

I have been very much struck with phenomena of "cup marks."

They look to me like symbols of communication.

But they do not look to me like means of communication between some of the inhabitants of this earth and other inhabitants of this earth.

My own impression is that some external force has marked, with symbols, rocks of this earth, from far away.

I do not think that cup marks are inscribed communications among different inhabitants of this earth, because it seems too unacceptable that inhabitants of China, Scotland, and America should all have conceived of the same system.

Cup marks are strings of cup-like impressions in rocks. Sometimes there are rings around them, and sometimes they have only semi-circles. Great Britain, America, France, Algeria, Circassia, Palestine: they're virtually everywhere--except in the far north, I think. In China, cliffs are dotted with them. Upon a cliff near Lake Como, there is a maze of these markings. In Italy and Spain and India they occur in enormous numbers.

Given that a force, say, like electric force, could, from a distance, mark such a substance as rocks, as, from a distance of hundreds of miles, selenium can be marked by telephotographers--but I am of two minds--

The Lost Explorers from Somewhere, and an attempt, from Somewhere, to communicate with them: so a frenzy of showering of messages toward this earth, in the hope that some of them would mark rocks near the lost explorers--

Or that somewhere upon this earth, there is an especial rocky surface, or receptor, or polar construction, or a steep, conical hill, upon which for ages have been received messages from some other world; but that at times messages go astray and mark substances perhaps thousands of miles from the receptor:

That perhaps forces behind the history of this earth have left upon the rocks of Palestine and England and India and China records that may some day be deciphered, of their misdirected instructions to certain esoteric ones--Order of the Freemasons--the Jesuits--

I emphasize the row-formation of cup marks:

Prof. Douglas (Saturday Review, Nov. 24, 1883):

"Whatever may have been their motive, the cup-markers showed a decided liking for arranging their sculpturings in regularly spaced rows."

That cup marks are an archaic form of inscription was first suggested by Canon Greenwell many years ago. But more specifically adumbratory to our own expression are the observations of Rivett-Carnac (Jour. Roy. Asiatic Soc., 1903-515):

That the Braille system of raised dots is an inverted arrangement of cup marks: also that there are strong resemblances to the Morse code. But no tame and systematized archaeologist can do more than casually point out resemblances, and merely suggest that strings of cup marks look like messages, because--China, Switzerland, Algeria, America--if messages they be, there seems to be no escape from attributing one origin to them--then, if messages they be, I accept one external origin, to which the whole surface of this earth was accessible, for them.

Something else that we emphasize: