Rare stories, page 1
Rare
Olaf Stapledon
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The Heavens Declare
Nothing from The Opening of the Eyes
At his death in 1950 Stapledon left a nearly complete text of fifty-four interlaced meditations addressed to an unnamed "you" - deity or, to use his term, "daimon." The manuscript was edited by his wife Agnes and published in 1954 as The Opening of the Eyes. As in much of his fiction, Stapledon was searching for a spiritual language adequate to the modern world, one that could encompass the newest understandings of physics: the big bang, the expanding universe, entropy. Meditation 32, "The Heavens declare - Nothing," is a response to Psalm 19, which opens: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork." It is one of the most concise statements of Stapledon's agnostic piety, his earnest attempt to yoke science and theology, to reconcile spiritual longing with intellectual skepticism. For Stapledon the night sky replete with countless stars was at once a scene of never-failing beauty and a profound dilemma. It is viewed in this meditation from the prospect of Caldy Hill on the Wirral peninsula, overlooking the town of West Kirby and the Irish Sea. His parents' house stood on Caldy Hill, and he evoked this landscape in his first published book Latter-Day Psalms and most memorably in his greatest, Star Maker. Indeed, The Opening of the Eyes is in many respects similar in mood to Star Maker, though here the dark night of a soul struggling to understand a remote and disturbing spiritual entity is portrayed with greater intimacy and simplicity.
ON THIS MOONLESS and star-brilliant night, I have come out on to the hill yearning to find you, if not in my heart, then in the heavens. But in my heart and mind you are silent, and the constellations are not your features. The heavens declare nothing. The human lights of the town beneath me tell me nothing. Beyond the houses the sea is nothing but a flat darkness.
Overhead a flight of geese, unseen but vocal, momentarily eclipse one star.
To the eye of imagination, the great earth has become visibly a sphere; now great, but now a granule in the huge void. Bright Jupiter lies far afield. The vault of the sky, no longer a pricked black tent, is expanded to be depth beyond depth of empty darkness, with here and there a sun, reduced by distance to a mere punctual star. The Milky Way, that vague over-arching stain, is seen now as a tenuous dust of suns, extending outwards disc-wise, far afield beyond the constellations. The blackness around the pole is deep beyond all sounding, is space boundless; wherein the immense galaxy itself is but a mote, a minute wisp of stars. Within that darkness, for imagination's eye, the swarming galaxies drift like snowflakes; each flake a host of suns, numerous as the sand; each flake the matrix of a million earth-like worlds. The whole unnumbered multitude of the galaxies, so some astronomers say, bursts ever apart, the more remote of them racing away faster than light's own speed; inaccessible, therefore, to vision.
Some surmise that the boundless throng of many million galaxies is finite. Space itself, though boundless, they say, is finite, and mysteriously re-entrant upon itself. Imagination, they say, cannot picture this truth, which mathematics alone, with its exact symbols, can precisely figure. In this view, the galaxies, stars, worlds, and even the very electrons, are numerable. There are just so many of them and no more. Long ago there was a single creative and explosive act, first cause of this expanding universe. Long hence, all the energies of that creation will be dissipated, and death will be universal. By then, perhaps the purpose of the cosmos (if purpose there be, which seems unlikely) will have been achieved; and with the ceasing of all change, time itself will cease.
But others, rejecting this strange boundless finitude, prefer another fantasy, no less unimaginable to man. They declare that between the ever-separating, ever-dying galaxies, a new sparse dust of matter is ever being created, here and there a lonely atom; and that the new matter gathers slowly into nebulae, which mature into galaxies, each with its million earth-like worlds where man-like beings may emerge from brutishness. Thus in the infinite host of the galaxies the worlds are infinitely many. Imagination overstrains and collapses. And for ever, within the interstices and ever-wider-yawning chasms of the ever-dying, ever-infinitely-expanding universe, an infinite sequence of fresh universes is for ever being created, in turn to mature and die. If purpose has indeed determined this strange, this seemingly crazy scheme, it must surely be a purpose infinitely alien to man's desires.
Whichever of the two modern cosmical pictures is the less false to the fads, man's understanding is defeated. Truth slips between the fingers of the exploring mind.
Yet some such picture we must accept. Gone for ever is the East's great elephant that supports the world and is supported by a greater tortoise. Gone for ever are the celestial spheres, that box of boxes, which Dante described, Hell-centred, God-surrounded. Gone too the sun-centred universe within the sphere of the fixed stars. Gone the uniquenes of the sun's system, the uniqueness of our earth, the uniqueness of man.
Instead, we must conceive, as best we may, at least a host, perhaps an infinity of habitable earth-like worlds, each housing its own human or parahuman race.
Yet well it may be, it must be, that both the new pictures of the cosmos, these latest, proudest feats of terrestrial observation and intelligence, are but a very little nearer to the truth than the East's elephant and tortoise.
Yes, but for us today they have authority. Some such explosion of ever-receding galaxies, each with its scattered population of earths, is now the background of all human life.
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Time and Eternity from Death into Life
The seven meditative interludes in the 1946 Death into Life are the most impressive parts of an otherwise plodding narrative. The fourth, "Time and Eternity," blends autobiography with poetic reverie in a version of a recurrent motif in Stapledon's writing: his visionary encounter in 1903 with his visiting nine-year-old Australian cousin and future wife, Agnes Miller. He always spoke of this moment, so like Dante's first glimpse of Beatrice at age nine in the Vita Nuova, as the wellspring of his creative life.
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TODAY! TOMORROW!
Today comprises the whole present universe of infinite detail and inconceivable extent. Today is fields and houses and the huge sky. Today human creatures are being conceived, are born, are loving, hating, dying. Electrons and protons in their myriads are everywhere busily performing their unimaginable antics. Planets attend their suns. Galaxies drift and whirl.
All this today comprises, and with all this the whole past is pastly present in today: Queen Victoria, Babylon, the ice ages, the condensing of the stars in the primeval nebula, and the initial inconceivable explosion of creativity.
But tomorrow? It is a wall of impenetrable fog, out of which anything may come.
When we remember or discover the past, we confront something that is what it is, eternally though pastly. It is such and such, and not otherwise. Our view of it may indeed be false; but it, in itself, is what in fact it was, however darkly it is now veiled. No fiat, not even an Almighty's, can make the past be other than in fact it was, and eternally is. God himself, if such there be, cannot expunge for me the deeds I now regret.
But the future? It is not veiled, it is nothing. It has still to be created. We ourselves, choosing this course rather than that, must play a part in creating it. Even though we ourselves, perhaps, are but expressions of the whole living past at work within us, yet we, such as we are, are makers of future events that today are not. Today the future actuality is nothing whatever but one or other of the infinite host of possibilities now latent in the present. Or perhaps (for how can we know?) not even latent in the present, but utterly unique and indeterminate.
Yesterday is palpably there, there, just behind me; but receding deeper and deeper into the past, as I live onward along the sequence of the new todays.
But tomorrow?
Yesterday I had porridge and toast for breakfast, as on the day before, and the day before that. Yesterday, according to instruction I caught a train to Preston. I had set my plans so as to reach the station in good time. And because a thousand other strands of planning had been minutely co-ordinated, at the appointed minute the engine driver, who had been waiting in readiness for the guard's whistle and his waving flag, moved levers. The train crept forward. In that train I found myself sitting opposite a lovely stranger, not according to instruction, nor as the result of any plan. Soon we were talking, looking into one another's eyes; talking not of love but of nursing and hospitals and the wished-for planned society, and of her Christian God, and of a future life, and of eternity. Before we met, before our two minds struck light from each other, our conversation had no existence anywhere. But then in a fleeting present we began creating it. And now the universe is eternally the richer because of it, since irrevocably the past now holds it, now preserves in a receding yesterday that unexpected, that brief and never-to-be- repeated, warmth and brightness.
With her I have no past but yesterday, and no future; but with you, my best known and loved, I have deep roots in the past, and flowers too, and the future.
Some fifteen thousand yesterdays ago there lies a day when you were a little girl with arms like sticks and a bright cascade of hair. In a green silk frock you came through a door, warmed your hands at the fire, and looked at me for a moment. And now, so real that moment seems, that it might be yesterday! For that particular fraction of the eternal reality is always queerly accessible to me, though fifteen thousand yesterdays ago.
But tomorrow?
Tomorrow, shall I, as it ha s been planned, catch the bus for Chester? Or shall I miss it? Or will it refuse me, or never start on its journey? Or having absorbed me will it collide with a hearse or a menagerie van? Will the freed lions and tigers chase people along the street? Shall I feel their huge claws in my flesh and smell their breath, and know that for me at least there is no tomorrow? Or perhaps some hidden disease is ready to spring on me tonight? Or a bomb? Or will the laws of nature suddenly change, so that stones leap from the earth, houses become soaring pillars of rubble and dust, and the sea rush into the sky? Or will the sky itself be drawn aside like a curtain, revealing God on his throne, his accusing finger pointing precisely at abject me? Or at a certain moment of tomorrow will everything simply end? Will there be just nothing any more, no future at all?
I cannot answer these questions with certainty. No man can answer them with certainty. And yet if I were to bet a million pounds to a penny that things will go on, and half a million that they will go on fundamentally much as before, few would call me rash.
Yesterday the events which are now so vividly present and actual were in the main inscrutable and not yet determined. And therefore yesterday they had, we say, no being. And yet, and yet-there are moments when we vaguely sense that, just as the past is eternally real, though pastly, so the future also is eternally what in fact it will be, though for a while futurely to the ever-advancing present. We move forward, and the fog recedes before us, revealing a universe continuous with the present universe, and one which, we irresistibly feel, was there all the while, awaiting us. Could we but by some magic or infra-red illumination pierce the fog-wall, we should see the future universe as in fact it is. So at least we sometimes irresistibly feel. My conversation with that lovely and serious travelling companion-was it not always there, awaiting me, knit irrevocably into the future as it is now irrevocably knit into the past? When I was born, was not that journey awaiting me? Through the interplay of external causation and my own freely choosing nature, was not that happy encounter already a feature of the eternal fact, though futurely? Was it not equally so when the Saxons first landed on this island, and when the island itself took shape, and when the sun gave birth?
And fifteen thousand yesterdays ago, when you and I first looked at each other, was not our future even then just what in fact it has been? It was of course related to us futurely, and was therefore inaccessible; but was it not all the while there, lying in wait for us? One does not suppose that the centre of the earth, because it is inaccessible, is therefore blankly nothing, until someone shall burrow down to it.
And indeed I cannot even be sure that in that moment of our first meeting the future was, in very truth, wholly inaccessible. For in looking into your eyes I did (how I remember it!) have a strange, a startling experience, long since dismissed as fantasy, yet unforgettable. It was as though your eyes were for me windows, and as though curtains were drawn aside, revealing momentarily a wide, an unexpected and unexplored prospect, a view obscure with distance, but none the less an unmistakable prevision of our common destiny. I could not, of course, see it clearly; for it was fleeting, and I was a boy and simple. But I saw, or I seemed to see, what now I recognize as the very thing that has befallen us, the thing that has taken so long to grow, and is only now in these last years flowering. Today our hair is greying, our faces show the years. We can no longer do as once we did. But the flower has opened. And strangely it is the very flower that once I glimpsed even before the seed was sown.
Fantasy, sheer fantasy? Perhaps! But when we think of time and of eternity, intelligence reels. The shrewdest questions that we can ask about them are perhaps falsely shaped, being but flutterings of the still unfledged human mentality.
The initial creative act that blasted this cosmos into being may, or may not (or neither), be in eternity co- real with today, and with the last faint warmth of the last dying star.
* * *
The Reflections of an Ambulance Orderly
Written in Belgium in 1916 after the passage in England of the Military Service Act, this short article appeared in the Quaker newspaper, The Friend, on 14 April. At the time Stapledon, who was not a member of the Society of Friends, was a driver for the Friends' Ambulance Unit, and the Unit was torn over the question of whether to withdraw its pacifist volunteers to face imprisonment in England as absolute conscientious objectors or to continue the "compromise" of working alongside the battlefields, tending and transporting the wounded and evacuating both civilians and soldiers during poison gas attacks. In April Stapledon's convoy was based in the towns of Crombeke and Woes ten (identified only as "W" in the article because of military censorship rules) near the Franco-Belgian border, and everyone was nervously anticipating an apocalyptic "big battle," which finally erupted on the Somme in early July. As both on-the-spot war journalism and as an anti-absolutist argument for continuing to serve in the ambulance unit, the article is interesting in its own right. It also stands as an early statement of some of Stapledon's characteristic philosophical and literary themes.
CERTAIN YOUNG AMBULANCE DRIVERS sat together drinking cocoa and smoking. They talked of motors, guns, the condition of England, and finally of conscription. That was the burning subject. Some were determined to claim total exemption; some would be content with compulsory alternative service. All sighed for peace as the only satisfactory solution.
The door was opened by a Frenchman, who gave the order. "A gas attack has begun. You must send five cars to help your friends at W. Take helmets and respirators. Everyone else must be ready for work here."
Outside, in front of the old grey church, engines were soon started. The sun had set. Venus and Jupiter shone close together in the twilight. It seemed that those bright spheres could never be theatres of war. Yet what if this earth should after all be the first world to throw off this primeval strife?
From the east came a roar of guns, continuous, like the noise of a waterfall. At that distance the cannonade sounded not savage, but methodical, deliberate. It seemed not the cry of nations madly fighting, but the roar of machinery, the final expression of Western civilisation. Was this the great battle at last, or only another little experiment, resulting in pain, death and the conquest of a few ditches?
A group of drivers stood before the cars awaiting orders. "It's come at last," said one of them, "what we have been waiting for." "No, too soon," said another. A staunch pacifist cried, "Go it our guns," and checked himself in shame with the apology, "It's nicer to hear ours than theirs, somehow"; but another broke in, "It's awful, it's ghastly, no matter whose guns. It's just a huge hideous dog fight." After a pause he said, "Think of the pluck, though! And a fellow can't go into that fire without some ideal."
All stood impatiently quiet, awaiting further orders. Some perhaps had need to screw up their courage in preparation for expected shell-haunted runs, and all were humbled by the thought of the incomparable devotion of the fighting men. Helpless anger at the war fought against a longing to share fully the great burden of danger.
The old grey church stood quiet as ever. Its spire dimly soared into grey sky. Its clock tolled the hour deliberately, ringing through the noise of war. The aloofness of the church seemed a symbol of that consciousness of all humanity which sometimes flashes on the mind to make war ridiculous. The quiet church declared peace ultimate, war merely a stage.
Another order came, and cars dispersed to evacuate the sick and wounded from the hospitals. Men and baggage were safely stowed, stretchers strapped into place; rugs and hot bottles comforted the lying. One driver, who was without a car, helped his friends to load, and chatted with the patients in his best French. So sudden an evacuation must needs perturb weak men recovering from wounds. To chat with them is to cheer.
The moon rose red from the enemies' lines, and climbed among tall trees. She seemed indeed a hostile moon, lighting the attack. She might end the lull that had come with the darkness. Someone seeing her murmured with quaint urgency, "Couchez-toi, la lune." He added, "Our people at W. will be busy to- night. Helmets and respirators are no farce there. Some of those roads will be hot enough if this is really the battle. And one is always short of sleep at W."
