May Baldwin - "Sarah's School Friend"

John F. Davis - "California Romantic and Resourceful"

Frances Parkinson Keyes - "The Old Gray Homestead"

Charles Louis Fontenay - "Rebels of the Red Planet"

Editorial
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Centaur

A >> Algernon Blackwood >> The Centaur







XXXI


It was spring--and the flutes of Pan played everywhere. The radiance
of the world's first morning shone undimmed. Life flowed and sang and
danced, abundant and untamed. It bathed the mountains and that sky of
stainless blue. It bathed him too. Dipped, washed, and shining in it, he
walked the Earth as she lay radiant in her early youth. The crystal
presence of her everlasting Spring flew laughing through a world of light
and flowers--flowers that none could ever pluck to die, light that could
never fade to darkness within walls and roofs.

All day they wound easily, as though on winged feet, through the steep
belt of box and beech woods, and in sparkling brilliant heat across
open spaces where the azaleas shone; a cooling wind, fresh as the dawn,
seemed ever to urge them forwards. The country, for all its huge scale
and wildness, was park-like; the giant, bushy trees wore an air of being
tended by the big winds that ran with rustling music among their waving
foliage. Between the rhododendrons were avenues of turf, broad-gladed
pathways, yet older than the moon, from which a thousand gardeners
of wind and dew had gone but a moment before to care for others
further on. Over all brimmed up some primal, old-world beauty of a
simple life--some immemorial soft glory of the dawn.

Closer and closer, deeper and deeper, ever swifter, ever more direct,
O'Malley passed down toward the heart of his mother's being. Along
the tenderest pathways of his inner being, so wee, so soft, so simple
that for most men they lie ignored or overgrown, he slipped with joy a
little nearer--one stage perhaps--toward Reality.

Pan "blew in power" across these Caucasian heights and valleys.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river

In front his big leader, no longer blundering clumsily as on that toy
steamer with the awkward and lesser motion known to men, pressed
forward with a kind of giant sure supremacy along paths he knew, or
rather over a trackless, pathless world which the great planet had
charted lovingly for his splendid feet. That wind, blowing from the
depths of valleys left long since behind, accompanied them wisely. They
heard, not the faint horns of Elfland faintly blowing, but the blasts of
the _Urwelt_ trumpets growing out of the still distance, nearer, ever
nearer. For leagues below the beech woods poured over the enormous slopes
in a sea of soft green foam, and through the meadow spaces they saw the
sweet nakedness of running water, and listened to its song. At noon they
rested in the greater heat, sleeping beneath the shadow of big rocks; and
sometimes traveled late into the night, when the stars guided them and
they knew the pointing of the winds. The very moonlight then, that
washed this lonely world with silver, sheeting the heights of snow
beyond, was friendly, half divine ... and it seemed to O'Malley that
while they slept they were watched and cared for--as though Others
who awaited had already come halfway out to meet them.

And ever, more and more, the passion of his happiness increased; he
knew himself complete, fulfilled, made whole. It was as though his Self
were passing outwards into hundreds of thousands, and becoming
countless as the sand. He was everywhere; in everything; shining,
singing, dancing.... With the ancient woods he breathed; slipped with the
streams down the still darkened valleys; called from each towering
summit to the Sun; and flew with all the winds across the immense,
untrodden slopes. About him lay this whole spread being of the flowered
Caucasus, huge and quiet, drinking in the sunshine at its leisure. But it
lay also _within_ himself, for his expanding consciousness included and
contained it. Through it--this early potent Mood of Nature--he passed
toward the Soul of the Earth within, even as a child, caught by a mood of
winning tenderness in its mother, passes closer to the heart that gave it
birth. Some central love enwrapped him. He knew the surrounding power of
everlasting arms.




XXXII

"Inward, ay, deeper far than love or scorn,
Deeper than bloom of virtue, stain of sin,
Rend thou the veil and pass alone within,
Stand naked there and know thyself forlorn.
Nay! in what world, then, spirit, vast thou born?
Or to what World-Soul art thou entered in?
Feel the Self fade, feel the great life begin.
With Love re-rising in the cosmic morn.
The Inward ardor yearns to the inmost goal;
The endless goal is one with the endless way;
From every gulf the tides of Being roll,
From every zenith burns the indwelling day,
And life in Life has drowned thee and soul in Soul;
And these are God and thou thyself art they."

--F.W.H. MYERS. From "A Cosmic Outlook"


The account of what followed simply swept me into fairyland, yet a
Fairyland that is true because it lives in every imaginative heart that
does not dream itself shut off from the Universe in some wee compartment
all alone.

If O'Malley's written account, and especially his tumbled notebooks,
left me bewildered and confused, the fragments that he told me brought
this sense of an immense, sweet picture that actually existed. I caught
small scenes of it, set in some wild high light. Their very incoherence
conveyed the gorgeous splendor of the whole better than any neat ordered
sequence could possibly have done.

Climax, in the story-book meaning, there was none. The thing flowed
round and round forever. A sense of something eternal wrapped me as
I listened; for his imagination set the whole adventure out of time and
space, and I caught myself dreaming too. "A thousand years in His
sight"--I understood the old words as refreshingly new--might be a day.
Thus felt that monk, perhaps, for whose heart a hundred years had passed
while he listened to the singing of a little bird.

My practical questions--it was only at the beginning that I was dull
enough to ask them--he did not satisfy, because he could not. There
was never the least suggestion of the artist's mere invention.

"You really felt the Earth about and in you," I had asked, "much as
one feels the presence of a friend and living person?"

"Drowned in her, yes, as in the thoughts and atmosphere of some one
awfully loved." His voice a little trembled as he said it.

"So speech unnecessary?"

"Impossible--fatal," was the laconic, comprehensive reply, "limiting:
destructive even."

That, at least, I grasped: the pitifulness of words before that love by
which self goes wholly lost in the being of another, adrift yet cared
for, gathered all wonderfully in.

"And your Russian friend--your leader?" I ventured, haltingly.

His reply was curiously illuminating:--

"Like some great guiding Thought within her mind--some flaming
_motif_--interpreting her love and splendor--leading me straight."

"As you felt at Marseilles, a clue--a vital clue?" For I remembered
the singular phrase he had used in the notebook.

"Not a bad word," he laughed; "certainly, as far as it goes, not a wrong
one. For he--_it_--was at the same time within myself. We merged, as
our life grew and spread. We swept things along with us from the banks.
We were in flood together," he cried. "We drew the landscape with us!"

The last words baffled me; I found no immediate response. He pushed
away the plates on the table before us, where we had been lunching in
the back room of a dingy Soho restaurant. We now had the place to
ourselves. He drew his chair a little nearer.

"Don't ye see--our journey also was _within_," he added abruptly.

The pale London sunlight came through the window across chimneys,
dreary roofs, courtyards. Yet where it touched his face it seemed at
once to shine. His voice was warm and eager. I caught from him, as it
were, both heat and light.

"You moved actually, though, over country--?"

"While at the same time we moved within, advanced, sank deeper,"
he returned; "call it what you will. Our condition moved. There was this
correspondence between the two. Over her face we walked, yet into her
as well. We 'traveled' with One greater than ourselves, both caught and
merged in her, in utter sympathy with one another as with herself..."

This stopped me dead. I could not pretend more than a vague sympathetic
understanding with such descriptions of a mystical experience. Nor, it
was clear, did he expect it of me. Even his own heart was troubled, and
he knew he spoke of things that only few may deal with sanely, still
fewer hear with patience.

But, oh, that little room in Greek Street smelt of forests, dew, and
dawn as he told it,--that dear wayward Child of Earth! For "his voice
fell, like music that makes giddy the dim brain, faint with intoxication
of keen joy." I watched those delicate hands he spread about him
through the air; the tender, sensitive lips, the light blue eyes that
glowed. I noted the real strength in the face,--a sort of nobility it
was--his shabby suit of grey, his tie never caught properly in the
collar, the frayed cuffs, and the enormous boots he wore even in
London--"policeman boots" as we used to call them with a laugh.

So vivid was the picture that he painted! Almost, it seemed, I knew
myself the pulse of that eternal Spring beneath our feet, beating in vain
against the suffocating weight of London's bricks and pavements laid
by civilization--the Earth's delight striving to push outwards into
visible form as flowers. She flashed some scrap of meaning thus into
me, though blunted on the way, I fear, and crudely paraphrased.

Yes, as he talked across the airless gloom of that little back room, in
some small way I caught the splendor of his vision. Behind the words,
I caught it here and there. My own wee world extended. My being stretched
to understand him and to net in fugitive fragments the scenes of wonder
that he knew complete.

Perhaps his larger consciousness fringed my own to "bruise" it, as he
claimed the Earth had done to him, so that I glimpsed in tinier measure
an experience that in himself blazed whole and thundering. It was, I
must admit, exalting and invigorating, if a little breathless; and the
return to streets and omnibuses painful--a descent to ugliness and
disappointment. For things I can hardly understand now, even in my
own descriptions of them, seemed at the time quite clear--or clear-ish
at any rate. Whereas normally I could never have compassed them at all.

It taught me: that, at least, I know. In some spiritual way I quickened
to the view that all great teaching really comes in some such curious
fashion--via a temporary stretching or extension of the "heart" to
receive it. The little normal self is pushed aside to make room, even to
the point of loss, in order to contain it. Later, the consciousness
contracts again. But it has expanded--and there has been growth. Was
this, I wondered, perhaps what mystics speak of when they say the
personal life must slip aside, be trampled on, submerged, before there
can be room for the divine Presences...?

At any rate, as he talked there over coffee that grew cold and cigarette
smoke that made the air yet thicker than it naturally was, his words
conveyed with almost grandeur of conviction this reality of a profound
inner experience. I shared in some faint way its truth and beauty, so
that when I saw it in his written form I marveled to find the thing so
thin and cold and dwindled. The key his personal presence supplied, of
guidance and interpretation, of course was gone.




XXXIII

"Why, what is this patient entrance into Nature's deep resources
But the child's most gradual learning to walk upright without bane?
When we drive out, from the cloud of steam, majestical white horses,
Are we greater than the first men who led black ones by the mane?"

--E.B. BROWNING


The "Russian" led.

O'Malley styled him thus to the end for want of a larger word, perhaps--a
word to phrase the inner and the outer. Although the mountains were
devoid of trails, he seemed always certain of his way. An absolute
sense of orientation possessed him; or, rather, the whole earth became
a single pathway. Her being, in and about their hearts, concealed no
secrets; he knew the fresh, cool water-springs as surely as the corners
where the wild honey gathered. It seemed as natural that the bees should
leave them unmolested, giving them freely of their store, as that the
savage dogs in the aouls, or villages, they passed so rarely now, should
refrain from attack. Even the peasants shared with them some common,
splendid life. Occasionally they passed an Ossetian on horseback, a rifle
swung across his saddle, a covering burka draping his shoulders and the
animal's haunches in a single form that seemed a very outgrowth of the
mountains. But not even a greeting was exchanged. They passed in silence;
often very close, as though they did not see these two on foot. And once
or twice the horses reared and whinnied, while their riders made the
signs of their religion.... Sentries they seemed. But for the password
known to both they would have stopped the travelers. In these forsaken
fastnesses mere unprotected wandering means death. Yet to the happy
Irishman there never came a thought of danger or alarm. All was a portion
of himself, and no man can be afraid of his own hands or feet. Their
convoy was immense, invisible, a guaranteed security of the vast Earth
herself. No little personal injury could pass so huge defense. Others,
armed with a lesser security of knives and guns and guides, would
assuredly have been turned back, or had they shown resistance, would
never have been heard to tell the tale. Dr. Stahl and the fur-merchant,
for instance--

But such bothering little thoughts with their hard edges no longer
touched reality; they spun away and found no lodgment; they were--untrue;
false items of some lesser world unrealized.

For, in proportion as he fixed his thoughts successfully on outward and
physical things, the world wherein he now walked grew dim: he missed the
path, stumbled, saw trees and flowers indistinctly, failed to hear
properly the call of birds and wind, to feel the touch of sun; and,
most unwelcome of all,--was aware that his leader left him, dwindling
in size, dropping away somehow among shadows far behind or far ahead.

The inversion was strangely complete: what men called solid, real, and
permanent he now knew as the veriest shadows of existence, fleeting,
unsatisfactory, false.

Their dreary make-believe had all his life oppressed him. He now knew
why. Men, driving their forces outwards for external possessions had lost
the way so utterly. It truly was amazing. He no longer quite understood
how such feverish strife was possible to intelligent beings: the
fur-merchant, the tourists, his London friends, the great majority of
men and women he had known, pain in their hearts and weariness in
their eyes, the sad strained faces, the furious rush to catch a little
pleasure they deemed joy. It seemed like some wild senseless game that
madness plays. He found it difficult to endow them, one and all, with any
sense of life. He saw them groping in thick darkness, snatching with
hands of shadow at things of even thinner shadow, all moving in a wild
and frantic circle of artificial desires, while just beyond, absurdly
close to many, blazed this great living sunshine of Reality and Peace and
Beauty. If only they would turn--and look _within_--!

In fleeting moments these sordid glimpses of that dark and shadow-world
still afflicted his outer sight--the nightmare he had left behind. It
played like some gloomy memory through a corner of consciousness not yet
wholly disentangled from it. Already he burned to share his story with
the world...! A few he saw who here and there half turned, touched by a
flashing ray--then rushed away into the old blackness as though
frightened, not daring to escape. False images thrown outward by the
intellect prevented. Stahl he saw ... groping; a soft light of yearning
in his eyes ... a hand outstretched to push the shadows from him, yet
ever gathering them instead.... Men he saw by the million, youth still in
their hearts, yet slaving in darkened trap-like cages not merely to earn
a competency but to pile more gold for things not really wanted; faces
of greed round gambling-tables; the pandemonium of Exchanges; even fair
women, playing Bridge through all a summer afternoon--the strife and lust
and passion for possessions degrading every heart, choking the channels
of simplicity.... Over the cities of the world he heard the demon
Civilization sing its song of terror and desolation. Its music of
destruction shook the nations. He saw the millions dance. And mid the
bewildering ugly thunder of that sound few could catch the small sweet
voice played by the Earth upon the little Pipes of Pan... the fluting
call of Nature to the Simple Life--which is the Inner.

For now, as he moved closer to the Earth, deeper ever deeper into the
enfolding moods of her vast collective consciousness, he drew nearer
to the Reality that satisfies. He approached that center where outward
activity is less, yet energy and vitality far greater--because it is at
rest. Here he met things halfway, as it were, _en route_ for the outer
physical world where they would appear later as "events," but not yet
emerged, still alive and breaking with their undischarged and natural
potencies. Modern life, he discerned, dealt only with these forces when
they had emerged, masquerading at the outer rim of life as complete
embodiments, whereas actually they are but partial and symbolical
expressions of their eternal prototypes behind. And men today were busy
at this periphery only, touch with the center lost, madly consumed with
the unimportant details that concealed the inner glory. It was the spirit
of the age to mistake the outer shell for the inner reality. He at last
understood the reason of his starved loneliness amid the stupid uproar
of latter-day life, why he distrusted "Civilization," and stood apart.
His yearnings were explained. His heart dwelt ever in the Golden Age of
the Earth's first youth, and at last--he was coming home.

Like mud settling in dirty water, the casual realities of that outer life
all sank away. He grew clear within, one with the primitive splendor,
beauty, grace of a fresh world. Over his inner self, flooding slowly the
passages and cellars, those subterranean ways that honeycomb the dim-lit
foundations of personality, this tide of power rose. Filling chamber
after chamber, melting down walls and ceiling, eating away divisions
softly and irresistibly, it climbed in silence, merging all moods and
disunion of his separate Selves into the single thing that made him
comprehensible to himself and able to know the Earth as Mother. He
saw himself whole; he knew himself divine. A strange tumult as of some
ecstasy of old remembrance invaded him. He dropped back into a more
spacious scale of time, long long ago when a month might be a moment,
or a thousand years pass round him as a single day....

The qualities of all the Earth lay too, so easily contained, within
himself. He understood that old legend by which man the microcosm
represents and sums up Earth, the macrocosm in himself, so that Nature
becomes the symbol and interpreter of his inner being. The strength
and dignity of the trees he drew into himself; the power of the wind was
his; with his unwearied feet ran all the sweet and facile swiftness of
the rivulets, and in his thoughts the graciousness of flowers, the wavy
softness of the grass, the peace of open spaces and the calm of that vast
sky. The murmur of the _Urwelt_ was in his blood, and in his heart the
exaltation of her golden Mood of Spring.

How, then, could speech be possible, since both shared this common life?
The communion with his friend and leader was too profound and perfect
for any stammering utterance in the broken, partial symbols known as
language. This was done for them: the singing of the birds, the
wind-voices, the rippling of water, the very humming of the myriad
insects even, and rustling of the grass and leaves, shaped all they felt
in some articulate expression that was right, complete, and adequate. The
passion of the larks set all the sky to music, and songs far sweeter than
the nightingales' made every dusk divine.

He understood now that laborious utterance of his friend upon the
steamer, and why his difficulty with words was more than he could
overcome.

Like a current in the sea he still preserved identity, yet knew the
freedom of a boundless being. And meanwhile the tide was ever rising.
With this singular companion he neared that inner realization which
should reveal them as they were--Thoughts in the Earth's old
Consciousness too primitive, too far away, too vital and terrific to be
confined in any outward physical expression of the "civilized" world
today.... The earth shone, glittered, sang, holding them close to the
rhythm of her gigantic heart. Her glory was their own. In the blazing
summer of the inner life they floated, happy, caught away, at peace ...
emanations of her living Self.

* * * * *

The valleys far below were filled with mist, cutting them off literally
from the world of men, but the beauty of the upper mountains grew more
and more bewilderingly enticing. The scale was so immense, while the
brilliant clearness of the air brought distance close before the eyes,
altered perspective, and robbed "remote" and "near" of any definite
meaning. Space fled away. It shifted here and there at pleasure,
according as they felt. It was within them, not without. They passed,
dispersed and swift about the entire landscape, a very part of it,
diffused in terms of light and air and color, scattered in radiance,
distributed through flowers, spread through the sky and grass and
forests. Space is a form of thought. But they no longer "thought": they
felt.... O, that prodigious, clean, and simple Feeling of the Earth! Love
that redeems and satisfies! Power that fills and blesses! Electric
strength that kills the germ of separateness, making whole! The medicine
of the world!

For days and nights it was thus--or was it years and minutes?--while
they skirted the slopes and towers of the huge Dykh-Taou, and Elbrous,
supreme and lonely in the heavens, beckoned solemnly. The snowy
Kochtan-Taou rolled past, yet through, them; Kasbek superbly thundered;
hosts of lesser summits sang in the dawn and whispered to the
stars. And longing sank away--impossible.

"My boy, my boy, could you only have been with me...!" broke his
voice across the splendid dream, bringing me back to the choking, dingy
room I had forgotten. It was like a cry--a cry of passionate yearning.

"I'm with you now," I murmured, some similar rising joy half breaking in
my breast. "That's something--"

He sighed in answer. "Something, perhaps. But I have got it always; it's
all still part of me. Oh, oh! that I could give it to the world and lift
the ache of all humanity...!" His voice trembled. I saw the moisture of
immense compassion in his eyes. I felt myself swim out into universal
being.

"Perhaps," I stammered half beneath my breath, "perhaps some day you
may...!"

He shook his head. His face turned very sad.

"How should they listen, much less understand? Their energies drive
outwards, and separation is their God. There is no 'money in it'...!"




XXXIV

"Oh! whose heart is not stirred with tumultuous joy when the intimate
Life of Nature enters into his soul with all its plenitude, ... when that
mighty sentiment for which language has no other name than Love is
diffused in him, like some powerful all-dissolving vapor; when he,
shivering with sweet terror, sinks into the dusky, enticing bosom of
Nature; when the meager personality loses itself in the overpowering
waves of passion, and nothing remains but the focal point of the
incommensurable generative Force, an engulfing vortex in the ocean?"

--NOVALIS, _Disciples at Sais._ Translated by U.C.B.


Early in the afternoon they left the bigger trees behind, and passed
into that more open country where the shoulders of the mountains were
strewn with rhododendrons. These formed no continuous forest, but
stood about in groups some twenty-five feet high, their rounded masses
lighted on the surface with fires of mauve and pink and purple. When
the wind stirred them, and the rattling of their stiff leaves was heard,
it seemed as if the skin of the mountains trembled to shake out colored
flames. The air turned radiant through a mist of running tints.

Still climbing, they passed along broad glades of turfy grass between
the groups. More rapidly now, O'Malley says, went forward that inner
change of being which accompanied the progress of their outer selves.
So intimate henceforth was this subtle correspondence that the very
landscape took the semblance of their feelings. They moved as
"emanations" of the landscape. Each melted in the other, dividing lines
all vanished.

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