Rutherford Mayne - "The Drone"

V. T. Sherman - "The Call of the Beaver Patrol"

Virgil and Voltaire - "The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad"

Clinton Scollard - "From The Lips of the Sea"

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




Their union with the Earth approached this strange and sweet fulfillment.

And so it was that, though at this height the vestiges of bird and
animal life were wholly gone, there grew more and more strongly the
sense that, in their further depths and shadows, these ancient bushes
screened Activities even more ancient than themselves. Life, only
concealed because they had not reached its plane of being, pulsed
everywhere about their pathway, immense in power, moving swiftly, very
grand and very simple, and sometimes surging close, seeking to draw them
in. More than once, as they moved through glade and clearing, the
Irishman knew thrills of an intoxicating happiness, as this abundant,
driving life brushed past him. It came so close, it glided before his
eyes, yet still was viewless. It strode behind him and before, peered
down through space upon him, lapped him about with the stir of mighty
currents. The deep suction of its invitation caught his soul, urging the
change within himself more quickly forward. Huge and delightful, he
describes it, awful, yet bringing no alarm.

He was always on the point of seeing. Surely the next turning would
reveal; beyond the next dense, tangled group would come--disclosure;
behind that clustered mass of purple blossoms, shaking there mysteriously
in the wind, some half-veiled countenance of splendor watched
and welcomed! Before his face passed swift, deific figures, tall, erect,
compelling, charged with this ancient, golden life that could never
wholly pass away. And only just beyond the fringe of vision. Vision
already strained upon the edge. His consciousness stretched more and
more to reach them, while They came crowding near to let him know
inclusion.

These projections of the Earth's old consciousness moved thick and
soft about them, eternal in their giant beauty. Soon he would know,
perhaps, the very forms in which she had projected them--dear portions
of her streaming life the earliest races half divined and worshipped, and
never quite withdrawn. Worship could still entice them out. A single
worshipper sufficed. For worship meant retreat into the heart where still
they dwelt. And he had loved and worshipped all his life.

And always with him, now at his side or now a little in advance, his
leader moved in power, with vigorous, springing gestures like to dancing,
singing that old tuneless song of the wind, happier even than himself.

The splendor of the _Urwelt_ closed about them. They drew nearer to
the Gates of that old Garden, the first Time ever knew, whose frontiers
were not less than the horizons of the entire world. For this lost Eden
of a Golden Age when "first God dawned on chaos" still shone within
the soul as in those days of innocence before the "Fall," when men first
separated themselves from their great Mother.

A little before sunset they halted. A hundred yards above the
rhododendron forest, in a clear wide space of turf that ran for leagues
among grey boulders to the lips of the eternal snowfields, they waited.
Through a gap of sky, with others but slightly lower than himself, the
pyramid of Kasbek, grim and towering, stared down upon them, dreadfully
close though really miles away. At their feet yawned the profound
valley they had climbed. Halfway into it, unable to reach the depths,
the sun's last rays dropped shafts like rivers slanting. Already in soft
troops the shadows crept downwards from the eastern-facing summits
overhead.

Out of these very shadows Night drew swiftly down about the world,
building with her masses of silvery architecture a barrier that rose to
heaven. These two lay down beside it. Beyond it spread that shining
Garden...only the shadow-barrier between.

With the rising of the moon this barrier softened marvelously, letting
the starbeams in. It trembled like a line of wavering music in the wind
of night. It settled downwards, shaking a little, toward the ground,
while just above them came a curving inwards like a bay of darkness, with
overhead two stately towers, their outline fringed with stars.

"The Gateway...!" whispered something through the mountains.

It may have been the leader's voice; it may have been the Irishman's own
leaping thought; it may have been merely a murmur from the rhododendron
leaves below. It came sifting gently through the shadows. O'Malley knew.
He followed his leader higher. Just beneath this semblance of an
old-world portal which Time could neither fashion nor destroy, they lay
upon the earth--and waited. Beside them shone the world, dressed by the
moon in silver. The wind stood still to watch. The peak of Kasbek from
his cloudy distance listened too.

For, floating upwards across the spaces came a sound of simple,
old-time piping--the fluting music of a little reed. It drew near,
stopped for a moment as though the player watched them; then, with a
plunging swiftness, passed off through starry distance up among the
darker mountains. The lost, forsaken Asian valley covered them. Nowhere
were they extraneous to it. They slept. And while they slept, they moved
across the frontiers of fulfillment.

The moon-blanched Gate of horn and ivory swung open. The consciousness
of the Earth possessed them. They passed within.




XXXV

"For of old the Sun, our sire,
Came wooing the mother of men,
Earth, that was virginal then,
Vestal fire to his fire.
Silent her bosom and coy,
But the strong god sued and press'd;
And born of their starry nuptial joy
Are all that drink of her breast.

"And the triumph of him that begot,
And the travail of her that bore,
Behold they are evermore
As warp and weft in our lot.
We are children of splendor and flame,
Of shuddering, also, and tears.
Magnificent out of the dust we came,
And abject from the spheres.

"O bright irresistible lord!
We are fruit of Earth's womb, each one,
And fruit of thy loins, O Sun,
Whence first was the seed outpour'd.
To thee as our Father we bow,
Forbidden thy Father to see,
Who is older and greater than thou, as thou
Art greater and older than we."

--WILLIAM WATSON, "Ode in May"


Very slowly the dawn came. The sky blushed rose, trembled, flamed. A
breath of wind stirred the vapors that far below sheeted the surface
of the Black Sea. But it was still in that gentle twilight before
the actual color comes that O'Malley found he was lying with his eyes
wide open, watching the rhododendrons. He may have slept meanwhile,
though "sleep," he says, involving loss of consciousness, seemed no
right description. A sense of interval there was at any rate, a
"transition-blank,"--whatever that may mean--he phrased it in the
writing.

And, watching the rhododendron forest a hundred yards below, he saw it
move. Through the dim light this movement passed and ran, here, there,
and everywhere. A curious soft sound accompanied it that made him
remember the Bible phrase of wind "going in the tops of the mulberry
trees." Hushed, swift, elusive murmur, it passed about him through the
dusk. He caught it next behind him and, turning, noticed groups upon the
slopes,--groups that he had not seen the night before. These groups
seemed also now to move; the isolated scattered clusters came together,
merged, ran to the parent forest below, or melted just beyond the line of
vision above.

The wind sprang up and rattled all the million leaves. That rattling
filled the air, and with it came another, deeper sound like to a sound
of tramping that seemed to shake the earth. Confusion caught him then
completely, for it was as if the mountain-side awoke, rose up, and shook
itself into a wild and multitudinous wave of life.

At first he thought the wind had somehow torn the rhododendrons loose
from their roots and was strewing them with that tramping sound about the
slopes. But the groups passed too swiftly over the turf for that, swept
completely from their fastenings, while the tramping grew to a roaring as
of cries and voices. That roaring had the quality of the voice that
reached him weeks ago across the AEgean Sea. A strange, keen odor, too,
that was not wholly unfamiliar, moved upon the wind.

And then he knew that what he had been watching all along were not
rhododendrons at all, but living, splendid creatures. A host of others,
moreover, large ones and small together, stood shadowy in the background,
stamping their feet upon the turf, manes tossing in the early wind, in
their entire mass awful as in their individual outline somehow noble.

The light spread upwards from the east. With a fire of terrible joy and
wonder in his heart, O'Malley held his breath and stared. The luster of
their glorious bodies, golden bronze in the sunlight, dazed the sight.
He saw the splendor of ten hundred velvet flanks in movement, with here
and there the uprising whiteness of a female outline that flashed and
broke above the general mass like foam upon a great wave's crest--figures
of incomparable grace and power; the sovereign, upright carriage; the
rippling muscles upon massive limbs, and shoulders that held defiant
strength and softness in exquisite combination. And then he heard huge
murmurs of their voices that filled the dawn, aged by lost thousand
years, and sonorous as the booming of the sea. A cry that was like
singing escaped him. He saw them rise and sweep away. There was
a rush of magnificence. They cantered--wonderfully. They were gone.

The roar of their curious commotion traveled over the mountains,
dying into distance very swiftly. The rhododendron forest that had
concealed their approach resumed its normal aspect, but burning now
with colors innumerable as the sunrise caught its thousand blossoms.
And O'Malley understood that during "sleep" he had passed with his
companion through the gates of ivory and horn, and stood now within
the first Garden of the early world. All frontiers crossed, all
barriers behind, he stood within the paradise of his heart's desire.
The Consciousness of the Earth included him. These were early forms
of life she had projected--some of the living prototypes of legend,
myth, and fable--embodiments of her first manifestations of
consciousness, and eternal, accessible to every heart that holds a
true and passionate worship. All his life this love of Nature, which
was worship, had been his. It now fulfilled itself. Merged by love
into the consciousness of the Being loved, he _felt_ her
thoughts, her powers, and manifestations of life as his own.

In a flash, of course, this all passed clearly before him; but there
was no time to dwell upon it. For the activity of his companion had
likewise become suddenly tremendous. He had risen into complete
revelation at last. His own had called him. He was off to join his
kind.

The transformation came upon both of them, it seems, at once, but
in that moment of bewilderment, the Irishman only realized it first in
his leader.

For on the edge of the advancing sunlight first this Cosmic Being
crouched, then rose with alert and springing movement, leaping to his
feet in a single bound that propelled him with a stride of more than a
man's two limbs. His great sides quivered as he shook himself. A roar,
similar to that sound the distance already swallowed, rolled forth
into the air. With head thrown back, chest forward, too, for all the
backward slant of the mighty shoulders, he stood there, grandly
outlined, pushing the wind before him. The great brown eyes shone
with the joy of freedom and escape--a superb and regal transformation.

Urged by the audacity of his strange excitement, the Irishman obeyed
an impulse that came he knew not whence. The single word sprang to
his lips before he could guess its meaning, much less hold it back.

"Lapithae...!" he cried aloud; "Lapithae...!"

The stalwart figure turned with an awful spring as though it would
trample him to the ground. A moment the brown eyes flamed with a light of
battle. Then, with another roar, and a gesture that was somehow both huge
and simple, he seemed to rise and paw the air. The next second this
figure of the _Urwelt_, come once more into its own, bent down and
forward, leaped wonderfully--then, cantering, raced away across the
slopes to join his kind. He went like a shape of wind and cloud. The
heritage of racial memory was his, and certain words remained still
vividly evocative. That old battle with the Lapithae was but one item of
the scenes of ancient splendor lying pigeon-holed in his mighty Mother's
consciousness. The instant he had called, the Irishman himself lay caught
in lost memory's tumultuous whirl. The lonely world about him seemed of a
sudden magnificently peopled--sky, woods, and torrents.

He watched a moment the fierce rapidity with which he sped toward the
mountains, the sound of his feet already merged in that other, vaster
tramping, and then he turned--to watch himself. For a similar
transformation was going forward in himself, and with the happiness of
wild amazement he saw it. Already, indeed, it was accomplished. All white
and shining lay the sunlight over his own extended form. Power was in his
limbs; he rose above the ground in some new way; the usual little stream
of breath became a river of rushing air he drew into stronger, more
capacious lungs; likewise his bust grew strangely deepened, pushed the
wind before it; and the sunshine glowed on shaggy flanks agleam with dew
that powerfully drove the ground behind him while he ran.

He ran, yet only partly as a man runs; he found himself shot forwards
through the air, upright, yet at the same time upon all fours brandishing
his arms he flew with a free, unfettered motion, traversing the surface
of the mother's mind and body. Free of the entire Earth he was.

And as he raced to join the others, there passed again across his memory
faintly--it was like the little memory of some physical pain almost--the
picture of the boy who swam so strangely in the sea, the picture of the
parent's curious emanations on the deck, and, lastly, of those flying
shapes of cloud and wind his inner vision brought so often speeding over
long, bare hills. This was the final fragment of the outer world that
reached him....

He tore along the mountains in the dawn, the awful speed at last
explained. His going made a sound upon the wind, and like the wind
he raced. Far beyond him in the distance, he saw the shadow of that
disappearing host spreading upon the valleys like a mist. Faintly still
he caught their sound of roaring; but it was his own feet now that made
that trampling as of hoofs upon the turf. The landscape moved and opened,
gathering him in....

And, hardly had he gone, when there stole upon the place where he
had stood, a sweet and simple sound of music--the little piping of a
reed. It dropped down through the air, perhaps, or came from the forest
edge, or possibly the sunrise brought it--this ancient little sound of
fluting on those Pipes men call the Pipes of Pan....




XXXVI

"Here we but peak and dwindle
The clank of chain and crane,
The whirr of crank and spindle
Bewilder heart and brain;
The ends of our endeavor
Are wealth and fame,
Yet in the still Forever
We're one and all the same;

"Yet beautiful and spacious
The wise, old world appears.
Yet frank and fair and gracious
Outlaugh the jocund years.
Our arguments disputing,
The universal Pan
Still wanders fluting--fluting--
Fluting to maid and man.
Our weary well-a-waying
His music cannot still:
Come! let us go a-maying,
And pipe with him our fill."

--W.E. HENLEY


In a detailed description, radiant with a wild loveliness of some
forgotten beauty, and of necessity often incoherent, the Irishman
conveyed to me, sitting in that dreary Soho restaurant, the passion of
his vision. With an astonishing vitality and a wealth of deep conviction
it all poured from his lips. There was no halting and no hesitation. Like
a man in trance he talked, and like a man in trance he lived it over
again while imparting it to me. None came to disturb us in our dingy
corner. Indeed there is no quieter place in all London town than the back
room of these eating-houses of the French Quarter between the hours of
lunch and dinner. The waiters vanish, the "patron" disappears; no
customers come in. But I know surely that its burning splendor came not
from the actual words he used, but was due to definite complete
transference of the vision itself into my own heart. I caught the fire
from his very thought. His heat inflamed my mind. Words, both in the
uttered and the written version, dimmed it all distressingly.

And the completeness of the transference is proved for me by the fact
that I never once had need to ask a question. I saw and understood it
all as he did. And hours must have passed during the strange recital, for
toward the close people came in and took the vacant tables, the lights
were up, and grimy waiters clattered noisily about with plates and knives
and forks, thrusting an inky carte du jour beneath our very faces.

Yet how to set it down I swear I know not. Nor he, indeed. The
notebooks that I found in that old sack of Willesden canvas were a
disgrace to any man who bid for sanity,--a disgrace to paper and pencil
too!

All memory of his former life, it seems, at first, had fallen utterly
away; nothing survived to remind him of it; and thus he lost all standard
of comparison. The state he moved in was too complete to admit of
standards or of critical judgment. For these confine, imprison, and
belittle, whereas he was free. His escape was unconditioned. From the
thirty years of his previous living, no single fragment broke through.
The absorption was absolute.

"I really do believe and know myself," he said to me across that
spotted table-cloth, "that for the time I was merged into the being of
another, a being immensely greater than myself. Perhaps old Stahl was
right, perhaps old crazy Fechner; and it actually was the consciousness
of the Earth. I can only tell you that the whole experience left no room
in me for other memories; all I had previously known was gone, wiped
clean away. Yet much of what came in its place is beyond me to describe;
and for a curious reason. It's not the size or splendor that prevent the
telling, but rather the sublime simplicity of it all. I know no language
today simple enough to utter it. Far behind words it lies, as difficult
of full recovery as the dreams of deep sleep, as the ecstasy of the
religious, elusive as the mystery of Kubla Khan or the Patmos visions of
St. John. Full recapture, I am convinced, is not possible at all in
words.

"And at the time it did not seem like vision; it was so natural;
unstudied, unprepared, and ever there; spontaneous too and artless as
a drop of water or a baby's toy. The natural is ever the unchanging. My
God! I tell you, man, it was divine!"

He made about him a vehement sweeping gesture with his arm which
emphasized more poignantly than speech the contrast he felt here where
we sat--tight, confining walls, small stifling windows, chairs to rest
the body, smothering roof and curtains, doors of narrow entrance and
exit, floors to lift above the sweet surface of the soil,--all of them
artificial barriers to shut out light and separate away from the Earth.
"See what we've come to!" it said plainly. And it included even his
clothes and boots and collar, the ridiculous hat upon the peg, the
unsightly "brolly" in the dingy corner. Had there been room in me for
laughter, I could well have laughed aloud.

* * * * *

For as he raced across that stretch of splendid mountainous Earth,
watching the sunrise kiss the valleys and the woods, shaking the dew
from his feet and swallowing the very wind for breath, he realized that
other forms of life similar to his own were everywhere about him--also
moving.

"They were a part of the Earth even as I was. Here she was crammed
to the brim with them--projections of her actual self and being,
crowded with this incomparable ancient beauty that was strong as her
hills, swift as her running streams, radiant as her wild flowers. Whether
to call them forms or thoughts or feelings, or Powers perhaps, I swear,
old man, I know not. Her Consciousness through which I sped, drowned,
lost, and happy, wrapped us all in together as a mood contains its own
thoughts and feelings. For she _was_ a Being--of sorts. And I _was_
in her mind, mood, consciousness, call it what you best can. These
other thoughts and presences I felt were the raw material of forms,
perhaps--Forces that when they reach the minds of men must clothe
themselves in form in order to be known, whether they be Dreams, or Gods,
or any other kind of inspiration. Closer than that I cannot get.... I
knew myself within her being like a child, and I felt the deep, eternal
pull--to simple things."

* * * * *

And thus the beauty of the early world companioned him, and all the
forgotten gods moved forward into life. They hovered everywhere,
immense and stately. The rocks and trees and peaks that half concealed
them, betrayed at the same time great hints of their mighty gestures.
Near him, they were; he moved toward their region. If definite sight
refused to focus on them the fault was not their own but his. He never
doubted that they could be seen. Yet, even thus partially, they
manifested--terrifically. He was aware of their overshadowing presences.
Sight, after all, was an incomplete form of knowing--a thing he had left
behind--elsewhere. It belonged, with the other limited sense-channels,
to some attenuated dream now all forgotten. Now he knew _all over._ He
himself was of them.

"I am home!" it seems he cried as he ran cantering across the sunny
slopes. "At last I have found you! Home...!" and the stones shot wildly
from his thundering tread.

A roar of windy power filled the sky, and far away that echoing
tramping paused to listen.

"We have called you! Come...!"

And the forms moved down slowly from their mountainous pedestals;
the woods breathed out a sigh; the running water sang; the slopes
all murmured through their grass and flowers. For a worshipper, strayed
from the outer world of the dead, stood within the precincts of their
ancient temple. He had passed the Angel with the flaming sword those
very dead had set there long ago. The Garden now enclosed him. He
had found the heart of the Earth, his mother. Self-realization in the
perfect union with Nature was fulfilled. He knew the Great At-onement.

* * * * *

The quiet of the dawn still lay upon the world; dew sparkled; the air was
keen and fresh. Yet, in spite of all this vast sense of energy, this
vigor and delight, O'Malley no longer felt the least goading of
excitement. There was this animation and this fine delight; but craving
for sensation of any kind, was gone. Excitement, as it tortured men in
that outer world he had left, could not exist in this larger state of
being; for excitement is the appetite for something not possessed,
magnified artificially till it has become a condition of disease. All
that he needed was now contained within himself; he was at-ease; and,
literally, that unrest which men miscall delight could touch him not nor
torture him again.

If this were death--how exquisite!

And Time was not a passing thing, for it lay, he says, somehow in an
ocean everywhere, heaped up in gulfs and spaces. It was as though he
could help himself and take it. That morning, had he so wished, could
last forever; he could go backwards and taste the shadows of the night
again, or forward and bask in the glory of hot noon. There were no parts
of things, and so no restlessness, no sense of incompleteness, no
divisions.

This quiet of the dawn lay in himself, and, since he loved it, lay there,
cool and sweet and sparkling for--years; almost--forever.

* * * * *

Moreover, while this giant form of _Urwelt_-life his inner self had
assumed was new, it yet seemed somehow familiar. The speed and weight
and power caused him no distress, there was no detail that he could not
manage easily. To race thus o'er the world, keeping pace with an eternal
dawn, was as simple as for the Earth herself to spin through space. His
union with her was as complete as that. In every item of her being lay
the wonder of her perfect form--a sphere. It was complete. Nothing
could add to it.

Yet, while all recollection of his former, pettier self was gone, he
began presently to remember--men. Though never in relation to himself, he
retained dimly a picture of that outer world of strife and terror. As a
memory of illness he recalled it--dreadfully, a nightmare fever from
which he had recovered, its horror already fading out. Cities and crowds,
poverty, illness, pain and all the various terror of Civilization, robbed
of the power to afflict, yet still hung hovering about the surface of his
consciousness, though powerless to break his peace.

For the power to understand it vanished; no part of him knew sympathy
with it; so clearly he now saw himself sharing the Earth, that a vague
wonder filled him when he recalled the mad desires of men to possess
external forms of things. It was amazing and perplexing. How could they
ever have devised such wild and childish efforts--all in the
wrong direction?

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