J. Fenimore Cooper - "Recollections of Europe"

by Alfred Russell Wallace - "The Malay Archipelago Volume 1"

H. C. Leeds - "The Laws of Euchre"

Algernon Blackwood - "The Centaur"

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




"Perhaps," said Stahl at length in a pause, "the greatest difference
between us is merely that whereas you jump headlong, ignoring details
by the way, I climb slowly, counting the steps and making them secure.
I deny at first because if the steps survive such denial, I know that
they are permanent. I build scaffolding. You fly."

"Flight is quicker," put in the Irishman.

"It is for the few," was the reply; "scaffolding is for all."

"You spoke a few days ago of strange things," O'Malley said presently
with abruptness, "and spoke seriously too. Tell me more about that, if
you will." He sought to lead the talk away from himself, since he did
not intend to be fully drawn. "You said something about the theory that
the Earth is alive, a living being, and that the early legendary forms of
life may have been emanations--projections of herself--detached portions
of her consciousness--or something of the sort. Tell me about that
theory. Can there be really men who are thus children of the earth,
fruit of pure passion--Cosmic Beings as you hinted? It interests me
deeply."

Dr. Stahl appeared to hesitate.

"It is not new to me, of course," pursued the other, "but I should like
to know more."

Stahl still seemed irresolute. "It is true," he replied at length slowly,
"that in an unguarded moment I let drop certain observations. It is
better you should consider them unsaid perhaps: forget them."

"And why, pray?"

The answer was well calculated to whet his appetite.

"Because," answered the doctor, bending over to him as he crossed over to
his side, "they are dangerous thoughts to play with, dangerous to the
interests of humanity in its present state today, unsettling to the soul,
shaking the foundations of sane consciousness." He looked hard at him.
"Your own mind," he added softly, "appears to me to be already on their
track. Whether you are aware of it or not, you have in you that kind of
very passionate desire--of yearning--which might reconstruct them and
make them come true--for yourself--if you get out."

O'Malley, his eyes shining, looked up into his face.

"'Reconstruct--make them come true--if I get out'!" he repeated
stammeringly, fearful that if he appeared too eager the other would stop.
"You mean, of course, that this Double in me would escape and build
its own heaven?"

Stahl nodded darkly. "Driven forth by your intense desire." After a
pause he added, "The process already begun in you would complete
itself."

Ah! So obviously what the doctor wanted was a description of his
sensations in that haunted cabin.

"Temporarily?" asked the Irishman under his breath.

The other did not answer for a moment. O'Malley repeated the question.

"Temporarily," said Stahl, turning away again toward his desk,
"unless--the yearning were too strong."

"In which case--?"

"Permanently. For it would draw the entire personality with it...."

"The soul?"

Stahl was bending over his books and papers. The answer was barely
audible.

"Death," was the whispered word that floated across the heavy air of
that little sun-baked cabin.

The word if spoken at all was so softly spoken that the Irishman
scarcely knew whether he actually heard it, or whether it was uttered by
his own thought. He only realized--catching some vivid current from
the other man's mind--that this separation of a vital portion of himself
that Stahl hinted at might involve a kind of nameless inner catastrophe
which should mean the loss of his personality as it existed today--an
idea, however, that held no terror for him if it meant at the same time
the recovery of what he so passionately sought.

And another intuition flashed upon its heels--namely, that this
extraordinary doctor spoke of something he knew as a certainty; that
his amazing belief, though paraded as theory, was to him more than
theory. Had he himself undergone some experience that he dared not
speak of, and were his words based upon a personal experience instead
of, as he pretended, merely upon the observation of others? Was this a
result of his study of the big man two years ago? Was this the true
explanation of his being no longer an assistant at the H--hospital,
but only a ship's doctor? Had this "modern" man, after all, a flaming
volcano of ancient and splendid belief in him, akin to what was in
himself, yet ever fighting it?

Thoughts raced and thundered through his mind as he watched him across
the cigar smoke. The rattling of that donkey-engine, the shouts of the
lightermen, the thuds of the sulfur-sacks--how ridiculous they all
sounded, the clatter of a futile, meaningless existence where men
gathered--rubbish, for mere bodies that lived amid dust a few years,
then returned to dust forever.

He sprang from his sofa and crossed over to the doctor's side. Stahl
was still bending over a littered desk.

"You, too," he cried, and though trying to say it loud, his voice could
only whisper, "you, too, must have the _Urmensch_ in your heart and
blood, for how else, by my soul, could you _know_ it all? Tell me,
doctor, tell me!" And he was on the very verge of adding, "Join us! Come
and join us!" when the little German turned his bald head slowly round
and fixed upon the excited Irishman such a cool and quenching stare that
instantly he felt himself convicted of foolishness, almost of
impertinence.

He dropped backwards into an armchair, and the doctor at the same moment
let himself down upon the revolving stool that was nailed to the floor in
front of the desk. His hands smoothed out papers. Then he leaned forward,
still holding his companion's eyes with that steady stare which forbade
familiarity.

"My friend," he said quietly in German, "you asked me just now to tell
you of the theory--Fechner's theory--that the Earth is a living,
conscious Being. If you care to listen, I will do so. We have time." He
glanced round at the shady cabin, took down a book from the shelf
before him, puffed his black cigar and began to read.

"It is from one of your own people--William James; what you call a
'Hibbert Lecture' at Manchester College. It gives you an idea, at least,
of what Fechner saw. It is better than my own words."

So Stahl, in his turn, refused to be "drawn." O'Malley, as soon as he
recovered from the abruptness of the change from that other conversation,
gave all his attention. The uneasy feeling that he was being played
with, coaxed as a specimen to the best possible point for the microscope,
passed away as the splendor of the vast and beautiful conception dawned
upon him, and shaped those nameless yearnings of his life in glowing
language.




XV


The shadows of the September afternoon were lengthening toward us from
the Round Pond by the time O'Malley reached this stage of his curious and
fascinating story. It was chilly under the trees, and the "wupsey-up,
wupsey-down" babies, as he termed them, had long since gone in to their
teas, or whatever it is that London babies take at six o'clock.

We strolled home together, and he welcomed the idea of sharing a dinner
we should cook ourselves in the tiny Knightsbridge flat. "Stewpot
evenings," he called these occasions. They reminded us of camping trips
together, although it must be confessed that in the cage-like room the
"stew" never tasted quite as it did beside running water on the skirts of
the forest when the dews were gathering on the little gleaming tent, and
the wood-smoke mingled with the scents of earth and leaves.

Passing that grotesque erection opposite the Albert Hall, gaudy in the
last touch of sunset, I saw him shudder. The spell of the ship and sea
and the blazing Sicilian sunshine lay still upon us, Etna's cones
towering beyond those gilded spikes of the tawdry Memorial. I stole a
glance at my companion. His light blue eyes shone, but with the
reflection of another sunset--the sunset of forgotten, ancient, far-off
scenes when the world was young.

His personality held something of magic in that silent stroll homewards,
for no word fell from either one of us to break its charm. The untidy
hair escaped from beneath the broad-brimmed old hat, and his faded coat
of grey flannel seemed touched with the shadows that the dusk brings
beneath wild-olive trees. I noticed the set of his ears, and how the
upper points of them ran so sharply into the hair. His walk was springy,
light, very quiet, suggesting that he moved on open turf where a sudden
running jump would land him, not into a motor-bus, but into a mossy
covert where ferns grew. There was a certain fling of the shoulders that
had an air of rejecting streets and houses. Some fancy, wild and sweet,
caught me of a faun passing down through underbrush of woodland glades to
drink at a forest pool; and, chance giving back to me a little verse of
Alice Corbin's, I turned and murmured it while watching him:

What dim Arcadian pastures
Have I known,
That suddenly, out of nothing,
A wind is blown,
Lifting a veil and a darkness,
Showing a purple sea--
And under your hair, the faun's eyes
Look out on me?

It was, of course, that whereas his body marched along Hill Street and
through Montpelier Square, his thoughts and spirit flitted through the
haunted, old-time garden he forever craved. I thought of the morrow--of
my desk in the Life Insurance Office, of the clerks with oiled hair
brushed back from the forehead, all exactly alike, trousers neatly turned
up to show fancy colored socks from bargain sales, their pockets full of
cheap cigarettes, their minds busy with painted actresses and the names
of horses! A Life Insurance Office! All London paying yearly sums to
protect themselves against--against the most interesting moment of
life. Premiums upon escape and freedom!

Again, it was the spell of my companion's personality that turned all
this paraphernalia of the busy, modern existence into the counters in
some grotesque and rather sordid game. Tomorrow, of course, it would
all turn real and earnest again, O'Malley's story a mere poetic fancy.
But for the moment I lived it with him, and found it magnificent.

And the talk we had that evening when the stew-pot was empty and we were
smoking on the narrow-ledged roof of the prison-house--for he always
begged for open air, and with cushions we often sat beneath the stars and
against the grimy chimney-pots--that talk I shall never forget. Life
became constructed all anew. The power of the greatest fairy tale this
world can ever know lay about me, raised to its highest expression. I
caught at least some touch of reality--of awful reality--in the idea that
this splendid globe whereon we perched like insects peeping timidly from
tiny cells, might be the body of a glorious Being--the mighty frame to
which some immense Collective Consciousness, vaster than that of men, and
wholly different in kind, might be attached.

In the story, as I found it later in the dusty little Paddington room,
O'Malley reported, somewhat heavily, it seemed to me, the excerpts
chosen by Dr. Stahl. As an imaginative essay, they were interesting, of
course, and vitally suggestive, but in a tale of adventure such as this
they overweight the barque of fancy. Yet, in order to appreciate what
followed, it seems necessary for the mind to steep itself in something of
his ideas. The reader who dreads to think, and likes his imagination to
soar unsupported, may perhaps dispense with the balance of this section;
but to be faithful to the scaffolding whereon this Irishman built his
amazing dream, I must attempt as best I can some precis of that
conversation.




XVI

"Every fragment of visible Nature might, as far as is known, serve as
part in some organism unlike our bodies.... As to that which can, and
that which cannot, play the part of an organism, we know very little. A
sameness greater or less with our own bodies is the basis from which we
conclude to other bodies and souls.... A certain likeness of outward
form, and again some amount of similarity in action, are what we stand on
when we argue to psychical life. But our failure, on the other side, to
discover these symptoms is no sufficient warrant for positive denial. It
is natural in this connection to refer to Fechner's vigorous advocacy."

--F.H. BRADLEY, _Appearance and Reality_


It was with an innate resistance--at least a stubborn prejudice--that
I heard him begin. The earth, of course, was but a bubble of dried fire,
a huge round clod, dead as mutton. How could it be, in any permissible
sense of the word--alive?

Then, gradually, as he talked there among the chimney-pots of old smoky
London, there stole over me this new and disquieting sense of reality--a
strange, vast splendor, too mighty to lie in the mind with comfort.
Laughter fled away, ashamed. A new beauty, as of some amazing dawn,
flashed and broke upon the world. The autumn sky overhead, thick-sown
with its myriad stars, came down close, sifting gold and fire about my
life's dull ways. That desk in the Insurance Office of Cornhill gleamed
beyond as an altar or a possible throne.

The glory of Fechner's immense speculation flamed about us both, majestic
yet divinely simple. Only a dim suggestion of it, of course, lay caught
in the words the Irishman used--words, as I found later, that were a
mixture of Professor James and Dr. Stahl, flavored strongly with Terence
O'Malley--but a suggestion potent enough to have haunted me ever since
and to have instilled meanings of stupendous divinity into all the
commonest things of daily existence. Mountains, seas, wide landscapes,
forests,--all I see now with emotions of wonder, delight, and awe unknown
to me before. Flowers, rain, wind, even a London fog, have come to hold
new meanings.

I never realized before that the mere _size_ of our old planet could
have hindered the perception of so fair a vision, or her mere
quantitative bulk have killed automatically in the mind the possible idea
of her being in some sense living. A microbe, endowed with our powers of
consciousness, might similarly deny life to the body of the elephant on
which it rode; or some wee arguing atom, endowed with mind and senses,
persuade itself that the monster upon whose flesh it dwelt were similarly
a "heavenly body" of dead, inert matter; the bulk of the "world" that
carried them obstructing their perception of its Life.

And Fechner, as it seems, was no mere dreamer, playing with a huge
poetical conception. Professor of Physics in Leipsic University, he found
time amid voluminous labors in chemistry to study electrical science
with the result that his measurements in galvanism are classic to this
day. His philosophical work was more than considerable. "A book on the
atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical and experimental
volumes on what he called psychophysics (many persons consider Fechner to
have practically founded scientific psychology in the first of these
books); a volume on organic evolution, and two works on experimental
aesthetics, in which again Fechner is thought by some judges to have laid
the foundations of a new science," are among his other performances....
"All Leipsic mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the
ideal German scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was
homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and
learning.... His mind was indeed one of those multitudinously organized
crossroads of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children
of men, and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen
in due perspective. Patientest observation, exactest mathematics,
shrewdest discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on the
largest scale, with no apparent detriment to one another. He was in fact
a philosopher in the 'great' sense."

"Yes," said O'Malley softly in my ear as we leaned against the chimneys
and watched the tobacco curl up to the stars, "and it was this man's
imagination that had evidently caught old Stahl and bowled him over.
I never fathomed the doctor quite. His critical and imaginative apparatus
got a bit mixed up, I suspect, for one moment he cursed me for asking
'suspicious questions,' and the next sneered sarcastically at me for
boiling over with a sudden inspirational fancy of my own. He never
gave himself away completely, and left me to guess that he made that
Hospital place too hot to hold him. He was a wonderful bird. But every
time I aimed at him I shot wide and hit a cloud. Meantime he peppered
me all over--one minute urging me into closer intimacy with my
Russian--his cosmic being, his _Urmensch_ type--so that he might study
my destruction, and half an hour later doing his utmost apparently to
protect me from him and keep me sane and balanced." His laugh rang
out over the roofs.

"The net result," he added, his face tilted toward the stars as though
he said it to the open sky rather than to me, "was that he pushed me
forwards into the greatest adventure life has ever brought to me. I
believe, I verily believe that sometimes, there were moments of
unconsciousness--semi-consciousness perhaps--when I really did leave my
body--caught away as Moses, or was it Job or Paul?--into a Third Heaven,
where I touched a bit of Reality that fairly made me reel with happiness
and wonder."

"Well, but Fechner--and his great idea?" I brought him back.

He tossed his cigarette down into the back-garden that fringed the
Park, leaning over to watch its zigzag flight of flame.

"Is simply this," he replied, "--'that not alone the earth but the
whole Universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, is everywhere
alive and conscious.' He regards the spiritual as the rule in Nature, not
the exception. The professorial philosophers have no vision. Fechner
towers above them as a man of vision. He dared to imagine. He made
discoveries--whew!!" he whistled, "and such discoveries!"

"To which the scholars and professors of today," I suggested, "would
think reply not even called for?"

"Ah," he laughed, "the solemn-faced Intellectuals with their narrow
outlook, their atrophied vision, and their long words! Perhaps! But in
Fechner's universe there is room for every grade of spiritual being
between man and God. The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders
of body. He believes passionately in the Earth Soul, he treats her as our
special guardian angel; we can pray to the Earth as men pray to their
saints. The Earth has a Collective Consciousness. We rise upon the Earth
as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of her soil as leaves grow
from a tree. Sometimes we find our bigger life and realize that we are
parts of her bigger collective consciousness, but as a rule we are aware
only of our separateness, as individuals. These moments of cosmic
consciousness are rare. They come with love, sometimes with pain, music
may bring them too, but above all--landscape and the beauty of Nature!
Men are too petty, conceited, egoistic to welcome them, clinging for dear
life to their precious individualities."

He drew breath and then went on: "'Fechner likens our individual
persons on the earth to so many sense-organs of her soul, adding to
her perceptive life so long as our own life lasts. She absorbs our
perceptions, just as they occur, into her larger sphere of knowledge.
When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for
all perceptive contributions from that particular quarter cease.'"

"Go on," I exclaimed, realizing that he was obviously quoting verbatim
fragments from James that he had since pondered over till they had
become his own, "Tell me more. It is delightful and very splendid."

"Yes," he said, "I'll go on quick enough, provided you promise me one
thing: and that is--to understand that Fechner does not regard the
Earth as a sort of big human being. If a being at all, she is a being
utterly different from us in kind, as of course we know she is in
structure. Planetary beings, as a class, would be totally different from
any other beings that we know. He merely protests at the presumption of
our insignificant human knowledge in denying some kind of life and
consciousness to a form so beautifully and marvelously organized as
that of the earth! The heavenly bodies, he holds, are beings superior to
men in the scale of life--a vaster order of intelligence altogether. A
little two-legged man with his cocksure reason strutting on its tiny
brain as the apex of attainment he ridicules. D'ye see, now?"

I gasped, I lit a big pipe--and listened. He went on. This time it was
clearly a page from that Hibbert Lecture Stahl had mentioned--the one
in which Professor James tries to give some idea of Fechner's aim and
scope, while admitting that he "inevitably does him miserable injustice
by summarizing and abridging him."

"Ages ago the earth was called an animal," I ventured. "We all know
that."

"But Fechner," he replied, "insists that a planet is a higher class of
being than either man or animal--'a being whose enormous size requires an
altogether different plan of life.'"

"An inhabitant of the ether--?"

"You've hit it," he replied eagerly. "Every element has its own living
denizens. Ether, then, also has hers--the globes. 'The ocean of ether,
whose waves are light, has also her denizens--higher by as much as
their element is higher, swimming without fins, flying without wings,
moving, immense and tranquil, as by a half-spiritual force through the
half-spiritual sea which they inhabit,' sensitive to the slightest pull
of one another's attraction: beings in every way superior to us. Any
imagination, you know," he added, "can play with the idea. It is old as
the hills. But this chap showed how and why it could be actually true."

"This superiority, though?" I queried. "I should have guessed their
stage of development lower than ours, rather than higher."

"Different," he answered, "different. That's the point."

"Ah!" I watched a shooting star dive across our thick, wet atmosphere,
and caught myself wondering whether the flash and heat of that hurrying
little visitor produced any reaction in this Collective Consciousness
of the huge Body whereon we perched and chattered, and upon which
later it would fall in finest dust.

"It is by insisting on the differences as well as on the resemblances,"
rushed on the excited O'Malley, "that he makes the picture of the earth's
life so concrete. Think a moment. For instance, our animal organization
comes from our inferiority. Our need of moving to and fro, of stretching
our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only our defect."

"Defect!" I cried. "But we're so proud of it!"

'"What are our legs,'" he laughed, "'but crutches, by means of which,
with restless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not inside
ourselves? The Earth is no such cripple; why should she who already
possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue, have limbs
analogous to ours? What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach
for? Of a neck with no head to carry? Of eyes or nose, when she finds
her way through space without either, and has the millions of eyes of
all her animals to guide their movements on her surface, and all their
noses to smell the flowers she grows?'"

"We are literally a part of her, then--projections of her immense life,
as it were--one of the projections, at least?"

"Exactly. And just as we are ourselves a part of the earth," he
continued, taking up my thought at once, "so are our organs her organs.
'She is, as it were, eye and ear over her whole extent--all that we see
and hear in separation she sees and hears at once.'" He stood up beside
me and spread his hands out to the stars and over the trees and paths
of the Park at our feet, where the throngs of men and women walked
and talked together in the cool of the evening. His enthusiasm grew as
the idea of this German's towering imagination possessed him.

"'She brings forth living beings of countless kinds upon her surface,
and their multitudinous conscious relations with each other she takes
up into her higher and more general conscious life.'"

He leaned over the parapet and drew me to his side. I stared with him
at the reflection of London town in the sky, thinking of the glow and
heat and restless stir of the great city and of the frantic strivings of
its millions for success--money, power, fame, a few, here and there, for
spiritual success. The roar of its huge trafficking beat across the night
in ugly thunder to our ears. I thought of the other cities of the world;
of its villages; of shepherds among the lonely hills; of its myriad wild
creatures in forest, plain, and mountain...

"All this she takes up into her great heart as part of herself!" I
murmured.

"All this," he replied softly, as the sound of the Band beyond the
Serpentine floated over to us on our roof; "--the separate little
consciousnesses of all the cities, all the tribes, all the nations of
men, animals, flowers, insects--everything." He again opened his arms to
the sky. He drew in deep breaths of the night air. The dew glistened on
the slates behind us. Far across the towers of Westminster a yellow moon
rose slowly, dimming the stars. Big Ben, deeply booming, trembled on
the air nine of her stupendous vibrations. Automatically, I counted
them--subconsciously.

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