John Kendrick Bangs - "The Autobiography of Methuselah"

Charles Kingsley - "Women and Politics"

John Kendrick Bangs - "The Autobiography of Methuselah"

E.V. Lucas - "Highways & Byways in Sussex"

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




"Oh!" he cried once with passion, turning to the fair-haired figure of
youth who stood with him in the bows, meeting the soft wind,--"Oh,
to have heard the trees whispering together in the youth of the world,
and felt one of the earliest winds that ever blew across the cooling
seas!"

And the boy, not understanding the words, but responding with a
perfect naturalness to the emotion that drove them forth, seized his
hand and with an extraordinarily free motion as of flying, raced with
him down the decks, happy, laughing, hair loose over his face, and with
a singular action of the shoulders as though he somehow--cantered.
O'Malley remembered his vision of the Flying Shapes....

Toward the evening, however, the boy disappeared, keeping close to
his father's side, and after dinner both retired early to their cabin.

And the ship, meanwhile, drew ever nearer to the haunted land.




XIX

"Privacy is ignorance."

--JOSIAH ROYCE


Somewhat after the manner of things suffered in vivid dreams, where
surprise is numbed and wonder becomes the perfect password, the Irishman
remembers the sequence of little events that filled the following day.

Yet his excitement held nothing of the vicious fling of fever; it was
spread over the entire being rather than located hotly in the brain and
blood alone; and it "derived," as it were, from tracts of his personality
usually unstirred, atrophied indeed in most men, that connected him
as by a delicate network of feelers with Nature and the Earth. He came
gradually to feel them, as a man in certain abnormal conditions becomes
conscious of the bodily processes that customarily go on in himself
without definite recognition.

Stahl could have told him, had he cared to seek the information, that
this fringe of wider consciousness, stretching to the stars and winds
and earth, was the very part that had caused his long unrest and
yearning--the part that knew the Earth as mother and sought the sweet
and savage freedom of what he called with the poverty of modern
terms--primitive. The channels leading toward a state of Cosmic
Consciousness, one with the Earth Life, were being now flushed and
sluiced by the forces emanating from the persons of his new companions.

And as this new state slowly usurped command, the readjustment of
his spiritual economy thus involved, caused other portions of himself
to sink into temporary abeyance. While it alarmed him, it was too
delicious to resist. He made no real attempt to resist. Yet he knew full
well that the portion sinking thus out of sight was what folk with such
high pride call Reason, Judgment, Common Sense!

In common with animal, bird, and insect life, all intimately close to
Nature, he began to feel as realities those subtle currents of the
Earth's personality by which the seals know direction in the depths of a
thousand-mile sea, by which the homing pigeons blaze trails through
space, birds fly south, the wild bees know their pathways, and all simple
life, from the Red Indian to the Red Ant, acknowledges the viewless
guidance of the mother's enveloping heart. The cosmic life ran through
his being, lighting signals, offering service, more--claiming leadership.

With it, however, came no loss of individuality, but rather a powerful
increase of life by means of which for the first time he dreamed of a
fuller existence which should eventually harmonize and combine the
ancient simplicity of soul that claimed the Earth, with the modern
complexity which, indulged alone, rendered the world so ugly and
insignificant...! He experienced an immense, driving push upon what
Bergson has called the _elan vital_ of his being.

The opening charge of his new discovery, however, was more than
disconcerting, and it is not surprising that he lost his balance. Its
attack and rush were overwhelming. Thus, it was a kind of exalted
speculative wonder lying behind his inner joy that caused his mistakes.
He had imagined, for instance, that the first sight of Greece would bring
some climax of revelation, making clear to what particular type of early
life the spirits of his companions conformed; more, that they would then
betray themselves to one and all for what they were in some effort to
escape, in some act of unrestraint, something, in a word, that would
explain themselves to the world of passengers, and focus them upon the
doctor's microscope forever.

Yet when Greece showed her first fair rim of outline, his companions
still slept peacefully in their bunks. The anticipated _denouement_ did
not appear. Nothing happened. It was not the mere sight of so much land
lying upon the sea's cool cheek that could prove vital in an adventure
of such a kind. For the adventure remained spiritual. O'Malley had
merely confused two planes of consciousness. As usual, he saw the thing
"whole" in that extraordinary way to which his imagination alone held
the key; and hence his error.

Yet the moment has ever remained for him one of vital, stirring
splendor, significant as life or death. He remembers that he was early
on deck and saw the dawn blow up softly from behind the islands with
a fresh, salt wind that blew at the same time like music into his very
heart. Golden clear it rose; and just below, like the petals of some
vast, archetypal flower that gave it birth, the low blue hills of coast
and island opened magically into blossom. The rocky cliffs of Mattapan
slipped past; the smooth, bare slopes of the ancient shore-line followed;
treeless peaks and shoulders, abrupt precipices, summits and ridges all
exquisitely rosy and alive. He had seen Greece before, yet never thus,
and the emotion that invaded every corner of his larger consciousness lay
infinitely deeper than any mere pseudo-classical thrill he had known in
previous years. He saw it, felt it, knew it from within, instead of as a
spectator from without. This dawn-mood of the Earth was also his own;
and upon his spirit, as upon her blue-crowned hills, lay the tide of high
light with its delicate swift blush. He saw it with her--through one of
her opened eyes.

The hot hours the steamer lay in the Piraeus Harbor were wearisome,
the noise of loading and unloading cargo worse even than at Catania.
While the tourist passengers hurried fussily ashore, carrying guidebooks
and cameras, to chatter among the ruined temples, he walked the decks
alone, dreaming his great dream, conscious that he spun through leagues
of space with the great Being who more and more possessed him. Beyond
the shipping and the masts collected there from all the ports of the
Mediterranean and the Levant, he watched the train puffing slowly to
the station that lay in the shadow of Theseus' Temple, but his eyes at
the same tune strained across the haze toward Eleusis Bay, and while
his ears caught the tramping feet of the long Torchlight Procession, some
power of his remoter consciousness divined the forms of hovering gods,
expressions of his vast Mother's personality with which, in worship, this
ancient people had believed it possible to merge themselves. The
significant truths that lay behind the higher Mysteries, degraded since
because forgotten and misinterpreted, trooped powerfully down into his
mind. For the supreme act of this profound cult, denied by a grosser age
that seeks to telephone to heaven, deeming itself thereby "advanced," lay
in the union of the disciple with his god, the god he worshipped all his
life, and into whose Person he slipped finally at death by a kind of
marriage rite.

"The gods!" ran again through his mind with passion and delight, as
the letter of his early studies returned upon him, accompanied now for
the first time by the in-living spirit that interpreted them. "The
gods!--Moods of her giant life, manifestations of her spreading
Consciousness pushed outwards, Powers of life and truth and beauty...!"

* * * * *

And, meanwhile, Dr. Stahl, sometimes from a distance, sometimes coming
close, kept over him a kind of half-paternal, half-professional
attendance, the Irishman accepting his ministrations without resentment,
almost with indifference.

"I shall be on deck between two and three in the morning to see the
comet," the German observed to him casually toward evening as they
met on the bridge. "We may meet perhaps--"

"All right, doctor; it's more than possible," replied O'Malley, realizing
how closely he was being watched.

In his mind at the moment another sentence ran, the thought growing
stronger and stronger within him as the day declined:

"It will come tonight--come as an inner catastrophe not unlike that
of death! I shall hear the call--to escape...."

For he knew, as well as if it had been told to him in so many words,
that the sleep of his two companions all day was in the nature of a
preparation. The fluid projections of themselves were all the time active
elsewhere. Their bodies heavily slumbered; their spirits were out and
alert. Summoned forth by those strange and radiant evocative forces
that even in the dullest minds "Greece" stirs into life, they had
temporarily escaped. Again he saw those shapes of cloud and wind moving
with swift freedom over the long, bare hills. Again and again the image
returned. With the night a similar separation of the personality might
come to himself too. Stahl's warning passed in letters of fire across his
inner sight. With a relief that yet contained uneasiness he watched his
shambling figure disappear down the stairway. He was alone.




XX

"To everything that a man does he must give his undivided attention or
his Ego. When he has done this, thoughts soon arise in him, or else a new
method of apprehension miraculously appears....

"Very remarkable it is that through this play of his personality man
first becomes aware of his specific freedom, and that it seems to him as
though he awaked out of a deep sleep as though he were only now at home
in the world, and as if the light of day were breaking now over his
interior life for the first time.... The substance of these impressions
which affect us we call Nature, and thus Nature stands in an immediate
relationship to those functions of our bodies which we call senses.
Unknown and mysterious relations of our body allow us to surmise unknown
and mysterious correlations with Nature, and therefore Nature is that
wondrous fellowship into which our bodies introduce us, and which we
learn to know through the mode of its constitutions and abilities."

--NOVALIS, _Disciples at Sais_. Translated by U.C.B.


And so, at last, the darkness came, a starry darkness of soft blue
shadows and phosphorescent sea out of which the hills of the Cyclades
rose faint as pictures of floating smoke a wind might waft away like
flowers to the sky.

The plains of Marathon lay far astern, blushing faintly with their
scarlet tamarisk blossoms. The strange purple glow of sunset upon
Hymettus had long since faded. A hush grew over the sea, now a
marvelous cobalt blue. The earth, gently sleeping, manifested dreamily.
Into the subconscious state passed one half of her huge, gentle life.

The Irishman, responding to the eternal spell of her dream-state,
experienced in quite a new way the magic of her Night-Mood. He found
it more difficult than ever to realize as separate entities the little
things that moved about through the upper surface of her darkness.
Wings of silver, powerfully whirring, swept his soul onwards to another
place--toward Home.

And the two worlds intermingled oddly. These little separate "outer
things" going to and fro so busily became as symbols more or less vital,
more or less transparent. They varied according to their simplicity. Some
of them were channels that led directly where he was going; others,
again, had lost all connection with their vital source and center of
existence. To the former belonged the sailors, children, the tired birds
that rested on the ship as they journeyed northwards, swallows, doves,
and little travelers with breasts of spotted yellow that nested in the
rigging; even, in a measure, the gentle, brown-eyed priest; but to the
latter, the noisy, vulgar, beer-drinking tourists, and, especially,
the fur-merchant.... Stahl, interpreter and intermediary, hovered
between--incarnate compromise.

Escaping from everybody, at length, he made his way into the bows; there,
covered by the stars, he waited. And the thing he waited for--he felt it
coming over him with a kind of massive sensation as little local as heat
or cold--was that disentanglement of a part of his personality from the
rest against which Stahl had warned him. That portion of his complex
personality in which resided desire and longing, matured during these
many years of poignant nostalgia, was now slowly and deliberately
loosening out from the parent center. It was the vehicle of his _Urwelt_
yearnings; and the _Urwelt_ was about to draw it forth. The Call
was on its way.

Hereabouts, then, near the Isles of Greece, lay a channel to the Earth's
far youth, a channel for some reason still unclosed. His companions
knew it; he, too, had half divined it. The increased psychic activity of
all three as they approached Greece seemed explained. The sign--would
it be through hearing, sight, or touch?--would shortly come that should
convince.

That very afternoon Stahl had said--"Greece will betray them," and
he had asked: "Their true form and type?" And for answer the old man
did an expressive thing, far more convincing than words: he bent
forwards and downwards. He made as though to move a moment on all fours.

O'Malley remembered the brief and vital scene now. The word, however,
persistently refused to come into his mind. Because the word was really
inadequate, describing but partially a form and outline symbolical of far
more,--a measure of Nature and Deity alike.

And so, as a man dreading the entrance to a great adventure that he
yet desires, the Irishman waited there alone beneath the cloud of
night.... Soft threads of star-gold, trailing the sea, wove with the
darkness a veil that hid from his eyes the world of crude effects. All
memory of the casual realities of modern life that so distressed his
soul, fled far away. The archetypal world, soul of the Earth, swam close
about him, enormous and utterly simple. He seemed alone in some hollow of
the night which Time had overlooked, and where the powers of sea and
air held him in the stretch of their gigantic, changeless hands. In this
hollow lay the entrance to the channel down which he presently might
flash back to that primal Garden of the Earth's first beauty--her Golden
Age... down which, at any rate, the authoritative Call he awaited was
to come.... "Oh! what a power has white simplicity!"

Wings from the past, serene and tranquil, bore him toward this ancient
peace where echoes of life's brazen clash today could never enter.
Ages before Greece, of course, it had flourished, yet Greece had caught
some flying remnant ere it left the world of men, and for a period had
striven to renew its life, though by poetry but half believed. Over the
vales and hills of Hellas this mood had lingered bravely for a while,
then passed away forever ... and those who dreamed of its remembrance
remain homeless and lonely, seeking it ever again in vain, lost citizens,
rejected by the cycles of vainer life and action that succeeded.

The Spirit of the Earth, yes, whispered in his ears as he waited covered
by the night and stars. She called him, as though across all the forests
on her breast the long sweet winds went whispering his name. Lying
there upon the coils of thick and tarry rope, the _Urwelt_ caught him
back with her splendid passion. Currents of Earth life, quasi-deific,
gentle as the hands of little children, tugged softly at this loosening
portion of his Self, urging his very lips, as it were, once more to the
mighty Mother's breasts. Again he saw those cloud-like shapes careering
over long, bare hills ... and almost knew himself among them as they
raced with streaming winds ... free, ancient comrades among whom he was
no longer alien and outcast, including his two companions of the steamer.
The early memory of the Earth became his own; as a part of her, he
shared it too.

The _Urwelt_ closed magnificently about him. Vast shapes of power and
beauty, other than human, once his comrades thus, but since withdrawn
because denied by a pettier age, moved up, huge and dim, across the
sham barriers of time and space, singing the great Earth-Song of welcome
in his ears. The whisper grew awfully.... The Spirit of the Earth
flew close and called upon him with a shout...!

Then, out of this amazing reverie, he woke abruptly to the consciousness
that some one was approaching him stealthily, yet with speed, through the
darkness. With a start he sat up, peering about him. There was dew on his
clothes and hair. The stars, he saw, had shifted their positions.

He heard the surge of the water from the vessel's bows below. The
line of the shore lay close on either side. Overhead he saw the black
threads of rigging, quivering with the movement of the ship; the swaying
mast-head light; the dim, round funnels; the confused shadows where
the boats swung--and nearer, moving between the ropes and windlasses,
this hurrying figure whose approach had disturbed him in his gorgeous
dream.

And O'Malley divined at once that, though in one sense a portion of his
dream, it belonged outwardly to the same world as this long dark steamer
that trailed after him across the sea. A piece of his vision, as it
were, had broken off and remained in the cruder world wherein his body
lay upon these tarry ropes. The boy came up and stood a moment by
his side in silence, then, stooping to the level of his head, he spoke:--

"Come," he said in low tones of joy; "come! We wait long for you
already!"

The words, like music, floated over the sea, as O'Malley took the
outstretched hand and suffered himself to be led quickly toward the
lower deck. He walked at first as in a dream continued after waking;
more than once it seemed as though they stepped together from the
boards and moved through space toward the line of peaked hills that
fringed the steamer's course so close. For through the salt night air ran
a perfume that suggested flowers, earth, and woods, and there seemed
no break in the platforms of darkness that knit sea and shore to the very
substance of the vessel.




XXI


The lights in the saloon were out, the smoking-room empty, the
passengers in bed. The ship seemed entirely deserted. Only, on the
bridge, the shadow of the first officer paced quietly to and fro. Then,
suddenly, as they approached the stern, O'Malley discerned anther
figure, huge and motionless, against the background of phosphorescent
foam; and at the first glance it was exactly as though he had detached
from the background of his mind one of those Flying Outlines upon
the hills--and caught it there, arrested visibly at last.

He moved along, fairly sure of himself, yet with a tumult of confused
sensations, as if consciousness were transferring itself now more rapidly
to that portion of him which sought to escape.

Leaning forward, in a stooping posture over the bulwarks, wrapped in the
flowing cape he sometimes wore, the man's back and shoulders married so
intimately with the night that it was hard to determine the dividing line
between the two. So much more of the deck behind him, and of the sky
immediately beyond his neck, was obliterated than by any possible human
outline. Whether owing to obliquity of disturbed vision, tricks of
shadow, or movement of the vessel between the stars and foam, the
Irishman saw these singular emanations spread about him into space. He
saw them this time directly. And more than ever before they seemed in
some way right and comely--true. They were in no sense monstrous; they
reported beauty, though a beauty cloaked in power.

And, watching him, O'Malley felt that this loosening portion of himself,
as once before in the little cabin, likewise began to grow and spread.
Within some ancient fold of the Earth's dream-consciousness they both lay
caught. In some mighty Dream of her planetary Spirit, dim, immense,
slow-moving, they played their parts of wonder. Already they lay close
enough to share the currents of her subconscious activities. And the
dream, as she turned in her vast, spatial sleep, was a dream of a time
long gone.

Here, amid the loneliness of deserted deck and night, this illusion of
bulk was more than ever before outwardly impressive, and as he yielded
to the persuasion of the boy's hand, he was conscious of a sudden wild
inclination to use his own arms and legs in a way he had never before
known or dreamed of, yet that seemed curiously familiar. The balance
and adjustment of his physical frame sought to shift and alter; neck and
shoulders, as it were, urged forward; there came a singular pricking in
the loins, a rising of the back, a thrusting up and outwards of the
chest. He felt that something grew behind him with a power that sought to
impel or drive him in advance and out across the world at a terrific
gait; and the hearing of his ears became of a sudden intensely acute.
While his body moved ordinarily, he knew that a part of him that was not
body moved--otherwise, that he neither walked, ran, nor stepped upon
two feet, but--galloped. The motion proclaimed him kin with the flying
shapes upon the hills. At the heart of this portion which sought to
detach itself from his central personality--which, indeed, seemed
already half escaped--he cantered.

The experience lasted but a second--this swift, free motion of the
escaping Double--then passed away like those flashes of memory that rise
and vanish again before they can be seized for examination. He shook
himself free of the unaccountable obsession, and with the effort of
returning to the actual present, the passing-outwards was temporarily
checked. And it was then, just as he held himself in hand again, that
glancing sideways, he became aware that the boy beside him had, like
his parent, also changed--grown large and shadowy with a similar
suggestion of another splendid outline. The extension already half
accomplished in himself and fully accomplished in the father, was in
process of accomplishment in the smaller figure of the son. Clothed in
the emerged true shape of their inner being they slowly revealed
themselves. It was as bewildering as watching death, and as stern and
beautiful.

For the boy, still holding his hand, loped along beside him as though
the projection that emanated from him, grown almost physical, were
somehow difficult to manage.

In the moment of nearer, smaller consciousness that yet remained to
him, O'Malley recalled the significant pantomime of Dr. Stahl two days
before in the cabin. It came with a rush of fire. The warning operated;
his caution instantly worked. He dropped the hand, let the clinging
fingers slip from his own, overcome by something that appalled. For
this, surely, was the inner catastrophe that he dreaded, the radical
internal dislocation of his personality that involved--death. The thing
that had happened, or was happening to these other two, was on the
edge of fulfillment in himself--before he was either ready or had
decided to accept it.

At any rate he hesitated; and the hesitation, shifting his center of
consciousness back into his brain, checked and saved him. A confused
sense of forces settling back within himself followed; a kind of rush and
scuttle of moods and powers: and he remained temporarily master of
his being, recovering balance and command. Twice already--in that
cabin-scene, as also on the deck when Stahl had seized him--the
moment had come close. Now, again, had he kept hold of the boy's
grasp, that inner transformation, which should later become externalized,
must have completed itself.

"No, no!" he tried to cry aloud, "for I'm not yet ready!" But his voice
rose scarcely above a whisper. The decision of his will, however, had
produced the desired result. The "illusion," so strangely born, had
passed, at any rate for the time. He knew once more the glory of the
steadfast stars, realized that he walked normally upon a steamer's deck,
heard with welcome the surge of the sea below, and felt the peace of this
calm southern night as they coasted with two hundred sleeping tourists
between the islands and the Grecian mainland.... He remembered the
fur-merchant, the Armenian priest, the Canadian drummer....

It seemed his feet half tripped, or at least that he put out a hand to
steady himself against the ship's long roll, for the pair of them moved
up to the big man's side with a curious, rushing motion that brought
them all together with a mild collision. And the boy laughed merrily,
his laughter like singing half completed. O'Malley remembers the little
detail, because it serves to show that he was yet still in a state of
intensified consciousness, far above the normal level. It was still "like
walking in my sleep or acting out some splendid dream," as he put it
in his written version. "Half out of my body, if you like, though in no
sense of the words at all half out of my mind!"

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