Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon [top rated books of all time .TXT] 📗

CHAPTER VIII

CONCERNING THE EXPLORERS

 

BVALLTU and I, in company with the increasing band of our fellow

explorers, visited many worlds of many strange kinds. In some we spent

only a few weeks of the local time; in others we remained for centuries,

or skimmed from point to point of history as our interest dictated. Like

a swarm of locusts we would descend upon a new-found world, each of us

singling out a suitable host. After a period of observation, long or

short, we would leave, to alight again, perhaps, on the same world in

another of its ages; or to distribute our company among many worlds, far

apart in time and in space.

 

This strange life turned me into a very different being from the

Englishman who had at a certain date of human history walked at night

upon a hill. Not only had my own immediate experience increased far

beyond the normal age, but also, by means of a peculiarly intimate union

with my fellows, I myself had been, so to speak, multiplied. For in a

sense I was now as much Bvalltu and each one of my colleagues as I was

that Englishman.

 

This change that had come over us deserves to be carefully described,

not merely for its intrinsic interest, but also because it afforded us a

key for understanding many cosmical beings whose nature would otherwise

have been obscure to us.

 

In our new condition our community was so perfected that the experiences

of each were available to all. Thus I, the new I, participated in the

adventures of that Englishman and of Bvalltu and the rest with equal

ease. And I possessed all their memories of former, separate existence

in their respective native worlds.

 

Some philosophically minded reader may ask, “Do you mean that the many

experiencing individuals became a single individual, having a single

stream of experience? Or do you mean that there remained many

experiencing individuals, having numerically distinct but exactly

similar experiences?” The answer is that I do not know. But this I know.

I, the Englishman, and similarly each of my colleagues, gradually “woke”

into possession of each other’s experience, and also into more lucid

intelligence. Whether, as experients, we remained many or became one, I

do not know. But I suspect that the question is one of those which can

never be truly answered because in the last analysis it is meaningless.

 

In the course of my communal observation of the many worlds, and equally

in the course of my introspection of my own communal mental processes,

now one and now another individual explorer, and now perhaps a group of

explorers, would form the main instrument of attention, affording

through their particular nature and experience material for the

contemplation of all. Sometimes, when we were exceptionally alert and

eager, each awakened into a mode of perception and thought and

imagination and will more lucid than any experiencing known to any of us

as individuals. Thus, though each of us became in a sense identical with

each of his friends, he also became in a manner a mind of higher order

than any of us in isolation. But in this “waking” there seemed to be

nothing more mysterious in kind than in those many occasions in normal

life when the mind delightedly relates together experiences that have

hitherto been insulated from one another, or discovers in confused

objects a pattern or a significance hitherto unnoticed.

 

It must not be supposed that this strange mental community blotted out

the personalities of the individual explorers. Human speech has no

accurate terms to describe our peculiar relationship. It would be as

untrue to say that we had lost our individuality, or were dissolved in a

communal individuality, as to say that we were all the while distinct

individuals. Though the pronoun “I” now applied to us all collectively,

the pronoun “we” also applied to us. In one respect, namely unity of

consciousness, we were indeed a single experiencing individual; yet at

the same time we were in a very important and delightful manner distinct

from one another. Though there was only the single, communal “I,” there

was also, so to speak, a manifold and variegated “us,” an observed

company of very diverse personalities, each of whom expressed

creatively his own unique contribution to the whole enterprise of

cosmical exploration, while all were bound together in a tissue of

subtle personal relationships. I am well aware that this account of the

matter must seem to my readers self-contradictory, as indeed it does to

me. But I can find no other way of expressing the vividly remembered

fact that I was at once a particular member of a community and the

possessor of the pooled experience of that community.

 

To put the matter somewhat differently, though in respect of our

identity of awareness we were a single individual, in respect of our

diverse and creative idiosyncrasies we were distinct persons observable

by the common “I.” Each one, as the common “I,” experienced the whole

company of individuals, including his individual self, as a group of

actual persons, differing in temperament and private experience. Each

one of us experienced all as a real community, bound together by such

relations of affection and mutual criticism as occurred, for instance,

between Bvalltu and myself. Yet on another plane of experience, the

plane of creative thought and imagination, the single communal attention

could withdraw from this tissue of personal relationships. Instead, it

concerned itself wholly with the exploration of the cosmos. With partial

truth it might be said that, while for love we were distinct, for

knowledge, for wisdom, and for worship we were identical. In the

following chapters, which deal with the cosmical, experiences of this

communal “I,” it would be logically correct to refer to the exploring

mind always in the singular, using the pronoun “I,” and saying simply,

“I did so and so, and thought so and so”; nevertheless the pronoun “we”

will still be generally employed so as to preserve the true impression

of a communal enterprise, and to avoid the false impression that the

explorer was just the human author of this book.

 

Each one of us had lived his individual active life in one or other of

the many worlds. And for each one, individually, his own little

blundering career in his remote native world retained a peculiar

concreteness and glamour, like the vividness which mature men find in

childhood memories. Not only so, but individually he imputed to his

former private life an urgency and importance which, in his communal

capacity, was overwhelmed by matters of greater cosmical significance.

Now this concreteness and glamour, this urgency and importance of each

little private life, was of great moment to the communal “I” in which

each of us participated. It irradiated the communal experience with its

vividness, its pathos. For only in his own life as a native in some

world had each of us actually fought, so to speak, in life’s war as a

private soldier at close grips with the enemy. It was the recollection

of this fettered, imprisoned, blindfold, eager, private individuality,

that enabled us to watch the unfolding of cosmical events not merely as

a spectacle but with a sense of the poignancy of every individual life

as it flashed and vanished. Thus I, the Englishman, contributed to the

communal mind my persistently vivid recollections of all my ineffectual

conduct in my own troubled world; and the true significance of that

blind human life, redeemed by its little imperfect jewel of community,

became apparent to me, the communal “I,” with a lucidity which the

Englishman in his primaeval stupor could never attain and cannot now

recapture. All that I can now remember is that, as the communal “I,” I

looked on my terrestrial career at once more critically and with less

guilt than I do in the individual state; and on my partner in that

career at once with clearer, colder understanding of our mutual impact

and with more generous affection.

 

One aspect of the communal experience of the explorers I have still to

mention. Each of us had originally set out upon the great adventure

mainly in the hope of discovering what part was played by community in

the cosmos as a whole. This question had yet to be answered; but

meanwhile another question was becoming increasingly insistent. Our

crowded experiences in the many worlds, and our new lucidity of mind,

had bred in each of us a sharp conflict of intellect and feeling.

Intellectually the idea that some “deity,” distinct from the cosmos

itself, had made the cosmos now seemed to us less and less credible.

Intellectually we had no doubt that the cosmos was self-sufficient, a

system involving no logical ground and no creator. Yet increasingly, as

a man may feel the psychical reality of a physically perceived beloved

or a perceived enemy, we felt in the physical presence of the cosmos the

psychical presence of that which we had named the Star Maker. In spite

of intellect, we knew that the whole cosmos was infinitely less than the