Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon [top rated books of all time .TXT] 📗
- Author: Olaf Stapledon
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the cosmos; in some, as in our own cosmos, it was manifested as in many
respects “expanding.” In others again space “contracted”; so that the
end of such a cosmos, rich perhaps in intelligent communities, was the
collision and congestion of all its parts, and their final coincidence
and vanishing into a dimensionless point.
In some creations expansion and ultimate quiescence were followed by
contraction and entirely new kinds of physical activity. Sometimes, for
example, gravity was replaced by anti-gravity. All large lumps of matter
tended to burst asunder, and all small ones to fly apart from each
other. In one such cosmos the law of entropy also was reversed. Energy,
instead of gradually spreading itself evenly throughout the cosmos,
gradually piled itself upon the ultimate material units. I came in time
to suspect that my own cosmos was followed by a reversed cosmos of this
kind, in which, of course, the nature of living things was profoundly
different from anything conceivable to man. But this is a digression,
for I am at present describing much earlier and simpler universes. Many
a universe was physically a continuous fluid in which the solid
creatures swam. Others were constructed as series of concentric spheres,
peopled by diverse orders of creatures. Some quite early universes were
quasi-astronomical, consisting of a void sprinkled with rare and minute
centers of power.
Sometimes the Star Maker fashioned a cosmos which was without any
single, objective, physical nature. Its creatures were wholly without
influence on one another; but under the direct stimulation of the Star
Maker each creature conceived an illusory but reliable and useful
physical world of its own, and peopled it with figments of its
imagination. These subjective worlds the mathematical genius of the Star
Maker correlated in a manner that was perfectly systematic.
I must not say more of the immense diversity of physical form which,
according to my dream, the early creations assumed. It is enough to
mention that, in general, each cosmos was more complex, and in a sense
more voluminous than the last; for in each the ultimate physical units
were smaller in relation to the whole, and more multitudinous. Also, in
each the individual conscious creatures were generally more in number,
and more diverse in type; and the most awakened in each cosmos reached a
more lucid mentality than any creatures in the previous cosmos.
Biologically and psychologically the early creations were very diverse.
In some cases there was a biological evolution such as we know. A small
minority of species would precariously ascend toward greater
individuation and mental clarity. In other creations the species were
biologically fixed, and progress, if it occurred, was wholly cultural.
In a few most perplexing creations the most awakened state of the cosmos
was at the beginning, and the Star Maker calmly watched this lucid
consciousness decay.
Sometimes a cosmos started as a single lowly organism with an internal,
non-organic environment. It then propagated by fission into an
increasing host of increasingly small and increasingly individuated and
awakened creatures. In some of these universes evolution would continue
till the creatures became too minute to accommodate the complexity of
organic structure necessary for intelligent minds. The Star Maker would
then watch the cosmical societies desperately striving to circumvent the
fated degeneration of their race.
In some creations the crowning achievement of the cosmos was a chaos of
mutually unintelligible societies, each devoted to the service of some
one mode of the spirit, and hostile to all others. In some the climax
was a single Utopian society of distinct minds; in others a single
composite cosmical mind.
Sometimes it pleased the Star Maker to ordain that each creature in a
cosmos should be an inevitable, determinate expression of the
environment’s impact on its ancestors and itself. In other creations
each creature had some power of arbitrary choice, and some modicum of
the Star Maker’s own creativity. So it seemed to me in my dream; but
even in my dream I suspected that to a more subtle observer both kinds
would have appeared as in fact determinate, and yet both of them also
spontaneous and creative.
In general the Star Maker, once he had ordained the basic principles of
a cosmos and created its initial state, was content to watch the issue;
but sometimes he chose to interfere, either by infringing the natural
laws that he himself had ordained, or by introducing new emergent
formative principles, or by influencing the minds of the creatures by
direct revelation. This according to my dream, was sometimes done to
improve a cosmical design; but, more often, interference was included in
his original plan. Sometimes the Star Maker flung off creations which
were in effect groups of many linked universes, wholly distinct physical
systems of very different kinds, yet related by the fact that the
creatures lived their lives successively in universe after universe,
assuming in each habitat an indigenous physical form, but bearing with
them in their transmigration faint and easily misinterpreted memories of
earlier existences. In another way also, this principle of
transmigration was sometimes used. Even creations that were not thus
systematically linked might contain creatures that mentally echoed in
some vague but haunting manner the experience or the temperament of
their counterparts in some other cosmos.
One very dramatic device was used in cosmos after cosmos. I mentioned
earlier that in my dream the immature Star Maker had seemed to regard
the tragic failure of his first biological experiment with a kind of
diabolical glee. In many subsequent creations also he appeared to be
two-minded. Whenever his conscious creative plan was thwarted by some I
unsuspected potentiality of the substance which he had objectified from
his unconscious depth, his mood seemed to include not only frustration
but also surprised satisfaction, as of some unrecognized hunger
unexpectedly satisfied. This twi-mindedness at length gave rise to a new
mode of creating. There came a stage in the Star Maker’s growth, as my
dream represented it, when he contrived to dissociate himself as two
independent spirits, the one his essential self, the spirit that sought
positive creation of vital and spiritual forms and ever more lucid
awareness, the other a rebellious, destructive and cynical spirit, that
could have no being save as a parasite upon the works of the other.
Again and again he dissociated these two moods of himself, objectified
them as independent spirits, and permitted them to strive within a
cosmos for mastery. One such cosmos, which consisted of three linked
universes, was somewhat reminiscent of Christian orthodoxy. The first of
these linked universes was inhabited by generations of creatures gifted
with varying degrees of sensibility, intelligence, and moral integrity.
Here the two spirits played for the souls of the creatures. The “good”
spirit exhorted, helped, rewarded, punished; the “evil” spirit
deceived, tempted, and morally destroyed. At death the creatures passed
into one or other of the two secondary universes, which constituted a
timeless heaven and a timeless hell. There they experienced an eternal
moment either of ecstatic comprehension and worship or of the extreme
torment of remorse.
When my dream presented me with this crude, this barbaric figment, I was
at first moved with horror and incredulity. How could the Star Maker,
even in his immaturity, condemn his creatures to agony for the weakness
that he himself had allotted to them? How could such a vindictive deity
command worship? In vain I told myself that my dream must have utterly
falsified the reality; for I was convinced that in this respect it was
not false, but in some sense true, at least symbolically. Yet, even when
I was confronted by this brutal deed, even in the revulsion of pity and
horror, I saluted the Star Maker.
To excuse my worship, I told myself that this dread mystery lay far
beyond my comprehension, and that in some sense even such flagrant
cruelty must, in the Star Maker, be right. Did barbarity perhaps belong
to the Star Maker only in his immaturity? Later, when he was fully
himself, would he finally outgrow it? No! Already I deeply knew that
this ruthlessness was to be manifested even in the ultimate cosmos.
Could there, then, be some key fact, overlooked by me, in virtue of
which such seeming vindictiveness was justified? Was it simply that all
creatures were indeed but figments of the creative power, and that in
tormenting his creatures the Star Maker did but torment himself in the
course of his adventure of self-expression? Or was it perhaps that even
the Star Maker himself, though mighty, was limited in all creation by
certain absolute logical principles, and that one of these was the
indissoluble bond between betrayal and remorse in half-awakened spirits?
Had he, in this strange cosmos, simply accepted and used the ineluctable
limitations of his art? Or again, was my respect given to the Star Maker
only as the “good” spirit, not as the “evil” spirit? And was he in fact
striving to eject evil from himself by means of this device of
dissociation?
Some such explanation was suggested by the strange evolution of this
cosmos. Since its denizens had mostly a very low degree of intelligence
and moral integrity, the hell was soon overcrowded, while the heaven
remained almost empty. But the Star Maker in his “good” aspect loved and
pitied his creatures. The “good” spirit therefore entered into the
mundane sphere to redeem the sinners by his own suffering. And so at
last the heaven was peopled, though the hell was not depopulated.
Was it, then, only the “good” aspect of the Star Maker that I
worshipped? No! Irrationally, yet with conviction, I gave my adoration
to the Star Maker as comprising both aspects of his dual nature, both
the “good” and the “evil,” both the mild and the terrible, both the
humanly ideal and the incomprehensibly inhuman. Like an infatuated lover
who denies or excuses the flagrant faults of the beloved, I strove to
palliate the inhumanity of the Star Maker, nay positively I gloried in
it. Was there then something cruel in my own nature? Or did my heart
vaguely recognize that love, the supreme virtue in creatures, must not
in the creator be absolute?
This dire and insoluble problem confronted me again and again in the
course of my dream. For instance there appeared a creation in which the
two spirits were permitted to strive in a novel and more subtle manner.
In its early phase this cosmos manifested only physical characters; but
the Star Maker provided that its vital potentiality should gradually
express itself in certain kinds of living creatures which, generation by
generation, should emerge from the purely physical and evolve toward
intelligence and spiritual lucidity. In this cosmos he permitted the two
spirits, the “good” and the “evil,” to compete even in the very making
of the creatures.
In the long early ages the spirits struggled over the evolution of the
innumerable species. The “good” spirit worked to produce creatures more
highly organized, more individual, more delicately related to the
environment, more skilled in action, more comprehensively and vividly
aware of their world, of themselves, and of other selves. The “evil”
spirit tried to thwart this enterprise.
The organs and tissues of every species manifested throughout their
structure the conflict of the two spirits. Sometimes the “evil” spirit
contrived seemingly unimportant but insidious and lethal features for a
creature’s undoing. Its nature would include some special liability to
harbor parasites, some weakness of digestive machinery, some instability
of nervous organization. In other cases the “evil” spirit would equip
some lower species with special weapons for the destruction of the
pioneers of evolution, so that they should succumb, either to some new
disease, or to plagues of the vermin of this particular cosmos, or to
the more bruitsh of their own kind.
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