Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon [top rated books of all time .TXT] 📗
- Author: Olaf Stapledon
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A still more ingenious plan the evil spirit sometimes used with great
effect. When the “good” spirit had hit upon some promising device, and
from small beginnings had worked up in its favoured species some new
organic structure or mode of behavior, the evil spirit would contrive
that the process of evolution should continue long after it had reached
perfect adjustment to the creature’s needs. Teeth would grow so large
that eating became excessively difficult, protective shells so heavy
that they hampered locomotion, horns so curved that they pressed upon
the brain, the impulse to individuality so imperious that it destroyed
society, or the social impulse so obsessive that individuality was
crushed.
Thus in world after world of this cosmos, which greatly surpassed all
earlier creations in complexity, almost every species came sooner or
later to grief. But in some worlds a single species reached the “human”
level of intelligence and I of spiritual sensibility. Such a combination
of powers ought to have secured it from all possible attack. But both
intelligence and spiritual sensibility were most skilfully perverted by
the “evil” spirit. For though by nature they were complementary, they
could be brought into conflict; or else one or both could be exaggerated
so as to become as lethal as the extravagant horns and teeth of earlier
kinds. Thus intelligence, which led on the one hand to the mastery of
physical force and on the other to intellectual subtlety, might, if
divorced from spiritual sensibility, cause disaster. The mastery of
physical force often produced a mania for power, and the dissection of
society into two alien classes, the powerful and the enslaved.
Intellectual subtlety might produce a mania for analysis and
abstraction, with blindness to all that intellect could not expound. Yet
sensibility itself, when it rejected intellectual criticism and the
claims of daily life, would be smothered in dreams.
2. MATURE CREATING
According to the myth that my mind conceived when the supreme moment of
my cosmical experience had passed, the Star Maker at length entered into
a state of rapt meditation in which his own nature suffered a
revolutionary change. So at least I judged from the great change that
now came over his creative activity.
After he had reviewed with new eyes all his earlier works, dismissing
each, as it seemed to me, with mingled respect and impatience, he
discovered in himself a new and pregnant conception.
The cosmos which he now created was that which contains the readers and
the writer of this book. In its making he used, but with more cunning
art, many of the principles which had already served him in earlier
creations; and he wove them together to form a more subtle and more
capacious unity than ever before.
It seemed to me, in my fantasy, that he approached this new enterprise
in a new mood. Each earlier cosmos appeared to have been fashioned with
conscious will to embody certain principles, physical, biological,
psychological. As has already been reported, there often appeared a
conflct between his intellectual purpose and the raw nature which he had
evoked for his creature out of the depth of his own obscure being. This
time, however, he dealt more sensitively with the medium of his
creation. The crude spiritual “material” which he objectified from his
own hidden depth for the formation of his new creature was molded to his
still tentative purpose with more sympathetic intelligence, with more
respect for its nature and its potentiality, though with detachment from
its more extravagant demands.
To speak thus of the universal creative spirit is almost childishly
anthropomorphic. For the life of such a spirit, if it exists at all,
must be utterly different from human mentality, and utterly
inconceivable to man. Nevertheless, since this childish symbolism did
force itself upon me, I record it. In spite of its crudity, perhaps it
does contain some genuine reflection of the truth, however distorted.
In the new creation there occurred a strange kind of discrepancy between
the Star Maker’s own time and the time proper to the cosmos itself.
Hitherto, though he could detach himself from the cosmical time when the
cosmical history had completed itself, and observe all the cosmical ages
as present, he could not actually create the later phases of a cosmos
before he had created the earlier. In his new creation he was not thus
limited.
Thus although this new cosmos was my own cosmos, I regarded it from a
surprising angle of vision. No longer did it appear as a familiar
sequence of historical events beginning with the initial physical
explosion and advancing to the final death. I saw it now not from within
the flux of the cosmical time but quite otherwise. I watched the
fashioning of the cosmos in the time proper to the Star Maker; and the
sequence of the Star Maker’s creative acts was very different from the
sequence of historical events.
First he conceived from the depth of his own being a something, neither
mind nor matter, but rich in potentiality, and in suggestive traits,
gleams, hints for his creative imagination. Over this fine substance for
a long while he pondered. It was a medium in which the one and the many
demanded to be most subtly dependent upon one another; in which all
parts and all characters must pervade and be pervaded by all other parts
and all other characters; in which each thing must seemingly be but an
influence in all other things; and yet the whole must be no other than
the sum of all its parts, and each part an all-pervading determination
of the whole. It was a cosmical substance in which any individual spirit
must be, mysteriously, at once an absolute self and a mere figment of
the whole.
This most subtle medium the Star Maker now rough-hewed into the general
form of a cosmos. Thus he fashioned a still indeterminate space-time, as
yet quite ungeometrized; an amorphous physicality with no clear quality
or direction, no intricacy of physical laws; a more distinctly conceived
vital trend and epic adventure of mentality; and a surprisingly definite
climax and crown of spiritual lucidity. This last, though its situation
in the cosmical time was for the most part late, was given a certain
precision of outline earlier in the sequence of creative work than any
other factor in the cosmos. And it seemed to me that this was so because
the initial substance itself so clearly exposed its own potentiality for
some such spiritual form. Thus it was that the Star Maker at first
almost neglected the physical minutiae of his work, neglected also the
earlier ages of cosmical history, and devoted his skill at first almost
entirely to shaping the spiritual climax of the whole creature. Not till
he had blocked in unmistakably the most awakened phase of the cosmical
spirit did he trace any of the variegated psychological trends which, in
the cosmical time, should lead up to it. Not till he had given outline
to the incredibly diverse themes of mental growth did he give attention
fully to constructing the biological evolutions and the physical and
geometrical intricacy which could best evoke the more subtle
potentialities of his still rough-hewn cosmical spirit. But, as he
geometrized, he also intermittently turned again to modify and elucidate
the spiritual climax itself. Not till the physical and geometrical form
of the cosmos was almost completely fashioned could he endow the
spiritual climax with fully concrete individuality.
While he was still working upon the detail of the countless, poignant
individual lives, upon the fortunes of men, of ichthyoids, of
nautiloids, and the rest, I became convinced that his attitude to his
creatures was very different from what it had been for any other cosmos.
For he was neither cold to them nor yet simply in love with them. In
love with them, indeed, he still was; but he had seemingly outgrown all
desire to save them from the consequences of their finitude and from the
cruel impact of the environment. He loved them without pity. For he saw
that their distinctive virtue lay in their finitude, their minute
particularity, their tortured balance between dullness and lucidity; and
that to save them from these would be to annihilate them.
When he had given the last touches to all the cosmical ages from the
supreme moment back to the initial explosion and on to the final death,
the Star Maker contemplated his work. And he saw that it was good.
As he lovingly, though critically, reviewed our cosmos in all its
infinite diversity and in its brief moment of lucidity, I felt that he
was suddenly filled with reverence for the creature that he had made, or
that he had ushered out of his own secret depth by a kind of divine
self-midwifery. He knew that this creature, though imperfect, though a
mere cerature, a mere figment of his own creative power, was yet in a
manner more real than himself. For beside this concrete splendor what
was he but a mere abstract potency of creation? Moreover in another
respect the thing that he had made was his superior, and his teacher.
For as he contemplated this the loveliest and subtlest of all his works
with exultation, even with awe, its impact upon him changed him,
clarifying and deepening his will. As he discriminated its virtue and
its weakness, his own perception and his own skill matured. So at least
it seemed to my bewildered, awe-stricken mind.
Thus, little by little, it came about, as so often before, that the Star
Maker outgrew his creature. Increasingly he frowned upon the loveliness
that he still cherished. Then, seemingly with a conflict of reverence
and impatience, he set our cosmos in its place among his other works.
Once more he sank into deep meditation. Once more the creative urge
possessed him.
Of the many creations which followed I must perforce say almost nothing,
for in most respects they lay beyond my mental reach. I could not have
any cognizance of them save in so far as they contained, along with much
that was inconceivable, some features that were but fantastic
embodiments of principles which I had already encoutered. Thus all their
most vital novelty escaped me.
I can, indeed, say of all these creations that, like our own cosmos,
they were immensely capacious, immensely subtle; and that, in some alien
manner or other, every one of them had both a physical and a mental
aspect; though in many the physical, however crucial to the spirit’s
growth, was more transparent, more patently phantasmal than in our own
cosmos. In some cases this was true equally of the mental, for the
beings were often far less deceived by the opacity of their individual
mental processes, and more sensitive to then-underlying unity.
I can say too that in all these creations the goal which, as it seemed
to me, the Star Maker sought to realize was richness, delicacy, depth
and harmoniousness of being. But what these words in detail mean I
should find it hard to say. It seemed to me that in some cases, as in
our own cosmos, he pursued this end by means of an evolutionary process
crowned by an awakened cosmical mind, which strove to gather into its
own awareness the whole wealth of the cosmical existence, and by
creative action to increase it. But in many cases this goal was achieved
with incomparably greater economy of effort and suffering on the part of
the creatures, and without the huge dead loss of utterly wasted,
ineffective lives which is to us so heartrending. Yet in other
creations suffering seemed at least as grave and widespread as in our
own cosmos.
In his maturity the Star Maker conceived many strange forms of time. For
instance, some of the later creations were designed with
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