The Book of the Damned

A paper was read by Mr. J. Huband Smith, descriptive of about a dozen Chinese seals that had been found in Ireland. They are all alike: each a cube with an animal seated upon it. "It is said that the inscriptions upon them are of a very ancient cla.s.s of Chinese characters."

The three points that have made a leper and an outcast of this datum--but only in the sense of disregard, because nowhere that I know of is it questioned:

Agreement among archaeologists that there were no relations, in the remote past, between China and Ireland:

That no other objects, from ancient China--virtually, I suppose--have ever been found in Ireland:

The great distances at which these seals have been found apart.

After Mr. Smith's investigations--if he did investigate, or do more than record--many more Chinese seals were found in Ireland, and, with one exception, only in Ireland. In 1852, about 60 had been found. Of all archaeologic finds in Ireland, "none is enveloped in greater mystery."

(_Chambers' Journal_, 16-364.) According to the writer in _Chambers'

Journal_, one of these seals was found in a curiosity shop in London.

When questioned, the shopkeeper said that it had come from Ireland.

In this instance, if you don't take instinctively to our expression, there is no orthodox explanation for your preference. It is the astonishing scattering of them, over field and forest, that has hushed the explainers. In the _Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy_, 10-171, Dr. Frazer says that they "appear to have been sown broadcast over the country in some strange way that I cannot offer solution of."

The struggle for expression of a notion that did not belong to Dr.

Frazer's era:

"The invariable story of their find is what we might expect if they had been accidentally dropped...."

Three were found in Tipperary; six in Cork; three in Down; four in Waterford; all the rest--one or two to a county.

But one of these Chinese seals was found in the bed of the River Boyne, near Clonard, Meath, when workmen were raising gravel.

That one, at least, had been dropped there.

12

Astronomy.

And a watchman looking at half a dozen lanterns, where a street's been torn up.

There are gas lights and kerosene lamps and electric lights in the neighborhood: matches flaring, fires in stoves, bonfires, house afire somewhere; lights of automobiles, illuminated signs--

The watchman and his one little system.

Ethics.

And some young ladies and the dear old professor of a very "select"

seminary.

Drugs and divorce and rape: venereal diseases, drunkenness, murder--

Excluded.

The prim and the precise, or the exact, the h.o.m.ogeneous, the single, the puritanic, the mathematic, the pure, the perfect. We can have illusion of this state--but only by disregarding its infinite denials. It's a drop of milk afloat in acid that's eating it. The positive swamped by the negative. So it is in intermediateness, where only to "be" positive is to generate corresponding and, perhaps, equal negativeness. In our acceptance, it is, in quasi-existence, premonitory, or pre-natal, or pre-awakening consciousness of a real existence.

But this consciousness of realness is the greatest resistance to efforts to realize or to become real--because it is feeling that realness has been attained. Our antagonism is not to Science, but to the att.i.tude of the sciences that they have finally realized; or to belief, instead of acceptance; to the insufficiency, which, as we have seen over and over, amounts to paltriness and puerility of scientific dogmas and standards.

Or, if several persons start out to Chicago, and get to Buffalo, and one be under the delusion that Buffalo is Chicago, that one will be a resistance to the progress of the others.

So astronomy and its seemingly exact, little system--

But data we shall have of round worlds and spindle-shaped worlds, and worlds shaped like a wheel; worlds like t.i.tanic pruning hooks; worlds linked together by streaming filaments; solitary worlds, and worlds in hordes: tremendous worlds and tiny worlds: some of them made of material like the material of this earth; and worlds that are geometric super-constructions made of iron and steel--

Or not only fall from the sky of ashes and cinders and c.o.ke and charcoal and oily substances that suggest fuel--but the ma.s.ses of iron that have fallen upon this earth.

Wrecks and flotsam and fragments of vast iron constructions--

Or steel. Sooner or later we shall have to take up an expression that fragments of steel have fallen from the sky. If fragments not of iron, but of steel have fallen upon this earth--

But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked vessel above him should drop and b.u.mp him on the nose?

Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable density.

Sometimes I'm a savage who has found something on the beach of his island. Sometimes I'm a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.

The greatest of mysteries:

Why don't they ever come here, or send here, openly?

Of course there's nothing to that mystery if we don't take so seriously the notion--that we must be interesting. It's probably for moral reasons that they stay away--but even so, there must be some degraded ones among them.

Or physical reasons:

When we can specially take up that subject, one of our leading ideas, or credulities, will be that near approach by another world to this world would be catastrophic: that navigable worlds would avoid proximity; that others that have survived have organized into protective remotenesses, or orbits which approximate to regularity, though by no means to the degree of popular supposition.

But the persistence of the notion that we must be interesting. Bugs and germs and things like that: they're interesting to us: some of them are too interesting.

Dangers of near approach--nevertheless our own ships that dare not venture close to a rocky sh.o.r.e can send rowboats ash.o.r.e--

Why not diplomatic relations established between the United States and Cyclorea--which, in our advanced astronomy, is the name of a remarkable wheel-shaped world or super-construction? Why not missionaries sent here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and super-whiskeys; fortunes made in selling us cast-off super-fineries, which we'd take to like an African chief to someone's old silk hat from New York or London?

The answer that occurs to me is so simple that it seems immediately acceptable, if we accept that the obvious is the solution of all problems, or if most of our perplexities consist in laboriously and painfully conceiving of the unanswerable, and then looking for answers--using such words as "obvious" and "solution" conventionally--

Or:

Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle?

Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation?

I think we're property.

I should say we belong to something: