Sauron Defeated (31 page)

'That doesn't quite get rid of some connexion other than coinciding in time,' said Frankley.

'Well, never mind. They did coincide,' said Ramer. 'And that is my point at the moment. The mind can be in more than one place at a given time; but it is more properly said to be where its attention is. And that, I suppose, is in one place only: for most human minds, or at any rate for my mind.

'But I'm afraid this is a digression. To go back to dreams. Of course, the memory of such true dreams, or free dreams, is notoriously rarish and chancy, and also scrappy as a rule. But it is not legitimate, it is pretty plainly wrong, to assume that what is ordinarily remembered by ordinary people of their dreaming is either most of the total, or the most important part of it. And the will to remember can be strengthened, and the memory can (* Ramer said later: 'It is still more like re-viewing in memory a place that one has really been to; it is like memory in its quality as compared with sightseeing, but on the first occasion of its arising in the mind it does not seem to be "remembering".' N.G.)

be enlarged. Rufus has had a good deal of experience in that direction, and he has helped me from time to time.'

Dolbear stirred and opened his eyes. 'So his suspicion was not due to pure literary criticism of discords?' said Frankley.

'Well, I haven't the faintest idea of what Michael is driving at, yet - if that's what you mean,' said Dolbear. 'Or rather, I understand what he's saying and more or less agree with it, but what it has to do with that vision of, of what was it?'

'Emberu,' said Ramer. 'I don't yet see,' Dolbear ended.(28)

'Well, here is a third thread,' Ramer went on. 'I had the notion, as others probably have too, that for movement or travelling the mind (when abstracted from the flood of sense) might use the memory of the past and the foreshadowing of the future that reside in all things, including what we call "inanimate matter". Those are not the right words, but they'll have to do: I mean, perhaps, the causal descent from the past, and the casual probability in the present, that are implicit in everything.

At any rate, I thought that might be one of the mind's vehicles.(29) But an incarnate mind seemed rather a problem to me.'

'Not a very new one! ' said Guildford.

Ramer laughed. 'Don't be too hard on me,' he said. 'I'm not at all original. And anyway my problem was practical rather i than philosophical. I was puzzled about jumping. I didn't see how it could be done. I'm not a philosopher, but an experimenter, a man driven by desires - if not very fleshly ones, still very incarnate ones. Being an incarnate mind, I am conditioned by Time and Space, even in my curiosities; though being a mind, I want to get beyond the range of my own body's senses and history.

'Of course, you might imagine the mind, by some special effort of its own, doing something analogous to the body's leaping from place to place, especially in a less trammelled state like sleep, or trance. But I thought the analogy probably false -

for a living man, anchored even in trance to the body, however long and thin the rope. The mind may be neither in Time nor Space, except in so far as it is specially associated with a body; but while you're alive the bond holds, I thought. Mind-body: they jump together, or neither jumps at all.

'I hardly need to say again that by jump I do not mean the movement of thought to objects already in its grasp, or memory: shifting instantaneously from, say, considering the peculiar configuration of Rufus's face to thinking of Table Mountain (which I once saw). I wanted to observe new things far off in Time and Space beyond the compass of a terrestrial animal.'

'And so,' said Lowdham, 'like the Pig on the Ruined Pump, day and night you made your moan, because you could not jump?'(30)

'Exactly,' said Ramer; 'for of course by this time I was really thinking more about travelling myself than writing a travel-story. But I didn't want to die. And I thought that all I could do was to refine my observation of other things that have moved and will move: to inspect the history of things whose paths have, at some point of time and space, crossed the path of my body.

'The mind uses the memory of its body. Could it use other memories, or rather, records? What kind of record of past events and forms could there be? In the time-sequence the disintegration of a form destroys the memory - or the special record - of the history of that form, unless it has got into a mind first. The fragments, right down to the smallest units, no doubt preserve the record of their own particular history, and that may include some of the history of the combinations that they've entered into. But take a haunted house, for instance.'

'Take a house! ' interrupted Jeremy. 'All houses are haunted.'

'I agree,' said Ramer. 'But I'm using the words, as they're commonly used, to mean a house where some particular detail of the haunting has become specially perceptible; how or why that occurs is another question.'

'But haunting, and atmosphere (which I suppose is what Jeremy means), are something added by accident of history,'

objected Frankley. 'They're not part of the house itself, qua house.'

'I'm not sure I understand you,' said Ramer. 'But I'm quite sure that I personally am not interested in 'housiness' in itself, but in this or that thing which you may class as a house, part of which (the most interesting part to me) is its history. If I say No.

100 Banbury Road,(31) I mean the shape which you call house and all that you call the accidents of its history: what it is at present. So do you. And if you destroy an actual house qua house, you also destroy, or dissipate, the special haunting. If a haunted house were pulled to pieces, it would stop being haunted, even if it were built up as accurately as possible again.

Or so I think, and so-called 'psychical' research seems to bear me out. In a way analogous to life in a body. If all the king's horses and all his men had put Humpty Dumpty together again, they'ld have got, well, an egg-shell.'

'But you can go a long way, short of destruction, without wholly banishing atmosphere or quite laying ghosts,' said Jeremy. 'Bricking up windows, changing staircases, and things like that.'

'Quite right,' said Lowdham. 'There was one poor ghost I heard of, and when they raised the floor of his favourite corridor, he went on walking on the old level. So people in the passage below could see the old fellow's feet trudging along under the ceiling. That's how they discovered he had holes in his soles. Don't laugh!' he said indignantly. 'It's a most melancholy case, and well authenticated.'

'I dare say!' said Ramer. 'But quite apart from such forlorn ghosts, and Arry's authorities (whoever they may be), I expect there are in fact lots of neglected chances of historical research, with proper training; especially among old houses and things more or less shaped by man. But that was not my chief interest. I wanted to travel a long way.

'So I tried various experiments, on myself; various forms of training. It's difficult to concentrate, chiefly because it's difficult to get quiet enough. The body makes such a noise itself, quite apart from the din of sensations coming from outside. I wanted to discover if my mind had any power, any trainable latent power, to inspect and become aware of the memory or record in other things, that would be in them anyway, even if not inspectable by me. For, I suppose, what we call memory, human memory, is both the power to inspect and be aware of the record within us, and the record that would be there anyway.

The power of inspection and awareness is always there; and so is the material and record, I suppose, unless it is smashed up.

Though the inspector cannot always get at the records. We aren't in full control of ourselves, even, so obviously it wouldn't be easy to deal with other things.'

'But the mind seems also to have its own storehouses, as well as keys of inspection, doesn't it?' said Guildford. 'I mean, it can remember past inspections, and retains what it has noted.'

'Yes, I think so,' said Ramer; 'but it is difficult, of course, when you're dealing with a mind-body, an association in which neither can do anything without having some effect on the other. I don't think an incarnate mind ever gets really free of its body, wherever it strays, until a man dies, if then. However, I went on trying to train myself for this kind of, well, historical inspection and awareness. I don't think I have any special talent for it. I don't know, for so few people seem to have tried it. But I fancy that Jeremy, for instance, has more of a bent in this direction than I have.

'It is difficult, and it's also frightfully slow. Less slow, of course, with things that have organic life, or any kind of human associations: but they don't carry you very far. It's slow, and it's faint. In inorganic things too faint to surmount the blare of waking sense, even with eyes shut and ears stopped.

'But here the threads begin to join. Remember, I was also training my memory on dreams at the same time. And that is how I discovered that the other experiments affected them.

Though they were blurred, blurred by the waking senses beyond recognition, I found that these other perceptions were not wholly unnoted; they were like things that are passed over when one is abstracted or distracted, but that are really "taken in".

And, asleep, the mind, rootling about, as it does, in the day's leavings (or the week's), would inspect them again with far less distraction, and all the force of its original desire. I dare say it enjoyed it.

'But it couldn't make much of it. By which I suppose I mean that I couldn't remember much about such inspections, although I was now becoming pretty good at remembering large passages of more vivid and pictorial dreams. And that means I suppose also, that my mind was not able (at least not without more practice) to translate the notes into the terms of the senses which I can handle when awake. All the same, I used to get at that time very extraordinary geometric patterns presented to me, shifting kaleidoscopically but not blurred; and queer webs and tissues, too. And other non-visual impressions also, very difficult to describe; some like rhythms, almost like music; and throbs and stresses.

'But all the time, of course, I wanted to get off the Earth.

That's how I got the notion of studying a meteorite, instead of mooning about with houses, ruins, trees, boulders, and all sorts of other things. There is a very large meteorite in a park, Gunthorpe Park in Matfield,(32) where I lived as a boy, after we came back from abroad; even then it had a strange fascination for me. I wondered if it could have come from Malacandra. I took to hobnobbing with it again, in the vacs. Indeed, I made myself ridiculous and an object of suspicion. I wanted to visit the stone alone at night - to lessen the distractions; but I was not allowed to: closing hours were closing hours. So I gave that up. It seemed to be quite without results.'

'So the poor old stone was left all alone?' said Lowdham.

'Yes,' said Ramer. 'It was. It is a very long way indeed from home, and it is very lonely. That is, there is a great loneliness in it, for a perceiver to perceive. And I got a very heavy dose of it.

In fact I can't bear to look at such things now. For I found, about the end of the long vac. two years ago, after my final visit, that there had been results. It had evidently taken some time to digest them, and even partially translate them. But that is how I first got away, out beyond the sphere of the Moon, and very much further.'

'Travelling on a dream-meteor!' said Frankley. 'Hm! So that's your method, is it?'

'No,' said Ramer. 'Not if you mean how I got the news of Emberu that I put into my tale.(33) But I did work back into the meteorite's history, I think; though that sort of vehicle does not readily give any place or time references that can be related to our waking point. I did get, all the rest of that term, and I still do get occasionally, some very odd dreams or sleep-experiences: painful often, and alarming. Some were quite unpictorial, and those were the worst. Weight, for instance. Just Weight with a capital W: very horrible. But it was not a weight that was pressing on me, you understand; it was a perception of, or sympathy in, an experience of almost illimitable weight.(34) And Speed too. Heavens! waking up from that one was like hitting a wall, though only a wall of light and air in my bedroom, at a hundred miles a second - or rather, like knowing about it.

'And Fire! I can't describe that. Elemental Fire: fire that is, and does not consume, but is a mode or condition of physical being. But I caught sight of blazing fire, too: some real pictures.

One, I think, must have been a glimpse of the meteorite hitting our air. A mountain corroded into a boulder in a few seconds of agonizing flame. But above, or between, or perhaps through all the rest, I knew endlessness. That's perhaps emotional and inaccurate. I mean Length with a capital L, applied to Time; unendurable length to mortal flesh. In that kind of dream you can know about the feeling of aeons of constricted waiting.