Nebula Maker Read online

  In spite of deep differences, the nebulae and the living things of earth are at bottom akin, for in each the prime vital tendency and the most urgent desire are directed toward self-maintenance and development; and in both kinds of life there is needed for this end a constant flow of energy. Further, just as for terrestrial creatures the procuring of physical energy is the main practical enterprise, so in the living nebula the first of all tasks is to secure to its own vital processes a lavish supply of its own internal radiation. But the nebula’s task is in one respect the easier and in another the more difficult. It never suffers from dearth but the torrential violence of its own energy spate is apt to rend and shatter its flimsy tissues.

  Since they have no need to seek food abroad or to avoid being preyed upon, none of the young nebulae save those significant few which grow up in enduring groups, develop organs of external sense. For the lone nebula, experience is entirely of events within its own body. But of those internal events it develops a very poignant and subtle awareness. It has an urgent need to be sensitive to the fluctuations of its internal energies, so that it may control and organize their expression and prevent them from damaging its tissues. So varied and inconstant are the patterns of events within the great fluid body, that physiological controls are seldom automatic, as they are with us, but almost always under conscious and intelligent guidance.

  The core and the tresses of the living nebula are composed of many kinds of tissues, each a pattern of little enduring whirlwinds of many gasses and dusts in physical relation with one another. Scattered through these tissues are many organs of sensation and of control, and many insulated tracks for the transmission of messages between the core and the tresses. By means of this complex organization the nebula becomes very precisely aware of the intricate pattern of events which constitute its bodily life, and it influences them very minutely according to its wishes. It is sensitive to all the frequencies of radiation, to pressure, to warmth and cold and to many chemical changes. It can retard and quicken the flow of its radiation in different parts of its body. It can also, by stimulating certain regions to expand or contract, alter the shape of its convolutions.

  Since a nebula is so large that the cosmical light takes many thousands of years to travel across it, its nerve currents, though moving at the speed of light, are in a sense very sluggish. The whole tempo of nebular life is therefore, from the human point of view, fantastically slow. Passages of thought which a human brain would perform in a few seconds would take the huge nebular brain many years. Yet in terms of its own life its mental operations are rapid. “Quick as thought” is an analogy as true for the nebula as for man. For slow as its thinking seems to us, its responses to events occurring in its remote extremities are far slower. In dealing with such events it has to take into account time lost on the inward and outward passage of the nerve current, just as we, when we carryon a correspondence, have to take into account time lost in the post.

  Owing to the extreme slowness of their experience, the nebulae tend to be much impressed by the swiftness and elusive changefulness of events. And when at last, after aeons of maturity, they begin to notice in themselves that decay which we associate with senescence, they are dismayed at the brevity of their life.

  In its earliest phase the foetal mind of the nebula hovers long between the deepest slumber and drowsy waking. It basks in its own inherent sunshine. It luxuriates in the confused streaming and stroking and thrusting of its living winds, as they move among one another on their ordered courses. But as the ages pass, it comes to feel more accurately its patterned currents and the spreading torrents of its radiation; and little by little it takes charge of its own economy. It has by now perceptions not only of light and darkness, pressures, balance, and a thousand tactual textures, but also of vigour, faintness, fatigue, restlessness, the glow of health, and innumerable local strains and pains. These manifold characters it experiences with all the precision which we know only in perceiving the external world. It inwardly feels and sees its body in more detail than we achieve in touching and seeing external objects. But of its environment it knows less than we know of our digestive operations.

  As a human infant, lying in its cot, discovers its toes and exults in dictating their movements, so the infant nebula discovers not toes and fingers, ears and genitals, but the living and mobile tresses that are its limbs. But whereas the human infant discovers its body’s external aspect and at the same time sets about exploring the vast external world, the lone nebulae is externally blind and numb. Yet internally it encounters such diversified and passionate experience, that in many cases, though this may seem almost incredible, the lone nebulae have developed a considerable intricacy of thought and a vast and subtle gamut of emotions. I shall later try to give some idea of this strange life.

  The mental life of the lone nebulae had of course to be carried on entirely without the use of language. That it could proceed at all, thus hobbled, may seem impossible. But I found that the more advanced of the lone nebulae had, as a matter of fact, been driven to develop a kind of “internal language” of symbolic images and incipient gestures. In many cases this proved a very efficient vehicle for the process of their thought and feeling.

  Only the relatively few nebulae which were “born” in groups developed normally any perception of events occurring beyond their own bodies. For these it was very important to react to the whole group in which they lived, for they had far-reaching influences on one another, determining their mutual orbits, shaping each other, with their tidal attraction, sometimes tearing limbs from one another, sometimes caressing one another, sometimes fighting to the death, sometimes ecstatically merging.

  Even in infancy the social nebulae began to be mutually sensitive. Their external perceptions were derived from experience of the distortion of their vital form by the gravitational sway of their neighbours, and from light which impinged upon their outer tissues.

  I need not tell in detail how, from the direction, strength and texture of these external influences, the young social nebulae came to apprehend one another as physical objects. Their visual perceptions were of course very different from those which we obtain by lens and retina. Their grasp of the solid form of seen objects was based on their power of discriminating slight differences in the direction of the light rays which entered their tissues at different points. Thus their seeing consisted of the apprehension of innumerable ever-changing parallaxes, the relations of which were automatically analysed in the brain tracts of the core, and perceived as external objects having precise shapes and colours and sizes, and moving at definite distances from the point of vision.

  When I had succeeded in mastering this odd way of seeing, I found it no less subtle and no less aesthetically significant than the familiar human mode.

  The nebula’s sense of external attraction was at bottom not unlike a blend of our touch, our balance, and our kinaesthesis. But it was developed with the same subtlety as nebular vision. It afforded very precise perceptions of masses at a distance, discriminating them with surprising accuracy in respect of shape and detailed texture of density. Thus it amounted to a kind of “tactual seeing” entirely unknown to man.

  In addition to these two ways of perceiving one another, the social nebulae could sense differences of electric charge in their neighbours. And as electric changes were symptomatic of emotional changes, this electric sensitivity had for the percipient a strong emotive significance.

  Along with powers of external perception came powers of voluntary locomotion. In infancy the nebula’s orbit was determined solely by the simpler principles which we call physical. But as the young creatures developed needs to avoid and approach one another, they acquired also, little by little, the power to control their movements. This was done by directing the discharge of their radiation in such a manner that the recoil might propel them whither they willed. At first this voluntary control produced but a slight perturbation of the normal orbit, but in time it came to be used with gre
ater effect. It was not until the discovery of mechanical power, the subatomic energy derived from the disintegration of the flesh of their slaughtered fellows, that the social nebulae were able to make long voyages from group to group.

  The social nebulae could communicate with one another. In infancy they learned to associate certain t appearances of their neighbours with impending approach or flight, hostility or friendliness, vigour or fatigue, and so on. In time they came to make deliberate use of these spontaneous “gestures” to communicate their intentions to one another. And, from these clumsy babblings of childhood each group of nebulae developed in maturity a more or less efficient language, which grew up in close association with the internal “language” of symbolic images and movements. The external language in its finished state consisted entirely of delicate rhythmic changes of radiation produced and received by specialized organs.

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  OUTLINE OF A STRANGE MENTALITY

  To understand the mentality of the nebulae, one must bear in mind three facts which make them differ through and through from human beings. They do not succeed one another in generations; they are not constrained by economic necessity; the great majority of them have reached maturity in ignorance of other minds.

  On Earth, the individuals of a race procreate and die, handing on the torch of evolution and of tradition to their successors. But with the nebulae there is no distinction between the growth of individuals and the evolution of the race. The life arid memory of each nebula reaches back to the racial dawn. The race consists of the original host of individuals that condensed more or less contemporaneously after the explosion of the atom-cosmos. When the last of these dies, the race dies with it.

  Nebular evolution has consequently been far less profuse in “experimental” types than terrestrial evolution. It has not proliferated in myriad diverse species. Its advance has been more steady and less varied. It was partly through this lack of variety, partly through the extreme simplicity of the environment (compared with the immense complexity of our terrestrial environment) that even the social nebulae developed a certain naive directness of thought and feeling known only in human children. Owing to this lack of sophistication nebular history displays more starkly and dramatically than human history the great formative influences at work within it.

  Another important consequence of the absence of generations is this. The nebulae are in a sense “nearer to God” than any man can ever be. The human child, in spite of our great poet, trails but dim and tattered clouds of glory. He embarks upon life, not fresh from God’s making fingers, but warped by the misfortunes and blunders of countless ancestors; and, no sooner is he born, than he entangles himself further by learning from the example of his elders. But the nebulae wake with the divine lust keen and unconfused within them, and they pursue it untrammelled either by errant instinct or by perverse tradition. Never need they suffer from mistakes not their own, or be led astray by the half-truths of teachers whose very obscurity lends them a baneful prestige. Thus the nebulae, at least in their youthful phase, have been able on the whole to follow the light within them with a steadier will than man, though with less diversity of expression. Stage by stage during their youth, and without any widespread misadventure, they have discovered the true direction of their nature, and have very constantly pursued it. Not till the main host of them was already in the prime was fate to waylay them with an opportunity of destroying themselves by offering them the priceless but dangerous gift of mechanical power.

  The absence of generations had another far-reaching effect. In all human cultures the idea of parenthood, birth and death, and all the attributes of youth and age, are familiar and significant. But the nebulae in their early maturity, before they began to conceive their cosmical society, were almost entirely without these experiences. Parenthood and birth were the rarest accidents; death itself was on the whole an unusual calamity, always artificially produced, and common only in periods of warfare. Youth they knew vaguely from recollection of their past phases and the study of their less mature contemporaries. Senescence was as yet not even a rare disease. It was entirely unknown. Not till the last phase of the nebular drama did they discover the inexorable decay and annihilation which plays so great a part in all human experience.

  No less important than the absence of generations was lack of constraint by economic necessity. Interest in economic activities, which has played a part in terrestrial life at once so stimulating to the practical intelligence and so hostile to the finer kinds of percipience and thought, finds no place in nebular culture. When at last (as I shall tell) sheer intellectual curiosity stumbled upon the means of utilizing subatomic energy, and militarism found a use for it, economic activity did indeed playa great part in the nebular world; but even then, and even though it brought disaster, it was never (as so often with us) taken to be an end. It was always emphatically subordinated to the true and universally accepted goal of nebular life, a goal which unfortunately the human mind can only very dimly conceive.

  Until I became familiar with nebular life I had supposed that without the spur of economic need no progress could be made, and the higher reaches of mentality would never be achieved. This error seems to me now ludicrous.

  In the young nebulae another stimulus took the place of the economic; and in those that were mature the habit of ardent endeavour persisted, though its original cause had ceased. Not the need to annex energy, but the need to canalise it so that it should do no damage to the vital organization, was the stimulus to practical activity. All nebulae at every age, but especially in youth and early maturity, are beset by the fear that at any moment they may fail to maintain the structure of their airy tissues and organs. For not only the violence of radiation, but also any sudden voluntary movement, if too vigorous or jerky, may rend them; as with a mere breath one may disintegrate a smoke wreath. Thus all nebulae live in constant dread of physical disorders and mental derangements of the most terrifying kind. And all in their youth have to behave with courage and intelligence in order to cope with these dangers. As terrestrial animals delight in hunting and feasting and fighting, so the young nebulae delight to conquer and tame the fury of radiation within their dense cores. But again and again I have seen, and actually felt, their delicate organs wounded in untoward adventures. In some cases life itself has been destroyed, perhaps to appear again after aeons of quiescence, perhaps to remain forever extinguished. More often the damage would be painfully repaired by conscious remoulding of the wounded parts, and the only scar would be a memory of horror. Sometimes, though life maintained itself, intelligence was abolished; and the unhappy creature must henceforth drift through space forever torturing itself with insane fantasies.

  This precariousness of life breeds in the young nebulae something of that directness and heroism which we look for in primitive human societies. But whereas with us the active and “realist” temperament is all too prone to be snared into the pursuit of gross material power, in the nebulae it can as a rule find no such outlet and must instead expend itself in perfecting the vital organization and the instruments of mental life.

  The last of the three most important facts for the understanding of nebular mentality is the complete isolation of very many nebulae throughout their youth. Social life was impossible to them. And since self-consciousness depends very largely on the conscious distinction between self and others, this also was unable to develop normally in the isolated nebulae. Only when disease produced in them violent mental conflicts and a state of “multiple personality” did they ever conceive of a plurality of minds. And then, of course, it was regarded by them not as affording the possibility of love and all the loveliest blossoms of the spirit, but as a hideous distemper; which indeed it was.

  Yet an extremely complex inner life has combined with freedom from economic servitude to foster in them a kind of self-consciousness peculiar to themselves. They had no opportunity of distinguishing between “I” and “you”; but they had constant need of disting
uishing between “I” and the many opposed and often rebellious processes and cravings at work within them. Though normally they could never conceive the possibility of an “ego” or a “stream of consciousness” other than their own, they thoroughly grasped the difference between the lowly and the lofty within themselves.

  Moreover, owing to lack of distraction, they were able to apprehend earlier, and to develop more earnestly, certain aspects of “inner” experience or “experience of experience” which terrestrial spirits can only rarely and with austere self-discipline discover at all. I myself, very surely, could never have appreciated this side of nebular life had I not suffered an age-long process of self-discipline under the influence of my cosmical adventure. And now that the adventure is over, and I try to record it, I find that I have lost the insight which was then forced upon me.

  Lack of inherited complexity and of cultural sophistication, lack of economic adventures, and lack of social experience combined to give to the lone nebulae an innocence and single-mindedness which at first I mistook for sheer mental poverty. I had long savoured the minds of many mature nebulae before I began to understand what it was that they were seeking to do with their lives. And even when I had gained some insight into their passionately sought, but to my mind “one-dimensional” ideals, aeons had yet to pass before activities which I had hitherto regarded with condescension, sometimes even with disgust, began to display a characteristic beauty and a mysterious, nay, a mystical, significance.

  ***

  As the young nebula advances to maturity, its constitution becomes more hardy and its practical activity more regular and automatic. It now seeks fresh modes of expression. To my surprise I discovered that time and interest were henceforth increasingly given to a strange kind of internal play. For no practical end, but for sheer delight, the great kittenish creature would juggle its living winds into freakish patterns, or thread them together as meshes of interwoven currents. Or it would toss and ripple its flying tresses for sheer joy of “muscular” skill.