MOYERS: So the old story, so long known and transmitted through the generations, isn’t functioning, and we have not yet learned a new one?
CAMPBELL: The story that we have in the West, so far as it is based on the Bible, is based on a view of the universe that belongs to the first millennium B.C. It does not accord with our concept either of the universe or of the dignity of man. It belongs entirely somewhere else. (31)
Thus spake Joseph Campbell in the interview that became the book The Power of Myth, offering one of the viewpoints that made him deeply unpopular with fundamentalists and something of a hero to those who feel a deep brokenness in all the available thought-systems (not a perfect word; perhaps image-systems or mythologies) of the modern world. Moyers gives something of the backdrop of the discussion, which is still appropriate twenty and some years later:
As we sit here and talk, there is one story after another of car bombings in Beirut – by the Muslims of the Christians, by the Christians of the Muslims, and by the Christians of the Christians. It strikes me that Marshall McLuhan was right when he said that television has made a global village of the world – but he didn’t know the global village would be Beirut. (25)
The writer Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) spent a life working for world peace and writing science-fiction novels, which attempt to fill precisely the gap Campbell describes between the immense scope of our scientific cosmology and our more parochial religious conceptions of the cosmos’s maker. He was not entirely successful – more on this later – but his work still indicates a viable and even important direction. The last chapters of his novel Star Maker describe a direct encounter with God, tantamount to Stapledon’s personal credo – an effort at religious elucidation I wish every person capable of expression would make at some point in their lives.
Stapledon was English, educated at Oxford, received a Ph.D. – which his writing never really recovered from – and was admired by such figures as Borges, Woolf, and C.S. Lewis, who disagreed with his religious ideas but was deeply excited by his mode of expression. This review comes after reading two of his novels, Last and First Men and Star Maker, found in a single volume printed by Dover (I am working from an undated reissue of the 1968 edition, which, to judge from its $7.95 cover price is not more than twenty years old).
Stapledon’s main contribution to the novel is the introduction of cosmic magnitude, which hopes to put all human endeavor in its proper perspective. The novel Last and First Men purports to be a complete history of intelligent life in our solar system, from its inception to its dissolution, and contains such aids to understanding as a time line in which each nick represents 500 million years, from 2 billion years ago (“planets formed”; Stapledon’s estimate of distances in time do not quite agree with modern scientific estimates) to 2 billion years from now (“end of man”). In between those endpoints Stapledon describes eighteen species of intelligent human form which are born, effloresce, and come near extinction; whereupon they are replaced by another species of phoenix humanity, after periods of interregnum which can last millions of years. Of these eighteen species we are the first.
The book’s perspective is that of one of the “last men,” who through historical research (mainly done via telepathy with past figures) know the entire history of mankind. This last man is watching the expanding sun destroy all hope of human life, and takes the time to communicate a sense of the human whole telepathically to a man of the 20th Century. As reading it is mostly dry; for it is a natural history, dealing with the rise and fall of species. But there is some wonder in it, as there is in the best nature programs. And there are, as you would imagine, a fair number of twists and turns. But Stapledon was not a dramatist, and compared to similar works such as H.G. Wells The Time Machine, Stapledon manages to couch his ideas in readable but not always compelling form.
Some of the conclusions are also difficult to abide by. If you were to shoot a laser-beam at Alpha Centauri, the slightest error of angle would result in missing the target by millions or billions or even trillions of miles, the error has such distance to compound itself. There is a similar difficulty in science fiction of this sort, which is that it extrapolates to immense distances based on the fuzzy scientific knowledge of its time. It seems unlikely that human life on Earth will be nearly destroyed in 10 million years by a cataclysmic war with the Martians, as Stapledon foretells, because there are no Martians. Many scientific concerns of our age play small roles in Stapledon’s history of humanity. Genetic manipulation exists but it does not play the pivotal role that it does in Brave New World or the Star Trek mythology. Interstellar travel never occurs although there is some motion from planet to planet. There is no artificial intelligence. The fact that his narrative hence lacks plausibility in our eyes is a great detraction – just as you take with a grain of salt the observations of the economist who predicted the Dow would hit 30,000 by 2008.
Stapledon’s temporal treatment resembles a funnel, where he narrates in terms of decades at the beginning, then moves to centuries, millennia, and by the end is dealing in periods of millions of years. But even as a prognosticator of the 20th Century he left much to be desired. Some great misprision – perhaps related to his overvaluation of the intellect – leads him to envision Europe’s most intellectual country, Germany, becoming after World War I “the most pacific, and a stronghold of enlightenment;” and the macho Latin countries France and Italy fight a purposeless war of national pride, before France engages in a catastrophic war against England which results in the destruction of Paris and London and ultimately the removal of these two nations from world history. This destruction also unfortunately robbed the world of rational skepticism, because apparently that was a racial trait of English and French:
But it was France, with England, that had chiefly inspired the intellectual integrity which was the rarest and brightest thread of Western culture, not only within the territories of their two nations, but throughout Europe and America. In the seventeenth and eighteenth Christian centuries, the French and English had conceived, more clearly than other peoples, an interest in the objective world for its own sake, had founded physical science, and had fashioned out of scepticism the most brilliantly constructive of mental instruments. At a later stage it was largely the French and English who, by means of this instrument, had revealed man and the physical universe in something like their true proportions; and it was chiefly the elect of these two peoples that had been able to exult in this bracing discovery.
With the eclipse of France and England this great tradition of dispassionate cognizance began to wane. (26)
Needless to say, it is not surprising that to an Englishman England (and next-door neighbor France) should be the indispensable players in the human drama. And as so often in European fables, America plays something of a villain in the drama of the “First Men” (us). But since there is always something to be gleaned from even the most judgemental criticism, I will air some of Stapledon’s complaints about Americans:
But these best [intellectual Americans] were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night. (33)
This spiritual desolation he terms “an Americanized planet.” And any fair person will see precisely what he is talking about in American culture. But as an American I might question whether France and England were (or are) such champions of “dispassionate cognizance” themselves, and whether or not the adolescence and self-deception Stapledon describes is not rather a human than an American trait.
The description of Americans points to a recurring pattern of thought in Stapledon, and it is worth pondering whether or not it is true, and what the consequences might mean in the universe if it is. Stapledon time and again portrays intelligent life as beset by some fatal flaw, which varies from species to species or race to race, but there is always something, which prevents them from achieving what they otherwise might. He portrays the same thing happening in the novel Star Maker, and to worlds impossibly distant:
As we searched up and down time and space, discovering more and more of the rare grains called planets, as we watched race after race struggle to a certain degree of lucid consciousness, only to succumb to some external accident or, more often, to some flaw in its own nature, we were increasingly oppressed by a sense of the futility, the planlessness of the cosmos. A few worlds did indeed wake to such lucidity that they passed beyond our ken. But several of the most brilliant of these occurred in the earliest epochs of the galactic story; and nothing that we could as yet discover in the later phases of the cosmos suggested that any galaxies, still less the cosmos as a whole, had at last come (or will at last come) more under the sway of the awakened spirit than they were during the epochs of those early brilliant worlds. (301)
It is as if there is a production of Hamlet going on everywhere in the universe, and again and again the brainy son can’t manage to avenge his father and become king, and time and again we are left with a stage full of corpses and a whole lot of angst about existence.
This is, I think, the most distinctive quality of Stapledon’s vision of the universe, and it permeates everything he writes. He also writes of something like a solution to this problem – something akin to, “there is a tragic beauty in it, the maker of the universe likes being the one-man audience to a universe full of Oedipuses.” But it is clear enough that this solution does not satisfy Stapledon himself. And all other solutions he sees as mere weak-mindedness.
During the next two hundred million years all the main phases of man’s life on earth were many times repeated on Venus with characteristic differences. Theocratic empires; free and intellectualistic island cities; insecure overlordship of feudal archipelagos; rivalries of high priest and emperor; religious feuds over the interpretation of sacred scriptures; recurrent fluctuations of thought from naïve animism, through polytheism, conflicting monotheisms, and all the desperate “isms” by which mind seeks to blur the severe outline of truth; recurrent fashions of comfort-seeking fantasy and cold intelligence; social disorders through the misuse of volcanic or wind power in industry; business empires and pseudo-communistic empires – all these forms flitted over the changing substance of mankind again and again, as in an enduring hearth fire there appear and vanish the infinitely diverse forms of flame and smoke. But all the while the brief spirits, in whose massed configurations these forms inhered, were intent chiefly on the primitive needs of food, shelter, companionship, crowd-lust, love-making, the two-edged relationship of parent and child, the exercise of muscle and intelligence in facile sport. Very seldom, only in rare moments of clarity, only after ages of misapprehension, did a few of them, here and there, now and again, begin to have the deeper insight into the world’s nature and man’s. And no sooner had this precious insight begun to propagate itself, than it would be blotted out by some small or great disaster, by epidemic disease, by the spontaneous disruption of society, by an access of racial imbecility, by a prolonged bombardment of meteorites, or by the mere cowardice and vertigo that dared not look down the precipice of fact. (195)
Speaking of looking down the precipice of fact, it is surprising that after positing an entire cosmos’s worth of frustrated efforts to achieve “deeper insight,” Stapledon never comes up with the obvious conclusion: the universe is not that impressed by or interested in “deep insight.” Stapledon is an intellectual, and he cannot conceive that the purpose of the whole be anything other than to produce intellectuals – the rest of it, to him, seems strange and wasteful. This bias is evident enough in Stapledon’s protagonist in the universe – intelligent life, “mentality,” as he calls it. Who knows, perhaps Stapledon is right, but I for one am not so convinced that my life is more important than the woodpeckers that visit my property during the winter. I notice that they always come in pairs, and seem to be able to be content with each other, and stay faithful to each other – who can say that these are not more pleasing to their maker than we are? My favorite friends are not necessarily the smartest ones. And Lord knows I would much rather watch a troop of monkeys fling poo at each other in a great intertribal grudge match than watch Book Television, and to judge by the latter’s ratings, I’m not alone.
But that is my own view. Let us return to the concept of “the precipice of fact.” This is another central concept for Stapledon, that reality is horrible, and the only realism is a kind of horror you feel so often you get used to it and don’t mind it too much. This theory carries with it a “modern” feel, and to some extent is the viewpoint of almost any late 19th or early 20th Century thinker considered “serious.” To this day it is presumed by modern taste-makers (i.e. university intellectuals) that tragic works are higher art and more worthy of attention (read the Inferno only, read Great Expectations of all the Dickens works, hail Cormac McCarthy as the world’s greatest living writer, and Blood Meridian as his greatest work, etc.). It’s not hard to see how this kind of viewpoint is related to Fascism, which of course was popular at the same time, and also with the brutalities of “Proletarian Dictatorship”: life is terrible at its core, the Solar System itself is an oven in which we all get roasted, inure yourself to slamming the oven-door on the faces of men: this is life. Now Stapledon was no fascist, though in a book covering two billion years of human history he does manage to devote almost an entire page to Mussolini, the only historical persona mentioned in the entire narrative (an extraordinary fact), praised for his “genius in action” and the Fascists called a “flamboyant but sincere national party.” But Stapledon did lay down a set of premises from which Fascism is a rational conclusion. Not the only conclusion, mind you, but a rational one. For the most part, they were the basic premises of his age for intellectuals, but he did not depart from them.
There is another striking instance of “the precipice of fact”: when humans attempted to travel to other star systems, they had to turn back from sheer horror at the emptiness they encountered (could this emptiness have been a surprise?). The implication is, “If you had to confront the horrors of the universe as they really are, you would be destroyed by the encounter.”
Throughout the voyage, which was the longest ever attempted, they had encountered nothing whatever but two comets, and an occasional meteor. Some of the nearer constellations were seen with altered forms. One or two stars increased slightly in brightness; and the sun was reduced to being the most brilliant of stars. The aloof and changeless presence of the constellations seems to have crazed the voyagers. When at last the ship returned and berthed, there was a scene such as is seldom witnessed in our modern world. The crew flung open the ports and staggered blubbering into the arms of the crowd. It would never have been believed that members of our species [the Eighteenth Men] could be so far reduced from the self-possession that is normal to us. Subsequently these poor human wrecks have shown an irrational phobia of the stars, and of all that is not human. They dare not go out at night. They live in an extravagant passion for the presence of others. And since all others are astronomically minded, they cannot find real companionship. They insanely refuse to participate in the mental life of the race upon the plane where all things are seen in their just proportions. They cling piteously to the sweets of individual life; and so they are led to curse the immensities. They fill their minds with human conceits, and their houses with toys. By night they draw the curtains and drown the quiet voice of the stars in revelry. But it is a joyless and a haunted revelry, desired less for itself than as a defence against reality. (218)
He describes the agonies of the Last Men, who watch the Sun’s energy output increase and increase until it ultimately destroys them:
We cannot rise even to that more homely beatitude which was once within the reach of the unaided individual, that serenity which, it seemed, should be the spirit’s answer to every tragic event. It is gone from us. It is not only impossible but inconceivable. We now see our private distresses and the public calamity as merely hideous. That after so long a struggle into maturity man should be roasted alive like a trapped mouse, for the entertainment of a lunatic! How can any beauty lie in that? (244)
I remember I used to throw slugs into the fire when I was a child, just for the pleasure of watching them squirm as they bubbled like bacon. But this may not be relevant here.
Star Maker contains Stapledon’s myth of creation (pp. 415-430). The universe, according to this myth, is the work of a fabulously complex and intelligent but cold-blooded aesthete, who learns as he goes along. He begins with a universe that is a simple drum-beat. “Thereafter cosmos upon cosmos, each more rich and subtle than the last, leapt from his fervent imagination” (415). Life occurs as something of an accident – a significant detail – and was not part of the design:
… it became evident that some of his creatures were manifesting traces of a life of their own, recalcitrant to the conscious purposes of the Star Maker. The themes of the music began to display modes of behaviour that were not in accord with the canon which he had ordained for them. It seemed to me that he watched them with intense interest, and that they spurred him to new conceptions, beyond the creatures’ power to fulfill. Therefore he brought this cosmos to completion; and in a novel manner. He contrived that the last state of the universe should lead immediately back to the first. He knotted the final event temporally to the beginning, so that the cosmical time formed an endless circlet. (416)
Other things go awry:
For the next cosmos he consciously projected something of his own percipience and will, ordaining that certain patterns and rhythms of quality should be the perceivable bodies of perceiving minds. Seemingly these creatures were intended to work together to produce the harmony which he had conceived for this cosmos; but instead, each sought to mould the whole cosmos in accordance with its own form. The creatures fought desperately, and with self-righteous conviction. When they were damaged, they suffered pain. This, seemingly, was something which the young Star Maker had never experienced or conceived [again, very different from the Judeo-Christian idea]. With rapt, surprised interest, and (as it seemed to me) with almost diabolical glee, he watched the antics and the sufferings of his first living creatures, till by their mutual strife and slaughter they had reduced this cosmos to chaos. (416)
Stapledon goes on to enumerate dozens of other universes, described with real ingenuity – Stapledon resembles his fecund Creator (a theme we will pursue further). But let me note above the opening of several alternative paths for thought (besides the Judeo-Christian idea of a God who experiences pain): Stapledon notes that each creature “sought to mould the whole cosmos in accordance with its own form”: in Greek terms, hubris. Reducing hubris – not merely of action but also of conception – is one of the traditional means of establishing some kind of harmony between creature and created. It is entirely plausible, if we are constructing a myth that describes the universe as it is, that we are “mice to be roasted,” and not quite so good or valuable as we like to think we are (nor the Creator quite so kindly disposed to us, though even the old mythologies note this; as Campbell said, “A God who invented hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army”).
The end result of Stapledon’s mythology is a universe that is indifferent to its pieces, which indifference can seep down into the life of the creatures themselves:
During many aeons we had followed the fortunes of the many worlds. So often we had lived out their passions, novel to them, but to us for the most part repetitive. We had shared all kinds of sufferings, all kinds of glories and shames. And now that the cosmical ideal, the full awakening of the spirit, seemed on the point of attainment, we found ourselves a little tired of it. What matter whether the whole huge drama of existence should be intricately known and relished by the perfected spirit or not? What matter whether we ourselves should complete our pilgrimage or not? …
It gradually appeared to us that the prevailing mood of these countless utopian systems of worlds was at heart very different from that of triumph. In every world we found a deep conviction of the littleness and impotence of all finite beings, no matter how exalted. In a certain world there was a kind of poet. When we told him our conception of the cosmical goal, he said, “When the cosmos wakes, if ever she does, she will find herself not the single beloved of her maker, but merely a little bubble adrift on the boundless and bottomless ocean of being.” (375)
I strained my fainting intelligence to capture something of the form of the ultimate cosmos. With mingled admiration and protest I haltingly glimpsed the final subtleties of world and flesh and spirit, and of the community of those most diverse and individual beings, awakened to full self-knowledge and mutual insight. But as I strove to hear more inwardly into that music of concrete spirits in countless worlds, I caught echoes not merely of joys unspeakable, but of griefs inconsolable. For some of these ultimate beings not only suffered, but suffered in darkness. Though gifted with full power of insight, their power was barren. The vision was withheld from them. They suffered as lesser spirits would never suffer. Such intensity of harsh experience was intolerable to me, the frail spirit of a lowly cosmos. In an agony of horror and pity I despairingly stopped the ears of my mind. In my littleness I cried out against my maker that no glory of the eternal and absolute could redeem such agony in the creatures. Even if the misery that I had glimpsed was in fact but a few dark strands woven into the golden tapestry to enrich it, and all the rest was bliss, yet such desolation of awakened spirits, I cried, ought not, ought never to be. By what diabolical malice, I demanded, were these glorious beings not merely tortured but deprived of the supreme consolation, the ecstasy of contemplation and praise which is the birthright of all fully awakened spirits? (428)
It was with anguish and horror, and yet with acquiescence, even with praise, that I felt or seemed to feel something of the eternal spirit’s temper as it apprehended in one intuitive and timeless vision all our lives. Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy. Our broken lives, our loves, our follies, our betrayals, our forlorn and gallant defences, were one and all calmly anatomized, assessed, and placed. True, they were one and all lived through with complete understanding, with insight and full sympathy, even with passion. But sympathy was not ultimate in the temper of the eternal spirit; contemplation was. Love was not absolute; contemplation was. And though there was love, there was also hate comprised within the spirit’s temper, for there was cruel delight in the contemplation of every horror, and glee in the downfall of the virtuous. All passions, it seemed, were comprised within the spirit’s temper; but mastered, icily gripped within the cold, clear, crystal ecstasy of contemplation. (429)
This reveals the general truth that religion is generally to be seen as a branch of psychology; for the above is clearly an intellectual’s God, a science-fiction writer’s God. Everything here is deadly serious, and terribly brainy. It also looks like its time period, early 20th Century, Nietzsche-influenced and Joyce-influenced: cruelty and beauty (Joyce said the artist was to be behind the creation, indifferent, “paring his nails,” and he said aesthetic appreciation began when you did not desire to possess the object). It is easy enough to find different visions of God, which are not prima facie worse than this. Stapledon says contemplation is absolute; St. John says love. Jung said, “Humor is the only divine quality in man.” The incarnation-idea of Christianity is in a completely different universe, that God would Pygmalion-like want to sexually possess the most perfect woman he could make, and take the stage of his creation as a player in it. And look at the fat-man’s vision of the heart of the universe – raging impassioned copulation – to be found in Balzac. Now, it is terribly unfair to compare anyone to Balzac, for Balzac is the doctor insuperabilis, the master who cannot be surpassed, but really, when you think about it, how did Stapledon manage to get to the heart of the universe and leave his passion behind? And why did he learn of the universe via telepathy – wouldn’t you want to taste it, touch it, and indeed, if you want real knowledge, sexually experience it all? Even the Bible equates “knowing” and sexual union. Who would want any other type of knowledge?
The Balzac excerpt I will produce is lengthy, but since it contains a vision of the nature of the universe, it needs a bit more than a paragraph to spread its wings. It is written from the perspective of a medieval French judge in a witch-trial, who falls under the snares of said witch; this is an excerpt of his confession. The story from which this is taken, “The Succubus,” is the pinnacle of Balzac’s monumental Droll Stories, the zestiest bit of praise of the maker of the real universe – i.e. the one where sex, betrayal, pleasure, gaiety, and the like are included and count among the more interesting parts – ever offered.
Now then listen and tremble with great fear! Elected by the assembled Chapter to carry out, instruct, and complete the process commenced against a demon, who had appeared in a feminine shape, in the person of a relapsed nun – an abominable person, denying God, and bearing the name of Zulma in the infidel country whence she comes; the which devil is known in the diocese under that of Claire of the convent of Mount Carmel, and has much afflicted the town by putting herself under an infinite number of men to gain their souls to Mammon, Astaroth, and Satan – princes of hell, by making them leave this world in a state of mortal sin, and causing their death where life has its source, I have, I the judge, fallen in my latter days into this snare, and have lost my senses, while acquitting myself traitorously of the functions committed with great confidence by the Chapter to my cold senility. Hear how subtle the demon is, and stand firm against her artifices. While listening to the first response of the aforesaid Succubus, I saw with horror that the irons placed upon her feet and hands left no mark there, and was astonished at her hidden strength and at her apparent weakness. Then my mind was troubled suddenly at the sight of the natural perfections with which the devil was endowed. I listened to the music of her voice, which warmed me from head to foot, and made me desire to be young, to give myself up to this demon, thinking that for an hour passed in her company my eternal salvation was but poor payment for the pleasure of love tasted in those slender arms. Then I lost that firmness with which all judges should be furnished. This demon by me questioned, reasoned with me in such a manner that at the second interrogatory I was firmly persuaded I should be committing a crime in fining and torturing a poor little creature who cried like an innocent child. Then warned by a voice from on high to do my duty, and that these golden words, this music of celestial appearance, were diabolical mummeries, that this body, so pretty, so infatuating, would transmute itself into a bristly beast with sharp claws, those eyes so soft into flames of hell, her behind into a scaly tail, her pretty rose-bud mouth and gentle lips into the jaws of a crocodile, I came back to my intention of having the said Succubus tortured until she avowed her mission, as this practice had already been followed in Christianity. Now when this demon showed herself stripped to me, to be put to the torture, I was suddenly placed in her power by magical conjurations. I felt my old bones crack, my brain received a warm light, my heart trans-shipped young and boiling blood. I was light in myself, and by virtue of the magic philter thrown into my eyes the snows of my forehead melted away. I lost all conscience of my Christian life and found myself a schoolboy, running about the country, escaped from class and stealing apples. I had not the power to make the sign of the cross, neither did I remember the Church, God the Father, nor the sweet Saviour of men. A prey to this design, I went about the streets thinking over the delights of that voice, the abominable, pretty body of this demon, and saying a thousand wicked things to myself. Then pierced and drawn by a blow of the devil’s fork, who had planted himself already in my head as a serpent in an oak, I was conducted by this sharp prong towards the jail, in spite of my guardian angel, who from time to time pulled me by the arm and defended me against these temptations, but in spite of his holy advice and his assistance I was dragged by a million claws stuck into my heart, and soon found myself in the jail. As soon as the door was opened to me I saw no longer any appearance of a prison, because the Succubus had there, with the assistance of evil genii or fays, constructed a pavilion of purple and silk, full of perfumes and flowers, where she was seated, superbly attired with neither irons on her neck nor chains on her feet. I allowed myself to be stripped of my ecclesiastical vestments, and was put into a scent-bath. Then the demon covered me with a Saracen robe, entertained me with a repast of rare viands, contained in precious vases, gold cups, Asiatic wines, songs and marvellous music, and a thousand sweet sounds that tickled my soul by means of my ears. At my side kept always the said Succubus, and her sweet, detestable embrace distilled new ardour into my members. My guardian angel quitted me. Then I lived only by the terrible light of the Moorish woman’s eyes, coveted the warm embraces of the delicate body, wished always to feel her red lips, that I believed natural, and had no fear of the bite of those teeth which drew one to the bottom of hell. I delighted to feel the unequalled softness of her hands without thinking that they were unnatural claws. In short, I acted like a husband desiring to go to his affianced without thinking that that spouse was everlasting death. I had no thought for the things of this world nor the interests of God, dreaming only of love, of the sweet breasts of this woman, who made me burn, and of the gate of hell in which I wished to cast myself. Alas! my brethren, during three days and three nights was I thus constrained to toil without being able to stop the stream which flowed from my veins, in which were plunged, like two pikes, the hands of the Succubus, which communicated to my poor old age and to my dried up bones, I know not what sweat of love. At first this demon, to draw me to her, caused to flow in my inside the softness of milk, then came poignant joys which pricked like a hundred needles my bones, my marrow, my brain, and my nerves. Then all this gone, all things became inflamed, my head, my blood, my nerves, my flesh, my bones, and then I burned with the real fire of hell, which caused me torments in my joints, and an incredible, intolerable, tearing voluptuousness which loosened the bonds of my life. The tresses of this demon, which enveloped my poor body, poured upon me like a stream of flame, and I felt each lock like a bar of red iron. During this mortal delectation I saw the ardent face of the said Succubus, who laughed and addressed to me a thousand exciting words; such as that I was her knight, her lord, her lance, her day, her joy, her hero, her life, her good, her rider, and that she would like to clasp me even closer, wishing to be in my skin or have me in hers. Hearing which, under the prick of this tongue which sucked out my soul, I plunged and precipitated myself into hell without finding the bottom. And then when I had no more a drop of blood in my veins, when my heart no longer beat in my body, and I was ruined at all points, the demon still fresh, white, rubicund, glowing, and laughing, said to me –
“Poor fool, to think me a demon! Had I asked thee to sell me thy soul for a kiss, wouldst thou not give it me with all thy heart?”
“Yes,” said I.
“And if always to act thus it were necessary for thee to nourish thyself with the blood of new-born children in order always to have new life to spend in my arms, would you not imbibe it willingly?”
“Yes,” said I.
“And to be always my gallant horseman, gay as a man in his prime, feeling life, drinking pleasure, plunging to the depths of joy as a swimmer into the Loire, wouldst thou not deny God, wouldst thou not spit in the face of Jesus?”
“Yes,” said I.
“If twenty years of monastic life could yet be given thee, would thou not forfeit them for two years of this love which burns thee, and to be at this sweet occupation?”
“Yes,” said I.
Then I felt a hundred sharp claws which tore my diaphragm as if the beaks of a thousand birds there took their bellyfuls, shrieking. Then I was lifted suddenly above the earth upon the said Succubus, who had spread her wings, and cried to me –
“Ride, ride, my gallant rider! Hold yourself firmly on the back of thy mule, by her mane, by her neck; and ride, ride, my gallant rider – everything rides!” And then I saw, as a thick fog, the cities of the earth, where by a special gift I perceived each one coupled with a female demon, and tossing about, engendering in great concupiscence, all shrieking a thousand words of love and exclamations of all kinds, and all toiling away with ecstasy. Then my horse with the Moorish head pointed out to me, still flying and galloping beyond the clouds, the earth coupled with the sun in a conjunction, from which proceeded a germ of stars, and there each female world was embracing a male world; but in place of the words used by creatures, the worlds were giving forth the howl of tempests, throwing out lightnings and crying thunders. Then still rising, I saw overhead the female nature of all things in love with the Prince of Movement. Now, by way of mockery, the Succubus placed me in the center of this horrible and perpetual conflict, where I was lost as a grain of sand in the sea. Then still cried my white mare to me, “Ride, ride, my gallant rider – all things ride!” Now, thinking how little was a priest in this torrent of the seeds of worlds, nature always clasped together, and metals, stones, waters, airs thunders, fish, plants, animals, men, spirits, worlds, and planets, all embracing with rage, I denied the Catholic faith. Then the Succubus, pointing out to me the great patch of stars seen in the heavens, said to me, “That way is a drop of celestial seed escaped from the great flow of the worlds in conjunction.” Thereupon I instantly clasped the Succubus with passion by the light of a thousand million of stars, and I wished in clasping her to feel the nature of those thousand million of creatures. Then by this great effort of love I fell impotent in every way, and heard a great infernal laugh. Then I found myself in my bed, surrounded by my servitors, who had had the courage to struggle with the demon, throwing into the bed where I was stretched a basin full of holy water, and saying fervent prayers to God. Then had I to sustain, in spite of this assistance, a horrible combat with the said Succubus, whose claws still clutched my heart, causing me infinite pains; still, while reanimated by the voice of my servitors, relations, and friends, I tried to make the sacred sign of the cross; the Succubus perched on my bed, on the bolster, at the foot, everywhere occupying herself in distracting my nerves, laughing, grimacing, putting before my eyes a thousand obscene images, and causing me a thousand wicked desires. Nevertheless, taking pity on me, my lord the Archbishop caused the relics of St. Gatien to be brought, and the moment the shrine had touched my bed the said Succubus was obliged to depart, leaving an odor of Sulphur and of Hell, which made the throats of my servants, friends, and others sore for a whole day. (second volume, p. 60 et seq.)
This story ends without a clear fate for Zulma: her trial was declared a mistrial, because Balzac wanted to save the story for another retelling, for which he planned to write depositions from an entire medieval town and thus give a panorama of all medieval French society (and make more money for himself). But clearly she will be burned at the stake in the end. But such an end cannot obliterate and outweigh the passion which is the heart of Balzac’s universe – what does the fire care what happens to the ashes?
Interestingly, the Balzac cosmology also highlights the smallness of the old, Catholic mythology, particularly of course the role of the priest as the intermediary of all incarnation, into which such a grand vision of the universe cannot possibly fit. (This is probably the real reason for the implosion of the priesthood; the mythology being dead, we cannot believe in any but the worldly powers of the priesthood, which can be gotten other ways than by (half-successful at best) abstention from the cosmic orgy Balzac describes).
At the end of Star Maker, Stapledon’s protagonist returns to his “little atom of happiness,” his small human home with his wife, which gains more importance, in his eyes, after having witnessed the cosmic indifference of the whole and its Maker. He describes these two things – one’s own little atom of community, and the “crystal ecstasy” of the contemplated beauty of things – as the “two lights” of our lives. In some sense this only highlights the problem, which remains after Stapledon’s efforts: a true mythology manages to merge all things into one light, and the significance of home and wife blends seamlessly into a universal coherence. For Balzac, the joy of sex is the same joy as that which unites Sun and Earth. But Stapledon cannot find how this could be: his home and wife have a significance to him which in some sense surpasses that of the whole. The things he values – free will, love, community, justice, compassion – are accidental in the universe – they surprised even their Creator – and remain just as unexplained as ever. What is needed is an image which is also a “theory of everything,” which contains all human meaning but also faces facts: that the maker of the universe has no qualms whatsoever about tsunamis that wipe away a hundred thousand people good and bad in a quarter of an hour, and exploding stars that destroy worlds in as little time. To call such a God “loving” is a trifle simplistic. Yet he is the Creator of love as well.
But Stapledon, as mentioned before, deserves credit and praise for taking aim at the large and important target of our time. Much that is important is left out (I have not mentioned humor, which is paramount; and the passions to him have no transcendent meaning and are “merely” biological impulsions and pleasures, which distract us from the work of mind). But much that never before had an opportunity to enter is brought in: the vast extent of the universe, and immense spans of time. The date 10,000 A.D. will come, as will 10,000,000 A.D. and 10,000,000,000 A.D.: what will our lives mean then? And the arrival of these moments is as certain as anything else is. Some might find their lives dwindle to crushing insignificance by such a measure, but in truth, this reaction would indicate other psychological problems (which I do not think Stapledon was exempt from). Another possible reaction is a sensation of liberation, in particular from all self-importance (pride and hubris, in the old vernacular), which to my mind causes more trouble than old-fashioned bugaboos like hatred and malice.
I have heard that a wise man visited the Museum of Natural History in New York City, and upon seeing the dinosaurs asked, “How long were the dinosaurs on Earth?” And the answer was, “Three hundred million years.” And he marvelled in silence, before finally saying, “What were they doing for three hundred million years?” To which his interlocutor replied (and there is more truth in it than appears), “Eating grass.” And then the wise man further said, “What was God doing for those three hundred million years?” A modern saint or prophet, if we had one, would perhaps have an answer to this question.
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