(AN INCIDENT IN THE LIFE OF A STAR.)
By Benjamin De Casseres
(The northern fire-cap of the Sun, on which floats the Temple of the Spirits of the Planets. The yearly conclave, presided over by Archimage, the Sun God, weaver of light and color, spendthrift of heat and motion, and Impresario Eternitatus, the plot-builder and dramiturge of the comedies and tragedies enacted on the planets in the Sidereal System.
Sitting on their lesser thrones are the Spirit of Mercury, the Spirit of Venus, the Spirit of Mars, the Spirit of the Earth, Capocomico the Great; the Spirit of Jupiter, the Spirit of Saturn, the Spirit of Uranus, the Spirit of Neptune. They are all giants, helmed like war gods. When they march upon the flaming plateaus of the solar fire-cap the whir of their wings, white and crimson, topaz and violet, to match the planet of their birth, compete with the giant dynamos of the Sun, those metaphysical dynamos hidden in the heart of the Mother of Life, which Archimage himself has never been permitted to visit.
On the calendar of Earth time which the sinister Spirit, Capocomico the Great, wears on the front of his red helmet, it is Christmas Eve, 1915. Once a year the Spirits of the Planets assemble here at the call of Archimage and Impresario Eternitatus to relate the greatest event of the twelvemonth on the planets in leash to the Sun. Christmas Eve, Earth time, was always chosen for this reunion because although Christ had met the same fate on all the planets of the Sidereal System that befel him on Earth, the latter planet was the first on which the utilitarian experiment had been tried.)
Capocomico the Great: Life-weavers and shadow-eaters, dwellers in the eternal beauty of light and fire, organizers of the great spectacles of time, I often ask myself, Are we pessimists or optimists? to use Earth phrases. That is, do we believe that these planetarian pictures have a meaning other than the merely aesthetic and dramatic one?
You will all answer: “No; we are artists, the Shakespeares of Space, the Raphaels of this snug little Sidereal System which whirls we know not whither.
Yet sometimes I am troubled, for I fear that our puppets from Mercury to Neptune will revolt against us and raise their standards against Impresario Eternitatus and Archimage, and hence against us all.
On all our planets, as you know, these marvelous manikins grow wise in cosmic lore. Their wisest beings already know they are being used to amuse some obscure powers that they have called “gods.” On my planet there were Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and Shakespeare, and Erasmus, and the Preacher, and Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, and Goethe and others. They guessed the truth. On Mars there is the mighty Arcvad, and on Jupiter Ixlenicus, whose dark and terrible fulminations against the rulers of us all, Impresario Eternitatus and Archimage, struck terror into our spines. Uranus gave birth to Balbe, who preached the unsexing of babes and who wrote that stupendous anathema against the Sun and the whole Kingdom of Archimage. In my own territory there was a marvelous manikin who was called Eduard von Hartmann, who preached universal suicide. So I ask, in view of all these portents, Are we pessimists or optimists? For as soon as all of our marvelous puppets dream of war or extinction we shall have to invent some new cosmological system. All the old ones are worn out. What form shall our new Sacred Lie take?
Impresario Eternitatus: Stuff! When all these siderealists are fully enlightened Archimage will drown the Sun in space and send all our beautiful toys, from Mercury to Neptune, crashing into the billionth billionth whorl of nihility, and we, the sublime necromancers of life, shall take flight beyond Sirius, where we shall organize another sidereal system and enjoy for another aeon the tragedies and comedies of flesh and blood. But to your story, Capocomico.
Capocomico: The toys of my Earth children have been many. From their first two toys of which they have left any record—the Pyramids and the Tower of Babel—to their last two toys—the flying machine and the Panama Canal—they have excited my mirth, and, brothers, my pity; for few of them have ever guessed the fatality of the Eternal Return. Solomon, King of the Jews; the Yogis of India and Nietzsche, the last a terrible portent among men, alone have dwelt upon the Everlasting Repetition of Things. Our planet children must never know of this law, hence we, at least I, have decreed that they should have short historical memories. On my Earth their memory of events does not go back further than eight or nine thousand years at the most, where things are lost in myth and cloudland. In the great ocean of human [370] life on the Earth, as in all your own particular planets, the great historical epochs are waves, and the deep hollows that lie between are the all-merciful Lethes.
Fifty thousand years ago, as you all know, the Panama Canal was opened by identically the same nations that hurried to participate in its opening last March. And the tale I told you was the same; but as we, too, gods of the ether, are under the same law of Repetition as our mortals, and from time to time are compelled—even thou, O Impresario Eternitatus!—to a season of syncope beyond these worlds saturated with Sun-sweat, you may not remember that event.
The Spirit of Saturn: I dream of the Great Extinction. I am weary of light; I am like a brain scribbled o’er with thought and a heart that is like a giant cluster of empty grape skins. The target of my eye is riddled with images. I have bad dreams. I see myself as a rebellious atom of Space that weeps to crumble back to its God.
Capocomico: Saturn never had a sense of humor—he’s a moralist. But listen.
On the sixth day of last March the navies of all the world lay in the harbor—and far beyond—of my newest ant hill, New York City. You see it, O fellow gods, do you not, glimmering down there, that little wispy patch of light on Earth?
In fifty thousand years never had there been such a conclave of sea-lords and painted steel. Here was marshalled the granite purpose of the races. It was a peace conference of the war instinct. Those thousand and twelve battleships were the sublimation of National Feeling, evocation in matter of the supra-subtle dreams of the Will-to-Power of the races of Earth. The conning towers and the turrets, the giant fire-belchers that poked their sinister nostrils into the air—winking, blinking, ironic billion billion atomed air!—those hulks which from the placid waters of the bay and ocean looked like the frowning, impregnable ramparts of citadels made for Wodins and Jupiters, but which from where I stood in the ether at a point directly over the Narrows were of as much importance as gondolas in the giant interstellar etheric canals in the Milky Way, the Venice of the skies. All this skilled mechanism of these ingenious Earth ants had come out of the dugs of the People Their work! And the acclamations of five million spectators rose in billows, which the Sea hurled back with its ethereal moan.
It was a rendezvous of all the rulers of the world as well. Each fleet, dressed in flaming colors, carried its ruler. The kingdoms and republics of the Earth were in New York literally. England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Turkey, Norway, Sweden, Spain, China, Japan, all the South American nations had sent its ruler—its Consciousness—to this Armada. A surge of Oneness swept over the subconscious nature of the Peoples of the Earth. Calcutta greeted London—the new route to the Indies at last!—and the voice of San Francisco thundered against the cliffs of Dover.
As those sea monsters stemmed out to sea the forts thundered and the little steel Aetnas hurled back their gladness, and all New York became a whistling, shrieking Larynx. Thous, Archimage, great and glorious Sun God, were at your best that day, for light hung like giant thawing icicles from every point in space, and the dazzling uniforms of the monarchs of the peoples created, in my eye, marvelous mirages in the air—mirages of buried Pompeiis and the pulverized sarcophagi of the rulers of the people.
And as the caravan of steel went away into the sea and air I, Capocomico the Great, ironic melancholy Spirit of the Earth, pondered on the drama of fifty thousand years before, where from the same spot in the ether I beheld the same event, and which I, because of the inexorable laws of Fatality to which we gods are all subjected, must lead to its identical issue.
On the eighteenth day of March, in this year 1915, the Conquerors, hereditary and elective, and their steel dugouts reached the Canal.
How to describe the sadic night of nights, the eve of the nineteenth day of March, which was to see the procession of fleets and rulers enter the Canal! How to describe that Event which put the palsy of fear on mankind and stanched in their sockets the hosannahs of a billion beings!
The sea was as smooth as the pools of yon ether. The tropic moon rose at the edge of the horizon and seemed to roll and toss on the waves and wheel the air like the phosphor-flaming eye of one of the dead primordial gods. The majesty of the world was en fête. Thousands of lights from the battleships and cruisers and hundreds of pleasure craft flung their scorn at the stars. Kings and Czars and Sultans and Presidents drank side by side to the new route to the Indies.
The merchant princes of the world were there in their yachts, like kites and vultures with their eyes lighted for the feasts on the body of China and India, and, in turn, Chinamen and Indians, dressed in purple silks, drank to the Bagdads of the Occident.
And amid that scene of revelry and hypocrisy, while the bands played the national hymns, and while all brains smoked with wine and the image of the tomorrow, the Moon climbed the heavens like the yellowed eye of an extinct God. The moon—eternal mirror of man’s nothingness! Magnificent frozen moth hovering over the Niagaras of birth and death on the planet Earth!
A sudden gigantic wave out of the smooth. Then another. A distant rumbling as of the advance of a [371] thousand unbolted thunders. A great heave from the dugs of Mother Earth. Another gigantic raucous sigh. Then the mouth of Mother Earth opened. Five hundred battleships and cruisers went into her aesophagus.
Panama and Colon met in mid-air. Five hundred square miles of Colombia fell on the Russian and American fleets. Three English dreadnaughts received the extreme unction of fire and lava before sinking with the granite locks of the canal into the maw of the hungry Mother.
The manholes of Hell had blown off.
At the very center of the canal the great volcano which they now call God’s Volcano rose and raked the air in a circle with its fires for a hundred miles.
Nicaragua was piled on Venezuela, and both were scuttled. The Atlantic and the Pacific became one in the union of two three thousand feet high tidal waves, their nuptial couch the air, their wedding priest the Moon, which still looked down like the yellowed eye of an extinct primordial God.
The rulers of the Earth and the battle fleets of the peoples and the floating cathedrals that housed the High Priests of Commerce had gone to Domdaniel, that marvelous kingdom under the bed of the seas where the King of Magicians reigns, the great alchemist of matter and mind. There flesh and steel shall be worked to something rare and strange.
That night, the eighteenth day of March, 1915, North America ended at the southern boundary of Mexico and South America began at the northern edge of Brazil.
The Canal was open. There was at last a new route to the Indies. In the center of this new magnificent waterway flames the Volcano of God, like a great garnet in a bezel of green and blue.
Impresario Eternitatus: The story of the year from Earth, Capocomico, is inconsequential. It is even vulgar. Our sidereal system is traveling at the rate of three hundred and sixty kilometers a second toward the great blue sun of Vega in Lyra. We shall reach there in about fourteen million years. Now, try to do something original, Capocomico, before we reach Vega. Pentheus, Spirit of Jupiter, it’s your turn.
Source: The International, Dec. 1914, pp. 369 – 371
Notes
In this story, De Casseres refers to “the mighty Arcvad” on Mars, a clear allusion to his January 1914 story “Arcvad the Terrible” published in The Forum.