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and winds that follow, speeding the ship, and the other winds that beat it back and
threaten it with the sea. And the fogs.
Each man, if he wishes, can employ this element alone, blowing up his ship with
the superficial gases until it floats like a balloon, with all the unconscious cargo buried
under tile water, a sea anchor on a line. His social vista will be extended by this inflation
of the ego and he will be a conspicuous craft, a high personage, but empty, without
capacity for cargo, drifting on every breeze and not making any port. And he will be in a
bad situation for storms; the anchor in the deep unconscious cannot be cut away and it
may pull apart his airship--or the winds may beat him to pieces. But, when the sailing is
pleasant, this is an envied way of life. It has a Park Avenue address and sits on many
university faculties.
Some men, by the same figure, are desperate rafts--all but submerged in Instinct--
waving with expiring arms for aid or cannibalizing each other. They never knew that they
were launched as ships. Or they traded their ship for some temporary convenience and
only the raft remains now that the chief asset is spent. They stare and starve and stab each
other and the sharks shove them overboard. The ocean is seen dotted with such rafts by
the wide scrutinizer. Some are even heaped with money, but neither the castaways nor the
sharks have any lust for the bills and gold.
On the stout vessel, the rich cargo of purpose proceeds toward the goal and
harbor. The passengers are content. The captain examines the sun for information and the
turning log for a report of the deep unconscious. If more knowledge be needed he has
charts and the ship's library--his education, and access everywhere on board to advice.
There may be, of course, malcontents below decks--or men in chains--sins which
the skipper has put out of sight and punished doubly by forgetting. These, if such exist,
plot to drill through the ship and scuttle it or to mutiny, with the aid of bribed prison
wardens, and set the ship on fire or blow it up or rape the women and escape in a small
boat. They also, sometimes, lure attack from the archetypal monsters that swim in the
abyss--for they remember their relationship.
Such is man and his journey--every man. Some carry wealth and are swift; some
are slow tankers with a coastal voyage to make. But all the conditions are the same. The
view is equally interesting. The opportunity to live is equal. And the voyage of greatest
profit is not the one that delivers the rarest cargo but the one that puts to port with cargo
intact and captain most content. Some skippers pray their way across, pretending a direct
access to God; they seldom meet the people on the boat who do not pray, and they rarely
know the crew. Some are scientists of navigation and do not deign to associate with the
rest of the world; their talk is mathematics. But all must face the same sea, the same
weathers, and the beasts; these cannot be avoided either in a palace or in a dungeon.
Most skippers fail to make the great discovery (which comes piecemeal to the
honest observer) that they are not just captain and crew and passengers but the cargo and
the ship--and the sea and the wind besides, if they can understand the venerable
association; that they are their own idlers and enjoyers, students and mutineers; that they
are even more than men, being somewhat females. For the opposite which resides inside
them, explains why the ship is called "she"--and this gives them an all but mystical
association with every woman on board, making it possible to understand women and to
learn how each one woman is them all.)
Whatever this assembly of facts from space and events from time may do or
achieve, is one man's life. Who is rescued, what is read in the library, the passing ships
encountered, and all the endless palaver of the radio antenna--this is the same, too. For
the true captain is with everything and everyone in the world and he is of the world but he
is also alone in the world because he is the world.
Such is consciousness, the infinite mirror, the magic glass which takes images of
fact and projects reality from the imagination.
Such is Nature. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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