A. E.
_______________________________from THE CANDLE OF VISION
(1918)
Analytic
BEFORE I may write more of that supernature which rises, a tower of heaven, above the depths where we move, I know I must try to solve some of the doubts and perplexities which come to most who hear of things they have not heard or seen for their own part. They will say, "You are an artist and have painted such things. We know you have imagination which creates images vividly. You are a poet, and it is the art of your tribe to gild for us the thoughts you have, the emotions you feel, so that what moods are common with us you attire richly till they walk like kings. But what certainty have you that it is not all fancy, and the visions you speak of were not born in the cloudy hollows of your brain, and are not glorified memories of things you have first seen with the sensual eye, and which were afterwards refashioned in memory? What certitude have you that these things you speak of are in any way related to a real world invisible to our eyes?"
To solve these doubts I must not fall back on authority, or appeal for trust. It will avail nothing to say that others have seen such things and have with me looked upon them, we speaking of them together as people who see the same scene, who refer as they speak to rocks, waters and trees, knowing these are a common vision. It would be true if I said this, but it would avail me nothing in my desire that you should go hopefully on the way I would have you journey. On that path, as an ancient scripture says, to whatsoever place one would travel that place one's own self becomes, and I must try first to uproot false ideas about memory, imagination and vision so that by pure reason people may be led out of error and be able to distinguish between that which arises in themselves and that which comes otherwise and which we surmise is a visitor from a far country. I too in boyhood had the idea so commonly held that the pictures of imagination are old memories refashioned. I first doubted this as a child when, lying on my bed, there came a sudden illumination of my brain, and pictures moved before my inner eyes like the coloured moving pictures we see in the theatre. I saw, I remember, a sunlit hillside which seemed close to me. There were huge grey boulders strewn about. Beyond this hill-slope I could see far distant mountains, pale blue through the sparkling air. While I looked, giants in brazen armour clambered swiftly up the hillside, swinging clubs which had spiked balls of brass held by a chain at the end. They glittered in the sun as they ran up and past me. Motion, light, shadow, colour were perfect as things seen passing before the physical eyes. Then the illumination in my brain ceased, the picture vanished, and I was startled, for I had seen no hillside like that, no distant mountains, no giants in brazen armour in picture of theatre, and I began a speculation which soon ended because childhood keeps no prolonged meditation. I may take this as a type of vision common to most people. Either when they sit in darkness, or with closed eyes, or as they drift into sleep or awaken from sleep, they pass through strange cities, float in the air, roam through woods, have adventures with people who are not the people they meet every day. There is nothing uncommon about such visions. It is in the interpretation of them that error arises. People pass them by too easily saying, "It is imagination," as if imagination were as easily explained as a problem in Euclid, and was not a mystery, and as if every moving picture in the brain did not need such minute investigation as Darwin gave to earthworms.
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