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By Root 1085 0

larger atoms that make up that mould or growth, humanity, as humanity is from the stars. And the items of this connecting feeding mesh (like an electric grid of humanity) were one; just as there is no such thing as “soldiers” but only Soldier, and not “clerks” but Clerk, and Gardener, and Teacher. For since any category anywhere always beat on its own wavelength of sound/light, there could not be individuals in this nourishing web. Together they formed one beat in the great dance, one note in the song. Everywhere and on every level the little individuals made up wholes, struck little notes, made tones of colour. On every level: even myself and my friends whom the Crystal had absorbed into a whole, unimportant gnats, and my women and my children and everyone I had known in my life—even someone passed on a street corner and smiled at once—these struck a note, made a whole. And this was the truth that gave the utter insignificance of these motes their significance: in the great singing dance, everything linked and moved together. My mind was the facet of a mind, like cells in a honeycomb. Letting my mind lie dark there, quiescent, a mirror for light, I could feel or sense or recognise a pulse of individuality that I had known once as poor Charlie or Felicity or James or Thomas. Pulses of mind lay beating and absorbing beside my own little pulse, and together we were a whole, connecting within this wholeness with the myriad differing wholes that each of these people had formed in their lives, were continuously forming in every breath they took, and through this web, these webs, ran a finer beat, as water ran everywhere in the stone city through channels cut or built in rock by men who were able to grade the lift or the fall of the earth.

But yet, while I observed this, felt this, understood at last, I was conscious always of that old, that very ancient weight, the cold of grief I had become aware of so early on after my absorption into this new area of being. There it lay, just out of sight, deadly and punishing, for its pulse was that of a cold heaviness, it had to be a counterweight to joy. There it was, close, always—I acknowledged it and in doing so moved out and on, since now everything was open to me and I floated deliciously, like a bubble in foam or as if lying at ease between a bird’s stretched wings.

The corporal earth, like a round boulder, lay revolving erratically at about the distance it would take a shout or a hail to carry. It spun slowly about, wobbling badly. This spinning made a system of streaks, brown, blue and white, show on the surface of the globe, but I knew that these streaks were the seas and continents and icecaps in motion. The globe lay surrounded by its envelope of pulsing light, through which, however, I could see, as if I were peering through a thin opalescent cloud. I was seeing this earth spinning in a time that was not humanity’s time. Somewhere behind me, or to one side, was the vast white blaze of the sun, and in this steady blaze the earth spun. I lay steady, a minuscule planet of the sun, watching the earth in its spin. Day and night were not visible except as a soft flicker, and the violent rocking back and forth that makes our seasons, seemed like a green flush that passed in a wink, and a momentary thickening of the white streaks at North and South poles. At this speed all I could see was a whizzing around on its axis and a whirling around the sun—and there was the weight of cold grief present here too, the compulsion, but I did not now attend to this, for as I thought of the speed of the planet, it began to slow, and now it was turning no faster than needed for me to take in a pattern of earth and water before the pattern turned out of sight. Since I was now further away than before, when the chart of darting impulses had shown itself to me, I could examine in less detail but in more perspective how the illuminated envelope about the earth thrilled and glowed and changed and shivered in its dance, and I could see very clearly how this envelope which clung to the earth’s surface like