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Refractions
Life and Letters vol. 9, no. 62 (February 1935) : 541-543
archive.org : link
 

Statues
      Each life is a posture. In the blaze of experience we unfold as a flower, or, like some dancer of the Orient, with averted head and lowered eyes we bend to our final attitude. These merging movements are the sum of our cycle. They are what we do in the face of life, and what life does to us. One slow movement is a lifetime’s comment and response. With rooted feet each body utters its single syllable. One may slowly rise to full height and with arms upstretched stare wide-eyed into the truth that blinds and will not be discerned. Another with slow consummation passes his hand over his body’s full vitality; or, quivering with an alertness so intense that all movement is stilled, a third stands with closed eyes unable to bear more than his own sentiency. A fourth yields to the tenderness she feels bathing her until, finding its source, she holds her hand as a cup at her own heart. A fifth denies in favour of a harmony that eludes, yet must exist, and is sought for, strained after by the listening eyes and negating sway of the head. Others lie for ever crouched in terror, lips twitching in propitiating grimace; others snarl as from the mouth of a cave, or whirl endlessly to pounce on the menace approaching from behind; or else they swell and boom to allay their own fears with their own noise, and each is convinced that theirs was the inevitable movement dictated by the notes of the reality they heard. But along with conviction runs the desire to be in unison with someone else, for if the notes heard and answered to were real for another, then the thing they sought and lied and died in following was perhaps real and not a shadow of themselves.

Spectrums
      We are as caught in our outlines as though we were crystals and our refractions of experience were limited by the number of our facets. We act as spectrums breaking life into qualities as light into colours, for what are colours but qualities of light, and what are qualities but degrees of life, and what is life but light? There is a point of emotional intensity where one feels not a quality but light itself. Then time and entity lose their hold. Consciousness is so freed from time that it packs a blast of experience into something too small to be measured as time. Time is perception of aspects. It is the zero’s awareness of positive and negative. If we attempt to resolve the two into one, we fall as helpless as a tortoise on its back, [542] waving at the sky where we have placed our symbol of unity.

Signals
      I have caught a glimpse of law. I have sensed the movement of the world. That which relinquishes something in becoming form was for a moment clear to me. I almost know or I half remember. Law signals to me in the shape of a shell, in the mathematical branching of an araucaria, in the centrifugal unfolding of the chrysanthemum’s petals. Energy makes itself visible, motion shows me its pattern, and I pulse with the motion that paused in the pattern. Then the energy ebbs from my sight and I am left with form which puzzles me because it is so separate. It tricks me into doubting the reality of that which slowed into form, so real is form itself. Actuality seems an illusion maintained beyond the limit of the possible. The strain is intolerable as I wait in this breathless stillness of hard outline. Held prisoner in the sleep of living, I am numb with having half known the unknowable.

Actuality
      I look in at actuality as into a brightly lighted room full of people all strange to me. I step inside pleased at the variety I see, wondering at the air of solidity everyone wears. I cannot follow what is said, for so much seems to be taken for granted that I am constrained at having come too late to ever understand. If I am addressed I glance to the right and left in search of a place where I may the better receive the remark, so little do I know what to do with it. No one sees the wide-open door through which I came, and so dazzled am I by the great discrepancy between there and here that, though I know my reality is close behind, I cannot tell of it. If I turned I could tell it all, but I cannot turn, I am held as in a nightmare. I must find order in this bright, disturbing room. But it was order that I left outside in that whirling darkness. This is chaos. Suddenly frightened I try to escape by conforming quickly lest I be kept too long. I name things, I call a shade a thing in itself, I declare opposites to be something more than relations, I am in a net and I am desperate. Will more be asked of me than my voice and hands? Surely I shall not have to give all of myself? I move slowly backwards until I stand at the very edge of that which is exit and entrance. My foot is on the threshold and I feel the great rhythms circling just outside the door, but I am gripped by the agony of choosing. Which way shall I turn? Which way?

Predicament
      I have become inextricably entangled in a mechanical doll. Some say the doll is me, but that is absurd, though I admit that I am embarrassingly implicated. I must be so lightly attached, yet I cannot shake myself loose. It is possible that I have in some way become connected with the machinery. The discrepancy between the doll and me is so great that there is something peculiarly annoying in the conspiracy everyone seems to be in to [543] pretend that our connection is natural. My entire energy is consumed in protesting that the arrangement is not of my making, and what should be clear to everyone is that it places me at a disadvantage. I have had moments of thinking that the thing was going to run down, but now that it has gone so far and led me into many equivocal situations, so that I am flustered and can hardly remember where I do rightly belong, I ask you to where, in case the thing should stop, to where could I jump?
 

26 July 2026