Bubbles of the Foam | Page 2

dangerous to enter, so difficult, as Mahmood
subsequently found, to cross, they discovered, that over and above the
plain prosaic danger, this Waste of Sand laid, like a very demon, goblin
snares for the unwary traveller's destruction, in the form of its Mirage.
Ignorant of "optical phenomena," they gazed at this strange illusion,
these phantom trees and water, these mocking semblances of cities that
vanished as you reached them, with astonishment, and even awe. It

struck their imagination, and they gave to it a name scarcely less
poetical than the thing: calling it "deer-water," or the "thirst of the
antelope."[1] Nor was this all. For the apparition was a kind of symbol,
made as it were expressly for their own phenomenology: it contained a
moral meaning that harmonised precisely with all their philosophical
ideas. What could be a better illustration of that MÁYÁ, that
metaphysical Delusion, in which all souls are wrapped, which leads
them to impute Reality to the Phantasms, the unsubstantial objects of
the senses, and lures them on to moral ruin as they wander in the waste?
And accordingly, we find the poets constantly recurring to this thirst of
the gazelle, as an emblem of the treacherous and bewildering
fascination of the fleeting shadows of this lower life (ihaloka;) the
beauty that is hollow, the Bubble of the World. And thus,
Disappointment is of the essence of Existence: disappointment, which
can only come about, when hopes and expectations have been founded
on a want of understanding (awiweka;) a blindness, born of Desire, that
sets and keeps its unhappy victims hunting, in vain, for what is not to
be found.
[Footnote 1: I am told, by a pundit in these matters, that the term is
found at least as early as Patanjali (the Mahábháshya;) that is probably,
the latter half of the second century B.C.: and hence, it must have
originated long before.]
Especially, essentially, in love: love, which has its origin in Dream, its
acme in Ecstasy, and its catastrophe in Disillusion: love, which is life's
core and kernel and epitome, the focus and quintessence of existence. A
life that is without it has somehow missed its mark: it is meaningless
and plotless, "a string of casual episodes, like a bad tragedy." For what,
after all, is Love? Who has given an account of it? Plato's fable, which
makes Love the child of Satiety and Want, or Poverty and Plenty, is a
pretty piece of fancy: it is clever: but like mathematics, an explanation
of the brain rather than the heart. Something is missing. For Plato,
almost always delicate and subtle, is never tender: the reason is, that he
was atrophied on the feminine side: he does not consequently
understand sex, being himself only half a man: that is, only man and
nothing more. But all the really great imaginative men are bi-sexual:

they have a large ingredient of woman in their composition, which
gives to their divination an extra touch of something that others cannot
reach. And so, with equal poetry, yet with a pathos infinitely deeper,
our Milton makes Love the child of Loneliness:[2] a parentage evinced
by the terrible melancholy of Love when he cannot find his proper
object, and the blank desolation and despair of the frightful void and
blackness left behind, when he has lost it. But now, it is just this
intolerable loneliness which makes him idealise the commonplace, and
see all things in the light of his own yearning, creating for himself
visions of unimaginable happiness, which presently vanish, to resolve
his Eden into nothing, and leave him, with no companion but the horror
of his own intensified isolation, in the sand. A situation, which hardly
any lover that really is a lover can endure, without going mad. They are
very shallow theologians, who by way of pandering to sentimental
prejudices make the essence of the Deity to consist in Love. Poor Deity!
his life would be a Hell, past all human imagination: an everlasting
Loneliness, with no prospect of release. For it is precisely to escape
from this hell that so many forlorn lovers take refuge in the tomb: a
resource not available to those who cannot die. Death is not always
terrible: sometimes he is kind.
[Footnote 2: In his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.]
* * * * *
Such then is the theme of Bubbles of the Foam: a little love-story,
whose title, like that of all her elder sisters, has in the original a double
application, by reason of the ambiguity of the last word, to Love, and to
the Moon. We might also render it, A Heavenly Bubble, or, Love is a
Bubble, or Nothing but a Bubble, or A Bubble of the World,[3] thinking
either of Love or the Moon. For the Moon, like the