New Lands | Page 3

before.
There are, or there are not, nearby cities of foreign existences. They have, or they have not, been seen, by reflection, in the skies of Sweden and Alaska. As one will. Whether acceptable, or too preposterous to be thought of, our data are of rabbles of living things that have been seen in the sky; also of processions of military beings--monsters that live in the sky and die in the sky, and spatter this earth with their red life-fluids--ships from other worlds that have been seen by millions of inhabitants of this earth, exploring, night after night, in the sky of France, England, New England, and Canada--signals from the moon, which, according to notable indications, may not be so far from this earth as New York is from London--definitely reported and, in some instances, multitudinously witnessed, events that have been disregarded by our opposition--
A scientific priestcraft--
"Thou shalt not!" is crystallized in its frozen textbooks.
I have data upon data upon data of new lands that are not far away. I hold out expectations and the materials of new hopes and new despairs and new triumphs and new tragedies. I hold out my hands and point to the sky--there is a hierarchy that utters me manacles, I think--there is a dominant force that pronounces prisons that have dogmas for walls for such thoughts. It binds its formulas around all attempting extensions.
But sounds have been heard in the sky. They have been heard, and it is not possible to destroy the records of them. They have been heard. In their repetitions and regularities of series and intervals, we shall recognize perhaps interpretable language. Columns of clouds, different-colored by sunset, have vibrated to the artillery of other worlds like the strings of a cosmic harp, and I conceive of no buzzing of insects that can forever divert attention from such dramatic reverberations. Language has shone upon the dark parts of the moon: luminous exclamations that have fluttered in the lunar crater Copernicus; the eloquence of the starlike light in Aristarchus; hymns that have been chanted in lights and shades upon Linn?; the wilder, luminous music in Plato--
But not a sound that has been heard in the sky, not a thing that has fallen from the sky, not a thing that "should not be," but that has nevertheless been seen in the sky can we, with any sense of freedom, investigate, until first we find out about the incubus that in the past has suffocated even speculation. I shall find out for myself: anybody who cares to may find out with me. A ship from a foreign world does, or does not, sail in the sky of this earth. It is in accordance with observations by hundreds of thousands of witnesses that this event has taken place, and, if the time be when aeronautics upon this earth is of small development, that is an important circumstance to consider--but there is suffocation upon the whole occurrence and every one of its circumstances. Nobody can give good attention to the data, if diverting his mind is consciousness, altogether respectful, of the scientists who say that there are no other physical worlds except planets, millions of miles away, distances that conceivable vessels could not traverse. I should like to let loose, in an opening bombardment, the data of the little black stones of Birmingham, which, time to time, in a period of eleven years, fell obviously from a fixed point in the sky, but such a release now, would be wasted. It will have to be prepared for. Now each one would say to himself that there are no such fixed points in the sky. Why not? Because astronomers say that there are not.
But there is something else that is implied. Implied is the general supposition that the science of astronomy represents all that is most accurate, most exacting, painstaking, semi-religious in human thought, and is therefore authoritative.
Anybody who has not been through what I've been through, in investigating this subject, would ask what are the bases and what is the consistency of the science of astronomy. The miserable, though at times amusing, confusions of thought that I find in this field of supposed research word my inquiry differently--what of dignity, or even of decency, is in it?
Phantom dogmas, with their tails clutching at vacancies, are coiled around our data.
Serpents of pseudo-thought are stifling history.
They are squeezing "Thou shalt not!" upon Development.
New Lands--and the horrors and lights, explosions and music of them; rabbles of hellhounds and the march of military angels. But they are Promised Lands, and first must we traverse a desert. There is ahead of us a waste of parallaxes and spectrograms and triangulations. It may be weary going through a waste of astronomic determinations, but that depends--
If out of a dreary, academic zenith shower betrayals