Sauron Defeated (37 page)

'Soon I noticed down by the river, near the heart of the agglomeration, where I had observed it beginning, several constructions that endured. Two or three had some real form, not without an echo of beauty even to one fresh from Tekel-Mirim. They continued standing, while the ringworm ate its way further and further around them.

' "I must have a really close look," I thought; "for if there are hnau here, it is important, however nasty they may be; and I must take some notes. Just a look, and then I must be off. Now, what is that thing like a great fluted mushroom with an odd top? It hasn't been here as long as some of the other larger things." With that I came right down.

'Of course, if one really concentrates on things - especially to observe their static forms, not their changes, as I'd been doing in Tekel-Mirim - then they tend to halt, as it were. The speed is in you, when you're not tied to a time-clock of a body. So as I bent my attention, I lost all the acceleration that the excitement of Tekel-Mirim had induced. Things stood still for a moment, rock-hard.

'I was gazing at the Camera.(69) I was about thirty feet above the ground in Radcliffe Square. I suppose I had at first been seeing the Thames Valley, at a huge speed; and then, slower and slower, Oxford since I don't know when, since the beginning of the University probably.

'The clock on Saint Mary's struck 7 a.m. - and I woke up for my appointment. To go to Mass. It was the morning of the feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, June 29th 1986, by our reckoning.

That's all for tonight! I must go to bed.'

'Well, I must be off too,' said Cameron. 'Thanks for a very enterrtaining evening!'

MGR. NC. PF. AAL. RD. WTJ. RS. JJ. JJR.

NOTES.

1. The Great Storm of June 12th, 1987: my father's 'prevision' was only out by four months. The greatest storm in living memory struck southern England, causing vast damage, on October 16th, 1987. It is curious in the light of this to read Mr. Green's remarks (p. 158): 'it may well be that the predictions (notably of the Storm), though genuine and not coincidences, were unconscious: giving one more glimpse of the strange processes of so-called literary "invention", with which the Papers are largely concerned.'

2. O.S.B.: 'Order of Saint Benedict'.

3. For the title as typed in the final text D, but subsequently rejected, see p. 153 note 2.

4. In A and B the report of Night 54 is absent (cf. Mr. Green's Foreword, p. 156: Many Nights are represented only by a few lines, or by short entries, of which Nights 54 and 64 have been included as specimens').

5. I cannot explain The Canticle of Artegall. Irish arteagal =

'article'; and an isolated note of my father's reads: 'My/The Canticle of Night in Ale', 'Artegall', 'article Artegall'. But this does not help very much.

6. In B Night 60 is Night 251, without date (see p. 149).

7. I have mentioned (p. 150) a page that preceded text A and carries the identifications of members of the Notion Club with members of the Inklings. On this page are found two brief, abandoned openings for The Notion Club Papers. In the first Ramer asks Latimer (predecessor of Guildford) for his opinion of his story.

With ' "Yes, I suppose it'll do," I answered' this opening breaks off, and is followed by:

When I had finished reading my story, we sat in silence for a while. 'Well?' I said. 'What do you think of it? Will it do?'

Nobody answered, and I felt the air charged with disapproval, as it often is in our circle, though on this occasion the critical interruptions had been fewer than usual. 'Oh, come on. What have you got to say? I may as well get the worst over,' I urged turning to Latimer. He is not a flatterer.

'Oh yes, it'll do, I suppose so,' he answered reluctantly. 'But why pick on me? You know I hate criticizing offhand and still in the heat of listening - or the chill.'

Here this second opening was abandoned. It is presumably to be connected with the word 'Self' written under Ramer at the head of the page (p. 150).

8. David Lindsay, author of A Voyage to Arcturus, published in 1920, to which Guildford refers subsequently (see note 9).

9. Cf. my father's letter to Stanley Unwin of 4 March 1938, concerning Out of the Silent Planet (Letters no. 26): I read 'Voyage to Arcturus' with avidity - the most comparable work, though it is both more powerful and more mythical (and less rational, and also less of a story - no one could read it merely as a thriller and without interest in philosophy religion and morals).

10. Cavorite was the substance 'opaque to gravitation' devised by the scientist Cavor in H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1901).

11. For 'the Great Explosion' see Mr. Green's Foreword, p. 157, and p. 186.

12. Ransom: Dr. Elwin Ransom was the Cambridge philologist who in Out of the Silent Planet went under duress to Mars (Malacandra), and in Perelandra went to Venus by the mediation of the Oyarsa of Malacandra (see next note).

13. At the beginning of Perelandra the Eldils are described thus: For Ransom had met other things in Mars besides the Martians. He had met the creatures called eldila, and specially that great eldil who is the ruler of Mars or, in their speech, the Oyarsa of Malacandra. The eldila are very different from any planatary creatures. Their physical organism, if organism it can be called, is quite unlike either the human or the Martian. They do not eat, breed, breathe, or suffer natural death, and to that extent resemble thinking minerals more than they resemble anything we should recognise as an animal. Though they appear on planets and may even seem to our senses to be sometimes resident in them, the precise spatial location of an eldil at any moment presents great problems. They themselves regard space (or 'Deep Heaven') as their true habitat, and the planets are to them not closed but merely moving points -

perhaps even interruptions - in what we know as the Solar System and they as the Field of Arbol.

14. Old Solar: cf. Perelandra Chapter 2, in which Ransom speaks to Lewis before his journey to Venus begins:

'... I rather fancy I am being sent because those two black-guards who kidnapped me and took me to Malacandra, did something which they never intended: namely, gave a human being a chance to learn that language.'

'What language do you mean?'

'Hressa-Hlab, of course. The language I learned in Malacandra.'

'But surely you don't imagine they will speak the same language on Venus?'

'Didn't I tell you about that?' said Ransom... 'I'm surprised I didn't, for I found out two or three months ago, and scientifically it is one of the most interesting things about the whole affair. It appears we were quite mistaken in thinking Hressa-Hlab the peculiar speech of Mars. It is really what may be called Old Solar, Hlab-Eribol-ef-Cordi.'

'What on earth do you mean?'

'I mean that there was originally a common speech for all rational creatures inhabiting the planets of our system: those that were ever inhabited, I mean - what the eldils call the Low Worlds.... That original speech was lost on Thulcandra, our own world, when our whole tragedy took place. No human language now known in the world is descended from it.'

For Ramer's observations on this subject see p. 203 and note 55.

15. In the original text A (still followed in B) Dolbear, waking up, says with reference to these words of Guildford's ('Incarnation.

By being born'): 'Then try reincarnation, or perhaps transcarna-tion without loss of memory. What do you say, Ramer?'

16. Arry, for Arundel, became the name by which Lowdham was known in text C; in the earliest lists of members of the Notion Club he was simply Harry Loudham. For the significance of this see pp. 233 - 4, 281 - 2.

17. New Erewhon: Erewhon (= 'Nowhere') is the title of a satire by Samuel Butler (1872). News from Nowhere: a fantasy of the future by William Morris (1890).

18. Turl Street or the Turl is a narrow street running between High Street and Broad Street in Oxford, onto which open the gates of Ramer's college Jesus, Guildford's college Lincoln, and Exeter College.

19. In B Night 61 is Night 252, without date (see p. 149).

20. B has Harry Loudham: see note 16.

21. In the 'Prose Edda' the Icelander Snorri Sturluson tells of Skidbladnir:

'Skihblahnir is the best of ships and made with great skill ...

Certain dwarves, the sons of Ivaldi, made Skihblahnir and gave the ship to Freyr; it is so large that all the AEsir [gods] can man it with their weapons and equipment of war, and it has a favourable wind so soon as the sail is set, wherever it is bound; but when it is not going to sea it is made of so many pieces and with such great cunning that it can be folded up like a napkin and kept in one's pouch' (Snorra Edda, Gylfaginning $42).

22. The Battle of Bosworth Field (1485), in which King Richard III was defeated and slain by Henry Tudor (Henry VII). A has here

'at any period before the accession of Richard II' (1377). On Frankley's horror borealis see pp. 151 - 2, 159.

23. 'Yes, 1938,' said Cameron: in A this observation is given to Loudham, and rather surprisingly Latimer's comment is much as Guildford's in the final text: 'whose memory is like that. I doubt if he ever read the book. Memoirs of the courts of minor 18th century monarchs are his natural browsing-ground.' Yet at this earliest stage Loudham's interest in Norse was perhaps already present, since it is he who makes the joke about Skidbladnir immediately before. As B was written the remark was still attributed to Loudham, and Guildford's comment remains the same as in A; later Loudham was changed to Franks (the earlier name of Frankley) and then to Cameron. See pp. 281 - 2.

24. Last Men in London by Olaf Stapledon (1932).

25. hnau: rational embodied beings.

26. I have added the footnote from the third manuscript C; it is not in the final typescript D, but was perhaps omitted inadvertently.

27. In A there is no reference to the Glacier or any mention of what the scene in the book was; but a later addition in the margin runs: and the chief difference (since both were now inner) is that the one is tinged with sadness for it is past, but the other, the Glacier, is not so tinged, has only its own proper flavour, because it is not past or present with reference to the world.

28. In A Dolbear does not speak at this point; Ramer says: 'And the will to remember can be strengthened; and the memory enlarged.

(Dolbear helped me in that: I suppose that is what made him so suspicious.) Now here comes another thread.' Thus neither Emberu nor any other name appear here in A; in 8 the name is Gyonyoru, changed subsequently to Emberu.

29. Following this, the text of Ramer's remarks in A and B is different from that in the final form. I give the B version:

A living body can move in space, but not without an effort (as in a leap), or a vehicle. A mind can move more freely and very much quicker than a living body, but not without effort of its own kind, or without a vehicle. [Added: This is distinct from the instantaneous movement of thought to objects already in its grasp as memory.] And Space and Time do exist as conditions for it, especially while it is incarnate, and certainly if it is (largely for that reason) interested in them and studying them.

How and how far in either dimension can it jump, without a vehicle? I asked myself. It probably cannot travel in empty Space, or eventless Time (which is the duration of empty Space): it would not be aware of it, if it did, anyway. How far can it jump over it? How can it jump at all?

The mind uses the memory of its body...

30. For the source of Lowdham's allusion to the Pig on the Ruined Pump see the Foreword.

31. The Banbury Road leads north out of the centre of Oxford. I do not think that there was any special reason for the choice of this particular late Victorian house (the reference to it only enters in C, where my father first wrote 'No. x Banbury Road', changing this subsequently to 'No. 100'). Mr. Green, the putative editor of the Papers refers in his Foreword (p. 157) to poltergeist activity at this house in the early years of the twenty-first century.

32. Gunthorpe Park in Matfield: so far as I car. discover, the only Matfield in England is in Kent, but there is no Gunthorpe Park in its vicinity.

33. Emberu: A has here: 'Not if you mean for getting such news as I put into that tale you've heard', and no name appears; 8 has, as at the previous occurrence (note 28) Cyonyoru ) Emberu.

34. My father once described to me his dream of 'pure Weight', but I do not remember when that was: probably before this time.

35. Of this experience also my father spoke to me, suggesting, as does Ramer here, that the significance did not lie in the remembered passage itself. See Ramer's subsequent remarks on this topic, pp.

189 ff.

36. See pp. 157, 167. A has here: 'pictures as unlike as seeing a small flower growing and a whole world shattered'; B places the great explosion 'in the sixties'.

37. The intervention of James Jones (see p. 159) first appears in C.

In B Ramer's explanation of what he meant by deep dreams is given in a footnote by Guildford ('Ramer said later...').

38. In B Dolbear replies differently to Lowdham ('If I was to reveal some of the situations I've seen you in, Harry my lad'). His pregnant remarks 'You walk in disguises, even when awake. But they'll slip, my lad, one day. I shouldn't wonder if it was fairly soon' entered in the C text.