Doppelgangers (36 page)

“To tell the truth, a pretty muddled person.”

“Only so if you will try to cram what you are into the queer little success picture which when you were an adolescent you tried to make of yourself and your future.”

“Well, who am I?”

“Look at that ring on your hand. There you see half the chart. There are the great legs firm on the earth bearing up the rest—the great viscerotonic mass of mankind. Next there is the huge torso, heart, chest, lungs, and arms, the up-drive of energy. Above that the head, mouth, eyes, and brain. And that is the visible Apex. But seen with more insight it is really the junction, the focus. For what has there come to a climax, is really a junction. From there what has been convergent again becomes expansion. One day that ring will have to be changed. The arms of the Adam Kadmon will be raised and Atlas will not be keeping heaven and earth apart, he will be the ladder, the great X, the Saint Andrew's Cross, that unites them. But that higher part must be invisible to those below who see only to the visible Apex. You, however, have reached that junction and focus and you now may look on.”

“But does that really answer the question, Who am I, even if it does say where I am?”

“If you really know the one you know the other. You are what you see and are as great as you can see far.” Then with a sudden intimacy, “Listen: you have come to the point when only the hang-over of a wish to be a person, someone who in privacy hugs himself thinking, ‘Here is little me and I have climbed up till, though the world doesn't know it, it is little me in the vast megaphonic mouth of the world statue who speaks to them. What fun, this is indeed fame!' That is the nonsense, the childish nonsense, that has undone nearly all those who have been carried to the station where now you stand.

“You are equal to the height of your office if you will do two simple truthful things. First, you must cease to want this secret gloating, of trying to live privately in the past looking up to what you are in the present. Be what you are. Live now. And the second part of that is, live so that every moment you pass into that next moment completely. Be at each moment what that moment makes you. Don't cling to this moment when it is past any more than you cling to what is now past. And don't see the moment as something you are viewing from outside to bottle its bouquet. If you try and straddle like that it will pull you in two. But if you go, give, yield, you and it will be one. It then can't hurt you, for you yourself have become the wave that you feared would engulf you. Move along. This is a bridge and you are at the peak of it. You must move that the others may move up. The circulation of life depends now more on your continued mobility, on your not settling down, on your further vision and viewpoint still leading you on. Mankind depends on that one fact now more than on any other.”

“But where can I move?”

“As I've said, you can move by continually becoming.”

“That's just gnomic nonsense to me.”

“No, it isn't. Something in you knows it isn't.”

“Something in me knows quite plainly one thing and it doesn't like it. You
are
leaving us alone, aren't you? And won't we relapse?”

“But don't you see that is freedom—there cannot be certainty, no, nor security, and liberty.” Then, even more quietly, “Can't you understand? That is the nature and power of that supreme mystery, Liberty. It is the power not to know what will happen. No tyranny, no autocrat, has been strong enough to be able to endure that creative ignorance. Freedom is the supreme achievement of, because it is the supreme answer to, Faith.”

“Look here, I'm not being difficult. I now do want to cooperate. But honestly, I don't understand.”

“Don't struggle so hard with your mind. That's not the way, and perhaps I'm not the right teacher. I always talked too much. No one can fully understand as long as they are in Time. As long as they act they do know in a way, but only by doing and as long as they are doing. If they stop halfway to ask what it means they are utterly confused. But when at last the doer has acted long enough—as you have nearly done—so that he no longer asks for any return for himself—no, not even to see the results he thought he saw would come—then at last he can begin to see things as they are, then at last he can understand what Freedom, Faith, and Anonymity are—three words for the threefold nature of the One!”

“Well, you told me I can't understand and certainly you have proved that!”

“But I have told you that you can implicitly, indeed actually, understand by doing?”

“But still, how?”

“Because your doing is your way of becoming.”

“Then we, Humanity Incorporated, are achieving something, not simply involved in an endless round-dance of which I am the petrified Maypole?”

“Assuredly: and as you can ask that question and are its President, its Conductor, I can tell you faintly and in symbol what you are doing. This human life is a hatching process. It should be good in itself but not good enough in itself. It is a prelude, a prologue, an embryo state. An embryo must live fully and well if the post-natal life is to be properly and fully achieved. The first wise man of the West gave us our sailing orders when he ruled, ‘Here we are as in an egg.' And you are the very nucleus of the germ. Now you may, therefore, cease to be actual and become wholly potential, no longer a man but a seed, no longer a personality but an idea. Now you
must
seek?”

Alpha II smiled very slowly with his large alien mouth and nodded.

“You see, it is as simple as that, as inevitable as that, as inevitable as the fact that unless the grain fall into the earth and die it cannot give rise to the next harvest. Now that you are throwing off, discarding all your husk of personality, you can go on. This is the true Sed Festival in which the priest-king is renewed. You are dying to rise again. So I hail you, because you die, as immortal. What is your title? Alpha—yes, and that's what you are—the first letter to the whole Alphabet. But once you are said, then the others have to follow in their sequence. Look at that letter in its old significance: in archaic, ideographic Hebrew its sign is Aleph, the camel, the broad-stanced beast of burden, the archetype totem of the desert-ship, the wilderness-crosser from oasis to oasis, the pilgrim beast who carries his own water and food in himself.

You, Alpha, are the successor, the culmination of those other three priest-kingly offices and titles, Attis, Adonis, Osiris. These were once men but they became ranks and because they were ranks, don't you see, what till then had been a blind alley, became an open way, a bridge. You pass through these stations to attain a still higher position. You are Alpha, the manifest and salient, and if you will really rise to that and leave all the petty nonsense of personality behind, you may at last pass out, leaving another Alpha to take your place as imperceptibly as you have taken the first Alpha's seat. And you can then be completed because you can become Omega. The most ancient pattern shows it—what we call the egg and dart—the salient pointed angle which is the structure of the Alph or Alp and the circle of complete rest, the Omega—the dart of the sperm and the globe of the ovum—penetration blended with comprehension. There that is all. You have nothing more to do but to go on—develop, and the future will and must open.”

He stopped. His voice became almost personal. “I won't say I hope we may meet again. It is impossible to step twice into the same stream. I shall not meet again that section of the process which I am speaking to now but of which the real you is the whole. I shall, of course, meet that river again; indeed, our waters may well be running in the same channel long before we both enter the ultimate estuary.”

He raised his hand and had turned out of the door before he lowered it.

Alpha II rose from his seat uncertainly. His mind was mixed; he wanted to go after the saffron figure. He wanted to get back to his old student self that was going to live its own life, of course generously, adventurously, but its own, with its own intimacies, its own units of affection, its privacies, its personal possessions, its particular character. Then he smiled slowly and felt those great foreign lips move and slide over those artificial jaws—no, that was cut short, literally cut off.

His eyes, without seeing, had been scanning his desk. Yes, there were the outlines of the next vast symbolic rally and titanic myth-performance. They were going to show the rise of the Psychological Revolution, the emergence of Alphism. They were going back further than ever before—making the story cover a far wider span of history. Till now they had been content with showing how all the modern age, the age of revolutions, the last five hundred years, had led inevitably to this the Psychological Revolution and explication. Now, it was suggested in the memorandum which he was to enlarge, that medieval and ancient history might be brought in at least as a prologue—the vast swaying conflict-balance of the Papacy and the Imperial power and back of that the Imperator and the Pontifex Maximus blended in one office by the Roman Principate.

His eye had begun to read with increasing interest. Back of all this there must be something more primal. There must be shown the strange figure slowly circling that primal tree of life that grew by the shores of that lake of Avernus, that pool where ancient man felt that the unseen world and the seen, life and death, met and mingled. The old lines began to run in his head from the old ballad: “The Priest who slew the Slayer and shall himself be slain”—the Priest of Nemi guarding the sacred tree on which grew the Golden Bough that lit the dim isthmus linking the living and the dead. “Light amid the vanished ages: star that gildest yet this phantom shore.” He began to see how this huge historical mythos could be handled.

He put out his hand to open the circuit that called his secretary. He heard her answer cheerfully. He sat down, his mind ordering itself for work. The words ran through his mind, Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Alpha, and Omega. Yes, that was the circuit. As she entered he did not look up, only sensed her happiness and rapport and began to dictate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry FitzGerald “Gerald” Heard (1889–1971) was an English philosopher, lecturer, and author. The BBC's first science commentator, he pioneered the study of the evolution of consciousness, which he explored in his definitive philosophical work
The Ascent of Humanity
(1929). A prolific writer, Heard was also the author of a number of fiction titles, including mysteries and dystopian novels. He is best known for his beloved Mycroft Holmes mystery series.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1947 by H. F. Heard

Cover design by Andrea Worthington

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3779-2

This edition published in 2016 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

www.mysteriouspress.com

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