Sauron Defeated (35 page)

{* Referring to Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, which we had all read some time ago, under pressure from Jeremy (while he was}

'Old Solar?' said Ramer. 'Well, no. But of course I was quoting Lewis, in saying Fields of Arbol. As to the other names, that's another matter. They're as firmly associated with the places and visions in my mind as bread is with Bread in your minds, and mine. But I think they're my names in a sense in which bread is not.*

'I daresay it depends on personal tastes and talents, but although I'm a philologist, I think I should find it difficult to learn strange languages in a free dream or vision. You can learn in dreams, of course; but in the case of real visions of new things you don't talk, or don't need to: you get the meaning of minds (if you meet any) more directly. If I had a vision of some alien people, even if I heard them talking, their sense would drown or blur my reception of their sounds; and when I woke up, if I remembered what had been said, and tried to relate it, it would come out in English.'

'But that wouldn't apply to pure names, proper nouns, would it?' said Lowdham.

'Yes, it would,' said Ramer. 'The voice might say Ellor, but I should get a glimpse of the other mind's vision of the place.

Even if a voice said bread or water, using , I should be likely to get, as the core of a vague cloud (including tastes and smells), some particular glimpse of a shaped loaf, or a running spring, or a glass filled with transparent liquid.

'I daresay that you, Arry, are more phonetical, and more sound-sensitive than I am, but I think even you would find it difficult to keep your ear-memory of the alien words unblurred

{writing his book on Imaginary Lands). See note to Night 60, p. 164.

Jeremy was an admirer of the Public-house School (as he himself had dubbed them), and soon after he became a Lecturer he gave a series of lectures with that title. Old Professor Jonathan Gow had puffed and boggled at the title; and J. had offered to change it to Lewis and Carolus, or the Oxford Looking-glass, or Jack and the Beanstalk; which did not smooth matters. Outside the Club J. had not had much success in reviving interest in these people; though the little book of anonymous memoirs In the Thirsty Forties, or the Inns and Outs of Oxford attracted some notice when it came out in 1980. N.G.}

(* Lowdham says that Ramer told him after the meeting that he thought Minal-zidar meant Poise in Heaven; but Emberu and Ellor were just names. Eshurizel was a title, signifying in an untranslatable way some blend or scheme of colours; but Oshul-kullosh meant simply Falling Water. N.G.)

by the impact of the direct meaning in such dreams. If you did, then very likely it would be only the sounds and not the sense that you'ld remember.

'And yet... especially far away outside this world of Speech, where no voices are heard, and other naming has not reached

... I seem to hear fragments of language and names that are not of this country.'

'Yes, yes,' said Lowdham. 'That's just what I want to hear about. What language is it? You say not Old Solar?'

'No,' said Ramer, 'because there isn't any such tongue. I'm sorry to disagree with your authorities, Jeremy; but that is my opinion. And by the way, speaking as a philologist, I should say that the treatment of language, intercommunication, in tales of travel through Space or Time is a worse blemish, as a rule, than the cheap vehicles that we were discussing last week. Very little thought or attention is ever given to it.(53) I think Arry will agree with me there.'

'I do,' said Lowdham, 'and that's why I'm still waiting to hear where and how you got your names.'

'Well, if you really want to know what these names are,' said Ramer, 'I think they're my native language.'

'But that is English, surely?' said Lowdham. 'Though you were born in Madagascar, or some strange place.'

'No, you ass! Magyarorszag, that is Hungary,' said Ramer.

'But anyway, English is not my native language. Nor yours either. We each have a native language of our own - at least potentially. In working-dreams people who have a bent that way may work on it, develop it. Some, many more than you'ld think, try to do the same in waking hours - with varying degrees of awareness. It may be no more than giving a personal twist to the shape of old words; it may be the invention of new words (on received models, as a rule); or it may come to the elaboration of beautiful languages of their own in private: in private only because other people are naturally not very interested.

'But the inherited, first-learned, language - what is usually mis-called "native" - bites in early and deep. It is hardly possible to escape from its influence. And later-learned languages also affect the natural style, colouring a man's linguistic taste; the earlier learned the more so. As Magyar does mine, strongly -

but all the more strongly, I think, because it is in many ways closer to my own native predilections than English is. In language-invention, though you may seem to build only out of material taken from other acquired tongues, it is those elements ]

most near to your native style that you select.

'In such rare dreams as I was thinking about, far away by oneself in voiceless countries, then your own native language bubbles up, and makes new names for strange new things.'

'Voiceless countries?' said Jeremy. 'You mean regions where there is nothing like our human language?'

'Yes,' said Ramer. 'Language properly so called, as we know it on Earth - token (perceived by sense) plus significance (for the mind) - that is peculiar to an embodied mind; an essential characteristic, the prime characteristic of the fusion of incarnation. Only hnau, to use Jeremy's Lewisian word again, would have language. The irrational couldn't, and the unembodied couldn't or wouldn't.'

'But spirits are often recorded as speaking,' said Frankley.

'I know,' Ramer answered. 'But I wonder if they really do, or if they make you hear them, just as they can also make you see them in some appropriate form, by producing a direct impression on the mind. The clothing of this naked impression in terms intelligible to your incarnate mind is, I imagine, often left to you, the receiver. Though no doubt they can cause you to hear words and to see shapes of their own choosing, if they will. But in any case the process would be the reverse of the normal in a way, outwards, a translation from meaning into symbol. The audible and visible results might be hardly distinguishable from the normal, even so, except for some inner emotion; though there is, in fact, sometimes a perceptible difference of sequence.'

'I don't know what spirits can do,' said Lowdham; 'but I don't see why they cannot make actual sounds (like the Eldil in Perelandra): cause the air to vibrate appropriately, if they wish.

They seem able to affect "matter" directly.'

'I dare say they can,' said Ramer. 'But I doubt if they would wish to, for such a purpose. Communication with another mind is simpler otherwise. And the direct attack seems to me to account better for the feelings human beings often have on such occasions. There is often a shock, a sense of being touched in the quick. There is movement from within outwards, even if one feels that the cause is outside, something other, not you. It is quite different in quality from the reception of sound inwards, even though it may well happen that the thing communicated directly is not strange or alarming, while many things said in the ordinary incarnate fashion are tremendous.'

'You speak as if you knew,' said Jeremy. 'How do you know all this?'

'No, I don't claim to know anything about such things, and I'm not laying down the law. But I feel it. I have been visited, or spoken to,' Ramer said gravely. 'Then, I think, the meaning was direct, immediate, and the imperfect translation perceptibly later: but it was audible. In many accounts of other such events I seem to recognize experiences similar, even when far greater.'

'You make it all sound like hallucination,' said Frankley.

'But of course,' said Ramer. 'They work in a similar way. If you are thinking of diseased conditions, then you may believe that the cause is nothing external; and all the same something (even if it is only some department of the body) must be affecting the mind and making it translate outwards. If you believe in possession or the attack of evil spirits, then there is no difference in process, only the difference between malice and good-will, lying and truth. There is Disease and Lying in the world, and not only among men.'

There was a pause. 'We've got rather away from Old Solar, haven't we?' said Guildford at last.

'No, I think what has been said is very much to the point,'

said Ramer. 'Anyway, if there is, or even was, any Old Solar, then either Lewis or I or both of us are wrong about it. For I don't get any such names as Arbol or Perelandra or Glund.(54) I get names much more consonant with the forms I devise, if I make up words or names for a story composed when awake.

'I think there might be an Old Human, or Primitive Adamic -

certainly was one, though it's not so certain that all our languages derive from it in unbroken continuity; the only undoubted common inheritance is the aptitude for making words, the compelling need to make them. But the Old Human could not possibly be the same as the Prime Language of other differently constituted rational animals, such as Lewis's Hrossa.(55) Because those two embodiments, Men and Hrossa, are quite different, and the physical basis, which conditions the symbol-forms, would be ab origine different. The mind-body blends would have quite different expressive flavours. The expression might not take vocal, or even audible form at all.

Without symbols you have no language; and language begins only with incarnation and not before it. But, of course, if you're going to confuse language with forms of thought, then you can perhaps talk about Old Solar. But why not Old Universal in that case?(56)

'However, I don't think the question of Old Solar arises. I don't think there are any other hnau but ourselves in the whole solar system.'

'How can you possibly know that?' asked Frankley.

'I think I know it by looking,' Ramer answered. 'I only once anywhere saw what I took to be traces of such creatures, but I'll tell you about that in a minute.

'I'll grant you that there is a chance of error. I have never been very interested in people. That's why when I first began to write, and tried to write about people (because that seemed to be the thing done, and the only thing that was much read), my efforts were so footling, as you see, even in dream. I'm now abnormally little interested in people in general, though I can be deeply interested in this or that unique individual; and the fewer I see the better I'm pleased. I haven't scoured the Fields of Arbol seeking for them! I suppose in dream I might have ignored or overlooked them. But I don't think it's at all likely. Because I like solitude in a forest and trees not manhandled, it does not follow that I shall overlook the evidence of men's work in a wood, or never notice any men I meet there. Much the reverse!

'It's true that I've not seen the solar planets often, nor explored them thoroughly: that's hardly necessary in most cases, if you're looking for any conceivable organic life resembling what we know. But what I have seen convinces me that the whole system, save Earth, is altogether barren (in our sense).

Mars is a horrible network of deserts and chasms; Venus a boiling whirl of wind and steam above a storm-racked twilit core. But if you want to know what it looks and sounds like: a smoking black Sea, rising like Everest, raging in the dusk over dim drowned mountains, and sucking back with a roar of cataracts like the end of Atlantis - then go there! It is magnificent, but it isn't Peace. To me indeed very refreshing - though that's too small a word. I can't describe the invigoration, the acceleration of intellectual interest, in getting away from all this tangle of ant-hill history! I am not a misanthrope. To me it's a more inspiring and exacting, a much more responsible, perilous, lonely venture: that Men are in fact alone in EN. In EN.(57) For that is the name to me of this sunlit archipelago in the midst of the Great Seas.

'We can cast our own shadows out on to the other islands, if we like. It's a good and lawful form of invention; but an invention it is and proceeds out of Earth, the Talkative Planet.

The only hnau ever to dwell in red Gormok or in cloud-bright Zingil (58) will be put there by us.'

'What reason have you for thinking that you've seen them at all, and not other places in remoter Space? asked Frankley.(59)

'Well, I went to them in a more questioning mood,' said Ramer, 'and I looked for such signs as I could understand. They were planets. They went round the Sun, or a sun, in more or less the ways and times the books say, so far as I could observe. And the further heavens had much the same pattern, just the same to my little knowledge, as they have here. And old Enekol, Saturn,(60) is unmistakable,. though I suppose it is not quite impossible that he has his counterpart elsewhere.'