BOOK OF THE DAMNED 179 



invisible, to terrestrial observers, except as the blurs that have so 

 often been reported by astronomers and meteorologists. The photo- 

 graph published by the Scientific American is of an aggregation sup- 

 posed to be clouds, presumably not very high, so clearly detailed are 

 they. The writer says that they looked to him like "a field of 

 broken ice." Beneath is a picture of a conventional field of ice, 

 floating ordinarily in water. The resemblance between the two 

 pictures is striking nevertheless, it seems to me incredible that the 

 first of the photographs could be of an aerial ice-field, or that gravi- 

 tation could cease to act at only a mile or so from this earth's sur- 



Unless: 



The exceptional: the flux and vagary of all things. 



Or that normally this earth's gravitation extends, say, ten or 

 fifteen miles outward but that gravitation must be rhythmic. 



Of course, in the pseudo-formulas of astronomers, gravitation as 

 a fixed quantity is essential. Accept that gravitation is a variable 

 force, and astronomers deflate, with a perceptible hissing sound, into 

 the punctured condition of economists, biologists, meteorologists, 

 and all the others of the humbler divinities, who can admittedly 

 offer only insecure approximations. 



We refer all who would not like to hear the hiss of escaping 

 arrogance, to Herbert Spencer's chapters upon the rhythm of all 

 phenomena. 



If everything else light from the stars, heat from the sun, the 

 winds and the tides; forms and colors and sizes of animals; de- 

 mands and supplies and prices; political opinions and chemic re- 

 actions and religious doctrines and magnetic intensities and the 

 ticking of clocks ; and arrival and departure of the seasons if every- 

 thing else is variable, we accept that the notion of gravitation as fixed 

 and formulable is only another attempted positivism, doomed, like 

 all other illusions of realness in quasi-existence. So it is inter- 

 mediatism to accept that, though gravitation may approximate high- 

 er to invariability than do the winds, for instance, it must be some- 

 where between the Absolutes of Stability and Instability. Here 

 then we are not much impressed with the opposition of physicists 

 and astronomers, fearing, a little mournfully, that their language is 

 of expiring sibilations. 



So then the fields of ice in the sky, and that, though usually so far 

 away as to be mere blurs, at times they come close enough to be 

 seen in detail. For description of what I call a "blur," see Pop. Set. 



