DON’T STOP READING JUST BECAUSE OF THE TITLE! That’s for later. Oh, and massive spoiler warnings of course.
Yesterday I wrote a post about the SF author, philosopher and peace activist Olaf Stapledon. Once I’d “done” ‘Last And First Men’, ‘Star Maker’ and ‘Last Men In London’, I realised it was getting really long, so I decided to break it up. That said, I did start on ‘Odd John’, so I broke off in mid-flow and will now continue with that novel. And yes, unlike much of Stapledon’s fiction it is actually a novel with plot, characters and everything.
‘Odd John”s full title is ‘Odd John: A Story Between Jest And Earnest’. I’ve largely ignored the satirical element in Stapledon’s fiction up until now, but it’s there in spades, possibly even humour. This makes a lot of his work “between jest and earnest”. I can relate to that because someone once said of me that they could never tell if I was serious or not and I realised that often, neither could I. It may not be surprising that I can relate to this.
The novel is a biography written by a journalist, who is, however, claimed to be the same person as the narrator of ‘Last And First Men’. That, though, claims to be narrated by one of the Last Men from two thousand million years in the future, so the questions arise of whether this is just a slip by the author, and of whether the reader can justifiably see the novel as written by the journalist under the unconscious influence of that same Neptunian. It’s also possible, indeed likely within the setting of the novel itself, that John Wainwright is in fact influencing what the narrator is writing in some way, telepathically or just by very subtle psychological manipulation. He is after all seen to do this within the story, for instance with the businessman who invests in South Africa – “the money stayed in the Empire”. In fact that whole conversation between John and the Magnate is pure gold for a socialist, and another example of Stapledon’s satire. This can also be seen in the treatment of the subhuman descendants of the First Men by the monkeys and their refusal to put down pieces of gold, the hidden flavour-based racism of the Other Men, the face masks worn by the early Neptunians to hide their mouths because eating is considered obscene and sex is just widely accepted by the public as natural and normal, and in the whole “Gordelpus” fiasco and the limited understanding of science, philosophy and spirituality seen in the First World State. None of these, though, comes across as lecturing or axe-grinding, and they all fit well into the “plot”, if there is one. Okay, they fit well into the chronicle when there’s no real plot.
Back to ‘Odd John’. The novel describes the central character’s life from birth to his death at a young age. He’s said to have a distinctive laugh in certain situations few would find funny, and to have very probably laughed in the face of his death, which he anticipated well in advance. This laugh, I think, represents the same sentiment as the detached appreciation for all the lows and highs of life in the Universe Stapledon alludes to elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, John is home educated and his mother carries out the pretence of teaching for the sake of public scrutiny, but he is in fact an autonomous learner. He didn’t get on well at school. As he moves through childhood, he becomes an adept cat burglar, and starts inventing things to profit from the patents. Take note, this is significant for me personally – here’s the first sign of madness, ideas of reference specifically. An idea of reference is where an apparently insignificant detail is interpreted by a diagnosably psychotic person to refer to them directly or have other special personal significance, and in this case it’s conveniently protected from scrutiny. This is, though, the only idea of reference I’m aware of having, so I will move on for now. John then discovers, interestingly, that he can’t play the money markets in the same way as he’s able to succeed in other areas, because he’s completely taken in by scams and dishonest dealings, which brings to mind, as does the entire book, the suspicion, as I often feel with Stapledon’s accounts of “first men” who are early sports for Homo superior, the neurodiverse. Incidentally, it’s also this book which coined “Homo superior“, and I’ve previously talked about the genealogy of the concept from this via Arthur C Clarke to David Bowie.
One way of looking at this novel is that it’s about a superhuman character, but it diverts from the usual graphic novel-style depiction of the subject because unlike those superheroes, John actually decides to turn his back on the world at large and do his own thing, trying to find his own people and community – other superhumans. His aim is to live his life unimpeded, not to save the world. He’s also bisexual, and has relationships with women and men alike. This was published in 1935! He then sets off across the world in search of companions, and finds several, including a man who died thirty-five years earlier in Port Saïd who communicates with him telepathically across time. He also encounters an evil baby eighteen years old who seems to have a long term malevolent influence on the entire group and tries to drag him down to Hell. I’m not sure what to make of this except that Stapledon does seem to believe in the idea of an evil cosmic force, as some of his other writings show. He doesn’t seem to believe in a literal Hell. I think maybe this baby is supposed to be an extremely frustrated, extremely advanced superbeing who would take many decades to reach adulthood. One of his fellow commune members, Jacqueline, looks about thirty but is in fact over one hundred and sixty years of age and has an elderly daughter who seems easily old enough to be her mother. I think part of the point of this section of the novel is to present a survey of how people might evolve piecemeal into a more advanced species. Stapledon undoubtedly believes in theistic evolution with a goal, although it’s also true that human intelligence of a certain kind has indeed advanced in the past few million years.
After all these adventures, John and his friends do indeed succeed in setting up a utopian colony on an uninhabited Pacific island. This is a naturist multi-ethnic community able to hide itself by manipulating Earth’s magnetic field with concealed buildings in a rain forest. There is highly sophisticated technology on the island including a total matter-to-energy conversion generator controlled by the mind, and something which appears to convert atomic matter to dark matter, which seems out of place until you realise the concept of dark matter was first thought of by Kelvin in 1884. The narrator compares the atmosphere to a Quaker meeting, something of which I think we can presume Stapledon has considerable experience. Some time after this, an international expedition attempts to carry out a mass arrest and are repelled by a psychic attack from the commune. After that, the group bequeaths the results of its studies in written form to the human race and is attacked by mercenaries, unsuccessfully. John sends psychic visions to his mother Pax outlining their plan to destroy themselves and their island, and the plan is accomplished, rather like the self-killing of the flying humans on Venus in ‘Last And First Men’.
‘Odd John’ was, until recently, Stapledon’s only work whose film rights had been sold, and it got far enough that David McCallum was chosen to play John Wainwright and George Pal was going to direct. This was in 1967, and sadly nothing came of it. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t’ve been any good anyway.
For me, the most remarkable thing about this book is what others would regard as an idea of reference in Chapter VI, but which I see as an Easter egg. I won’t go into detail about what this is because I think that if it were to be revealed, it would cease to be able to perform its function, which it may have to do again in future, I hope many times. In order for this to happen, I need to be able to make a long-lasting impression, not necessarily a big one, on culture in my lifetime, and I believe I have now done this and am able to pass this on beyond my own lifetime. For it to work, however, it’s important that nobody else knows what it is. I told you this was going to go weird. It will be obvious to whoever needs to see it in a future generation.
Getting back to apparent sanity, we reach ‘Sirius’. This is said to be Stapledon’s most relatable novel, even though its central character is a dog. It’s remarkable for having a cover which, as is so often the case, reveals that the artist has never read the book:
That’s Plaxy and Sirius apparently. ‘Sirius: A Fantasy Of Love And Discord’ was published in 1944 and makes references to the Second World War. Along with the reference to Hitler in ‘Star Maker’ I often wonder how Stapledon felt about having made such a massive miscalculation in ‘Last And First Men’. Maybe I shouldn’t wonder. Maybe I already know. Another few preliminary remarks. James Herbert’s ‘Fluke’ is also about a superintelligent dog and I wonder if it was inspired by this, although I’ve never read it and it may turn out to be completely different. A friend of mine actually went so far as to name her child Plaxy because of this book. I’m certainly not aware that the name existed before Stapledon wrote this.
If I wanted to be dismissive, I would say this book is basically ‘Frankenstein’. The novel is set in North Wales. A scientist breeds dogs for increasingly human-like intelligence and injects pregnant bitches with a hormone that stimulates brain development. This usually kills the mother because it causes her brain to grow as well and fatally increases intracranial pressure. He succeeds in breeding very capable sheepdogs and making a living from them, and finally in producing one dog of human intelligence, who is born at about the same time as his daughter Plaxy. They form a very close relationship and Sirius, who lives far longer than a dog could be expected to, grows up with her. He is chiefly frustrated by having to live in a human world with a canine body, and by being the only one of his kind. However, he does succeed in having a relationship with a bitch and feels that he can kind of glimpse the person she would be if she had his kind of intelligence. He is apprenticed as a sheep dog, which he does really well, and manages to write and post a letter back to Plaxy. He also, and this is difficult, enters into a sexual relationship with Plaxy. Ultimately he is killed and I can’t remember how that happens. I don’t remember this as well as the previous ones.
There’s a whole lot going on here. I want to mention first of all that although Sirius is described as a large Alsatian in the novel, I always saw him as a Shetland sheepdog, although an unusually large one. The name Sirius is very clever, because he’s the brightest star in the canine firmament. Returning to the name Plaxy, this is as I say very probably an invention of Stapledon’s because in ‘Odd John’, John Wainwright’s mother is called Pax, and whereas I can believe in someone being called that and presume it’s a real personal name, Plaxy is not a name I came across any real person being called until I met the actual, real life, person who had been given that name. It makes reading the novel a somewhat odd experience because of the association, and I have to keep reminding myself that the character in the novel is not the same person. The novel is, as I say, considered to be the most “human” and relatable story of all his work, and the irony of the central character being canine is not lost on readers of his other works here. The author sets himself a problem by attempting to describe the superhuman in most of his work, since that is by definition unimaginable, although he still manages quite well. In this novel, he solves this problem by pulling everything down a notch, and having a “subhuman” species become human-like. The similarities to ‘Flowers For Algernon’/’Charly’ are also apparent. Stapledon manages to take the supernality of his usual protagonists out of the equation here and examine the issue of being a misfit hampered by one’s physical limitations and that of society, and it can therefore be read as a metaphor for disability. Sirius is not simply a dog with a human voice. He can’t vocalise as most of us can and has developed a kind of argot which only those close to him can understand, although he understands English perfectly well. It also works well from a vegan perspective because one is forced to relate to a member of a different species face to face.
I’m going to have to discuss the bestiality. This is never explicitly portrayed but is clearly going on and I think is what results in his murder. Olaf Stapledon is no stranger to Gender and Sexual Minority content. At this point I’m going to have to refer to ‘Star Trek’. From a conservative perspective, ‘Star Trek’ is a filthy show where humans regularly practice bestiality, since inter-species sexual relationships are normative in it. Humans marry Vulcans, there are mixed-species characters and so forth. Taken from a certain viewpoint, wherewith I emphatically disagree, it’s a moral sewer. Imagine a show set on a ranch somewhere with people having sex with horses, sheep and dogs portrayed in a positive light. This would, I conjecture, have some difficulty with being greenlit on primetime TV. But in a sense that’s substantially what ‘Star Trek’ is: ‘Wagon Train’ in space where the human characters have sex with the horses. We never see it like that though, because there’s a crucial difference: informed consent. A real bitch or dog can’t give informed consent to sex with a human, but Sirius can. The other aspect of this issue, ethically, is that it engages the wisdom of disgust, so there are right and wrong reasons for opposing zoöphilia and one of them edges into racism from the perspective of the prejudiced person. In any case, I think this represents Stapledon’s remarkable anachronism, and again he may also be using it as a parallel to homophobia. As far as I can tell, Stapledon believes in utopian bisexuality, or possibly pansexuality since he portrays a world with ninety-six genders.
This novel is also markèdly unlike his other works in that its stage is very restricted. As far as I can remember it’s entirely set in a village in North Wales and the surrounding farmland. This reflects the restrictions in Sirius’s own life. There also seem to be parallels with Olaf Stapledon’s real relationship with his wife Agnes. Agnes Zena Miller was his cousin, born in Australia in 1894 and therefore eight years his junior, and they were friends from her childhood, at which point Olaf was already adult. I wonder if he felt disquiet at the age gap, the relatively close genetic relationship and the fact that they met when she was still decidedly a child, and I believe that the relationship between Plaxy and Sirius may reflect this. There’s also an incident in ‘Odd John’ when John, at the age of fifteen and looking like a twelve-year old, has a relationship with an adult woman called Europa. I just wonder. I also think that what we now think of as fair situations for including under the GSM/LGBTQIA+ umbrella have not always been the same, and therefore that Stapledon’s attitudes towards sex make us somewhat uncomfortable today because they appear to include pædophilia and zoöphilia. I needn’t remind you that until the early 1980s the Pædophile Information Exchange was supported by the National Council for Civil Liberties or that even in the later half of that decade one of the German Green Party’s policies was the legalisation of sex between adults and children. It disgusts us now but it didn’t back then, or at least the category of queerness had a different scope. As I said yesterday, he was very much a man of his times.
I now move on to what I think of as Stapledon’s more obscure writings. One of these is ‘The Flames’, or rather ‘The Flames: A Fantasy.” This is an epistolary story published in 1947, and is written from a mental hospital. A living flame has been trapped in a rock for millennia and is found by Cass, short for Cassandra but a man, who feels the urge to put the rock on the fire, thereby releasing the flame, who reveals after some time that it has caused Cass’s wife to kill herself and is manipulating conditions on Earth to make them more suitable for its species to thrive upon by, I think, attempting to cause a nuclear holocaust. It also wants him to be their ambassador to humanity. Cass extinguishes the flame and embarks on a mission to destroy all of its race, until he is sectioned after shutting down a furnace in a steam train factory. The letter’s recipient, Thos (for Doubting Thomas), visits Cass in hospital, where Cass claims to have established contact with the flames who are living on the Sun. At the end of the novel, Cass dies in a fire he started himself, burning down the asylum.
Probably the most significant theme in this novel, which incidentally seems to be motivated out of concern for the use of nuclear weapons, is that Cass is seen as psychotic because of his contact with the flame beings, and having that name, he is of course fated never to be believed. This idea of voices in the head being mistaken for a psychosis is also present in ‘Last Men In London’ and ‘Star Maker’. Authors are not their work, of course, and they don’t necessarily honestly entertain the ideas they put into novels, but clearly Stapledon is serious about some of them, for instance Communism is clearly what he sees as the ideal society and depicts Communist societies often in his work, and there also seems to be a link between his love life and his writing, often in a very healthy way.
The final work of fiction I’ve knowingly become familiar with is ‘Darkness And The Light’. This is unremittingly depressing. The 1942 novel seems influenced by being written in wartime. Stapledon envisages two possible futures stemming from what he calls a Tibetan Renaissance. One path leads to a dystopian nightmare and the degeneration and extinction of the species and the other to a socialist utopia. I only bothered to read the depressing bits! I don’t remember it clearly but it left me with the impression of being overwhelmingly pessimistic even compared to his other work. I probably shouldn’t’ve ignored the brighter side.
That concludes the fiction of his that I’ve read since my birth. The others are, as far as I know, ‘Old Man In New World’, which is about a man in the 1990s witnessing a parade where he notices that the seeds of jingoism and belligerence leading to the Second World War are once again germinating. ‘Four Encounters’ is an unfinished mainstream short story describing meetings with four people archetypal of the mystic, scientist, revolutionary and Christian.
With the exception of ‘Nebula Maker’, which is an early draft of ‘Star Maker’, I think that’s it for his fiction. Tell a lie, there’s also ‘Death Into Life’, which is about the afterlife. However, being a philosopher myself I’m also familiar with a lot of his non-fiction, including ‘Beyond The Isms’, ‘Philosophy And Living’ and ‘A Modern Theory Of Ethics’. This last is his PhD thesis, presented in 1929 and his first published prose. When I read it, I was surprised to find that it was uncannily similar to my own first degree dissertation ‘A Cognitivist And Consequentialist Theory Of Ethics’. It should probably be pointed out that this is a very common and hackneyed topic for undergraduate dissertations, and probably was back then as well, and it doesn’t bode well for a future career in academic philosophy. I presume that at the time it wasn’t a career-defining decision for Stapledon to write on this subject because unlike me he did actually go on to become a pro, as it were. ‘Philosophy And Living’ is a two-volume introduction to philosophy somewhat along the lines of something Russell might have written. I can’t really remember ‘Beyond The Isms’. There are some others such as ‘Waking World’ and ‘New Hope For Britain’ which I haven’t read.
Stapledon’s biggest claim to fame is probably that he was a major adversary to C S Lewis, to the extent that he included a version of him in his ‘Space Trilogy’, specifically ‘That Hideous Strength’. I don’t want to go into too much depth here but Stapledon’s depiction of the genocide of the Venerians in ‘Last And First Men’ very strongly negatively impressed Lewis because he felt he was too dismissive of them and regarded the Fifth Men’s natural supremacy as the only morally relevant point in the incident. In Stapledon’s defence, I would say that the human race was completely devastated and spiritually destroyed by that act, and they didn’t exactly get off lightly either. They knew it was an atrocity but felt they had no choice, and were fighting not only for their own survival but for the survival and growth of enlightenment in the Cosmos. They were not aware of any other sentient life forms in the Universe at any stage in their history apart from the Martians, who by this time were extinct, and for all they knew, that could’ve been the end of intelligence in the Cosmos. The Venerians were also doomed anyway. That said, I do see Lewis’s point. But Stapledon was a nice, gentle guy and also had a strong spiritual life. There’s no way he was the monster Lewis caricatured him as.
‘Last And First Men’ at least seems to have been influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson. I’m not aware of anyone else mentioning this, so maybe I’m wrong or maybe it’s just coincidence, but I mention it just in passing because I think there may be a link between their thought, although Bergson is in a very different tradition of philosophy than ours. Apart from that, there are a number of other interesting influences on his thought such as J D Bernal’s ‘The World, The Flesh And The Devil’, which is partly the inspiration for parts of ‘Star Maker’. But to me the most interesting figure, along with his ideas, is J W Dunne and his ‘An Experiment With Time’. J W Dunne thought up a theory of time called Serialism, which also influenced J B Priestley. This can be seen, for example, in ‘Time And The Conways’ and to a limited extent in ‘An Inspector Calls’. Serialism attempts to account for precognitive dreams by proposing that there’s a second time dimension along which consciousness operates which enables it to perceive past and future as well as the present. In dreams, the waking consciousness’s relationship with time is different and operates in a manner less constrained by the first time dimension as lived through progressively by the wakeful mind. The obvious problem with this is that there is an infinite regress of time dimensions. As well as influencing Stapledon’s writing, Serialism also seems to be an element in Tolkien’s idea of Lothlórien time, where it seems that time passes more slowly there, implied I hear by lunar phases, and of course in the Chronicles of Narnia, where time in Aslan’s world appears to pass more quickly than it does in ours. In fact, I can’t help thinking sometimes that the wardrobe does seem to be very much larger on the inside and leads those who walk through its doors to have a very peculiar relationship with time. Does that sound at all familiar?
These are all, of course, fictional devices although I get the impression that J B Priestley at least was pretty serious about his, since his plays don’t seem to be fantasy or even magic realism. Olaf Stapledon’s version of mental time travel is described in considerable depth in ‘Last Men In London’. After a ten-day period of isolation spent in study and meditation, the person concerned enters a trance which decouples their daily activities for maintenance of their health and fitness such as eating and exercise from their consciousness, which lasts thirty hours. After that point, the subject appears to fall asleep, but subjectively finds themselves experiencing at first a confused blizzard of experiences from arbitrary points in human history which gradually narrow down to the target mind living in a specific place and time. This can go on for months or even decades as far as an observer of the person’s body is concerned, but of course the consciousness of the individual concerned is experiencing at first hand the life of a different individual in the possibly very distant past.
If you know me face to face or in other situations, you will be aware that I’m quite focussed on dream work and lucid dreaming.
Jayne Mansfield
Here we go then. This may be the point at which you stop reading. It may even be a good idea to do so. Have you ever had a conversation with someone which appears to be going along in a fairly ordinary manner but then, as if they’re still talking about the weather, they start expressing their concern about a race of little people living in the trees which need to be legislated against (yes I did get that from Donald Fagen, in case you’re wondering)? Well that’s what’s about to happen to this blog post. You can still leave this post thinking I’m sane and that my contribution is, I hope, worthwhile and interesting. But do also feel free to accompany me on my descent into madness.
Jayne Mansfield is a 1950s movie icon who of course was tragically killed when her open-top car collided with the back of a lorry on 29th June 1967, causing her fatal brain trauma and immediately killing her. I was born thirty-one days later. On the night of her death, it’s said that someone spoke with her voice at the exact moment of her death. Unfortunately I have no further recollection of this story.
She’s almost exactly the same age as my mother, having been born Vera Jayne Palmer on 19th April 1933. Her IQ and mine have also been measured at exactly the same figure, but then IQs are pretty much meaningless in my opinion. She had a degree in physics and drama, and became a stage actor, playing in ‘The Crucible’. She’s been referred to as a “female female impersonator”. It isn’t clear to me whether she used her intelligence or not, but it does seem a shame that she didn’t get to use her physics degree. She bought a mansion on Sunset Boulevard which became known as the Pink Palace, in 1957, seven years after Stapledon’s sudden death from a heart attack. Her film career was at first successful but went into a decline. In the ’60s, she became a LaVeyan Satanist and Anton LaVey put a curse on her boyfriend Sam Brody, apparently to protect her from what he saw as Brody’s malign influence. Jayne was then involved in a car accident, she had her jewellery stolen, she was charged by the Venezuelan government with tax avoidance, robbed in Las Vegas and sexually assaulted by a mob in Rio. Brady then suffered a car accident on 22nd June 1967. After her death, she’s said to have haunted the Pink Palace. It was impossible to paint it a different colour in spite of investigations by experts on the science of paint. At her memorial service, a series of amber lamps suddenly brightened with no explanation. All the hair on the back of her daughter’s hair was torn out when it got wrapped round the axle of a toy electric car. People in the house reported a feeling of being watched. Mama Cass moved in some time later and died in her sleep of a heart attack in a hotel in London in 1974 at the age of thirty-two. The next occupant of the house felt the urge to bleach her hair blond and have breast enlargement surgery for reasons she was unable to explain and dress in some of the clothes still remaining in the house from Mansfield’s occupation, spent thousands of dollars on Mansfield memorabilia and finally heard a voice pleading with her to “get out” of the house, which she did so with considerable alacrity. Ringo Starr then bought the house and had the problem with attempting to have the pink paint covered up mentioned previously. He was followed by Engelbert Humperdinck, an ex of Mansfield’s, who concluded the house was not haunted but was a little perturbed when a quake revealed a heart shape in the garden, which was a favourite motif of hers. This, however, turned out to be a filled in paddling pool.
Why am I telling you this? Isn’t it parsecs away from the story of Stapledon? Well yes, on the whole, although they were contemporaries and there are spiritual concerns, plus there’s someone called Cass in both biographies, if ghosts can be said to have those. But the reason I mention this is that on hearing the story of Mansfield’s immediate haunting after her death, I began to believe I was her, that is, her reincarnation. This was substantially because the account I read got the date wrong and said she’d been killed the day before I was born. I have now completely discarded this idea. Even now though, when I look at photographs of her I still feel that I’m looking back at myself in them. It remains an uncanny experience. I definitely don’t feel like that when I look at Jean Shrimpton (who’s a close blood relative of some kind). It’s probably a process of auto-suggestion.
But there’s still the other issue, which doth unfix my hair.
William Olaf Stapledon had certain identity issues and an apparent belief in mental time travel. There are quite remarkable similarities between his PhD thesis and my first degree dissertation in spite of the fact that I hadn’t read his at the time I wrote mine. It’s possible, of course, that the influence of his thought on mine via his other writing succeeded in causing me to believe similar philosophical positions to his.
It’s very common indeed for people to “discover” that they are reincarnations of Cleopatra or some other famous historical figure from the distant past. I’m personally very sceptical about the idea of reincarnation because I don’t believe the self holds together as an entity even in life, except socially. Past life therapy, I believe, serves the purpose of creating a meaningful narrative for the client which helps them cope with their current circumstances. My own model of personal identity is that there is an underlying persistent identity within one’s own life, but that memories are more diffuse and disconnected, in a manner rather similar to Stapledon’s apparent view that he contained multitudes, perhaps even elements from elsewhere in the Universe or other times. I also believe that time travel is possible in dreams, because dreams as we apprehend them are not merely physical events in the brain. I have also myself experienced precognitive dreams which I wrote down the morning after I had them and were fulfilled several years later, and they corresponded to what I wrote down at the time, which I did to avoid the possibility that I might create false memories.
As I’ve said, I practice extensive dream work and sometimes dream lucidly. Last night’s dream is in fact lucid. I also recount dreams in the present tense because I believe they have a different relationship to time than our waking experience has. And, on one occasion, I have attempted to travel back in time using a lucid dream. Here it is:
I am in a dark multi-storey car park in Canterbury in the late 1960s, on the back seat of a car. Sitting in the front passenger seat is Olaf Stapledon. We have a conversation about his future and my present, which I think is probably the late 1990s at this point. Unfortunately, like the guy in Asimov’s ‘Birth Of A Notion’, I find myself unable to remember any facts at all about my waking present except that we now have decimal currency, so I fish a few coins out of my pocket and show him. He is mildly peeved and disappointed, and I am most apologetic.
Now I’m not saying that I’m definitely a reincarnation of Olaf Stapledon. Doing that would make me seem too special, and on the whole we’re all just faceless replicas in an impersonal universe. But I can’t account for the couple of sentences in ‘Odd John’ I mentioned before, and which of course I conveniently refuse to recount because I’ve used them to send a similar message to the future, so that makes them unfalsifiable in a pseudoscientific way. Nonetheless I do believe that somehow memories can be communicated between minds which exist at different places in space and time, and that I have in fact done this.
Feel free to call me crazy. Stapledon was himself quite afraid he might be judged as insane too. But also, ask yourself, what function this has in my life, and just because I’m delusional, is this more harmful or helpful to me and others. After all, happiness is often propped up by delusion and that’s healthy.
A Box Of Chocolates 