CHAPTER XL

 

September 11^th 1934

 

With Miller to see a show of scientific films.  Development of the sea urchin.  Fertilization, cell division, growth.  A renewal of last year's almost nightmarish vision of a more-than-Bergsonian life force, of an ultimate Dark God, much darker, stranger and more violent than any that Lawrence imagined.  Raw material that, on its own inhuman plane, is already a perfectly finished product.  A picture of earthworms followed.  Week-long hermaphroditic love-making, worm to worm, within a tube of slime.  Then an incredibly beautiful film showing the life-history of the blowfly.  The eggs.  The grubs on their piece of decaying meat.  Snow-white, like a flock of sheep on a meadow.  Hurrying away from light.  Then, after five days of growth, descending to the earth, burrowing, making a cocoon.  In twelve more days, the fly emerges.  Fantastic process of resurrection!  An organ in the head is inflated like a balloon.  Blown up so large, that the walls of the cocoon are split.  The fly wriggles out.  Positively now, instead of negatively phototropic, as it was as a grub, towards the light.  At the surface, you see it literally pumping up its soft, wet body with air, smoothing out its crumpled wings by forcing blood into the veins.  Astonishing and moving spectacle.

      I put the question to Miller: what will be the influence of the spread of knowledge such as this?  Knowledge of a world incomparably more improbable and more beautiful than the imaginings of any myth-maker.  A world, only a few years ago, completely unknown to all but a handful of people.  What the effects of its general discovery by all?  Miller laughed.  'It will have exactly as much or as little effect as people want it to have.  Those who prefer to think about sex and money will go on thinking about sex and money.  However loudly the movies proclaim the glories of God.'  Persistence of the ingenuous notion that the response to favourable circumstances is inevitably and automatically good.  Raw material, once again, to be worked up.  One goes on believing in automatic progress, because one wants to cherish this stupidity: it's so consoling.  Consoling, because it puts the whole responsibility for everything you do or fail to do on somebody or something other than yourself.