_ There is more than the germ of truth in things erroneous in the
child's definition of memory as the thing one forgets with. To be
able to forget means sanity. Incessantly to remember, means
obsession, lunacy. So the problem I faced in solitary, where
incessant remembering strove for possession of me, was the problem
of forgetting. When I gamed with flies, or played chess with
myself, or talked with my knuckles, I partially forgot. What I
desired was entirely to forget.
There were the boyhood memories of other times and places--the
"trailing clouds of glory" of Wordsworth. If a boy had had these
memories, were they irretrievably lost when he had grown to manhood?
Could this particular content of his boy brain be utterly
eliminated? Or were these memories of other times and places still
residual, asleep, immured in solitary in brain cells similarly to
the way I was immured in a cell in San Quentin?
Solitary life-prisoners have been known to resurrect and look upon
the sun again. Then why could not these other-world memories of the
boy resurrect?
But how? In my judgment, by attainment of complete forgetfulness of
present and of manhood past.
And again, how? Hypnotism should do it. If by hypnotism the
conscious mind were put to sleep, and the subconscious mind
awakened, then was the thing accomplished, then would all the
dungeon doors of the brain be thrown wide, then would the prisoners
emerge into the sunshine.
So I reasoned--with what result you shall learn. But first I must
tell how, as a boy, I had had these other-world memories. I had
glowed in the clouds of glory I trailed from lives aforetime. Like
any boy, I had been haunted by the other beings I had been at other
times. This had been during my process of becoming, ere the flux of
all that I had ever been had hardened in the mould of the one
personality that was to be known by men for a few years as Darrell
Standing.
Let me narrate just one incident. It was up in Minnesota on the old
farm. I was nearly six years old. A missionary to China, returned
to the United States and sent out by the Board of Missions to raise
funds from the farmers, spent the night in our house. It was in the
kitchen just after supper, as my mother was helping me undress for
bed, and the missionary was showing photographs of the Holy Land.
And what I am about to tell you I should long since have forgotten
had I not heard my father recite it to wondering listeners so many
times during my childhood.
I cried out at sight of one of the photographs and looked at it,
first with eagerness, and then with disappointment. It had seemed
of a sudden most familiar, in much the same way that my father's
barn would have been in a photograph. Then it had seemed altogether
strange. But as I continued to look the haunting sense of
familiarity came back.
"The Tower of David," the missionary said to my mother.
"No!" I cried with great positiveness.
"You mean that isn't its name?" the missionary asked.
I nodded.
"Then what is its name, my boy?"
"It's name is . . ." I began, then concluded lamely, "I, forget."
"It don't look the same now," I went on after a pause. "They've ben
fixin' it up awful."
Here the missionary handed to my mother another photograph he had
sought out.
"I was there myself six months ago, Mrs. Standing." He pointed with
his finger. "That is the Jaffa Gate where I walked in and right up
to the Tower of David in the back of the picture where my finger is
now. The authorities are pretty well agreed on such matters. El
Kul'ah, as it was known by--"
But here I broke in again, pointing to rubbish piles of ruined
masonry on the left edge of the photograph
"Over there somewhere," I said. "That name you just spoke was what
the Jews called it. But we called it something else. We called it
. . . I forget."
"Listen to the youngster," my father chuckled. "You'd think he'd
ben there."
I nodded my head, for in that moment I knew I had been there, though
all seemed strangely different. My father laughed the harder, but
the missionary thought I was making game of him. He handed me
another photograph. It was just a bleak waste of a landscape,
barren of trees and vegetation, a shallow canyon with easy-sloping
walls of rubble. In the middle distance was a cluster of wretched,
flat-roofed hovels.
"Now, my boy, where is that?" the missionary quizzed.
And the name came to me!
"Samaria," I said instantly.
My father clapped his hands with glee, my mother was perplexed at my
antic conduct, while the missionary evinced irritation.
"The boy is right," he said. "It is a village in Samaria. I passed
through it. That is why I bought it. And it goes to show that the
boy has seen similar photographs before."
This my father and mother denied.
"But it's different in the picture," I volunteered, while all the
time my memory was busy reconstructing the photograph. The general
trend of the landscape and the line of the distant hills were the
same. The differences I noted aloud and pointed out with my finger.
"The houses was about right here, and there was more trees, lots of
trees, and lots of grass, and lots of goats. I can see 'em now, an'
two boys drivin' 'em. An' right here is a lot of men walkin' behind
one man. An' over there"--I pointed to where I had placed my
village--"is a lot of tramps. They ain't got nothin' on exceptin'
rags. An' they're sick. Their faces, an' hands, an' legs is all
sores."
"He's heard the story in church or somewhere--you remember, the
healing of the lepers in Luke," the missionary said with a smile of
satisfaction. "How many sick tramps are there, my boy?"
I had learned to count to a hundred when I was five years old, so I
went over the group carefully and announced:
"Ten of 'em. They're all wavin' their arms an' yellin' at the other
men."
"But they don't come near them?" was the query.
I shook my head. "They just stand right there an' keep a-yellin'
like they was in trouble."
"Go on," urged the missionary. "What next? What's the man doing in
the front of the other crowd you said was walking along?"
"They've all stopped, an' he's sayin' something to the sick men.
An' the boys with the goats 's stopped to look. Everybody's
lookin'."
"And then?"
"That's all. The sick men are headin' for the houses. They ain't
yellin' any more, an' they don't look sick any more. An' I just
keep settin' on my horse a-lookin' on."
At this all three of my listeners broke into laughter.
"An' I'm a big man!" I cried out angrily. "An' I got a big sword!"
"The ten lepers Christ healed before he passed through Jericho on
his way to Jerusalem," the missionary explained to my parents. "The
boy has seen slides of famous paintings in some magic lantern
exhibition."
But neither father nor mother could remember that I had ever seen a
magic lantern.
"Try him with another picture," father suggested.
"It's all different," I complained as I studied the photograph the
missionary handed me. "Ain't nothin' here except that hill and them
other hills. This ought to be a country road along here. An' over
there ought to be gardens, an' trees, an' houses behind big stone
walls. An' over there, on the other side, in holes in the rocks
ought to be where they buried dead folks. You see this place?--they
used to throw stones at people there until they killed 'm. I never
seen 'm do it. They just told me about it."
"And the hill?" the missionary asked, pointing to the central part
of the print, for which the photograph seemed to have been taken.
"Can you tell us the name of the hill?"
I shook my head.
"Never had no name. They killed folks there. I've seem 'm more 'n
once."
"This time he agrees with the majority of the authorities,"
announced the missionary with huge satisfaction. "The hill is
Golgotha, the Place of Skulls, or, as you please, so named because
it resembles a skull. Notice the resemblance. That is where they
crucified--" He broke off and turned to me. "Whom did they crucify
there, young scholar? Tell us what else you see."
Oh, I saw--my father reported that my eyes were bulging; but I shook
my head stubbornly and said:
"I ain't a-goin' to tell you because you're laughin' at me. I seen
lots an' lots of men killed there. They nailed 'em up, an' it took
a long time. I seen--but I ain't a-goin' to tell. I don't tell
lies. You ask dad an' ma if I tell lies. He'd whale the stuffin'
out of me if I did. Ask 'm."
And thereat not another word could the missionary get from me, even
though he baited me with more photographs that sent my head whirling
with a rush of memory-pictures and that urged and tickled my tongue
with spates of speech which I sullenly resisted and overcame.
"He will certainly make a good Bible scholar," the missionary told
father and mother after I had kissed them good-night and departed
for bed. "Or else, with that imagination, he'll become a successful
fiction-writer."
Which shows how prophecy can go agley. I sit here in Murderers'
Row, writing these lines in my last days, or, rather, in Darrell
Standing's last days ere they take him out and try to thrust him
into the dark at the end of a rope, and I smile to myself. I became
neither Bible scholar nor novelist. On the contrary, until they
buried me in the cells of silence for half a decade, I was
everything that the missionary forecasted not--an agricultural
expert, a professor of agronomy, a specialist in the science of the
elimination of waste motion, a master of farm efficiency, a precise
laboratory scientist where precision and adherence to microscopic
fact are absolute requirements.
And I sit here in the warm afternoon, in Murderers' Row, and cease
from the writing of my memoirs to listen to the soothing buzz of
flies in the drowsy air, and catch phrases of a low-voiced
conversation between Josephus Jackson, the negro murderer on my
right, and Bambeccio, the Italian murderer on my left, who are
discussing, through grated door to grated door, back and forth past
my grated door, the antiseptic virtues and excellences of chewing
tobacco for flesh wounds.
And in my suspended hand I hold my fountain pen, and as I remember
that other hands of me, in long gone ages, wielded ink-brush, and
quill, and stylus, I also find thought-space in time to wonder if
that missionary, when he was a little lad, ever trailed clouds of
glory and glimpsed the brightness of old star-roving days.
Well, back to solitary, after I had learned the code of knuckle-talk
and still found the hours of consciousness too long to endure. By
self-hypnosis, which I began successfully to practise, I became able
to put my conscious mind to sleep and to awaken and loose my
subconscious mind. But the latter was an undisciplined and lawless
thing. It wandered through all nightmarish madness, without
coherence, without continuity of scene, event, or person.
My method of mechanical hypnosis was the soul of simplicity.
Sitting with folded legs on my straw-mattress, I gazed fixedly at a
fragment of bright straw which I had attached to the wall of my cell
near the door where the most light was. I gazed at the bright
point, with my eyes close to it, and tilted upward till they
strained to see. At the same time I relaxed all the will of me and
gave myself to the swaying dizziness that always eventually came to
me. And when I felt myself sway out of balance backward, I closed
my eyes and permitted myself to fall supine and unconscious on the
mattress.
And then, for half-an-hour, ten minutes, or as long as an hour or
so, I would wander erratically and foolishly through the stored
memories of my eternal recurrence on earth. But times and places
shifted too swiftly. I knew afterward, when I awoke, that I,
Darrell Standing, was the linking personality that connected all
bizarreness and grotesqueness. But that was all. I could never
live out completely one full experience, one point of consciousness
in time and space. My dreams, if dreams they may be called, were
rhymeless and reasonless.
Thus, as a sample of my rovings: in a single interval of fifteen
minutes of subconsciousness I have crawled and bellowed in the slime
of the primeval world and sat beside Haas--further and cleaved the
twentieth century air in a gas-driven monoplane. Awake, I
remembered that I, Darrell Standing, in the flesh, during the year
preceding my incarceration in San Quentin, had flown with Haas
further over the Pacific at Santa Monica. Awake, I did not remember
the crawling and the bellowing in the ancient slime. Nevertheless,
awake, I reasoned that somehow I had remembered that early adventure
in the slime, and that it was a verity of long-previous experience,
when I was not yet Darrell Standing but somebody else, or something
else that crawled and bellowed. One experience was merely more
remote than the other. Both experiences were equally real--or else
how did I remember them?
Oh, what a fluttering of luminous images and actions! In a few
short minutes of loosed subconsciousness I have sat in the halls of
kings, above the salt and below the salt, been fool and jester, man-
at-arms, clerk and monk; and I have been ruler above all at the head
of the table--temporal power in my own sword arm, in the thickness
of my castle walls, and the numbers of my fighting men; spiritual
power likewise mine by token of the fact that cowled priests and fat
abbots sat beneath me and swigged my wine and swined my meat.
I have worn the iron collar of the serf about my neck in cold
climes; and I have loved princesses of royal houses in the tropic-
warmed and sun-scented night, where black slaves fanned the sultry
air with fans of peacock plumes, while from afar, across the palm
and fountains, drifted the roaring of lions and the cries of
jackals. I have crouched in chill desert places warming my hands at
fires builded of camel's dung; and I have lain in the meagre shade
of sun-parched sagebrush by dry water-holes and yearned dry-tongued
for water, while about me, dismembered and scattered in the alkali,
were the bones of men and beasts who had yearned and died.
I have been sea-cuny and bravo, scholar and recluse. I have pored
over hand-written pages of huge and musty tomes in the scholastic
quietude and twilight of cliff-perched monasteries, while beneath on
the lesser slopes, peasants still toiled beyond the end of day among
the vines and olives and drove in from pastures the blatting goats
and lowing kine; yes, and I have led shouting rabbles down the
wheel-worn, chariot-rutted paves of ancient and forgotten cities;
and, solemn-voiced and grave as death, I have enunciated the law,
stated the gravity of the infraction, and imposed the due death on
men, who, like Darrell Standing in Folsom Prison, had broken the
law.
Aloft, at giddy mastheads oscillating above the decks of ships, I
have gazed on sun-flashed water where coral-growths iridesced from
profounds of turquoise deeps, and conned the ships into the safety
of mirrored lagoons where the anchors rumbled down close to palm-
fronded beaches of sea-pounded coral rock; and I have striven on
forgotten battlefields of the elder days, when the sun went down on
slaughter that did not cease and that continued through the night-
hours with the stars shining down and with a cool night wind blowing
from distant peaks of snow that failed to chill the sweat of battle;
and again, I have been little Darrell Standing, bare-footed in the
dew-lush grass of spring on the Minnesota farm, chilblained when of
frosty mornings I fed the cattle in their breath-steaming stalls,
sobered to fear and awe of the splendour and terror of God when I
sat on Sundays under the rant and preachment of the New Jerusalem
and the agonies of hell-fire.
Now, the foregoing were the glimpses and glimmerings that came to
me, when, in Cell One of Solitary in San Quentin, I stared myself
unconscious by means of a particle of bright, light-radiating straw.
How did these things come to me? Surely I could not have
manufactured them out of nothing inside my pent walls any more than
could I have manufactured out of nothing the thirty-five pounds of
dynamite so ruthlessly demanded of me by Captain Jamie, Warden
Atherton, and the Prison Board of Directors.
I am Darrell Standing, born and raised on a quarter section of land
in Minnesota, erstwhile professor of agronomy, a prisoner
incorrigible in San Quentin, and at present a death-sentenced man in
Folsom. I do not know, of Darrell Standing's experience, these
things of which I write and which I have dug from out my store-
houses of subconsciousness. I, Darrell Standing, born in Minnesota
and soon to die by the rope in California, surely never loved
daughters of kings in the courts of kings; nor fought cutlass to
cutlass on the swaying decks of ships; nor drowned in the spirit-
rooms of ships, guzzling raw liquor to the wassail-shouting and
death-singing of seamen, while the ship lifted and crashed on the
black-toothed rocks and the water bubbled overhead, beneath, and all
about.
Such things are not of Darrell Standing's experience in the world.
Yet I, Darrell Standing, found these things within myself in
solitary in San Quentin by means of mechanical self-hypnosis. No
more were these experiences Darrell Standing's than was the word
"Samaria" Darrell Standing's when it leapt to his child lips at
sight of a photograph.
One cannot make anything out of nothing. In solitary I could not so
make thirty-five pounds of dynamite. Nor in solitary, out of
nothing in Darrell Standing's experience, could I make these wide,
far visions of time and space. These things were in the content of
my mind, and in my mind I was just beginning to learn my way about. _