Jack London - The Star-Rover # aka The Jacket, Dodo Press edition (keep).pdf - Jack London - allforjesus2001

The Jacket

(The Star-Rover)

Jack London

The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

CHAPTER I

All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have

been aware of other persons in me.—Oh, and trust me, so have you,

my reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this

sense of awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience

of your childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You

were plastic, a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the

process of forming—ay, of forming and forgetting.

You have forgotten much, my reader, and yet, as you read these

lines, you remember dimly the hazy vistas of other times and places

into which your child eyes peered. They seem dreams to you to-

day. Yet, if they were dreams, dreamed then, whence the substance

of them? Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we

know. The stuff of our sheerest dreams is the stuff of our

experience. As a child, a wee child, you dreamed you fell great

heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as things of the air

fly; you were vexed by crawling spiders and many-legged creatures

of the slime; you heard other voices, saw other faces nightmarishly

familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than you know

now, looking back, you ever looked upon.

Very well. These child glimpses are of other-worldness, of other-

lifeness, of things that you had never seen in this particular world of

your particular life. Then whence? Other lives? Other worlds?

Perhaps, when you have read all that I shall write, you will have

received answers to the perplexities I have propounded to you, and

that you yourself, ere you came to read me, propounded to yourself.

* * * * *

Wordsworth knew. He was neither seer nor prophet, but just

ordinary man like you or any man. What he knew, you know, any

The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

man knows. But he most aptly stated it in his passage that begins

“Not in utter nakedness, not in entire forgetfulness. . .”

Ah, truly, shades of the prison-house close about us, the new-born

things, and all too soon do we forget. And yet, when we were new-

born we did remember other times and places. We, helpless infants

in arms or creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our

dreams of air-flight. Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of

nightmare fears of dim and monstrous things. We new-born infants,

without experience, were born with fear, with memory of fear; and

memory is experience .

As for myself, at the beginnings of my vocabulary, at so tender a

period that I still made hunger noises and sleep noises, yet even then

did I know that I had been a star-rover. Yes, I, whose lips had never

lisped the word “king,” remembered that I had once been the son of

a king. More—I remembered that once I had been a slave and a son

of a slave, and worn an iron collar round my neck.

Still more. When I was three, and four, and five years of age, I was

not yet I. I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit not yet cooled solid

in the mould of my particular flesh and time and place. In that

period all that I had ever been in ten thousand lives before strove in

me, and troubled the flux of me, in the effort to incorporate itself in

me and become me.

Silly, isn’t it? But remember, my reader, whom I hope to have travel

far with me through time and space—remember, please, my reader,

that I have thought much on these matters, that through bloody

nights and sweats of dark that lasted years-long, I have been alone

with my many selves to consult and contemplate my many selves. I

have gone through the hells of all existences to bring you news

which you will share with me in a casual comfortable hour over my

printed page.

So, to return, I say, during the ages of three and four and five, I was

not yet I. I was merely becoming as I took form in the mould of my

The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

body, and all the mighty, indestructible past wrought in the mixture

of me to determine what the form of that becoming would be. It was

not my voice that cried out in the night in fear of things known,

which I, forsooth, did not and could not know. The same with my

childish angers, my loves, and my laughters. Other voices screamed

through my voice, the voices of men and women aforetime, of all

shadowy hosts of progenitors. And the snarl of my anger was

blended with the snarls of beasts more ancient than the mountains,

and the vocal madness of my child hysteria, with all the red of its

wrath, was chorded with the insensate, stupid cries of beasts pre-

Adamic and progeologic in time.

And there the secret is out. The red wrath! It has undone me in this,

my present life. Because of it, a few short weeks hence, I shall be led

from this cell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by

a well-stretched rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I

am dead. The red wrath always has undone me in all my lives; for

the red wrath is my disastrous catastrophic heritage from the time of

the slimy things ere the world was prime.

* * * * *

It is time that I introduce myself. I am neither fool nor lunatic. I

want you to know that, in order that you will believe the things I

shall tell you. I am Darrell Standing. Some few of you who read this

will know me immediately. But to the majority, who are bound to be

strangers, let me exposit myself. Eight years ago I was Professor of

Agronomics in the College of Agriculture of the University of

California. Eight years ago the sleepy little university town of

Berkeley was shocked by the murder of Professor Haskell in one of

the laboratories of the Mining Building. Darrell Standing was the

murderer.

I am Darrell Standing. I was caught red-handed. Now the right and

the wrong of this affair with Professor Haskell I shall not discuss. It

was purely a private matter. The point is, that in a surge of anger,

obsessed by that catastrophic red wrath that has cursed me down the

Jack London - The Star-Rover # aka The Jacket, Dodo Press edition (keep).pdf

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