BLUE LIGHTS

(January 1941)

I tangled myself in the cord of my reading-lamp, a major
tragedy, last night but this morning Louisa herself unscrews the
cap and mends it. It is working again. My hot-water bottle also
leaked, but thanks to the Nazis for once, I was wakened before too
great damage was done to my blankets. If two things break, three
will; Jo used to say, "there is an old charwoman or gypsy idea
that if you yourself break the third, you will lay the spell - a
match-stick will do." I fumble for a match-box in the dark and
break a fresh match-stick, eureka, now we are finished for to-night,
last night. My house even, may come under this sanction - anyhow,
the raiders did not stay very long.

Bee who is "always right", alas, goes on and on about the
great blitz due in March. She wants me to pack up and go to
Cornwall or to Eckington where Robert has furnished a house in the
village. He found the landlord had left a dozen or more little
birds, budgorigars, in a cupboard and two gold fish in a pie-dish
in the sink. He writes Bee that he wants bird-seed, the birds are
so beautiful with such vivid colours; "don't bring any more sup-
plies," he writes, "only bird-seed. I want to keep these birds
alive."

I do not want to go to Cornwall or to Eckington, for that

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matter. It unmerves me to think of another move. The emotions
of daily life, even living in one's own usual surroundings are
so vivid, I can't stand any more. Sometimes, when one hears the
wings〔the buzz-zz-zz that is the Nazi, not"us",〕one almost thinks,
if only now - now - if only it came quickly. Life is really
not worth living, how can it be, how pretend it is?

It is pretty false to exaggerate. Yet almost, the only real
thing now, is the buzz-zz-zz of the enemy wings overhead. We
miss them if they don't come; stare at the black ceiling and
wonder, who is getting it now? If they rain fire and bombs on us,
at least, they are here, we know where they are. This is perhaps
an externalization of hidden inner terrors; a terror rationalized.
It brings a sort of peace and the enemy now seem the only reality.

Perhaps they are the only reality.

We can't stand it any more. But we do stand it. This is
what is interesting. When a man is dying, they say, his life
flashes across; or if a man is dying, suffering, they say, some-
times he ceases to suffer and in the last agony, feels nothing.
There is that. We reach the end, and if we can sustain sanity
and detachment and discernment, we are each of us, in a singular
and privileged position. We are each one of us a Galileo, a
Newton. We may make discoveries that the human mind has not yet,
so far, been in a position to make, about the human mind. If we
can be the doctor, alive, watching ourself dying, we may come

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across some amazingly important and staggering discoveries.
This sets a sort of fire burning. It is a blue fire, burning
it is true, in a vacuum, but it is fire.

We have a blue-flame in our skull, rather like the blue-
slide of the black-out lantern we use. There is a blue light,
if you slide the little catch, on the electric torch, one way;
there is the white or yellow light when you slide it in the oppo-
site direction. It is like that. The white or yellow light is
the ordinary light of human reason, the usual human mind-voltage.
The blue light is for extra occasions; we switch on the blue when
we go out in the black-out.

There are blue lamps everywhere. There must be these high-
powered cerebral minds at work everywhere. Now, I feel quite alone,
cut off; I write because the little blue flame in my skull, needs
me in order to burn. I write just anything as just now, "I tangled
myself in the cord of my reading-lamp" and then let the words run
along. What are the words? I do not stop to consider them. I
feel simply a click, as it were, and that other-mind is burning
in my mind.

People write from America, "what are you writing? Won't you
send your manuscripts to us here to keep for you? It would be
interesting to see what you are writing," and I feel, but this is
not writing. They will not understand that this is burning, that
this is a flame in a skull, and that this flame must meet another
flame, other flames, as the electric-torch picks out, in the damp

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and dank and murk of our London streets at night, the distant
steady, strange little blue-gleam of another distant electric
torch, coming or going or crossing a street or climbing onto a
bus. It is black, unutterably, the human consciousness. But maybe
where it is most terribly dense, this blackness, there will be more
opportunity for those blue-lights to show.

I am thinking of those blue-lights, burning in skulls,
burning out bodies that have become baffled with conditions of
the simplest living. I am thinking of others who have said, we
can't bear it but who go on, because of the immense adventure of
going on where the human mind has not yet penetrated, making a
path in the pitch-black night.