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Updated: May 3, 2025
THE HE-ANCIENT. No: the vortex is not the water nor the gas nor the atoms: it is a power over these things. THE SHE-ANCIENT. The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.
ECRASIA. Even in your childhood, then, you did not understand high art, and adored your own amateur crudities. THE SHE-ANCIENT. How old are you? ECRASIA. Eight months. THE SHE-ANCIENT. When you have lived as long as I have Thank heaven I am still in my prime. THE HE-ANCIENT. You are still capable of thanking, though you do not know what you thank.
THE HE-ANCIENT. It imprisons us on this petty planet and forbids us to range through the stars. ACIS. But even a vortex is a vortex in something. You cant have a whirlpool without water; and you cant have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.
Which is just what this old gentleman and this old lady seem to think too. THE SHE-ANCIENT. Quite so. THE HE-ANCIENT. Precisely. What do you want to be? THE HE-ANCIENT. A vortex. THE NEWLY BORN. A what? THE SHE-ANCIENT. A vortex. I began as a vortex: why should I not end as one? ECRASIA. Oh! That is what you old people are, Vorticists. ACIS. But if life is thought, can you live without a head?
THE HE-ANCIENT. You will also learn that when the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him. THE SHE-ANCIENT. And so I perceived that I had made myself the slave of a slave.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Look at us. Look at me. This is my body, my blood, my brain; but it is not me. Worse still, it can be broken by a slip of the foot, drowned by a cramp in the stomach, destroyed by a flash from the clouds. Sooner or later, its destruction is certain. THE SHE-ANCIENT. Yes: this body is the last doll to be discarded.
I had as much right to kill him as he had to make me. And how was I to know that a little thing like that would kill him? I shouldn't die if he cut off my arm or leg. ECRASIA. What nonsense! MARTELLUS. It may not be nonsense. I daresay if you cut off her leg she would grow another, like the lobsters and the little lizards. THE HE-ANCIENT. Did this dead boy make these two things?
When my arm was weak and I willed it to be strong, I could create a roll of muscle on it; and when I understood that, I understood that I could without any greater miracle give myself ten arms and three heads. THE HE-ANCIENT. I also came to understand such miracles. For fifty years I sat contemplating this power in myself and concentrating my will.
THE HE-ANCIENT. Yet I have seen you walking over the mountains alone. Have you not found your best friend in yourself? ACIS. What are you driving at, old one? What does all this lead to? THE HE-ANCIENT. It leads, young man, to the truth that you can create nothing but yourself. Ecrasia: you are clever. Do you understand it? I don't.
THE HE-ANCIENT. And I, like Acis, ceased to walk over the mountains with my friends, and walked alone; for I found that I had creative power over myself but none over my friends. And then I ceased to walk on the mountains; for I saw that the mountains were dead.
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