CHAPTER VI

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.