All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me.
Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we know. My reader, as a child, you dreamed you flew through the air; you were vexed by crawling spiders; you heard other voices, saw other faces, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than you know now.
Very well. These child glimpses are of other-worldness[1], of other-lifeness, of things that you had never seen in this particular world of your particular life. Then whence? Other lives? Other worlds?
Truly, shades of the prison close about us[2], and we all forget. And yet, when we were new-born we did remember other times and places. 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, even at the beginning of my life, I knew 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[3]. I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit. Silly, isn’t it? But remember, my reader, remember, please, that I have thought much on these matters. I have gone through the hells of all existences to bring you news which you will share with me over these pages.
So, I say, during the ages of three and four and five, I was not yet I. Other voices screamed through my voice, the voices of men and women aforetime, of all shadowy hosts of progenitors.
A few weeks, I shall be led from this cell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by a rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I am dead.
It is time that I introduce myself. I am neither fool nor lunatic. I am Darrell Standing[4]. 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[5] was shocked by the murder of Professor Haskell[6] in one of the laboratories. Darrell Standing was the murderer.
I am Darrell Standing. I was caught. In a surge of anger, obsessed by red wrath, I killed that professor.
No; I am not to be hanged for his murder. I received a life-sentence[7] as my punishment. I was thirty-six years of age at the time. I am now forty-four years old. I have spent eight years in the California State Prison of San Quentin[8]. Five of these years I spent in the dark. Solitary confinement[9], they call it. But through these five years I managed to attain freedom such as few men have ever known. Not only did I range the world, but I ranged time. Truly, thanks to Ed Morrell[10], I have had five years of star-roving. But Ed Morrell is another story. I shall tell you about him a little later. I have so much to tell.
Well, a beginning. I was born in Minnesota. And I knew agriculture. It was my profession. I was born to it, reared to it, trained to it; and I was a master of it. I can look, not at land, but at landscape, and pronounce the virtues and the shortcomings of the soil. Corn? Who else knows corn? And farm management! I know it. Who else knows it?
And here I must close this first chapter of my narrative. It is nine o’clock, and that means lights out.
I am Darrell Standing. They are going to take me out and hang me soon. In the meantime I write in these pages of the other times and places.
After my sentence, I came to spend the rest of my life in the prison of San Quentin. They put me in the jute-mill[11]. The criminality of wastefulness irritated me. The crime of waste was abhorrent. I rebelled. I tried to show the guards more efficient ways. But I was given the dungeon and the starvation of light and food. And I rebelled again. I was given the dungeon, plus the strait-jacket[12]. I was beaten by the stupid guards.
Two years of this witless persecution I endured. It is terrible for a man to be tied down and gnawed by rats. The stupid guards were rats, and they gnawed my intelligence, gnawed all my nerves and my consciousness. And I, who in my past have been a fighter, in this present life was no fighter at all. I was a farmer, an agriculturist, a professor, a laboratory slave, interested only in the soil and the increase of the productiveness of the soil.
I was not a fighter, but I was a thinker. And I told Warden Atherton[13]:
“It is so absurd, my dear Warden, to think that your guards can shake out of my brain the things that are clear and definite. The whole organization of this prison is stupid. You can’t weave jute. Your loom-rooms are fifty years behind the times.”
I showed him what a fool he was, and as a result he decided that I was a hopeless incorrigible.
Give a dog a bad name… – you know this proverb. Very well. Warden Atherton gave the final sanction to the badness of my name. Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel. The guards were stupid monsters. Listen, and you will learn what they did to me. There was a poet in the prison, a convict, a degenerate poet. He was a forger. He was a coward. He was a snitcher. This poet-forger’s name was
