The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

. Incessantly to remember, means obsession, lunacy. So the problem I faced in solitary, where incessant remembering strove for possession of me, was the prob

ey irretrievably lost when he had grown to manhood? Could this particular content of his boy brain be utterly eliminated? Or were these memories

ect and look upon the sun again. Then why could n

inment of complete forgetfulness

p, and the subconscious mind awakened, then was the thing accomplished, then would all the

ry 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 becomi

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 th

ave forgotten had I not heard my father recite it to

t. It had seemed of a sudden most familiar, in much the same way that my father's barn would have been in a photog

d," the missionary

d with great

n't its name?" th

odd

is its na

I began, then conclud

I went on after a pause. "Th

d to my mother another ph

Gate where I walked in and right up to the Tower of David in the back of the picture where my fin

to rubbish piles of ruined masonry

st spoke was what the Jews called it. But we call

" my father chuckled. "Yo

e missionary thought I was making game of him. He handed me another photograph. It was just a bleak waste of a landscape, barren of trees

re is that?" the

name cam

" I said

mother was perplexed at my antic conduct

I passed through it. That is why I bought it. And it goes

her and mot

y reconstructing the photograph. The general trend of the landscape and the line of the

n' two boys drivin' 'em. An' right here is a lot of men walkin' behind one man. An' over there"-I pointed to where I had placed my vi

healing of the lepers in Luke," the missionary said with a sm

hen I was five years old, so I went o

wavin' their arms an' y

come near them

and right there an' keep a-yel

? What's the man doing in the front of th

ing to the sick men. An' the boys with the g

d t

ey ain't yellin' any more, an' they don't look sick any

of my listeners br

cried out angrily. "A

way to Jerusalem," the missionary explained to my parents. "The boy

er could remember that I ha

other picture,"

untry road along here. An' over there ought to be gardens, an' trees, an' houses behind big stone walls. An' over there, on the other side, in holes in the rocks ought t

tral part of the print, for which the photograph seemed t

ok my

killed folks there. I'v

olgotha, the Place of Skulls, or, as you please, so named because it resembles a skull. Notice the resemblance. That is whe

t my eyes were bulging; but I sh

here. They nailed 'em up, an' it took a long time. I seen-but I ain't a-goin' to tell. I don't t

with more photographs that sent my head whirling with a rush of memory-pictures and that

r and mother after I had kissed them good-night and departed for bed. "O

pe, and I smile to myself. I became neither Bible scholar nor novelist. On the contrary, until they buried me in the cells of silence for half a decade, I was everything that the missionary forecasted not-an agricultural exper

d catch phrases of a low-voiced conversation between Josephus Jackson, the negro murderer on my right, and Bambeccio, the Italian murderer on my left, who are

s, wielded ink-brush, and quill, and stylus, I also find thought-space in time to wonder if that missionary

which I began successfully to practise, I became able to put my conscious mind to sleep and to awaken and loose my subconscious mind. But the latter

ear the door where the most light was. I gazed at the bright point, with my eyes close to it, and tilted upward till they strained to see. At the same time I relaxed all the will of me and gave mysel

mes and places shifted too swiftly. I knew afterward, when I awoke, that I, Darrell Standing, was the linking personality that connected all bizarreness and grotesqueness. But that

, in the flesh, during the year preceding my incarceration in San Quentin, had flown with Haas further over the Pacific at Santa Monica. Awake, I did not remember the crawling and the bellowing in the ancient slime. Nevertheless, awake, I reasoned that somehow I had remembered that early adve

n fool and jester, man-at-arms, clerk and monk; and I have been ruler above all at the head of the table-temporal power in my own sword arm, in the thickness of my castle walls

ck plumes, while from afar, across the palm and fountains, drifted the roaring of lions and the cries of jackals. I have crouched in chill desert places warming my hands at fires builded of camel's dung; and I have la

asants still toiled beyond the end of day among the vines and olives and drove in from pastures the blatting goats and lowing kine; yes, and I have led shouting rabbles down the wheel-worn, chariot-rutted paves of ancient

riven on forgotten battlefields of the elder days, when the sun went down on slaughter that did not cease and that continued through the night-hours with the stars shining down and with a cool night wind blowing from distant peaks of snow that failed to chill the sweat of battle; and again, I have been little Darrell St

of bright, light-radiating straw. How did these things come to me? Surely I could not have manufactured them out of nothing inside my pent walls any more than could

ngs of which I write and which I have dug from out my store-houses of subconsciousness. I, Darrell Standing, born in Minnesota and soon to die by the rope in California, surely never loved daughters of kings in the courts of kings; nor fought cutlass to cutlass

hin myself in solitary in San Quentin by means of mechanical self-hypnosis. No more were these experiences Darrell

n solitary, out of nothing in Darrell Standing's experience, could I make these wide, far visions of time and