Page:Episodes-before-thirty.djvu/241

Rh as mentioned earlier, I protected my sensitive inner self from being too much wounded. I would depute just sufficient intelligence and observation to attend to the immediate work in hand, while the rest of me, the major portion, lay inactive, uninvolved, certainly inoperative. Painful and vivid impressions were, none the less, received, of course, only I refused to admit or recognize them. They emerged, years later, in stories perhaps, these suppressed hieroglyphics, but at the actual time I could so protect myself that I did not consciously record them. And hence, I think, my faint recollection now of a thousand horrible experiences during these New York reporting days.

This "detachment," in the ignorant way I used it, was, perhaps, nothing less than shirking of the unpleasant. At twenty-three I had not yet discovered that better method which consists in facing the unpleasant without reservation or evasion, while raising the energy thus released into a higher channel, "transmuting" it, as the jargon of 1922 describes it. "Detachment," however, even in its earliest stages, and provided it does not remain merely where it starts, is an acquisition not without value; it can lead, at any rate, to interesting and curious experiments. It deputes the surface-consciousness, or sufficient of it, to deal with some disagreeable little matter in hand, while the subconscious or major portion of the self--for those who are aware of possessing it--may travel and go free. It is, I think, Bligh Bond, in his "Gate of Remembrance," who mentions that the automatic writer whose revelations are there given, read a book aloud while his hand with the pencil wrote. Many a literary man, whose inspiration depends upon the stirrings of this mysterious subconscious region, knows that to read a dull book, or talk to a dull person, engages just enough of his surface consciousness to set the other portion free. Reading verse--though not poetry, of course--has this effect; for some, a cinema performance, with the soothing dimness, the music, the ever-shifting yet not too arresting pictures, works the magic; for others, light music; for Rh