Fantasia of the Unconscious

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Title: Fantasia of the Unconscious
Author: D. H. Lawrence
Release Date: February 24, 2007 [eBook #20654]
Language: English
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FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
by
D. H. LAWRENCE
New York
Thomas Seltzer
1922
Copyright, 1922, by
Thomas Seltzer, Inc.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
FOREWORD
I. INTRODUCTION
II. THE HOLY FAMILY
III. PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON
IV. TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS
V. THE FIVE SENSES
VI. FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND
VII. FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION
VIII. EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD
IX. THE BIRTH OF SEX
X. PARENT LOVE
XI. THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
XII. LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS
XIII. COSMOLOGICAL
XIV. SLEEP AND DREAMS
XV. THE LOWER SELF
EPILOGUE
FOREWORD
The present book is a continuation from "Psychoanalysis and the
Unconscious." The generality of readers had better just leave it
alone. The generality of critics likewise. I really don't want to
convince anybody. It is quite in opposition to my whole nature. I
don't intend my books for the generality of readers. I count it a
mistake of our mistaken democracy, that every man who can read print
is allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed. I count it
a misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market, like
slaves exposed naked for sale. But there we are, since we live in an
age of mistaken democracy, we must go through with it.
I warn the generality of readers, that this present book will seem to
them only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the
last. I would warn the generality of critics to throw it in the waste
paper basket without more ado.
As for the limited few, in whom one must perforce find an answerer, I
may as well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus. That
statement alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably.
Finally, to the remnants of a remainder, in order to apologize for the
sudden lurch into cosmology, or cosmogony, in this book, I wish to say
that the whole thing hangs inevitably together. I am not a scientist.
I am an amateur of amateurs. As one of my critics said, you either
believe or you don't.
I am not a proper archæologist nor an anthropologist nor an
ethnologist. I am no "scholar" of any sort. But I am very grateful to
scholars for their sound work. I have found hints, suggestions for
what I say here in all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga and
Plato and St. John the Evangel and the early Greek philosophers like
Herakleitos down to Fraser and his "Golden Bough," and even Freud and
Frobenius. Even then I only remember hints--and I proceed by
intuition. This leaves you quite free to dismiss the whole wordy mass
of revolting nonsense, without a qualm.
Only let me say, that to my mind there is a great field of science
which is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science which
proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living
experience and of sure intuition. Call it subjective science if you
like. Our objective science of modern knowledge concerns itself only
with phenomena, and with phenomena as regarded in their
cause-and-effect relationship. I have nothing to say against our
science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regard it as
exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems to
me just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. Even
biology never considers life, but only mechanistic functioning and
apparatus of life.
I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece
were the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded our
own era once, had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a
science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic
and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles.
I believe that this great science previous to ours and quite different
in constitution and nature from our science once was universal,
established all over the then-existing globe. I believe it was
esoteric, invested in a large priesthood. Just as mathematics and
mechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the same way in
the universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow to-day, so,
it seems to me, in the great world previous to ours a great science
and cosmology were taught esoterically in all countries of the globe,
Asia, Polynesia, America, Atlantis and Europe. Belt's suggestion of
the geographical nature of this previous world seems to me most
interesting. In the period which geologists call the Glacial Period,
the waters of the earth must have been gathered up in a vast body on
the higher places of our globe, vast worlds of ice. And the sea-beds
of to-day must have been comparatively dry. So that the Azores rose up
mountainous from the plain of Atlantis, where the Atlantic now washes,
and the Easter Isles and the Marquesas and the rest rose lofty from
the marvelous great continent of the Pacific.
In that world men lived and taught and knew, and were in one complete
correspondence over all the earth. Men wandered back and forth from
Atlantis to the Polynesian Continent as men now sail from Europe to
America. The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science was
universal over the earth, cosmopolitan as it is to-day.
Then came the melting of the glaciers, and the world flood. The
refugees from the drowned continents fled to the high places of
America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some degenerated
naturally into cave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures, and some
retained their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the
South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some,
like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese,
refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its
half-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge:
remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story.
And so, the intense potency of symbols is part at least memory. And so
it is that all the great symbols and myths which dominate the world
when our history first begins, are very much the same in every country
and every people, the great myths all relate to one another. And so it
is that these myths now begin to hypnotize us again, our own impulse
towards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent.
And so, besides myths, we find the same mathematic figures, cosmic
graphs which remain among the aboriginal peoples in all continents,
mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or scientific significance
is lost, yet which continue in use for purposes of conjuring or
divining.
If my reader finds this bosh and abracadabra, all right for him. Only
I have no more regard for his little crowings on his own little
dunghill. Myself, I am not so sure that I am one of the
one-and-onlies. I like the wide world of centuries and vast
ages--mammoth worlds beyond our day, and mankind so wonderful in his
distances, his history that has no beginning yet always the pomp and
the magnificence of human splendor unfolding through the earth's
changing periods. Floods and fire and convulsions and ice-arrest
intervene between the great glamorous civilizations of mankind. But
nothing will ever quench humanity and the human potentiality to evolve
something magnificent out of a renewed chaos.
I do not believe in evolution, but in the strangeness and
rainbow-change of ever-renewed creative civilizations.
So much, then, for my claim to remarkable discoveries. I believe I am
only trying to stammer out the first terms of a forgotten knowledge.
But I have no desire to revive dead kings, or dead sages. It is not
for me to arrange fossils, and decipher hieroglyphic phrases. I
couldn't do it if I wanted to. But then I can do something else. The
soul must take the hint from the relics our scientists have so
marvelously gathered out of the forgotten past, and from the hint
develop a new living utterance. The spark is from dead wisdom, but the
fire is life.
And as an example--a very simple one--of how a scientist of the most
innocent modern sort may hint at truths which, when stated, he would
laugh at as fantastic nonsense, let us quote a word from the already
old-fashioned "Golden Bough." "It must have appeared to the ancient
Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from the fire which
resided in the sacred oak."
Exactly. The fire which resided in the Tree of Life. That is, life
itself. So we must read: "It must have appeared to the ancient Aryan
that the sun was periodically recruited from life."--Which is what the
early Greek philosophers were always saying. And which still seems to
me the real truth, the clue to the cosmos. Instead of life being drawn
from the sun, it is the emanation from life itself, that is, from all
the living plants and creatures which nourish the sun.
Of course, my dear critic, the ancient Aryans were just doddering--the
old duffers: or babbling, the babes. But as for me, I have some
respect for my ancestors, and believe they had more up their sleeve
than just the marvel of the unborn me.
One last weary little word. This pseudo-philosophy of
mine--"pollyanalytics," as one of my respected critics might say--is
deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poems
come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need which one has
for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in
general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's
experiences as a writer and as a man. The novels and poems are pure
passionate experience. These "pollyanalytics" are inferences made
afterwards, from the experience.
And finally, it seems to me that even art is utterly dependent on
philosophy: or if you prefer it, on a metaphysic. The metaphysic or
philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated and may be quite
unconscious, in the artist, yet it is a metaphysic that governs men at
the time, and is by all men more or less comprehended, and lived. Men
live and see according to some gradually developing and gradually
withering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea or
metaphysic--exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and
art. Our vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing woefully thin,
and the art is wearing absolutely threadbare. We have no future;
neither for our hopes nor our aims nor our art. It has all gone gray
and opaque.
We've got to rip the old veil of a vision across, and find what the
heart really believes in, after all: and what the heart really wants,
for the next future. And we've got to put it down in terms of belief
and of knowledge. And then go forward again, to the fulfillment in
life and art.
Rip the veil of the old vision across, and walk through the rent. And
if I try to do this--well, why not? If I try to write down what I
see--why not? If a publisher likes to print the book--all right. And
if anybody wants to read it, let him. But why anybody should read one
single word if he doesn't want to, I don't see. Unless of course he is
a critic who needs to scribble a dollar's worth of words, no matter
how.
TAORMINA
October 8, 1921
FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Let us start by making a little apology to Psychoanalysis. It wasn't
fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious; or perhaps it _was_
fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious, which is truly a
negative quantity and an unpleasant menagerie. What was really not
fair was to jeer at Psychoanalysis as if Freud had invented and
described nothing but an unconscious, in all his theory.
The unconscious is not, of course, the clue to the Freudian theory.
The real clue is sex. A sexual motive is to be attributed to all human
activity.
Now this is going too far. We are bound to admit than an element of
sex enters into all human activity. But so does an element of greed,
and of many other things. We are bound to admit that into all human
relationships, particularly adult human relationships, a large
element of sex enters. We are thankful that Freud has insisted on
this. We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to earth, out of
all our clouds of superfineness. What Freud says is always _partly_
true. And half a loaf is better than no bread.
But really, there is the other half of the loaf. All is _not_ sex. And
a sexual motive is _not_ to be attributed to all human activities. We
know it, without need to argue.
Sex surely has a specific meaning. Sex means the being divided into
male and female; and the magnetic desire or impulse which puts male
apart from female, in a negative or sundering magnetism, but which
also draws male and female together in a long and infinitely varied
approach towards the critical act of coition. Sex without the
consummating act of coition is never quite sex, in human
relationships: just as a eunuch is never quite a man. That is to say,
the act of coition is the essential clue to sex.
Now does all life work up to the one consummating act of coition? In
one direction, it does, and it would be better if psychoanalysis
plainly said so. In one direction, all life works up to the one
supreme moment of coition. Let us all admit it, sincerely.
But we are not confined to one direction only, or to one exclusive
consummation. Was the building of the cathedrals a working up towards
the act of coition? Was the dynamic impulse sexual? No. The sexual
element was present, and important. But not predominant. The same in
the building of the Panama Canal. The sexual impulse, in its widest
form, was a very great impulse towards the building of the Panama
Canal. But there was something else, of even higher importance, and
greater dynamic power.
And what is this other, greater impulse? It is the desire of the human
male to build a world: not "to build a world for you, dear"; but to
build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort
something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful.
Even the Panama Canal would never have been built _simply_ to let
ships through. It is the pure disinterested craving of the human male
to make something wonderful, out of his own head and his own self, and
his own soul's faith and delight, which starts everything going. This
is the prime motivity. And the motivity of sex is subsidiary to this:
often directly antagonistic.
That is, the essentially religious or creative motive is the first
motive for all human activity. The sexual motive comes second. And
there is a great conflict between the interests of the two, at all
times.
What we want to do, is to trace the creative or religious motive to
its source in the human being, keeping in mind always the near
relationship between the religious motive and the sexual. The two
great impulses are like man and wife, or father and son. It is no use
putting one under the feet of the other.
The great desire to-day is to deny the religious impulse altogether,
or else to assert its absolute alienity from the sexual impulse. The
orthodox religious world says faugh! to sex. Whereupon we thank Freud
for giving them tit for tat. But the orthodox scientific world says
fie! to the religious impulse. The scientist wants to discover a cause
for everything. And there is no cause for the religious impulse. Freud
is with the scientists. Jung dodges from his university gown into a
priest's surplice till we don't know where we are. We prefer Freud's
_Sex_ to Jung's _Libido_ or Bergson's _Elan Vital_. Sex has at least
_some_ definite reference, though when Freud makes sex accountable for
everything he as good as makes it accountable for nothing.
We refuse any _Cause_, whether it be Sex or Libido or Elan Vital or
ether or unit of force or _perpetuum mobile_ or anything else. But
also we feel that we cannot, like Moses, perish on the top of our
present ideal Pisgah, or take the next step into thin air. There we
are, at the top of our Pisgah of ideals, crying _Excelsior_ and trying
to clamber up into the clouds: that is, if we are idealists with the
religious impulse rampant in our breasts. If we are scientists we
practice aeroplane flying or eugenics or disarmament or something
equally absurd.
The promised land, if it be anywhere, lies away beneath our feet. No
more prancing upwards. No more uplift. No more little Excelsiors
crying world-brotherhood and international love and Leagues of
Nations. Idealism and materialism amount to the same thing on top of
Pisgah, and the space is _very_ crowded. We're all cornered on our
mountain top, climbing up one another and standing on one another's
faces in our scream of Excelsior.
To your tents, O Israel! Brethren, let us go down. We will descend.
The way to our precious Canaan lies obviously downhill. An end of
uplift. Downhill to the land of milk and honey. The blood will soon be
flowing faster than either, but we can't help that. We can't help it
if Canaan has blood in its veins, instead of pure milk and honey.
If it is a question of origins, the origin is always the same,
whatever we say about it. So is the cause. Let that be a comfort to
us. If we want to talk about God, well, we can please ourselves. God
has been talked about quite a lot, and He doesn't seem to mind. Why we
should take it so personally is a problem. Likewise if we wish to have
a tea party with the atom, let us: or with the wriggling little unit
of energy, or the ether, or the Libido, or the Elan Vital, or any
other Cause. Only don't let us have sex for tea. We've all got too
much of it under the table; and really, for my part, I prefer to keep
mine there, no matter what the Freudians say about me.
But it is tiring to go to any more tea parties with the Origin, or the
Cause, or even the Lord. Let us pronounce the mystic Om, from the pit
of the stomach, and proceed.
There's not a shadow of doubt about it, the First Cause is just
unknowable to us, and we'd be sorry if it wasn't. Whether it's God or
the Atom. All I say is Om!
The first business of every faith is to declare its ignorance. I don't
know where I come from--nor where I exit to. I don't know the origins
of life nor the goal of death. I don't know how the two parent cells
which are my biological origin became the me which I am. I don't in
the least know what those two parent cells were. The chemical analysis
is just a farce, and my father and mother were just vehicles. And yet,
I must say, since I've got to know about the two cells, I'm glad I do
know.
The Moses of Science and the Aaron of Idealism have got the whole
bunch of us here on top of Pisgah. It's a tight squeeze, and we'll be
falling very, very foul of one another in five minutes, unless some of
us climb down. But before leaving our eminence let us have a look
round, and get our bearings.
They say that way lies the New Jerusalem of universal love: and over
there the happy valley of indulgent Pragmatism: and there, quite near, is
the chirpy land of the Vitalists: and in those dark groves the home of
successful Analysis, surnamed Psycho: and over those blue hills the
Supermen are prancing about, though you can't see them. And there is
Besantheim, and there is Eddyhowe, and there, on that queer little
tableland, is Wilsonia, and just round the corner is Rabindranathopolis....
But Lord, I can't see anything. Help me, heaven, to a telescope, for I
see blank nothing.
I'm not going to try any more. I'm going to sit down on my posterior
and sluther full speed down this Pisgah, even if it cost me my trouser
seat. So ho!--away we go.
In the beginning--there never was any beginning, but let it pass.
We've got to make a start somehow. In the very beginning of all
things, time and space and cosmos and being, in the beginning of all
these was a little living creature. But I don't know even if it was
little. In the beginning was a living creature, its plasm quivering
and its life-pulse throbbing. This little creature died, as little
creatures always do. But not before it had had young ones. When the
daddy creature died, it fell to pieces. And that was the beginning of
the cosmos. Its little body fell down to a speck of dust, which the
young ones clung to because they must cling to something. Its little
breath flew asunder, the hotness and brightness of the little beast--I
beg your pardon, I mean the radiant energy from the corpse flew away
to the right hand, and seemed to shine warm in the air, while the
clammy energy from the body flew away to the left hand, and seemed
dark and cold. And so, the first little master was dead and done for,
and instead of his little living body there was a speck of dust in the
middle, which became the earth, and on the right hand was a brightness
which became the sun, rampaging with all the energy that had come out
of the dead little master, and on the left hand a darkness which felt
like an unrisen moon. And that was how the Lord created the world.
Except that I know nothing about the Lord, so I shouldn't mention it.
But I forgot the soul of the little master. It probably did a bit of
flying as well--and then came back to the young ones. It seems most
natural that way.
Which is my account of the Creation. And I mean by it, that Life is
not and never was anything but living creatures. That's what life is
and will be just living creatures, no matter how large you make the
capital L. Out of living creatures the material cosmos was made: out
of the death of living creatures, when their little living bodies fell
dead and fell asunder into all sorts of matter and forces and
energies, sun, moons, stars and worlds. So you got the universe. Where
you got the living creature from, that first one, don't ask me. He was
just there. But he was a little person with a soul of his own. He
wasn't Life with a capital L.
If you don't believe me, then don't. I'll even give you a little song
to sing.
"If it be not true to me
What care I how true it be . ."
That's the kind of man I really like, chirping his insouciance. And I
chirp back:
"Though it be not true to thee
It's gay and gospel truth to me. . ."
The living live, and then die. They pass away, as we know, to dust and
to oxygen and nitrogen and so on. But what we don't know, and what we
might perhaps know a little more, is how they pass away direct into
life itself--that is, direct into the living. That is, how many dead
souls fly over our untidiness like swallows and build under the eaves
of the living. How many dead souls, like swallows, twitter and breed
thoughts and instincts under the thatch of my hair and the eaves of my
forehead, I don't know. But I believe a good many. And I hope they
have a good time. And I hope not too many are bats.
I am sorry to say I believe in the souls of the dead. I am almost
ashamed to say, that I believe the souls of the dead in some way
reënter and pervade the souls of the living: so that life is always
the life of living creatures, and death is always our affair. This
bit, I admit, is bordering on mysticism. I'm sorry, because I don't
like mysticism. It has no trousers and no trousers seat: _n'a pas de
quoi_. And I should feel so uncomfortable if I put my hand behind me
and felt an absolute blank.
Meanwhile a long, thin, brown caterpillar keeps on pretending to be a
dead thin beech-twig, on a little bough at my feet. He had got his
hind feet and his fore feet on the twig, and his body looped up like
an arch in the air between, when a fly walked up the twig and began to
mount the arch of the imitator, not having the least idea that it was
on a gentleman's coat-tails. The caterpillar shook his stern, and the
fly made off as if it had seen a ghost. The dead twig and the live
twig now remain equally motionless, enjoying their different ways. And
when, with this very pencil, I push the head of the caterpillar off
from the twig, he remains on his tail, arched forward in air, and
oscillating unhappily, like some tiny pendulum ticking. Ticking,
ticking in mid-air, arched away from his planted tail. Till at last,
after a long minute and a half, he touches the twig again, and
subsides into twigginess. The only thing is, the dead beech-twig can't
pretend to be a wagging caterpillar. Yet how the two commune!
However--we have our exits and our entrances, and one man in his time
plays many parts. More than he dreams of, poor darling. And I am
entirely at a loss for a moral!
Well, then, we are born. I suppose that's a safe statement. And we
become at once conscious, if we weren't so before. _Nem con._ And our
little baby body is a little functioning organism, a little developing
machine or instrument or organ, and our little baby mind begins to
stir with all our wonderful psychical beginnings. And so we are in
bud.
But it won't do. It is too much of a Pisgah sight. We overlook too
much. _Descendez, cher Moïse. Vous voyez trop loin._ You see too far
all at once, dear Moses. Too much of a bird's-eye view across the
Promised Land to the shore. Come down, and walk across, old fellow.
And you won't see all that milk and honey and grapes the size of
duck's eggs. All the dear little budding infant with its tender
virginal mind and various clouds of glory instead of a napkin. Not at
all, my dear chap. No such luck of a promised land.
Climb down, Pisgah, and go to Jericho. _Allons_, there is no road yet,
but we are all Aarons with rods of our own.
CHAPTER II
THE HOLY FAMILY
We are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein for knocking that eternal
axis out of the universe. The universe isn't a spinning wheel. It is a
cloud of bees flying and veering round. Thank goodness for that, for
we were getting drunk on the spinning wheel.
So that now the universe has escaped from the pin which was pushed
through it, like an impaled fly vainly buzzing: now that the multiple
universe flies its own complicated course quite free, and hasn't got
any hub, we can hope also to escape.
We won't be pinned down, either. We have no one law that governs us.
For me there is only one law: _I am I._ And that isn't a law, it's
just a remark. One is one, but one is not all alone. There are other
stars buzzing in the center of their own isolation. And there is no
straight path between them. There is no straight path between you and
me, dear reader, so don't blame me if my words fly like dust into
your eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of like music into your
ears. I am I, but also you are you, and we are in sad need of a theory
of human relativity. We need it much more than the universe does. The
stars know how to prowl round one another without much damage done.
But you and I, dear reader, in the first conviction that you are me
and that I am you, owing to the oneness of mankind, why, we are always
falling foul of one another, and chewing each other's fur.
You are _not_ me, dear reader, so make no pretentions to it. Don't get
alarmed if _I_ say things. It isn't your sacred mouth which is opening
and shutting. As for the profanation of your sacred ears, just apply a
little theory of relativity, and realize that what I say is not what
you hear, but something uttered in the midst of my isolation, and
arriving strangely changed and travel-worn down the long curve of your
own individual circumambient atmosphere. I may say Bob, but heaven
alone knows what the goose hears. And you may be sure that a red rag
is, to a bull, something far more mysterious and complicated than a
socialist's necktie.
So I hope now I have put you in your place, dear reader. Sit you like
Watts' Hope on your own little blue globe, and I'll sit on mine, and
we won't bump into one another if we can help it. You can twang your
old hopeful lyre. It may be music to you, so I don't blame you. It is
a terrible wowing in my ears. But that may be something in my
individual atmosphere; some strange deflection as your music crosses
the space between us. Certainly I never hear the concert of World
Regeneration and Hope Revived Again without getting a sort of
lock-jaw, my teeth go so keen on edge from the twanging harmony.
Still, the world-regenerators may _really_ be quite excellent
performers on their own jews'-harps. Blame the edginess of my teeth.
Now I am going to launch words into space so mind your cosmic eye.
As I said in my small but naturally immortal book, "Psychoanalysis and
the Unconscious," there's more in it than meets the eye. There's more
in you, dear reader, than meets the eye. What, don't you believe it?
Do you think you're as obvious as a poached egg on a piece of toast,
like the poor lunatic? Not a bit of it, dear reader. You've got a
solar plexus, and a lumbar ganglion not far from your liver, and I'm
going to tell everybody. Nothing brings a man home to himself like
telling everybody. And I _will_ drive you home to yourself, do you
hear? You've been poaching in my private atmospheric grounds long
enough, identifying yourself with me and me with everybody. A nice row
there'd be in heaven if Aldebaran caught Sirius by the tail and said,
"Look here, you're not to look so green, you damm dog-star! It's an
offense against star-regulations."
Which reminds me that the Arabs say the shooting stars, meteorites,
are starry stones which the angels fling at the poaching demons whom
they catch sight of prowling too near the palisades of heaven. I must
say I like Arab angels. My heaven would coruscate like a catherine
wheel, with white-hot star-stones. Away, you dog, you prowling
cur.--Got him under the left ear-hole, Gabriel--! See him, see him,
Michael? That hopeful blue devil! Land him one! Biff on your bottom,
you hoper.
But I wish the Arabs wouldn't entice me, or you, dear reader, provoke
me to this. I feel with you, dear reader, as I do with a deaf-man when
he pushes his vulcanite ear, his listening machine, towards my mouth.
I want to shout down the telephone ear-hole all kinds of improper
things, to see what effect they will have on the stupid dear face at
the end of the coil of wire. After all, words must be very different
after they've trickled round and round a long wire coil. Whatever
becomes of them! And I, who am a bit deaf myself, and may in the end
have a deaf-machine to poke at my friends, it ill becomes me to be so
unkind, yet that's how I feel. So there we are.
Help me to be serious, dear reader.
In that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious," I tried
rather wistfully to convince you, dear reader, that you had a solar
plexus and a lumbar ganglion and a few other things. I don't know why
I took the trouble. If a fellow doesn't believe he's got a nose, the
best way to convince him is gently to waft a little pepper into his
nostrils. And there was I painting my own nose purple, and wistfully
inviting you to look and believe. No more, though.
You've got first and foremost a solar plexus, dear reader; and the
solar plexus is a great nerve center which lies behind your stomach. I
can't be accused of impropriety or untruth, because any book of
science or medicine which deals with the nerve-system of the human
body will show it to you quite plainly. So don't wriggle or try to
look spiritual. Because, willy-nilly, you've got a solar plexus, dear
reader, among other things. I'm writing a good sound science book,
which there's no gainsaying.
Now, your solar plexus, most gentle of readers, is where you are you.
It is your first and greatest and deepest center of consciousness. If
you want to know _how_ conscious and _when_ conscious, I must refer
you to that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious."
At your solar plexus you are primarily conscious: there, behind you
stomach. There you have the profound and pristine conscious awareness
that you are you. Don't say you haven't. I know you have. You might as
well try to deny the nose on your face. There is your first and
deepest seat of awareness. There you are triumphantly aware of your
own individual existence in the universe. Absolutely there is the keep
and central stronghold of your triumphantly-conscious self. There you
_are_, and you know it. So stick out your tummy gaily, my dear, with a
_Me voilà_. With a _Here I am!_ With an _Ecco mi!_ With a _Da bin
ich!_ There you are, dearie.
But not only a triumphant awareness that _There you are_. An exultant
awareness also that outside this quiet gate, this navel, lies a whole
universe on which you can lay tribute. Aha--at birth you closed the
central gate for ever. Too dangerous to leave it open. Too near the
quick. But there are other gates. There are eyes and mouths and ears
and nostrils, besides the two lower gates of the passionate body, and
the closed but not locked gates of the breasts. Many gates. And
besides the actual gates, the marvelous wireless communication between
the great center and the surrounding or contiguous world.
Authorized science tells you that this first great plexus, this
all-potent nerve-center of consciousness and dynamic life-activity is
a sympathetic center. From the solar plexus as from your castle-keep
you look around and see the fair lands smiling, the corn and fruit and
cattle of your increase, the cottages of your dependents and the halls
of your beloveds. From the solar plexus you know that all the world is
yours, and all is goodly.
This is the great center, where in the womb, your life first sparkled
in individuality. This is the center that drew the gestating maternal
blood-stream upon you, in the nine-months lurking, drew it on you for
your increase. This is the center whence the navel-string broke, but
where the invisible string of dynamic consciousness, like a dark
electric current connecting you with the rest of life, will never
break until you die and depart from corporate individuality.
They say, by the way, that doctors now perform a little operation on
the born baby, so that no more navel shows. No more belly-buttons,
dear reader! Lucky I caught you this generation, before the doctors
had saved your appearances. Yet, _caro mio_, whether it shows or not,
there you once had immediate connection with the maternal
blood-stream. And, because the male nucleus which derived from the
father still lies sparkling and potent within the solar plexus,
therefore that great nerve-center of you, still has immediate
knowledge of your father, a subtler but still vital connection. We
call it the tie of blood. So be it. It is a tie of blood. But much
more definite than we imagine. For true it is that the one bright male
germ which went to your begetting was drawn from the blood of the
father. And true it is that that same bright male germ lies unquenched
and unquenchable at the center of you, within the famous solar plexus.
And furthermore true is it that this unquenched father-spark within
you sends forth vibrations and dark currents of vital activity all the
time; connecting direct with your father. You will never be able to
get away from it while you live.
The connection with the mother may be more obvious. Is there not your
ostensible navel, where the rupture between you and her took place?
But because the mother-child relation is more plausible and flagrant,
is that any reason for supposing it deeper, more vital, more
intrinsic? Not a bit. Because if the large parent mother-germ still
lives and acts vividly and mysteriously in the great fused nucleus of
your solar plexus, does the smaller, brilliant male-spark that derived
from your father act any less vividly? By no means. It is
different--it is less ostensible. It may be even in magnitude smaller.
But it may be even more vivid, even more intrinsic. So beware how you
deny the father-quick of yourself. You may be denying the most
intrinsic quick of all.
In the same way it follows that, since brothers and sisters have the
same father and mother, therefore in every brother and sister there is
a direct communication such as can never happen between strangers. The
parent nuclei do not die within the new nucleus. They remain there,
marvelous naked sparkling dynamic life-centers, nodes, well-heads of
vivid life itself. Therefore in every individual the parent nuclei
live, and give direction connection, blood connection we call it, with
the rest of the family. It _is_ blood connection. For the fecundating
nuclei are the very spark-essence of the blood. And while life lives
the parent nuclei maintain their own centrality and dynamic
effectiveness within the solar plexus of the child. So that every
individual has mother and father both sparkling within himself.
But this is rather a preliminary truth than an intrinsic truth. The
intrinsic truth of every individual is the new unit of unique
individuality which emanates from the fusion of the parent nuclei.
This is the incalculable and intangible Holy Ghost each time--each
individual his own Holy Ghost. When, at the moment of conception, the
two parent nuclei fuse to form a new unit of life, then takes place
the great mystery of creation. A new individual appears--not the
result of the fusion merely. Something more. The quality of
individuality cannot be derived. The new individual, in his singleness
of self, is a perfectly new whole. He is not a permutation and
combination of old elements, transferred through the parents. No, he
is something underived and utterly unprecedented, unique, a new soul.
This quality of pure individuality is, however, only the one supreme
quality. It consummates all other qualities, but does not consume
them. All the others are there, all the time. And only at his maximum
does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become
purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure
individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly
unknown to them. "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" But this does
not alter the fact that within him lives the mother-quick and the
father-quick, and that though in his wholeness he is rapt away beyond
the old mother-father connections, they are still there within him,
consummated but not consumed. Nor does it alter the fact that very few
people surpass their parents nowadays, and attain any individuality
beyond them. Most men are half-born slaves: the little soul they are
born with just atrophies, and merely the organism emanates, the new
self, the new soul, the new swells into manhood, like big potatoes.
So there we are. But considering man at his best, he is at the start
faced with the great problem. At the very start he has to undertake
his tripartite being, the mother within him, the father within him,
and the Holy Ghost, the self which he is supposed to consummate, and
which mostly he doesn't.
And there it is, a hard physiological fact. At the moment of our
conception, the father nucleus fuses with the mother nucleus, and the
wonder emanates, the new self, the new soul, the new individual cell.
But in the new individual cell the father-germ and the mother-germ do
not relinquish their identity. There they remain still, incorporated
and never extinguished. And so, the blood-stream of race is one
stream, for ever. But the moment the mystery of pure individual
newness ceased to be enacted and fulfilled, the blood-stream would dry
up and be finished. Mankind would die out.
Let us go back then to the solar plexus. There sparkle the included
mother-germ and father-germ, giving us direct, immediate blood-bonds,
family connection. The connection is as direct and as subtle as
between the Marconi stations, two great wireless stations. A family,
if you like, is a group of wireless stations, all adjusted to the
same, or very much the same vibration. All the time they quiver with
the interchange, there is one long endless flow of vitalistic
communication between members of one family, a long, strange
_rapport_, a sort of life-unison. It is a ripple of life through many
bodies as through one body. But all the time there is the jolt, the
rupture of individualism, the individual asserting himself beyond all
ties or claims. The highest goal for every man is the goal of pure
individual being. But it is a goal you cannot reach by the mere
rupture of all ties. A child isn't born by being torn from the womb.
When it is born by natural process that is rupture enough. But even
then the ties are not broken. They are only subtilized.
From the solar plexus first of all pass the great vitalistic
communications between child and parents, the first interplay of
primal, pre-mental knowledge and sympathy. It is a great subtle
interplay, and from this interplay the child is built up, body and
psyche. Impelled from the primal conscious center in the abdomen, the
child seeks the mother, seeks the breast, opens a blind mouth and
gropes for the nipple. Not mentally directed and yet certainly
directed. Directed from the dark pre-mind center of the solar plexus.
From this center the child seeks, the mother knows. Hence the true
mindlessness of the pristine, healthy mother. She does not need to
think, mentally to know. She knows so profoundly and actively at the
great abdominal life-center.
But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it then know the mother
alone? To an infant the mother is the whole universe. Yet the child
needs more than the mother. It needs as well the presence of men, the
vibration from the present body of the man. There may not be any
actual, palpable connection. But from the great voluntary center in
the man pass unknowable communications and unreliable nourishment of
the stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, and which so far
we have refused to know, but none the less essential, quickening dark
rays which pass from the great dark abdominal life-center in the
father to the corresponding center in the child. And these rays, these
vibrations, are not like the mother-vibrations. Far, far from it. They
do not need the actual contact, the handling and the caressing. On the
contrary, the true male instinct is to avoid physical contact with a
baby. It may not need even actual presence. But present or absent,
there should be between the baby and the father that strange,
intangible communication, that strange pull and circuit such as the
magnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a vitalistic pull and flow
which lays all the life-plasm of the baby into the line of vital
quickening, strength, knowing. And any lack of this vital circuit,
this vital interchange between father and child, man and child, means
an inevitable impoverishment to the infant.
The child exists in the interplay of two great life-waves, the womanly
and the male. In appearance, the mother is everything. In truth, the
father has actively very little part. It does not matter much if he
hardly sees his child. Yet see it he should, sometimes, and touch it
sometimes, and renew with it the connection, the life-circuit, not
allow it to lapse, and so vitally starve his child.
But remember, dear reader, please, that there is not the slightest
need for you to believe me, or even read me. Remember, it's just your
own affair. Don't implicate me.
CHAPTER III
PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON
The primal consciousness in man is pre-mental, and has nothing to do
with cognition. It is the same as in the animals. And this pre-mental
consciousness remains as long as we live the powerful root and body of
our consciousness. The mind is but the last flower, the _cul de sac_.
The first seat of our primal consciousnesses the solar plexus, the
great nerve-center situated behind the stomach. From this center we
are first dynamically conscious. For the primal consciousness is
always dynamic, and never, like mental consciousness, static. Thought,
let us say what we will about its magic powers, is instrumental only,
the soul's finest instrument for the business of living. Thought is
just a means to action and living. But life and action take rise
actually at the great centers of dynamic consciousness.
The solar plexus, the greatest and most important center of our
dynamic consciousness, is a sympathetic center. At this main center of
your first-mind we know as we can never mentally know. Primarily we
know, each man, each living creature knows, profoundly and
satisfactorily and without question, that _I am I._ This root of all
knowledge and being is established in the solar plexus; it is dynamic,
pre-mental knowledge, such as cannot be transferred into thought. Do
not ask me to transfer the pre-mental dynamic knowledge into thought.
It cannot be done. The knowledge that _I am I_ can never be thought:
only known.
This being the very first term of our life-knowledge, a knowledge
established physically and psychically the moment the two parent
nuclei fused, at the moment of the conception, it remains integral as
a piece of knowledge in every subsequent nucleus derived from this one
original. But yet the original nucleus, formed from the two parent
nuclei at our conception, remains always primal and central, and is
always the original fount and home of the first and supreme knowledge
that _I am I._ This original nucleus is embodied in the solar plexus.
But the original nucleus divides. The first division, as science
knows, is a division of recoil. From the perfect oneing of the two
parent nuclei in the egg-cell results a recoil or new assertion. That
which was perfect _one_ now divides again, and in the recoil becomes
again two.
This second nucleus, the nucleus born of recoil, is the nuclear origin
of all the great nuclei of the voluntary system, which are the nuclei
of assertive individualism. And it remains central in the adult human
body as it was in the egg-cell. In the adult human body the first
nucleus of independence, first-born from the great original nucleus of
our conception, lies always established in the lumbar ganglion. Here
we have our positive center of independence, in a multifarious
universe.
At the solar plexus, the dynamic knowledge is this, that _I am I._ The
solar plexus is the center of all the sympathetic system. The great
prime knowledge is sympathetic in nature. I am I, in vital centrality.
I am I, the vital center of all things. I am I, the clew to the whole.
All is one with me. It is the one identity.
But at the lumbar ganglion, which is the center of separate identity,
the knowledge is of a different mode, though the term is the same. At
the lumbar ganglion I know that I am I, in distinction from a whole
universe, which is not as I am. This is the first tremendous flash of
knowledge of singleness and separate identity. I am I, not because I
am at one with all the universe, but because I am other than all the
universe. It is my distinction from all the rest of things which makes
me myself. Because I am set utterly apart and distinguished from all
that is the rest of the universe, therefore _I am I._ And this root of
our knowledge in separateness lies rooted all the time in the lumbar
ganglion. It is the second term of our dynamic psychic existence.
It is from the great sympathetic center of the solar plexus that the
child rejoices in the mother and in its own blissful centrality, its
unison with the as yet unknown universe. Look at the pictures of
Madonna and Child, and you will even _see_ it. It is from this center
that it draws all things unto itself, winningly, drawing love for the
soul, and actively drawing in milk. The same center controls the great
intake of love and of milk, of psychic and of physical nourishment.
And it is from the great voluntary center of the lumbar ganglion that
the child asserts its distinction from the mother, the single identity
of its own existence, and its power over its surroundings. From this
center issues the violent little pride and lustiness which kicks with
glee, or crows with tiny exultance in its own being, or which claws
the breast with a savage little rapacity, and an incipient
masterfulness of which every mother is aware. This incipient mastery,
this sheer joy of a young thing in its own single existence, the
marvelous playfulness of early youth, and the roguish mockery of the
mother's love, as well as the bursts of temper and rage, all belong to
infancy. And all this flashes spontaneously, _must_ flash
spontaneously from the first great center of independence, the
powerful lumbar ganglion, great dynamic center of all the voluntary
system, of all the spirit of pride and joy in independent existence.
And it is from this center too that the milk is urged away down the
infant bowels, urged away towards excretion. The motion is the same,
but here it applies to the material, not to the vital relation. It is
from the lumbar ganglion that the dynamic vibrations are emitted which
thrill from the stomach and bowels, and promote the excremental
function of digestion. It is the solar plexus which controls the
assimilatory function in digestion.
So, in the first division of the egg-cell is set up the first plane of
psychic and physical life, remaining radically the same throughout the
whole existence of the individual. The two original nuclei of the
egg-cell remain the same two original nuclei within the corpus of the
adult individual. Their psychic and their physical dynamic is the same
in the solar plexus and lumbar ganglion as in the two nuclei of the
egg-cell. The first great division in the egg remains always the same,
the unchanging great division in the psychic and the physical
structure; the unchanging great division in knowledge and function. It
is a division into polarized duality, psychical and physical, of the
human being. It is the great vertical division of the egg-cell, and of
the nature of man.
Then, this division having taken place, there is a new thrill of
conjunction or collision between the divided nuclei, and at once the
second birth takes place. The two nuclei now split horizontally. There
is a horizontal division across the whole egg-cell, and the nuclei are
now four, two above, and two below. But those below retain their
original nature, those above are new in nature. And those above
correspond again to those below.
In the developed child, the great horizontal division of the egg-cell,
resulting in four nuclei, this remains the same. The horizontal
division-wall is the diaphragm. The two upper nuclei are the two
great nerve-centers, the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion. We
have again a sympathetic center primal in activity and knowledge, and
a corresponding voluntary center. In the center of the breast, the
cardiac plexus acts as the great sympathetic mode of new dynamic
activity, new dynamic consciousness. And near the spine, by the wall
of the shoulders, the thoracic ganglion acts as the powerful voluntary
center of separateness and power, in the same vertical line as the
lumbar ganglion, but horizontally so different.
Now we must change our whole feeling. We must put off the deep way of
understanding which belongs to the lower body of our nature, and
transfer ourselves into the upper plane, where being and functioning
are different.
At the cardiac plexus, there in the center of the breast, we have now
a new great sun of knowledge and being. Here there is no more of self.
Here there is no longer the dark, exultant knowledge that _I am I._ A
change has come. Here I know no more of myself. Here I am not. Here I
only know the delightful revelation that you are you. The wonder is no
longer within me, my own dark, centrifugal, exultant self. The wonder
is without me. The wonder is outside me. And I can no longer exult
and know myself the dark, central sun of the universe. Now I look with
wonder, with tenderness, with joyful yearning towards that which is
outside me, beyond me, not me. Behold, that which was once negative
has now become the only positive. The other being is now the great
positive reality, I myself am as nothing. Positivity has changed
places.
If we want to see the portrayed look, then we must turn to the North,
to the fair, wondering, blue-eyed infants of the Northern masters.
They seem so frail, so innocent and wondering, touching outwards to
the mystery. They are not the same as the Southern child, nor the
opposite. Their whole life mystery is different. Instead of
consummating all things within themselves, as the dark little Southern
infants do, the Northern Jesus-children reach out delicate little
hands of wondering innocence towards delicate, flower-reverential
mothers. Compare a Botticelli Madonna, with all her wounded and
abnegating sensuality, with a Hans Memling Madonna, whose soul is pure
and only reverential. Beyond me is the mystery and the glory, says the
Northern mother: let me have no self, let me only seek that which is
all-pure, all-wonderful. But the Southern mother says: This is mine,
this is mine, this is my child, my wonder, my master, my lord, my
scourge, my own.
From the cardiac plexus the child goes forth in bliss. It seeks the
revelation of the unknown. It wonderingly seeks the mother. It opens
its small hands and spreads its small fingers to touch her. And bliss,
bliss, bliss, it meets the wonder in mid-air and in mid-space it finds
the loveliness of the mother's face. It opens and shuts its little
fingers with bliss, it laughs the wonderful, selfless laugh of pure
baby-bliss, in the first ecstasy of finding all its treasure, groping
upon it and finding it in the dark. It opens wide, child-wide eyes to
see, to see. But it cannot see. It is puzzled, it wrinkles its face.
But when the mother puts her face quite near, and laughs and coos,
then the baby trembles with an ecstasy of love. The glamour, the
wonder, the treasure beyond. The great uplift of rapture. All this
surges from that first center of the breast, the sun of the breast,
the cardiac plexus.
And from the same center acts the great function of the heart and
breath. Ah, the aspiration, the aspiration, like a hope, like a
yearning constant and unfailing with which we take in breath. When we
breathe, when we take in breath, it is not as when we take in food.
When we breathe in we aspire, we yearn towards the heaven of air and
light. And when the heart dilates to draw in the stream of dark blood,
it opens its arms as to a beloved. It dilates with reverent joy, as a
host opening his doors to an honored guest, whom he delights to serve:
opening his doors to the wonder which comes to him from beyond, and
without which he were nothing.
So it is that our heart dilates, our lungs expand. They are bidden by
that great and mysterious impulse from the cardiac plexus, which bids
them seek the mystery and the fulfillment of the beyond. They seek the
beyond, the air of the sky, the hot blood from the dark under-world.
And so we live.
And then, they relax, they contract. They are driven by the opposite
motion from the powerful voluntary center of the thoracic ganglion..
That which was drawn in, was invited, is now relinquished, allowed to
go forth, negatively. Not positively dismissed, but relinquished.
There is a wonderful complementary duality between the voluntary and
the sympathetic activity on the same plane. But between the two
planes, upper and lower, there is a further dualism, still more
startling, perhaps. Between the dark, glowing first term of knowledge
at the solar plexus: _I am I, all is one in me_; and the first term of
volitional knowledge: _I am myself, and these others are not as I
am_;--there is a world of difference. But when the world changes
again, and on the upper plane we realize the wonder of other things,
the difference is almost shattering. The thoracic ganglion is a
ganglion of power. When the child in its delicate bliss seeks the
mother and finds her and is added on to her, then it fulfills itself
in the great upper sympathetic mode. But then it relinquishes her. It
ceases to be aware of her. And if she tries to force its love to play
upon her again, like light revealing her to herself, then the child
turns away. Or it will lie, and look at her with the strange, odd,
curious look of knowledge, like a little imp who is spying her out.
This is the curious look that many mothers cannot bear. Involuntarily
it arouses a sort of hate in them--the look of scrutinizing curiosity,
apart, and as it were studying, balancing them up. Yet it is a look
which comes into every child's eyes. It is the reaction of the great
voluntary plexus between the shoulders. The mother is suddenly set
apart, as an object of curiosity, coldly, sometimes dreamily,
sometimes puzzled, sometimes mockingly observed.
Again, if a mother neglect her child, it cries, it weeps for her love
and attention. Its pitiful lament is one of the forms of compulsion
from the upper center. This insistence on pity, on love, is quite
different from the rageous weeping, which is compulsion from the lower
center, below the diaphragm. Again, some children just drop everything
they can lay hands on over the edge of their crib, or their table.
They drop everything out of sight. And then they look up with a
curious look of negative triumph. This is again a form of recoil from
the upper center, the obliteration of the thing which is outside. And
here a child is acting quite differently from the child who joyously
_smashes_. The desire to smash comes from the lower centers.
We can quite well recognize the will exerted from the lower center. We
call it headstrong temper and masterfulness. But the peculiar will of
the upper center--the sort of nervous, critical objectivity, the
deliberate forcing of sympathy, the play upon pity and tenderness, the
plaintive bullying of love, or the benevolent bullying of love--these
we don't care to recognize. They are the extravagance of spiritual
_will_. But in its true harmony the thoracic ganglion is a center of
happier activity: of real, eager curiosity, of the delightful desire
to pick things to pieces, and the desire to put them together again,
the desire to "find out," and the desire to invent: all this arises on
the upper plane, at the volitional center of the thoracic ganglion.
CHAPTER IV
TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS
Oh, damn the miserable baby with its complicated ping-pong table of an
unconscious. I'm sure, dear reader, you'd rather have to listen to the
brat howling in its crib than to me expounding its plexuses. As for
"mixing those babies up," I'd mix him up like a shot if I'd anything
to mix him with. Unfortunately he's my own anatomical specimen of a
pickled rabbit, so there's nothing to be done with the bits.
But he gets on my nerves. I come out solemnly with a pencil and an
exercise book, and take my seat in all gravity at the foot of a large
fir-tree, and wait for thoughts to come, gnawing like a squirrel on a
nut. But the nut's hollow.
I think there are too many trees. They seem to crowd round and stare
at me, and I feel as if they nudged one another when I'm not looking.
I can _feel_ them standing there. And they won't let me get on about
the baby this morning. Just their cussedness. I felt they encouraged
me like a harem of wonderful silent wives, yesterday.
It is half rainy too--the wood so damp and still and so secret, in the
remote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest
subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the
roots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much
stronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem to feel them moving
and thinking and prowling, and they overwhelm me. Ah, well, the only
thing is to give way to them.
It is the edge of the Black Forest--sometimes the Rhine far off, on
its Rhine plain, like a bit of magnesium ribbon. But not to-day.
To-day only trees, and leaves, and vegetable presences. Huge straight
fir-trees, and big beech-trees sending rivers of roots into the
ground. And cuckoos, like noise falling in drops off the leaves. And
me, a fool, sitting by a grassy wood-road with a pencil and a book,
hoping to write more about that baby.
Never mind. I listen again for noises, and I smell the damp moss. The
looming trees, so straight. And I listen for their silence. Big,
tall-bodied trees, with a certain magnificent cruelty about them. Or
barbarity. I don't know why I should say cruelty. Their magnificent,
strong, round bodies! It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful
sap drumming in their trunks. Great full-blooded trees, with strange
tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming.
Trees that have no hands and faces, no eyes. Yet the powerful
sap-scented blood roaring up the great columns. A vast individual
life, and an overshadowing will. The will of a tree. Something that
frightens you.
Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't got
a face. You look at the strong body of a trunk: you look above you
into the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs: you see the soft green
tips. But there are no eyes to look into, you can't meet its gaze. You
keep on looking at it in part and parcel.
It's no good looking at a tree, to know it. The only thing is to sit
among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk, and not bother.
That's how I write all about these planes and plexuses, between the
toes of a tree, forgetting myself against the great ankle of the
trunk. And then, as a rule, as a squirrel is stroked into its
wickedness by the faceless magic of a tree, so am I usually stroked
into forgetfulness, and into scribbling this book. My tree-book,
really.
I come so well to understand tree-worship. All the old Aryans
worshiped the tree. My ancestors. The tree of life. The tree of
knowledge. Well, one is bound to sprout out some time or other, chip
of the old Aryan block. I can so well understand tree-worship. And
fear the deepest motive.
Naturally. This marvelous vast individual without a face, without lips
or eyes or heart. This towering creature that never had a face. Here
am I between his toes like a pea-bug, and him noiselessly
over-reaching me. And I feel his great blood-jet surging. And he has
no eyes. But he turns two ways. He thrusts himself tremendously down
to the middle earth, where dead men sink in darkness, in the damp,
dense under-soil, and he turns himself about in high air. Whereas we
have eyes on one side of our head only, and only grow upwards.
Plunging himself down into the black humus, with a root's gushing
zest, where we can only rot dead; and his tips in high air, where we
can only look up to. So vast and powerful and exultant in his two
directions. And all the time, he has no face, no thought: only a huge,
savage, thoughtless soul. Where does he even keep his soul?--Where
does anybody?
A huge, plunging, tremendous soul. I would like to be a tree for a
while. The great lust of roots. Root-lust. And no mind at all. He
towers, and I sit and feel safe. I like to feel him towering round me.
I used to be afraid. I used to fear their lust, their rushing black
lust. But now I like it, I worship it. I always felt them huge
primeval enemies. But now they are my only shelter and strength. I
lose myself among the trees. I am so glad to be with them in their
silent, intent passion, and their great lust. They feed my soul. But I
can understand that Jesus was crucified on a tree.
And I can so well understand the Romans, their terror of the bristling
Hercynian wood. Yet when you look from a height down upon the rolling
of the forest--this Black Forest--it is as suave as a rolling, oily
sea. Inside only, it bristles horrific. And it terrified the Romans.
The Romans! They too seem very near. Nearer than Hindenburg or Foch or
even Napoleon. When I look across the Rhine plain, it is Rome, and the
legionaries of the Rhine that my soul notices. It must have been
wonderful to come from South Italy to the shores of this sea-like
forest: this dark, moist forest, with its enormously powerful
intensity of tree life. Now I know, coming myself from rock-dry
Sicily, open to the day.
The Romans and the Greeks found everything human. Everything had a
face, and a human voice. Men spoke, and their fountains piped an
answer.
But when the legions crossed the Rhine they found a vast impenetrable
life which had no voice. They met the faceless silence of the Black
Forest. This huge, huge wood did not answer when they called. Its
silence was too crude and massive. And the soldiers shrank: shrank
before the trees that had no faces, and no answer. A vast array of
non-human life, darkly self-sufficient, and bristling with indomitable
energy. The Hercynian wood, not to be fathomed. The enormous power of
these collective trees, stronger in their somber life even than Rome.
No wonder the soldiers were terrified. No wonder they thrilled with
horror when, deep in the woods, they found the skulls and trophies of
their dead comrades upon the trees. The trees had devoured them:
silently, in mouthfuls, and left the white bones. Bones of the mindful
Romans--and savage, preconscious trees, indomitable. The true German
has something of the sap of trees in his veins even now: and a sort of
pristine savageness, like trees, helpless, but most powerful, under
all his mentality. He is a tree-soul, and his gods are not human. His
instinct still is to nail skulls and trophies to the sacred tree, deep
in the forest. The tree of life and death, tree of good and evil, tree
of abstraction and of immense, mindless life; tree of everything
except the spirit, spirituality.
But after bone-dry Sicily, and after the gibbering of myriad people
all rattling their personalities, I am glad to be with the profound
indifference of faceless trees. Their rudimentariness cannot know why
we care for the things we care for. They have no faces, no minds and
bowels: only deep, lustful roots stretching in earth, and vast,
lissome life in air, and primeval individuality. You can sacrifice the
whole of your spirituality on their altar still. You can nail your
skull on their limbs. They have no skulls, no minds nor faces, they
can't make eyes of love at you. Their vast life dispenses with all
this. But they will live you down.
The normal life of one of these big trees is about a hundred years. So
the Herr Baron told me.
One of the few places that my soul will haunt, when I am dead, will be
this. Among the trees here near Ebersteinburg, where I have been
alone and written this book. I can't leave these trees. They have
taken some of my soul.
* * * * *
Excuse my digression, gentle reader. At first I left it out, thinking
we might not see wood for trees. But it doesn't much matter what we
see. It's nice just to look round, anywhere.
So there are two planes of being and consciousness and two modes of
relation and of function. We will call the lower plane the sensual,
the upper the spiritual. The terms may be unwise, but we can think of
no other.
Please read that again, dear reader; you'll be a bit dazzled, coming
out of the wood.
It is obvious that from the time a child is born, or conceived, it has
a permanent relation with the outer universe, relation in the two
modes, not one mode only. There are two ways of love, two ways of
activity and independence. And there needs some sort of equilibrium
between the two modes. In the same way, in physical function there is
eating and drinking, and excrementation, on the lower plane and
respiration and heartbeat on the upper plane.
Now the equilibrium to be established is fourfold. There must be a
true equilibrium between what we eat and what we reject again by
excretion: likewise between the systole and diastole of the heart,
the inspiration and expiration of our breathing. Suffice to say the
equilibrium is never quite perfect. Most people are either too fat or
too thin, too hot or too cold, too slow or too quick. There is no such
thing as an _actual_ norm, a living norm. A norm is merely an
abstraction, not a reality.
The same on the psychical plane. We either love too much, or impose
our will too much, are too spiritual or too sensual. There is not and
cannot be any actual norm of human conduct. All depends, first, on the
unknown inward need within the very nuclear centers of the individual
himself, and secondly on his circumstance. Some men _must_ be too
spiritual, some _must_ be too sensual. Some _must_ be too sympathetic,
and some _must_ be too proud. We have no desire to say what men
_ought_ to be. We only wish to say there are all kinds of ways of
being, and there is no such thing as human perfection. No man can be
anything more than just himself, in genuine living relation to all his
surroundings. But that which _I_ am, when I am myself, will certainly
be anathema to those who hate individual integrity, and want to swarm.
And that which I, being myself, am in myself, may make the hair
bristle with rage on a man who is also himself, but very different
from me. Then let it bristle. And if mine bristle back again, then let
us, if we must, fly at one another like two enraged men. It is how it
should be. We've got to learn to live from the center of our own
responsibility only, and let other people do the same.
To return to the child, however, and his development on his two planes
of consciousness. There is all the time a direct dynamic connection
between child and mother, child and father also, from the start. It is
a connection on two planes, the upper and lower. From the lower
sympathetic center the profound intake of love or vibration from the
living co-respondent outside. From the upper sympathetic center the
outgoing of devotion and the passionate vibration of _given_ love,
given attention. The two sympathetic centers are always, or should
always be, counterbalanced by their corresponding voluntary centers.
From the great voluntary ganglion of the lower plane, the child is
self-willed, independent, and masterful.
In the activity of this center a boy refuses to be kissed and pawed
about, maintaining his proud independence like a little wild animal.
From this center he likes to command and to receive obedience. From
this center likewise he may be destructive and defiant and reckless,
determined to have his own way at any cost.
From this center, too, he learns to use his legs. The motion of
walking, like the motion of breathing, is twofold. First, a
sympathetic cleaving to the earth with the foot: then the voluntary
rejection, the spurning, the kicking away, the exultance in power and
freedom.
From the upper voluntary center the child watches persistently,
wilfully, for the attention of the mother: to be taken notice of, to
be caressed, in short to exist in and through the mother's attention.
From this center, too, he coldly refuses to notice the mother, when
she insists on too much attention. This cold refusal is different from
the active rejection of the lower center. It is passive, but cold and
negative. It is the great force of our day. From the ganglion of the
shoulders, also, the child breathes and his heart beats. From the same
center he learns the first use of his arms. In the gesture of
sympathy, from the upper plane, he embraces his mother with his arms.
In the motion of curiosity, or interest, which derives from the
thoracic ganglion, he spreads his fingers, touches, feels, explores.
In the motion of rejection he drops an undesired object deliberately
out of sight.
And then, when the four centers of what we call the first _field_ of
consciousness are fully active, then it is that the eyes begin to
gather their sight, the mouth to speak, the ears to awake to their
intelligent hearings; all as a result of the great fourfold activity
of the first dynamic field of consciousness. And then also, as a
result, the mind wakens to its impressions and to its incipient
control. For at first the control is non-mental, even non-cerebral.
The brain acts only as a sort of switchboard.
The business of the father, in all this incipient child-development,
is to stand outside as a final authority and make the necessary
adjustments. Where there is too much sympathy, then the great
voluntary centers of the spine are weak, the child tends to be
delicate. Then the father by instinct supplies the roughness, the
sternness which stiffens in the child the centers of resistance and
independence, right from the very earliest days. Often, for a mere
infant, it is the father's fierce or stern presence, the vibration of
his voice, which starts the frictional and independent activity of the
great voluntary ganglion and gives the first impulse to the
independence which later on is life itself.
But on the other hand, the father, from his distance, supports,
protects, nourishes his child, and it is ultimately on the remote but
powerful father-love that the infant rests, in a rest which is beyond
mother-love. For in the male the dominant centers are naturally the
volitional centers, centers of responsibility, authority, and care.
It is the father's business, again, to maintain some sort of
equilibrium between the two modes of love in his infant. A mother may
wish to bring up her child from the lovely upper centers only, from
the centers of the breast, in the mode of what we call pure or
spiritual love. Then the child will be all gentle, all tender and
tender-radiant, always enfolded with gentleness and forbearance,
always shielded from grossness or pain or roughness. Now the father's
instinct is to be rough and crude, good-naturedly brutal with the
child, calling the deeper centers, the sensual centers, into play.
"What do you want? My watch? Well, you can't have it, do you see,
because it's mine." Not a lot of explanations of the "You see,
darling." No such nonsense.--Or if a child wails unnecessarily for its
mother, the father must be the check. "Stop your noise, you little
brat! What ails you, you whiner?" And if children be too sensitive,
too sympathetic, then it will do the child no harm if the father
occasionally throws the cat out of the window, or kicks the dog, or
raises a storm in the house. Storms there must be. And if the child is
old enough and robust enough, it can occasionally have its bottom
soundly spanked--by the father, if the mother refuses to perform that
most necessary duty. For a child's bottom is made occasionally to be
spanked. The vibration of the spanking acts direct upon the spinal
nerve-system, there is a direct reciprocity and reaction, the spanker
transfers his wrath to the great will-centers in the child, and these
will-centers react intensely, are vivified and educated.
On the other hand, given a mother who is too generally hard or
indifferent, then it rests with the father to provide the delicate
sympathy and the refined discipline. Then the father must show the
tender sensitiveness of the upper mode. The sad thing to-day is that
so few mothers have any deep bowels of love--or even the breast of
love. What they have is the benevolent spiritual will, the will of the
upper self. But the will is not love. And benevolence in a parent is
a poison. It is bullying. In these circumstances the father must give
delicate adjustment, and, above all, some warm, native love from the
richer sensual self.
The question of corporal punishment is important. It is no use roughly
smacking a shrinking, sensitive child. And yet, if a child is too
shrinking, too sensitive, it may do it a world of good cheerfully to
spank its posterior. Not brutally, not cruelly, but with real sound,
good-natured exasperation. And let the adult take the full
responsibility, half humorously, without apology or explanation. Let
us avoid self-justification at all costs. Real corporal punishments
apply to the sensual plane. The refined punishments of the spiritual
mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
The pained but resigned disapprobation of a mother is usually a very
bad thing, much worse than the father's shouts of rage. And sendings
to bed, and no dessert for a week, and so on, are crueller and meaner
than a bang on the head. When a parent gives his boy a beating, there
is a living passionate interchange. But in these refined punishments,
the parent suffers nothing and the child is deadened. The bullying of
the refined, benevolent spiritual will is simply vitriol to the soul.
Yet parents administer it with all the righteousness of virtue and
good intention, sparing themselves perfectly.
The point is here. If a child makes you so that you really want to
spank it soundly, then soundly spank the brat. But know all the time
_what_ you are doing, and always be responsible for your anger. Never
be ashamed of it, and never surpass it. The flashing interchange of
anger between parent and child is part of the responsible
relationship, necessary to growth. Again, if a child offends you
deeply, so that you really can't communicate with it any more, then,
while the hurt is deep, switch off your connection from the child, cut
off your correspondence, your vital communion, and be alone. But never
persist in such a state beyond the time when your deep hurt dies down.
The only rule is, do what you _really_, impulsively, wish to do. But
always act on your own responsibility sincerely. And have the courage
of your own strong emotion. They enrichen the child's soul.
For a child's primary education depends almost entirely on its
relation to its parents, brothers, and sisters. Between mother and
child, father and child, the law is this: I, the mother, am myself
alone: the child is itself alone. But there exists between us a vital
dynamic relation, for which I, being the conscious one, am basically
responsible. So, as far as possible, there must be in me no departure
from myself, lest I injure the preconscious dynamic relation. I must
absolutely act according to my own true spontaneous feeling. But,
moreover, I must also have wisdom for myself and for my child. Always,
always the deep wisdom of responsibility. And always a brave
responsibility for the soul's own spontaneity. Love--what is love?
We'd better get a new idea. Love is, in all, generous impulse--even a
good spanking. But wisdom is something else, a deep collectedness in
the soul, a deep abiding by my own integral being, which makes me
responsible, not for the child, but for my certain duties towards the
child, and for maintaining the dynamic flow between the child and
myself as genuine as possible: that is to say, not perverted by ideals
or by my _will_.
Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying. But what is
bullying? It is a desire to superimpose my own will upon another
person. Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is
more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally
good for them. I embrace for example an ideal, and I seek to enact
this ideal in the person of another. This is ideal bullying. A mother
says that life should be all love, all delicacy and forbearance and
gentleness. And she proceeds to spin a hateful sticky web of permanent
forbearance, gentleness, hushedness around her naturally passionate
and hasty child. This so foils the child as to make him half imbecile
or criminal. I may have ideals if I like--even of love and forbearance
and meekness. But I have no right to ask another to have these ideals.
And to impose _any ideals_ upon a child as it grows is almost
criminal. It results in impoverishment and distortion and subsequent
deficiency. In our day, most dangerous is the love and benevolence
ideal. It results in neurasthenia, which is largely a dislocation or
collapse of the great voluntary centers, a derangement of the will. It
is in us an insistence upon the one life-mode only, the spiritual
mode. It is a suppression of the great lower centers, and a living a
sort of half-life, almost entirely from the upper centers. Thence,
since we live terribly and exhaustively from the upper centers, there
is a tendency now towards pthisis and neurasthenia of the heart. The
great sympathetic center of the breast becomes exhausted, the lungs,
burnt by the over-insistence of one way of life, become diseased, the
heart, strained in one mode of dilation, retaliates. The powerful
lower centers are no longer fully active, particularly the great
lumbar ganglion, which is the clue to our sensual passionate pride and
independence, this ganglion is atrophied by suppression. And it is
this ganglion which holds the spine erect. So, weak-chested,
round-shouldered, we stoop hollowly forward on ourselves. It is the
result of the all-famous love and charity ideal, an ideal now quite
dead in its sympathetic activity, but still fixed and determined in
its voluntary action.
Let us beware and beware, and beware of having a high ideal for
ourselves. But particularly let us beware of having an ideal for our
children. So doing, we damn them. All we can have is wisdom. And
wisdom is not a theory, it is a state of soul. It is the state wherein
we know our wholeness and the complicate, manifold nature of our
being. It is the state wherein we know the great relations which exist
between us and our near ones. And it is the state which accepts full
responsibility, first for our own souls, and then for the living
dynamic relations wherein we have our being. It is no use expecting
the other person to know. Each must know for himself. But nowadays
men have even a stunt of pretending that children and idiots alone
know best. This is a pretty piece of sophistry, and criminal
cowardice, trying to dodge the life-responsibility which no man or
woman can dodge without disaster.
The only thing is to be direct. If a child has to swallow castor-oil,
then say: "Child, you've got to swallow this castor-oil. It is
necessary for your inside. I say so because it is true. So open your
mouth." Why try coaxing and logic and tricks with children? Children
are more sagacious than we are. They twig soon enough if there is a
flaw in our own intention and our own true spontaneity. And they play
up to our bit of falsity till there is hell to pay.
"You love mother, don't you, dear?"--Just a piece of indecent trickery
of the spiritual will. The great emotions like love are unspoken.
Speaking them is a sign of an indecent bullying will.
"Poor pussy! You must love poor pussy!"
What cant! What sickening cant! An appeal to love based on false pity.
That's the way to inculcate a filthy pharisaic conceit into a
child.--If the child ill-treats the cat, say:
"Stop mauling that cat. It's got its own life to live, so let it live
it." Then if the brat persists, give tit for tat.
"What, you pull the cat's tail! Then I'll pull your nose, to see how
you like it." And give his nose a proper hard pinch.
Children _must_ pull the cat's tail a little. Children _must_ steal
the sugar sometimes. They _must_ occasionally spoil just the things
one doesn't want them to spoil. And they _must_ occasionally tell
stories--tell a lie. Circumstances and life are such that we must all
sometimes tell a lie: just as we wear trousers, because we don't
choose that everybody shall see our nakedness. Morality is a delicate
act of adjustment on the soul's part, not a rule or a prescription.
Beyond a certain point the child _shall_ not pull the cat's tail, _or_
steal the sugar, _or_ spoil the furniture, _or_ tell lies. But I'm
afraid you can't fix this certain soul's humor. And so it must. If at
a sudden point you fly into a temper and thoroughly beat the boy for
hardly touching the cat--well, that's life. All you've got to say to
him is: "There, that'll serve you for all the times you _have_ pulled
her tail and hurt her." And he will feel outraged, and so will you.
But what does it matter? Children have an infinite understanding of
the soul's passionate variabilities, and forgive even a real
injustice, if it was _spontaneous_ and not intentional. They know we
aren't perfect. What they don't forgive us is if we pretend we are: or
if we _bully_.
CHAPTER V
THE FIVE SENSES
Science is wretched in its treatment of the human body as a sort of
complex mechanism made up of numerous little machines working
automatically in a rather unsatisfactory relation to one another. The
body is the total machine; the various organs are the included
machines; and the whole thing, given a start at birth, or at
conception, trundles on by itself. The only god in the machine, the
human will or intelligence, is absolutely at the mercy of the machine.
Such is the orthodox view. Soul, when it is allowed an existence at
all, sits somewhat vaguely within the machine, never defined. If
anything goes wrong with the machine, why, the soul is forgotten
instantly. We summon the arch-mechanic of our day, the medicine-man.
And a marvelous earnest fraud he is, doing his best. He is really
wonderful as a mechanic of the human system. But the life within us
fails more and more, while we marvelously tinker at the engines.
Doctors are not to blame.
It is obvious that, even considering the human body as a very delicate
and complex machine, you cannot keep such a machine running for one
day without most exact central control. Still more is it impossible to
consider the automatic evolution of such a machine. When did any
machine, even a single spinning-wheel, automatically evolve itself?
There was a god in the machine before the machine existed.
So there we are with the human body. There must have been, and must be
a central god in the machine of each animate corpus. The little soul
of the beetle makes the beetle toddle. The little soul of the _homo
sapiens_ sets him on his two feet. Don't ask me to define the soul.
You might as well ask a bicycle to define the young damsel who so
whimsically and so god-like pedals her way along the highroad. A young
lady skeltering off on her bicycle to meet her young man--why, what
could the bicycle make of such a mystery, if you explained it till
doomsday. Yet the bicycle wouldn't be spinning from Streatham to
Croydon by itself.
So we may as well settle down to the little god in the machine. We may
as well call it the individual soul, and leave it there. It's as far
as the bicycle would ever get, if it had to define Mademoiselle. But
be sure the bicycle would not deny the existence of the young miss who
seats herself in the saddle. Not like us, who try to pretend there is
no one in the saddle. Why even the sun would no more spin without a
rider than would a cycle-pedal. But, since we have innumerable planets
to reckon with, in the spinning we must not begin to define the rider
in terms of our own exclusive planet. Nevertheless, rider there is:
even a rider of the many-wheeled universe.
But let us leave the universe alone. It is too big a bauble for
me.--_Revenons._--At the start of me there is me. There is a
mysterious little entity which is my individual self, the god who
builds the machine and then makes his gay excursion of seventy years
within it. Now we are talking at the moment about the machine. For the
moment we are the bicycle, and not the feather-brained cyclist. So
that all we can do is to define the cyclist in terms of ourself. A
bicycle could say: Here, upon my leather saddle, rests a strange and
animated force, which I call the force of gravity, as being the one
great force which controls my universe. And yet, on second thoughts, I
must modify myself. This great force of gravity is not _always_ in
the saddle. Sometimes it just is not there--and I lean strangely
against a wall. I have been even known to turn upside down, with my
wheels in the air; spun by the same mysterious Miss. So that I must
introduce a theory of Relativity. However, mostly, when I am awake and
alive, she is in the saddle; or _it_ is in the saddle, the mysterious
force. And when it is in the saddle, then two subsidiary forces plunge
and claw upon my two pedals, plunge and claw with inestimable power.
And at the same time, a kind and mysterious force sways my head-stock,
sways most incalculably, and governs my whole motion. This force is
not a driving force, but a subtle directing force, beneath whose grip
my bright steel body is flexible as a dipping highroad. Then let me
not forget the sudden clutch of arrest upon my hurrying wheels. Oh,
this is pain to me! While I am rushing forward, surpassing myself in
an _élan vital_, suddenly the awful check grips my back wheel, or my
front wheel, or both. Suddenly there is a fearful arrest. My soul
rushes on before my body, I feel myself strained, torn back. My fibers
groan. Then perhaps the tension relaxes.
So the bicycle will continue to babble about itself. And it will
inevitably wind up with a philosophy. "Oh, if only the great and
divine force rested for ever upon my saddle, and if only the
mysterious will which sways my steering gear remained in place for
ever: then my pedals would revolve of themselves, and never cease, and
no hideous brake should tear the perpetuity of my motions. Then, oh
then I should be immortal. I should leap through the world for ever,
and spin to infinity, till I was identified with the dizzy and
timeless cycle-race of the stars and the great sun...."
Poor old bicycle. The very thought is enough to start a philanthropic
society for the prevention of cruelty to bicycles.
Well, then, our human body is the bicycle. And our individual and
incomprehensible self is the rider thereof. And seeing that the
universe is another bicycle riding full tilt, we are bound to suppose
a rider for that also. But we needn't say what sort of rider. When I
see a cockroach scuttling across the floor and turning up its tail I
stand affronted, and think: A rum sort of rider _you_ must have.
You've no business to have such a rider, do you hear?--And when I hear
the monotonous and plaintive cuckoo in the June woods, I think: Who
the devil made _that_ clock?--And when I see a politician making a
fiery speech on a platform, and the crowd gawping, I think: Lord, save
me--they've all got riders. But Holy Moses! you could never guess what
was coming.--And so I shouldn't like, myself, to start guessing about
the rider of the universe. I am all too flummoxed by the masquerade in
the tourney round about me.
We ourselves then: wisdom, like charity, begins at home. We've each of
us got a rider in the saddle: an individual soul. Mostly it can't
ride, and can't steer, so mankind is like squadrons of bicycles
running amok. We should every one fall off if we didn't ride so thick
that we hold each other up. Horrid nightmare!
As for myself, I have a horror of riding _en bloc_. So I grind away
uphill, and sweat my guts out, as they say.
Well, well--my body is my bicycle: the whole middle of me is the
saddle where sits the rider of my soul. And my front wheel is the
cardiac plane, and my back wheel is the solar plexus. And the brakes
are the voluntary ganglia. And the steering gear is my head. And the
right and left pedals are the right and left dynamics of the body, in
some way corresponding to the sympathetic and voluntary division.
So that now I know more or less how my rider rides me, and from what
centers controls me. That is, I know the points of vital contact
between my rider and my machine: between my invisible and my visible
self. I don't attempt to say what is my rider. A bicycle might as well
try to define its young Miss by wriggling its handle-bars and ringing
its bell.
However, having more or less determined the four primary motions, we
can see the further unfolding. In a child, the solar plexus and the
cardiac plexus, with corresponding voluntary ganglia, are awake and
active. From these centers develop the great functions of the body.
As we have seen, it is the solar plexus, with the lumbar ganglion,
which controls the great dynamic system, the functioning of the liver
and the kidneys. Any excess in the sympathetic dynamism tends to
accelerate the action of the liver, to cause fever and constipation.
Any collapse of the sympathetic dynamism causes anæmia. The sudden
stimulating of the voluntary center may cause diarrhoea, and so on.
But all this depends so completely on the polarized flow between the
individual and the correspondent, between the child and mother, child
and father, child and sisters or brothers or teacher, or
circumambient universe, that it is impossible to lay down laws,
unless we state particulars. Nevertheless, the whole of the great
organs of the lower body are controlled from the two lower centers,
and these organs work well or ill according as there is a true dynamic
_psychic_ activity at the two primary centers of consciousness. By a
_true_ dynamic psychic activity we mean an activity which is true to
the individual himself, to his own peculiar soul-nature. And a dynamic
psychic activity means a dynamic polarity between the individual
himself and other individuals concerned in his living; or between him
and his immediate surroundings, human, physical, geographical.
On the upper plane, the lungs and heart are controlled from the
cardiac plane and the thoracic ganglion. Any excess in the sympathetic
mode from the upper centers tends to burn the lungs with oxygen,
weaken them with stress, and cause consumption. So it is just criminal
to make a child too loving. No child should be induced to love too
much. It means derangement and death at last.
But beyond the primary physiological function--and it is the business
of doctors to discover the relation between the functioning of the
primary organs and the dynamic psychic activity at the four primary
consciousness-centers,--beyond these physical functions, there are the
activities which are half-psychic, half-functional. Such as the five
senses.
Of the five senses, four have their functioning in the face-region.
The fifth, the sense of touch, is distributed all over the body. But
all have their roots in the four great primary centers of
consciousness. From the constellation of your nerve-nodes, from the
great field of your poles, the nerves run out in every direction,
ending on the surface of the body. Inwardly this is an inextricable
ramification and communication.
And yet the body is planned out in areas, there is a definite
area-control from the four centers. On the back the sense of touch is
not acute. There the voluntary centers act in resistance. But in the
front of the body, the breast is one great field of sympathetic touch,
the belly is another. On these two fields the stimulus of touch is
quite different, has a quite different psychic quality and psychic
result. The breast-touch is the fine alertness of quivering curiosity,
the belly-touch is a deep thrill of delight and avidity.
Correspondingly, the hands and arms are instruments of superb
delicate curiosity, and deliberate execution. Through the elbows and
the wrists flows the dynamic psychic current, and a dislocation in the
current between two individuals will cause a feeling of dislocation at
the wrists and elbows. On the lower plane, the legs and feet are
instruments of unfathomable gratifications and repudiations. The
thighs, the knees, the feet are intensely alive with love-desire,
darkly and superbly drinking in the love-contact, blindly. Or they are
the great centers of resistance, kicking, repudiating. Sudden flushing
of great general sympathetic desire will make a man feel weak at the
knees. Hatred will harden the tension of the knees like steel, and
grip the feet like talons. Thus the fields of touch are four, two
sympathetic fields in front of the body from the throat to the feet,
two resistant fields behind from the neck to the heels.
There are two fields of touch, however, where the distribution is not
so simple: the face and the buttocks. Neither in the face nor in the
buttocks is there one single mode of sense communication.
The face is of course the great window of the self, the great opening
of the self upon the world, the great gateway. The lower body has its
own gates of exit. But the bulk of our communication with all the
outer universe goes on through the face.
And every one of the windows or gates of the face has its direct
communication with each of the four great centers of the first field
of consciousness. Take the mouth, with the sense of taste. The mouth
is primarily the gate of the two chief sensual centers. It is the
gateway to the belly and the loins. Through the mouth we eat and we
drink. In the mouth we have the sense of taste. At the lips, too, we
kiss. And the kiss of the mouth is the first sensual connection.
In the mouth also are the teeth. And the teeth are the instruments of
our sensual will. The growth of the teeth is controlled entirely from
the two great sensual centers below the diaphragm. But almost entirely
from the one center, the voluntary center. The growth and the life of
the teeth depend almost entirely on the lumbar ganglion. During the
growth of the teeth the sympathetic mode is held in abeyance. There is
a sort of arrest. There is pain, there is diarrhoea, there is misery
for the baby.
And we, in our age, have no rest with our teeth. Our mouths are too
small. For many ages we have been suppressing the avid, negroid,
sensual will. We have been converting ourselves into ideal creatures,
all spiritually conscious, and active dynamically only on one plane,
the upper, spiritual plane. Our mouth has contracted, our teeth have
become soft and un-quickened. Where in us are the sharp and vivid
teeth of the wolf, keen to defend and devour? If we had them more, we
should be happier. Where are the white negroid teeth? Where? In our
little pinched mouths they have no room. We are sympathy-rotten, and
spirit-rotten, and idea-rotten. We have forfeited our flashing sensual
power. And we have false teeth in our mouths. In the same way the lips
of our sensual desire go thinner and more meaningless, in the
compression of our upper will and our idea-driven impulse. Let us
break the conscious, self-conscious love-ideal, and we shall grow
strong, resistant teeth once more, and the teething of our young will
not be the hell it is.
Teething is strictly the period when the voluntary center of the lower
plane first comes into full activity, and takes for a time the
precedence.
So, the mouth is the great sensual gate to the lower body. But let us
not forget it is also a gate by which we breathe, the gate through
which we speak and go impalpably forth to our object, the gate at
which we can kiss the pinched, delicate, spiritual kiss. Therefore,
although the main sensual gate of entrance to the lower body, it has
its reference also to the upper body.
Taste, the sense of taste, is an intake of a pure communication
between us and a body from the outside world. It contains the element
of touch, and in this it refers to the cardiac plexus. But taste,
_quâ_ taste, refers purely to the solar plexus.
And then smell. The nostrils are the great gate from the wide
atmosphere of heaven to the lungs. The extreme sigh of yearning we
catch through the mouth. But the delicate nose advances always into
the air, our palpable communicator with the infinite air. Thus it has
its first delicate root in the cardiac plexus, the root of its intake.
And the root of the delicate-proud exhalation, rejection, is in the
thoracic ganglion. But the nostrils have their other function of
smell. Here the delicate nerve-ends run direct from the lower centers,
from the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, or even deeper. There
is the refined sensual intake when a scent is sweet. There is the
sensual repudiation when a scent is unsavoury. And just as the
fullness of the lips and the shape of the mouth depend on the
development from the lower or the upper centers, the sensual or the
spiritual, so does the shape of the nose depend on the direct control
of the deepest centers of consciousness. A perfect nose is perhaps the
result of a balance in the four modes. But what is a perfect nose!--We
only know that a short snub nose goes with an over-sympathetic nature,
not proud enough; while a long nose derives from the center of the
upper will, the thoracic ganglion, our great center of curiosity, and
benevolent or objective control. A thick, squat nose is the
sensual-sympathetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensual
voluntary nose, having the curve of repudiation, as when we turn up
our nose from a bad smell, but also the proud curve of haughtiness and
subjective authority. The nose is one of the greatest indicators of
character. That is to say, it almost inevitably indicates the mode of
predominant dynamic consciousness in the individual, the predominant
primary center from which he lives.--When savages rub noses instead of
kissing, they are exchanging a more sensitive and a deeper sensual
salute than our lip-touch.
The eyes are the third great gateway of the psyche. Here the soul goes
in and out of the body, as a bird flying forth and coming home. But
the root of conscious vision is almost entirely in the breast. When I
go forth from my own eyes, in delight to dwell upon the world which is
beyond me, outside me, then I go forth from wide open windows, through
which shows the full and living lambent darkness of my present inward
self. I go forth, and I leave the lovely open darkness of my sensient
self revealed; when I go forth in the wonder of vision to dwell upon
the beloved, or upon the wonder of the world, I go from the center of
the glad breast, through the eyes, and who will may look into the full
soft darkness of me, rich with my undiscovered presence. But if I am
displeased, then hard and cold my self stands in my eyes, and refuses
any communication, any sympathy, but merely stares outwards. It is the
motion of cold objectivity from the thoracic ganglion. Or, from the
same center of will, cold but intense my eyes may watch with
curiosity, as a cat watches a fly. It may be into my curiosity will
creep an element of warm gladness in the wonder which I am beholding
outside myself. Or it may be that my curiosity will be purely and
simply the cold, almost cruel curiosity of the upper will, directed
from the ganglion of the shoulders: such as is the acute attention of
an experimental scientist.
The eyes have, however, their sensual root as well. But this is hard
to transfer into language, as all _our_ vision, our modern Northern
vision is in the upper mode of actual seeing.
There is a sensual way of beholding. There is the dark, desirous look
of a savage who apprehends only that which has direct reference to
himself, that which stirs a certain dark yearning within his lower
self. Then his eye is fathomless blackness. But there is the dark eye
which glances with a certain fire, and has no depth. There is a keen
quick vision which watches, which beholds, but which never yields to
the object outside: as a cat watching its prey. The dark glancing look
which knows the _strangeness_, the danger of its object, the need to
overcome the object. The eye which is not wide open to study, to
_learn_, but which powerfully, proudly or cautiously glances, and
knows the terror or the pure desirability of _strangeness_ in the
object it beholds. The savage is all in all in himself. That which he
sees outside he hardly notices, or, he sees as something odd,
something automatically desirable, something lustfully desirable, or
something dangerous. What we call vision, that he has not.
We must compare the look in a horse's eye with the look in a cow's.
The eye of the cow is soft, velvety, receptive. She stands and gazes
with the strangest intent curiosity. She goes forth from herself in
wonder. The root of her vision is in her yearning breast. The same one
hears when she moos. The same massive weight of passion is in a bull's
breast; the passion to go forth from himself. His strength is in his
breast, his weapons are on his head. The wonder is always outside him.
But the horse's eye is bright and glancing. His curiosity is cautious,
full of terror, or else aggressive and frightening for the object. The
root of his vision is in his belly, in the solar plexus. And he fights
with his teeth, and his heels, the sensual weapons.
Both these animals, however, are established in the sympathetic mode.
The life mode in both is sensitively sympathetic, or preponderantly
sympathetic. Those animals which like cats, wolves, tigers, hawks,
chiefly live from the great voluntary centers, these animals are, in
our sense of the word, almost visionless. Sight in them is sharpened
or narrowed down to a point: the object of prey. It is exclusive.
They see no more than this. And thus they see unthinkably far,
unthinkably keenly.
Most animals, however, smell what they see: vision is not very highly
developed. They know better by the more direct contact of scent.
And vision in us becomes faulty because we proceed too much in one
mode. We see too much, we attend too much. The dark, glancing
sightlessness of the intent savage, the narrowed vision of the cat,
the single point of vision of the hawk--these we do not know any more.
We live far too much from the sympathetic centers, without the balance
from the voluntary mode. And we live far, far too much from the
_upper_ sympathetic center and voluntary center, in an endless
objective curiosity. Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And
we strain ourselves to see, see, see--everything, everything through
the eye, in one mode of objective curiosity. There is nothing inside
us, we stare endlessly at the outside. So our eyes begin to fail; to
retaliate on us. We go short-sighted, almost in self-protection.
Hearing the last, and perhaps the deepest of the senses. And here
there is no choice. In every other faculty we have the power of
rejection. We have a choice of vision. We can, if we choose, see in
the terms of the wonderful beyond, the world of light into which we go
forth in joy to lose ourselves in it. Or we can see, as the Egyptians
saw, in the terms of their own dark souls: seeing the strangeness of
the creature outside, the gulf between it and them, but finally, its
existence in terms of themselves. They saw according to their own
unchangeable idea, subjectively, they did not go forth from themselves
to seek the wonder outside.
Those are the two chief ways of sympathetic vision. We call our way
the objective, the Egyptian the subjective. But objective and
subjective are words that depend absolutely on your starting point.
Spiritual and sensual are much more descriptive terms.
But there are, of course, also the two ways of volitional vision. We
can see with the endless modern critical sight, analytic, and at last
deliberately ugly. Or we can see as the hawk sees the one concentrated
spot where beats the life-heart of our prey.
In the four modes of sight we have some choice. We have some choice to
refuse tastes or smells or touch. In hearing we have the minimum of
choice. Sound acts direct upon the great affective centers. We may
voluntarily quicken our hearing, or make it dull. But we have really
no choice of what we hear. Our will is eliminated. Sound acts direct,
almost automatically, upon the affective centers. And we have no power
of going forth from the ear. We are always and only recipient.
Nevertheless, sound acts upon us in various ways, according to the
four primary poles of consciousness. The singing of birds acts almost
entirely upon the centers of the breast. Birds, which live by flight,
impelled from the strong conscious-activity of the breast and
shoulders, have become for us symbols of the spirit, the upper mode of
consciousness. Their legs have become idle, almost insentient twigs.
Only the tail flirts from the center of the sensual will.
But their singing acts direct upon the upper, or spiritual centers in
us. So does almost all our music, which is all Christian in tendency.
But modern music is analytical, critical, and it has discovered the
power of ugliness. Like our martial music, it is of the upper plane,
like our martial songs, our fifes and our brass-bands. These act
direct upon the thoracic ganglion. Time was, however, when music acted
upon the sensual centers direct. We hear it still in savage music,
and in the roll of drums, and in the roaring of lions, and in the
howling of cats. And in some voices still we hear the deeper resonance
of the sensual mode of consciousness. But the tendency is for
everything to be brought on to the upper plane, whilst the lower plane
is just worked automatically from the upper.
CHAPTER VI
FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND
We can now see what is the true goal of education for a child. It is
the full and harmonious development of the four primary modes of
consciousness, always with regard to the individual nature of the
child.
The goal is _not_ ideal. The aim is _not_ mental consciousness. We
want _effectual_ human beings, not conscious ones. The final aim is
not _to know_, but _to be_. There never was a more risky motto than
that: _Know thyself_. You've got to know yourself as far as possible.
But not just for the sake of knowing. You've got to know yourself so
that you can at last _be_ yourself. "Be yourself" is the last motto.
The whole field of dynamic and effectual consciousness is _always_
pre-mental, non-mental. Not even the most knowing man that ever lived
would know how he would be feeling next week; whether some new and
utterly shattering impulse would have arisen in him and laid his
nicely-conceived self in ruins. It is the impulse we have to live by,
not the ideals or the idea. But we have to know ourselves pretty
thoroughly before we can break the automatism of ideals and
conventions. The savage in a state of nature is one of the most
conventional of creatures. So is a child. Only through fine delicate
knowledge can we recognize and release our impulses. Now our whole aim
has been to force each individual to a maximum of mental control, and
mental consciousness. Our poor little plans of children are put into
horrible forcing-beds, called schools, and the young idea is there
forced to shoot. It shoots, poor thing, like a potato in a warm
cellar. One mass of pallid sickly ideas and ideals. And no root, no
life. The ideas shoot, hard enough, in our sad offspring, but they
shoot at the expense of life itself. Never was such a mistake. Mental
consciousness is a purely individual affair. Some men are born to be
highly and delicately conscious. But for the vast majority, much
mental consciousness is simply a catastrophe, a blight. It just stops
their living.
Our business, at the present, is to prevent at all cost the young idea
from shooting. The ideal mind, the brain, has become the vampire of
modern life, sucking up the blood and the life. There is hardly an
original thought or original utterance possible to us. All is sickly
repetition of stale, stale ideas.
Let all schools be closed at once. Keep only a few technical training
establishments, nothing more. Let humanity lie fallow, for two
generations at least. Let no child learn to read, unless it learns by
itself, out of its own individual persistent desire.
That is my serious admonition, gentle reader. But I am not so flighty
as to imagine you will pay any heed. But if I thought you would, I
should feel my hope surge up. And if you _don't_ pay any heed,
calamity will at length shut your schools for you, sure enough.
The process of transfer from the primary consciousness to recognized
mental consciousness is a mystery like every other transfer. Yet it
follows its own laws. And here we begin to approach the confines of
orthodox psychology, upon which we have no desire to trespass. But
this we _can_ say. The degree of transfer from primary to mental
consciousness varies with every individual. But in most individuals
the natural degree is very low.
The process of transfer from primary consciousness is called
sublimation, the sublimating of the potential body of knowledge with
the definite reality of the idea. And with this process we have
identified all education. The very derivation of the Latin word
_education_ shows us. Of course it should mean the leading forth of
each nature to its fullness. But with us, fools that we are, it is the
leading forth of the primary consciousness, the potential or dynamic
consciousness, into mental consciousness, which is finite and static.
Now before we set out so gayly to lead our children _en bloc_ out of
the dynamic into the static way of consciousness, let us consider a
moment what we are doing.
A child in the womb can have no _idea_ of the mother. I think orthodox
psychology will allow us so much. And yet the child in the womb must
be dynamically conscious of the mother. Otherwise how could it
maintain a definite and progressively developing relation to her?
This consciousness, however, is utterly non-ideal, non-mental, purely
dynamic, a matter of dynamic polarized intercourse of vital
vibrations, as an exchange of wireless messages which are never
translated from the pulse-rhythm into speech, because they have no
need to be. It is a dynamic polarized intercourse between the great
primary nuclei in the foetus and the corresponding nuclei in the
dynamic maternal psyche.
This form of consciousness is established at conception, and continues
long after birth. Nay, it continues all life long. But the particular
interchange of dynamic consciousness between mother and child suffers
no interruption at birth. It continues almost the same. The child has
no conception whatsoever of the mother. It cannot see her, for its eye
has no focus. It can hear her, because hearing needs no transmission
into concept, but it has no oral notion of sounds. It knows her. But
only by a form of vital dynamic correspondence, a sort of magnetic
interchange. The idea does not intervene at all.
Gradually, however, the dark shadow of our object begins to loom in
the formless mind of the infant. The idea of the mother is, as it
were, gradually photographed on the cerebral plasm. It begins with the
faintest shadow--but the figure is gradually developed through years
of experience. It is never quite completed.
How does the figure of the mother gradually develop as a _conception_
in the child mind? It develops as the result of the positive and
negative reaction from the primary centers of consciousness. From the
first great center of sympathy the child is drawn to a lovely oneing
with the mother. From the first great center of will comes the
independent self-assertion which locates the mother as something
outside, something objective. And as a result of this twofold notion,
a twofold increase in the child. First, the dynamic establishment of
the individual consciousness in the infant: and then the first shadow
of a mental conception of the mother, in the infant brain. The
development of the _original_ mind in every child and every man always
and only follows from the dual fulfillment in the dynamic
consciousness.
But mark further. Each time, after the fourfold interchange between
two dynamic polarized lives, there results a development in the
individuality and a sublimation into consciousness, both
simultaneously in each party: _and this dual development causes at
once a diminution in the dynamic polarity between the two parties_.
That is, as its individuality and its mental concept of the mother
develop in the child, there is a corresponding _waning_ of the dynamic
relation between the child and the mother. And this is the natural
progression of all love. As we have said before, the accomplishment of
individuality never finally exhausts the dynamic flow between parents
and child. In the same way, a child can never have a finite conception
of either of its parents. It can have a very much more finite,
finished conception of its aunts or its friends. The portrait of the
parent can never be quite completed in the mind of the son or
daughter. As long as time lasts it must be left unfinished.
Nevertheless, the inevitable photography of time upon the mental plasm
does print at last a very substantial portrait of the parent, a very
well-filled concept in the child mind. And the nearer a conception
comes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out of
which this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To know, is to lose.
When I have a finished mental concept of a beloved, or a friend, then
the love and the friendship is dead. It falls to the level of an
acquaintance. As soon as I have a finished mental conception, a full
idea even of myself, then dynamically I am dead. To know is to die.
But knowledge and death are part of our natural development. Only, of
course, most things can never be known by us in full. Which means we
do never absolutely die, even to our parents. So that Jesus' question
to His mother, "Woman, what have I to do with thee!"--while
expressing a major truth, still has an exaggerated sound, which comes
from its denial of the minor truth.
This progression from dynamic relationship towards a finished
individuality and a finished mental concept is carried on from the
four great primary centers through the correspondence medium of all
the senses and sensibilities. First of all, the child knows the mother
only through touch--perfect and immediate contact. And yet, from the
moment of conception, the egg-cell repudiated complete adhesion and
even communication, and asserted its individual integrity. The child
in the womb, perfect a contact though it may have with the mother, is
all the time also dynamically polarized against this contact. From the
first moment, this relation in touch has a dual polarity, and, no
doubt, a dual mode. It is a fourfold interchange of consciousness, the
moment the egg-cell has made its two spontaneous divisions.
As soon as the child is born, there is a real severance. The contact
of touch is interrupted, it now becomes occasional only. True, the
dynamic flow between mother and child is not severed when simple
physical contact is missing. Though mother and child may not touch,
still the dynamic flow continues between them. The mother knows her
child, feels her bowels and her breast drawn to it, even if it be a
hundred miles away. But if the severance continue long, the dynamic
flow begins to die, both in mother and child. It wanes fairly
quickly--and perhaps can never be fully revived. The dynamic relation
between parent and child may fairly easily fall into quiescence, a
static condition.
For a full dynamic relationship it is necessary that there be actual
contact. The nerves run from the four primary dynamos, and end with
live ends all over the body. And it is necessary to bring the live
ends of the nerves of the child into contact with the live ends of
corresponding nerves in the mother, so that a pure circuit is
established. Wherever a pure circuit is established, there occurs a
pure development in the individual creation, and this is inevitably
accompanied by sensation; and sensation is the first term of mental
knowledge.
So, from the field of the breast and arms, the upper circuit, and from
the field of the knees and feet and belly, the lower circuit.
And then, the moment a child is born, the face is alive. And the face
communicates direct with both planes of primary consciousness. The
moment a child is born, it begins to grope for the breast. And
suddenly a new great circuit is established, the four poles all
working at once, as the child sucks. There is the profound
desirousness of the lower center of sympathy, and the superior avidity
of the center of will, and at the same time, the cleaving yearning to
the nipple, and the tiny curiosity of lips and gums. The nipple of the
mother's breast is one of the great gates of the body, hence of the
living psyche. In the nipple terminate vivid nerves which flash their
very powerful vibrations through the mouth of the child and deep into
its four great poles of being and knowing. Even the nipples of the man
are gateways to the great dynamic flow: still gateways.
Touch, taste, and smell are now active in the baby. And these senses,
so-called, are strictly sensations. They are the first term of the
child's mental knowledge. And on these three _cerebral_ reactions the
foundation of the future mind is laid.
The moment there is a perfect polarized circuit between the first four
poles of dynamic consciousness, at that moment does the mind, the
terminal station, flash into cognition. The first cognition is merely
sensation: sensation and the remembrance of sensation being the first
element in all knowing and in all conception.
The circuit of touch, taste, and smell must be well established,
before the eyes begin actually to see. All mental knowledge is built
up of sensation and of memory. It is the continually recurring
sensation of the touch of the mother which forms the basis of the
first conception of the mother. After that, the gradually
discriminated taste of the mother, and scent of the mother. Till
gradually sight and hearing develop and largely usurp the first three
senses, as medium of correspondence and of knowledge.
And while, of course, the sensational _knowledge_ is being secreted in
the brain, in some much more mysterious way the living individuality
of the child is being developed in the four first nuclei, the four
great nerve-centers of the primary field of consciousness and being.
As time goes on, the child learns to see the mother. At first he sees
her face as a blur, and though he knows her, knows her by a direct
glow of communication, as if her face were a warm glowing life-lamp
which rejoiced him. But gradually, as the circuit of touch, taste, and
smell become powerfully established; gradually, as the individual
develops in the child, and so retreats towards isolation; gradually,
as the child stands more immune from the mother, the circuit of
correspondence extends, and the eyes now communicate across space, the
ears begin to discriminate sounds. Last of all develops discriminate
hearing.
Now gradually the picture of the mother is transferred to the child's
mind, and the sound of the first baby-words is imprinted. And as the
child learns to discriminate visually, objectively, between the mother
and the nurse, he learns to choose, and becomes individually free. And
still, the dynamic correspondence is not finished. It only changes its
circuit.
While the brain is registering sensations, the four dynamic centers
are coming into perfect relation. Or rather, as we see, the reverse is
the case. As the dynamic centers come into perfect relation, the mind
registers and remembers sensations, and begins consciously to know.
But the great field of activity is still and always the dynamic field.
When a child learns to walk, it learns almost entirely from the solar
plexus and the lumbar ganglion, the cardiac plexus and the thoracic
ganglion balancing the upper body.
There is a perfected circuit of polarity. The two lower centers are
the positive, the two upper the negative poles. And so the child
strikes out with his feet for the earth, presses, and strikes away
again from the earth, the two upper centers meanwhile corresponding
implicitly in the balance of the upper body. It is a chain of
spontaneous activity in the four primary centers, establishing a
circuit through the whole body. But the positive poles are the lower
centers. And the brain has probably nothing at all to do with it. Even
the _desire_ to walk is not born in the brain, but in the primary
nuclei.
The same with the use of the hands and arms. It means the
establishment of a pure circuit between the four centers, the two
upper poles now being the positive, the lower the negative poles, and
the hands the live end of the wire. Again the brain is not concerned.
Probably, even in the first deliberate grasping of an object, the
brain is not concerned. Not until there is an element of recognition
and sensation-memory.
All our primal activity originates and circulates purely in the four
great nerve centers. All our active desire, our genuine impulse, our
love, our hope, our yearning, everything originates mysteriously at
these four great centers or well-heads of our existence: everything
vital and dynamic. The mind can only register that which results from
the emanation of the dynamic impulse and the collision or communion of
this impulse with its object.
So now we see that we can never know ourselves. Knowledge is to
consciousness what the signpost is to the traveler: just an indication
of the way which has been traveled before. Knowledge is not even in
direct proportion to being. There may be great knowledge of chemistry
in a man who is a rather poor _being_: and those who _know_, even in
wisdom like Solomon, are often at the end of the matter of living, not
at the beginning. As a matter of fact, David did the living, the
dynamic achievement. To Solomon was left the consummation and the
finish, and the dying down.
Yet we _must_ know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme
lesson of human consciousness is to learn how _not to know_. That is,
how not to _interfere_. That is, how to live dynamically, from the
great Source, and not statically, like machines driven by ideas and
principles from the head, or automatically, from one fixed desire. At
last, knowledge must be put into its true place in the living
activity of man. And we must know deeply, in order even to do that.
So a new conception of the meaning of education.
Education means leading out the individual nature in each man and
woman to its true fullness. You can't do that by stimulating the mind.
To pump education into the mind is fatal. That which sublimates from
the dynamic consciousness into the mental consciousness has alone any
value. This, in most individuals, is very little indeed. So that most
individuals, under a wise government, would be most carefully
protected from all vicious attempts to inject extraneous ideas into
them. Every extraneous idea, which has no inherent root in the dynamic
consciousness, is as dangerous as a nail driven into a young tree. For
the mass of people, knowledge _must_ be symbolical, mythical, dynamic.
This means, you must have a higher, responsible, conscious class: and
then in varying degrees the lower classes, varying in their degree of
consciousness. Symbols must be true from top to bottom. But the
interpretation of the symbols must rest, degree after degree, in the
higher, responsible, conscious classes. To _those who cannot divest_
themselves again of mental consciousness and definite ideas, mentality
and ideas are death, nails through their hands and feet.
CHAPTER VII
FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION
The first process of education is obviously not a mental process. When
a mother talks to a baby, she is not encouraging its little mind to
think. When she is coaxing her child to walk, she is not making a
theoretic exposition of the science of equilibration. She crouches
before the child, at a little distance, and spreads her hands. "Come,
baby--come to mother. Come! Baby, walk! Yes, walk! Walk to mother!
Come along. A little walk to its mother. Come! Come then! Why yes, a
pretty baby! Oh, he can toddle! Yes--yes--No, don't be frightened, a
dear. No--Come to mother--" and she catches his little pinafore by the
tip--and the infant lurches forward. "There! There! A beautiful walk!
A beautiful walker, yes! Walked all the way to mother, baby did. Yes,
he did--"
Now who will tell me that this talk has any rhyme or reason? Not a
spark of reason. Yet a real rhyme: or rhythm, much more important.
The song and the urge of the mother's voice plays direct on the
affective centers of the child, a wonderful stimulus and tuition. The
words hardly matter. True, this constant repetition in the end forms a
mental association. At the moment they have no mental significance at
all for the baby. But they ring with a strange palpitating music in
his fluttering soul, and lift him into motion.
And this is the way to educate children: the instinctive way of
mothers. There should be no effort made to teach children to think, to
have ideas. Only to lift them and urge them into dynamic activity. The
voice of dynamic sound, not the words of understanding. Damn
understanding. Gestures, and touch, and expression of the face, not
theory. Never have ideas about children--and never have ideas _for_
them.
If we are going to teach children we must teach them first to move.
And not by rule or mental dictation. Horror! But by playing and
teasing and anger, and amusement. A child must learn to move blithe
and free and proud. It must learn the fullness of spontaneous motion.
And this it can only learn by continuous reaction from all the
centers, through all the emotions. A child must learn to contain
itself. It must learn to sit still if need be. Part of the first phase
of education is the learning to stay still and be physically
self-contained. Then a child must learn to be alone, and to adventure
alone, and to play alone. Any peevish clinging should be quite roughly
rebuffed. From the very first day, throw a child back on its own
resources--even a little cruelly sometimes. But don't neglect it,
don't have a negative attitude to it. Play with it, tease it and roll
it over as a dog her puppy, mock it when it is too timorous, laugh at
it, scold it when it really bothers you--for a child must learn not to
bother another person--and when it makes you genuinely angry, spank it
soundly. But always remember that it is a single little soul by
itself; and that the responsibility for the wise, warm relationship is
yours, the adult's.
Then always watch its deportment. Above all things encourage a
straight backbone and proud shoulders. Above all things despise a
slovenly movement, an ugly bearing and unpleasing manner. And make a
mock of petulance and of too much timidity.
We are imbeciles to start bothering about love and so forth in a
child. Forget utterly that there is such a thing as emotional
reciprocity. But never forget your own honor as an adult individual
towards a small individual. It is a question of honor, not of love.
A tree grows straight when it has deep roots and is not too stifled.
Love is a spontaneous thing, coming out of the spontaneous effectual
soul. As a deliberate principle it is an unmitigated evil. Also
morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated
evil. A child which is proud and free in its movements, in all its
deportment, will be quite as moral as need be. Honor is an instinct, a
superb instinct which should be kept keenly alive. Immorality, vice,
crime, these come from a suppression or a collapse at one or other of
the great primary centers. If one of these centers fails to maintain
its true polarity, then there is a physical or psychic derangement, or
both. And viciousness or crime are the result of a derangement in the
primary system. Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which
the soul makes in every circumstance, adjusting one thing to another
livingly, delicately, sensitively. There can be no law. Therefore, at
every cost and charge keep the first four centers alive and alert,
active, and vivid in reaction. And then you need fear no perversion.
What we have done, in our era, is, first, we have tried as far as
possible to suppress or subordinate the two sensual centers. We have
so unduly insisted on and exaggerated the upper spiritual or selfless
mode--the living in the other person and through the other
person--that we have caused already a dangerous over-balance in the
natural psyche.
To correct this we go one worse, and try to rule ourselves more and
more by the old ideas of sympathy and benevolence. We think that love
and benevolence will cure anything. Whereas love and benevolence are
our poison, poison to the giver, and still more poison to the
receiver. Poison only because there is practically _no_ spontaneous
love left in the world. It is all _will_, the fatal love-will and
insatiable morbid curiosity. The pure sympathetic mode of love long
ago broke down. There is now only deadly, exaggerated volition.
This is also why general education should be suppressed as soon as
possible. We have fallen into a state of fixed, deadly will.
Everything we do and say to our children in school tends simply to fix
in them the same deadly will, under the pretence of pure love. Our
idealism is the clue to our fixed will. Love, beauty, benevolence,
progress, these are the words we use. But the principle we evoke is a
principle of barren, sanctified compulsion of all life. We want to put
all life under compulsion. "How to outwit the nerves," for
example.--And therefore, to save the children as far as possible,
elementary education should be stopped at once.
No child should be sent to any sort of public institution before the
age of ten years. If I could but advise, I would advise that this
notice should be sent through the length and breadth of the land.
"Parents, the State can no longer be responsible for the
mind and character of your children. From the first day of
the coming year, all schools will be closed for an
indefinite period. Fathers, see that your boys are trained
to be men. Mothers, see that your daughters are trained to
be women.
"All schools will shortly be converted either into public
workshops or into gymnasia. No child will be admitted into
the workshops under ten years of age. Active training in
primitive modes of fighting and gymnastics will be
compulsory for all boys over ten years of age.
"All girls over ten years of age must attend at one domestic
workshop. All girls over ten years of age may, in addition,
attend at one workshop of skilled labor, or of technical
industry, or of art. Admission for three months' probation.
"All boys over ten years of age must attend at one workshop
of domestic crafts, and at one workshop of skilled labor, or
of technical industry, or of art. A boy may choose, with his
parents' consent, his school of labor, or technical industry
or art, but the directors reserve the right to transfer him
to a more suitable department, if necessary, after a three
months' probation.
"It is the intention of this State to form a body of active,
energetic citizens. The danger of a helpless, presumptuous,
news-paper-reading population is universally recognized.
"All elementary education is left in the hands of the
parents, save such as is necessary to the different branches
of industry.
"Schools of mental culture are free to all individuals over
fourteen years of age.
"Universities are free to all who obtain the first culture
degree."
The fact is, our process of universal education is to-day so uncouth,
so psychologically barbaric, that it is the most terrible menace to
the existence of our race. We seize hold of our children, and by
parrot-compulsion we force into them a set of mental tricks. By
unnatural and unhealthy compulsion we force them into a certain amount
of cerebral activity. And then, after a few years, with a certain
number of windmills in their heads, we turn them loose, like so many
inferior Don Quixotes, to make a mess of life. All that they have
learnt in their heads has no reference at all to their dynamic souls.
The windmills spin and spin in a wind of words, Dulcinea del Toboso
beckons round every corner, and our nation of inferior Quixotes jumps
on and off tram-cars, trains, bicycles, motor-cars, buses, in one mad
chase of the divine Dulcinea, who is all the time chewing chocolates
and feeling very, very bored. It is no use telling the poor devils to
stop. They read in the newspapers about more Dulcineas and more
chivalry due to them and more horrid persons who injure the fair fame
of these bored females. And round they skelter, after their own tails.
That is, when they are not forced to grind out their lives for a wage.
Though work is the only thing that prevents our masses from going
quite mad.
To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever
been injected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection,
in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for.
An idea which is merely introduced into the brain, and started
spinning there like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all our
misery to-day. Instead of living from the spontaneous centers, we live
from the head. We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. We
grind, grind, grind in our mental consciousness, till we are beside
ourselves. Our primary affective centers, our centers of spontaneous
being, are so utterly ground round and automatized that they squeak in
all stages of disharmony and incipient collapse. We are a people--and
not we alone--of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don't even
know we are raving.
And all is due, directly and solely, to that hateful germ we call the
Ideal. The Ideal is _always_ evil, no matter what ideal it be. No
idea should ever be raised to a governing throne.
This does not mean that man should immediately cut off his head and
try to develop a pair of eyes in his breasts. But it does mean this:
that an idea is just the final concrete or registered result of living
dynamic interchange and reactions: that no idea is ever perfectly
expressed until its dynamic cause is finished; and that to continue to
put into dynamic effect an already perfected idea means the
nullification of all living activity, the substitution of mechanism,
and all the resultant horrors of _ennui_, ecstasy, neurasthenia, and a
collapsing psyche.
The whole tree of our idea of life and living is dead. Then let us
leave off hanging ourselves and our children from its branches like
medlars.
The idea, the actual idea, must rise ever fresh, ever displaced, like
the leaves of a tree, from out of the quickness of the sap, and
according to the forever incalculable effluence of the great dynamic
centers of life. The tree of life is a gay kind of tree that is
forever dropping its leaves and budding out afresh, quite different
ones. If the last lot were thistle leaves, the next lot may be vine.
You never can tell with the Tree of Life.
So we come back to that precious child who costs us such a lot of
ink. By what right, I ask you, are we going to inject into him our own
disease-germs of ideas and infallible motives? By the right of the
diseased, who want to infect everybody.
There are _few, few people_ in whom the living impulse and reaction
develops and sublimates into mental consciousness. There are all kinds
of trees in the forest. But few of them indeed bear the apples of
knowledge. The modern world insists, however, that every individual
shall bear the apples of knowledge. So we go through the forest of
mankind, cut back every tree, and try to graft it into an apple-tree.
A nice wood of monsters we make by so doing.
It is not the _nature_ of most men to know and to understand and to
reason very far. Therefore, why should they make a pretense of it? It
is the nature of some few men to reason, then let them reason. Those
whose nature it is to be rational will instinctively ask why and
wherefore, and wrestle with themselves for an answer. But why every
Tom, Dick and Harry should have the why and wherefore of the universe
rammed into him, and should be allowed to draw the conclusion hence
that he is the ideal person and responsible for the universe, I don't
know. It is a lie anyway--for neither the whys nor the wherefores are
his own, and he is but a parrot with his nut of a universe.
Why should we cram the mind of a child with facts that have nothing to
do with his own experiences, and have no relation to his own dynamic
activity? Let us realize that every extraneous idea effectually
introduced into a man's mind is a direct obstruction of his dynamic
activity. Every idea which is introduced from outside into a man's
mind, and which does not correspond to his own dynamic nature, is a
fatal stumbling-block for that man: is a cause of arrest for his true
individual activity, and a derangement to his psychic being.
For instance, if I teach a man the idea that all men are equal. Now
this idea has no foundation in experience, but is logically deduced
from certain ethical or philosophic principles. But there is a disease
of idealism in the world, and we all are born with it. Particularly
teachers are born with it. So they seize on the idea of equality, and
proceed to instil it. With what result? Your man is no longer a man,
living his own life from his own spontaneous centers. He is a
theoretic imbecile trying to frustrate and dislocate all life.
It is the death of all life to force a pure _idea_ into practice. Life
must be lived from the deep, self-responsible spontaneous centers of
every individual, in a vital, _non-ideal_ circuit of dynamic relation
between individuals. The passions or desires which are thought-born
are deadly. Any particular mode of passion or desire which receives an
exclusive ideal sanction at once becomes poisonous.
If this is true for men, it is much more true for women. Teach a woman
to act from an idea, and you destroy her womanhood for ever. Make a
woman self-conscious, and her soul is barren as a sandbag. Why were we
driven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease of
unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. All the
animals in Paradise enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Not
because we sinned. But because we got our sex into our head.
When Eve ate that particular apple, she became aware of her own
womanhood, mentally. And mentally she began to experiment with it. She
has been experimenting ever since. So has man. To the rage and horror
of both of them.
These sexual experiments are really anathema. But once a woman is
sexually self-conscious, what is she to do? There it is, she is born
with the disease of her own self-consciousness, as was her mother
before her. She is bound to experiment and try one idea after another,
in the long run always to her own misery. She is bound to have fixed
one, and then another idea of herself, herself as woman. First she is
the noble spouse of a not-quite-so-noble male: then a _Mater
Dolorosa_: then a ministering Angel: then a competent social unit, a
Member of Parliament or a Lady Doctor or a platform speaker: and all
the while, as a side show, she is the Isolde of some Tristan, or the
Guinevere of some Lancelot, or the Fata Morgana of all men--in her own
idea. She can't stop having an idea of herself. She can't get herself
out of her own head. And there she is, functioning away from her own
head and her own consciousness of herself and her own automatic
self-will, till the whole man and woman game has become just a hell,
and men with any backbone would rather kill themselves than go on with
it--or kill somebody else.
Yet we are going to inculcate more and more self-consciousness, teach
every little Mary to be more and more a nice little Mary out of her
own head, and every little Joseph to theorize himself up to the
scratch.
And the point lies here. There will _have_ to come an end. Every race
which has become self-conscious and idea-bound in the past has
perished. And then it has all started afresh, in a different way, with
another race. And man has never learnt any better. We are really far,
far more life-stupid than the dead Greeks or the lost Etruscans. Our
day is pretty short, and closing fast. We can pass, and another race
can follow later.
But there is another alternative. We still have in us the power to
discriminate between our own idealism, our own self-conscious will,
and that other reality, our own true spontaneous self. Certainly we
are so overloaded and diseased with ideas that we can't get well in a
minute. But we can set our faces stubbornly against the disease, once
we recognize it. The disease of love, the disease of "spirit," the
disease of niceness and benevolence and feeling good on our own behalf
and good on somebody else's behalf. Pah, it is all a gangrene. We can
retreat upon the proud, isolate self, and remain there alone, like
lepers, till we are cured of this ghastly white disease of
self-conscious idealism.
And we really can make a move on our children's behalf. We really can
refrain from thrusting our children any more into those hot-beds of
the self-conscious disease, schools. We really can prevent their
eating much more of the tissues of leprosy, newspapers and books. For
a time, there should be no compulsory teaching to read and write at
all. _The great mass of humanity should never learn to read and
write_--_never_.
And instead of this gnawing, gnawing disease of mental consciousness
and awful, unhealthy craving for stimulus and for action, we must
substitute genuine action. The war was really not a bad beginning. But
we went out under the banners of idealism, and now the men are home
again, the virus is more active than ever, rotting their very souls.
The mass of the people will never _mentally understand_. But they will
soon instinctively fall into line.
Let us substitute action, all kinds of action, for the mass of people,
in place of mental activity. Even twelve hours' work a day is better
than a newspaper at four in the afternoon and a grievance for the rest
of the evening. But particularly let us take care of the children. At
all cost, try to prevent a girl's mind from dwelling on herself, Make
her act, work, play: assume a rule over her girlhood. Let her learn
the domestic arts in their perfection. Let us even artificially set
her to spin and weave. Anything to keep her busy, to prevent her
reading and becoming self-conscious. Let us awake as soon as possible
to the repulsive machine quality of machine-made things. They smell of
death. And let us insist that the home is sacred, the hearth, and the
very things of the home. Then keep the girls apart from any
familiarity or being "pals" with the boys. The nice clean intimacy
which we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makes
neuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible.
The same with the boys. First and foremost establish a rule over them,
a proud, harsh, manly rule. Make them _know_ that at every moment they
are in the shadow of a proud, strong, adult authority. Let them be
soldiers, but as individuals not machine units. There are wars in the
future, great wars, which not machines will finally decide, but the
free, indomitable life spirit. No more wars under the banners of the
ideal, and in the spirit of sacrifice. But wars in the strength of
individual men. And then, pure individualistic training to fight, and
preparation for a whole new way of life, a new society. Put money
into its place, and science and industry. The leaders must stand for
life, and they must not ask the simple followers to point out the
direction. When the leaders assume responsibility they relieve the
followers forever of the burden of finding a way. Relieved of this
hateful incubus of responsibility for general affairs, the populace
can again become free and happy and spontaneous, leaving matters to
their superiors. No newspapers--the mass of the people never learning
to read. The evolving once more of the great spontaneous gestures of
life.
We can't go on as we are. Poor, nerve-worn creatures, fretting our
lives away and hating to die because we have never lived. The secret
is, to commit into the hands of the sacred few the responsibility
which now lies like torture on the mass. Let the few, the leaders, be
increasingly responsible for the whole. And let the mass be free:
free, save for the choice of leaders.
Leaders--this is what mankind is craving for.
But men must be prepared to obey, body and soul, once they have chosen
the leader. And let them choose the leader for life's sake only.
Begin then--there is a beginning.
CHAPTER VIII
EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD
The one thing we have to avoid, then, even while we carry on our own old
process of education, is this development of the powers of so-called
self-expression in a child. Let us beware of artificially stimulating
his self-consciousness and his so-called imagination. All that we do is
to pervert the child into a ghastly state of self-consciousness, making
him affectedly try to show off as we wish him to show off. The moment
the least little trace of self-consciousness enters in a child, good-by
to everything except falsity.
Much better just pound away at the ABC and simple arithmetic and so
on. The modern methods do make children sharp, give them a sort of
slick finesse, but it is the beginning of the mischief. It ends in the
great "unrest" of a nervous, hysterical proletariat. Begin to teach a
child of five to "understand." To understand the sun and moon and
daisy and the secrets of procreation, bless your soul. Understanding
all the way.--And when the child is twenty he'll have a hysterical
understanding of his own invented grievance, and there's an end of
him. Understanding is the devil.
A child mustn't understand things. He must have them his own way. His
vision isn't ours. When a boy of eight sees a horse, he doesn't see
the correct biological object we intend him to see. He sees a big
living presence of no particular shape with hair dangling from its
neck and four legs. If he puts two eyes in the profile, he is quite
right. Because he does _not_ see with optical, photographic vision.
The image on his retina is _not_ the image of his consciousness. The
image on his retina just does not go into him. His unconsciousness is
filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a
two-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence looming imminent.
And to _force_ the boy to see a correct one-eyed horse-profile is just
like pasting a placard in front of his vision. It simply kills his
inward seeing. We don't _want_ him to see a proper horse. The child is
_not_ a little camera. He is a small vital organism which has direct
dynamic _rapport_ with the objects of the outer universe. He
perceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism,
the elemental nature of the creature. So that to this day a Noah's Ark
tree is more real than a Corot tree or a Constable tree: and a flat
Noah's Ark cow has a deeper vital reality than even a Cuyp cow.
The mode of vision is not one and final. The mode of vision is
manifold. And the optical image is a mere vibrating blur to a
child--and, indeed, to a passionate adult. In this vibrating blur the
soul sees its own true correspondent. It sees, in a cow, horns and
squareness, and a long tail. It sees, for a horse, a mane, and a long
face, round nose, and four legs. And in each case a darkly vital
presence. Now horns and squareness and a long thin ox-tail, these are
the fearful and wonderful elements of the cow-form, which the dynamic
soul perfectly perceives. The ideal-image is just outside nature, for
a child--something false. In a picture, a child wants elemental
recognition, and not correctness or expression, or least of all, what
we call understanding. The child distorts inevitably and dynamically.
But the dynamic abstraction is more than mental. If a huge eye sits in
the middle of the cheek, in a child's drawing, this shows that the
deep dynamic consciousness of the eye, its relative exaggeration, is
the life-truth, even if it is a scientific falsehood.
On the other hand, what on earth is the good of saying to a child,
"The world is a flattened sphere, like an orange." It is simply
pernicious. You had much better say the world is a poached egg in a
frying pan. _That_ might have some dynamic meaning. The only thing
about the flattened orange is that the child just sees this orange
disporting itself in blue air, and never bothers to associate it with
the earth he treads on. And yet it would be so much better for the
mass of mankind if they never heard of the flattened sphere. They
should never be told that the earth is round. It only makes everything
unreal to them. They are balked in their impression of the flat good
earth, they can't get over this sphere business, they live in a fog of
abstraction, and nothing is anything. Save for purposes of
abstraction, the earth is a great plain, with hills and valleys. Why
force abstractions and kill the reality, when there's no need?
As for children, will we never realize that their abstractions are
never based on observations, but on subjective exaggerations? If there
is an eye in the face, the face is all eye. It is the child soul
which cannot get over the mystery of the eye. If there is a tree in a
landscape, the landscape is all tree. Always this partial focus. The
attempt to make a child focus for a whole view--which is really a
generalization and an adult abstraction--is simply wicked. Yet the
first thing we do is to set a child making relief-maps in clay, for
example: of his own district. Imbecility! He has not even the faintest
impression of the total hill on which his home stands. A steepness
going up to a door--and front garden railings--and perhaps windows.
That's the lot.
The top and bottom of it is, that it is a crime to teach a child
anything at all, school-wise. It is just evil to collect children
together and teach them through the head. It causes absolute
starvation in the dynamic centers, and sterile substitute of brain
knowledge is all the gain. The children of the middle classes are so
vitally impoverished, that the miracle is they continue to exist at
all. The children of the lower classes do better, because they escape
into the streets. But even the children of the proletariat are now
infected.
And, of course, as my critics point out, under all the school-smarm
and newspaper-cant, man is to-day as savage as a cannibal, and more
dangerous. The living dynamic self is denaturalized instead of being
educated.
We talk about education--leading forth the natural intelligence of a
child. But ours is just the opposite of leading forth. It is a ramming
in of brain facts through the head, and a consequent distortion,
suffocation, and starvation of the primary centers of consciousness. A
nice day of reckoning we've got in front of us.
Let us lead forth, by all means. But let us not have mental knowledge
before us as the goal of the leading. Much less let us make of it a
vicious circle in which we lead the unhappy child-mind, like a cow in
a ring at a fair. We don't want to educate children so that they may
understand. Understanding is a fallacy and a vice in most people. I
don't even want my child to know, much less to understand. _I_ don't
want my child to know that five fives are twenty-five, any more than I
want my child to wear my hat or my boots. I _don't_ want my child to
_know_. If he wants five fives let him count them on his fingers. As
for his little mind, give it a rest, and let his dynamic self be
alert. He will ask "why" often enough. But he more often asks why the
sun shines, or why men have mustaches, or why grass is green, than
anything sensible. Most of a child's questions are, and should be,
unanswerable. They are not questions at all. They are exclamations of
wonder, they are _remarks_ half-sceptically addressed. When a child
says, "Why is grass green?" he half implies. "Is it really green, or
is it just taking me in?" And we solemnly begin to prate about
chlorophyll. Oh, imbeciles, idiots, inexcusable owls!
The whole of a child's development goes on from the great dynamic
centers, and is basically non-mental. To introduce mental activity is
to arrest the dynamic activity, and stultify true dynamic development.
By the age of twenty-one our young people are helpless, hopeless,
selfless, floundering mental entities, with nothing in front of them,
because they have been starved from the roots, systematically, for
twenty-one years, and fed through the head. They have had all their
mental excitements, sex and everything, all through the head, and when
it comes to the actual thing, why, there's nothing in it. _Blasé._ The
affective centers have been exhausted from the head.
Before the age of fourteen, children should be taught only to move, to
act, to _do_. And they should be taught as little as possible even of
this. Adults simply cannot and do not know any more what the mode of
childish intelligence is. Adults _always_ interfere. They _always_
force the adult mental mode. Therefore children must be preserved from
adult instructions.
Make a child work--yes. Make it do little jobs. Keep a fine and
delicate and fierce discipline, so that the little jobs are performed
as perfectly as is consistent with the child's nature. Make the child
alert, proud, and becoming in its movements. Make it know very
definitely that it shall not and must not trespass on other people's
privacy or patience. Teach it songs, tell it tales. But _never_
instruct it school-wise. And mostly, leave it alone, send it away to
be with other children and to get in and out of mischief, and in and
out of danger. Forget your child altogether as much as possible.
All this is the active and strenuous business of parents, and must not
be shelved off on to strangers. It is the business of parents
_mentally_ to forget but dynamically never to forsake their children.
It is no use expecting parents to know _why_ schools are closed, and
_why_ they, the parents, must be quite responsible for their own
children during the first ten years. If it is quite useless to expect
parents to understand a theory of relativity, much less will they
understand the development of the dynamic consciousness. But why should
they understand? It is the business of very few to understand and for
the mass, it is their business to believe and not to bother, but to be
honorable and humanly to fulfill their human responsibilities. To give
active obedience to their leaders, and to possess their own souls in
natural pride.
Some must understand why a child is not to be mentally educated. Some
must have a faint inkling of the processes of consciousness during the
first fourteen years. Some must know what a child beholds, when it
looks at a horse, and what it means when it says, "Why is grass
green?" The answer to this question, by the way, is "Because it is."
The interplay of the four dynamic centers follows no one conceivable
law. Mental activity continues according to a law of co-relation. But
there is no logical or rational co-relation in the dynamic
consciousness. It pulses on inconsequential, and it would be
impossible to determine any sequence. Out of the very lack of sequence
in dynamic consciousness does the individual himself develop. The
dynamic abstraction of a child's precepts follows no mental law, and
even no law which can ever be mentally propounded. And this is why it
is utterly pernicious to set a child making a clay relief-map of its
own district, or to ask a child to draw conclusions from given
observations. Dynamically, a child draws no conclusions. All things
still remain dynamically possible. A conclusion drawn is a nail in the
coffin of a child's developing being. Let a child make a clay
landscape, if it likes. But entirely according to its own fancy, and
without conclusions drawn. Only, let the landscape be vividly
made--always the discipline of the soul's full attention. "Oh, but
where are the factory chimneys?"--or else--"Why have you left out the
gas-works?" or "Do you call that sloppy thing a church?" The
particular focus should be vivid, and the record in some way true. The
soul must give earnest attention, that is all.
And so actively disciplined, the child develops for the first ten
years. We need not be afraid of letting children see the passions and
reactions of adult life. Only we must not strain the _sympathies_ of a
child, in _any_ direction, particularly the direction of love and
pity. Nor must we introduce the fallacy of right and wrong.
Spontaneous distaste should take the place of right and wrong. And
least of all must there be a cry: "You see, dear, you don't
understand. When you are older--" A child's sagacity is better than an
adult understanding, anyhow.
Of course it is ten times criminal to tell young children facts about
sex, or to implicate them in adult relationships. A child has a strong
evanescent sex consciousness. It instinctively writes impossible words
on back walls. But this is not a fully conscious mental act. It is a
kind of dream act--quite natural. The child's curious, shadowy,
indecent sex-knowledge is quite in the course of nature. And does
nobody any harm at all. Adults had far better not notice it. But if a
child sees a cockerel tread a hen, or two dogs coupling, well and
good. It _should_ see these things. Only, without comment. Let nothing
be exaggeratedly hidden. By instinct, let us preserve the decent
privacies. But if a child occasionally sees its parent nude, taking a
bath, all the better. Or even sitting in the W. C. Exaggerated secrecy
is bad. But indecent exposure is also very bad. But worst of all is
dragging in the _mental_ consciousness of these shadowy dynamic
realities.
In the same way, to talk to a child about an adult is vile. Let
adults keep their adult feelings and communications for people of
their own age. But if a child sees its parents violently quarrel, all
the better. There must be storms. And a child's dynamic understanding
is far deeper and more penetrating than our sophisticated
interpretation. But _never_ make a child a party to adult affairs.
Never drag the child in. Refuse its sympathy on such occasions. Always
treat it as if it had _no_ business to hear, even if it is present and
_must_ hear. Truly, it has no business mentally to hear. And the
dynamic soul will always weigh things up and dispose of them properly,
if there be no interference of adult comment or adult desire for
sympathy. It is despicable for any one parent to accept a child's
sympathy against the other parent. And the one who _received_ the
sympathy is always more contemptible than the one who is hated.
Of course so many children are born to-day unnaturally mentally awake
and alive to adult affairs, that there is nothing left but to tell
them everything, crudely: or else, much better, to say: "Ah, get out,
you know too much, you make me sick."
To return to the question of sex. A child is born sexed. A child is
either male or female, in the whole of its psyche and physique is
either male or female. Every single living cell is either male or
female, and will remain either male or female as long as life lasts.
And every single cell in every male child is male, and every cell in
every female child is female. The talk about a third sex, or about the
indeterminate sex, is just to pervert the issue.
Biologically, it is true, the rudimentary formation of both sexes is
found in every individual. That doesn't mean that every individual is
a bit of both, or either, _ad lib._ After a sufficient period of
idealism, men become hopelessly self-conscious. That is, the great
affective centers no longer act spontaneously, but always wait for
control from the head. This always breeds a great fluster in the
psyche, and the poor self-conscious individual cannot help posing and
posturing. Our ideal has taught us to be gentle and wistful: rather
girlish and yielding, and _very_ yielding in our sympathies. In fact,
many young men feel so very like what they imagine a girl must feel,
that hence they draw the conclusion that they must have a large share
of female sex inside them. False conclusion.
These girlish men have often, to-day, the finest maleness, once it is
put to the test. How is it then that they feel, and look, so girlish?
It is largely a question of the direction of the polarized flow. Our
ideal has taught us to be _so_ loving and _so_ submissive and _so_
yielding in our sympathy, that the mode has become automatic in many
men. Now in what we will call the "natural" mode, man has his
positivity in the volitional centers, and women in the sympathetic. In
fulfilling the Christian love ideal, however, men have reversed this.
Man has assumed the gentle, all-sympathetic rôle, and woman has become
the energetic party, with the authority in her hands. The male is the
sensitive, sympathetic nature, the woman the active, effective,
authoritative. So that the male acts as the passive, or recipient pole
of attraction, the female as the active, positive, exertive pole, in
human relations. Which is a reversal of the old flow. The woman is now
the initiator, man the responder. They seem to play each other's
parts. But man is purely male, playing woman's part, and woman is
purely female, however manly. The gulf between Heliogabalus, or the
most womanly man on earth, and the most manly woman, is just the same
as ever: just the same old gulf between the sexes. The man is male,
the woman is female. Only they are playing one another's parts, as
they must at certain periods. The dynamic polarity has swung around.
If we look a little closer, we can define this positive and negative
business better. As a matter of fact, positive and negative, passive
and active cuts both ways. If the man, as thinker and doer, is active,
or positive, and the woman negative, then, on the other hand, as the
initiator of emotion, of feeling, and of sympathetic understanding the
woman is positive, the man negative. The man may be the initiator in
action, but the woman is initiator in emotion. The man has the
initiative as far as voluntary activity goes, and the woman the
initiative as far as sympathetic activity goes. In love, it is the
woman naturally who loves, the man who is loved. In love, woman is the
positive, man the negative. It is woman who asks, in love, and man who
answers. In life, the reverse is the case. In knowing and in doing,
man is positive and woman negative: man initiates, and woman lives up
to it.
Naturally this nicely arranged order of things may be reversed. Action
and utterance, which are male, are polarized against feeling, emotion,
which are female. And which is positive, which negative? Was man, the
eternal protagonist, born of woman, from her womb of fathomless
emotion? Or was woman, with her deep womb of emotion, born from the
rib of active man, the first created? Man, the doer, the knower, the
original in _being_, is he lord of life? Or is woman, the great
Mother, who bore us from the womb of love, is she the supreme Goddess?
This is the question of all time. And as long as man and woman endure,
so will the answer be given, first one way, then the other. Man, as
the utterer, usually claims that Eve was created out of his spare rib:
from the field of the creative, upper dynamic consciousness, that is.
But woman, as soon as she gets a word in, points to the fact that man
inevitably, poor darling, is the issue of his mother's womb. So the
battle rages.
But some men always agree with the woman. Some men always yield to
woman the creative positivity. And in certain periods, such as the
present, the majority of men concur in regarding woman as the source
of life, the first term in creation: woman, the mother, the prime
being.
And then, the whole polarity shifts over. Man still remains the doer
and thinker. But he is so only in the service of emotional and
procreative woman. His highest moment is now the emotional moment when
he gives himself up to the woman, when he forms the perfect answer
for her great emotional and procreative asking. All his thinking, all
his activity in the world only contributes to this great moment, when
he is fulfilled in the emotional passion of the woman, the birth of
rebirth, as Whitman calls it. In his consummation in the emotional
passion of a woman, man is reborn, which is quite true.
And there is the point at which we all now stick. Life, thought, and
activity, all are devoted truly to the great end of Woman, wife and
mother.
Man has now entered on to his negative mode. Now, his consummation is
in feeling, not in action. Now, his activity is all of the domestic
order and all his thought goes to proving that nothing matters except
that birth shall continue and woman shall rock in the nest of this
globe like a bird who covers her eggs in some tall tree. Man is the
fetcher, the carrier, the sacrifice, the crucified, and the reborn of
woman.
This being so, the whole tendency of his nature changes. Instead of
being assertive and rather insentient, he becomes wavering and
sensitive. He begins to have as many feelings--nay, more than a woman.
His heroism is all in altruistic endurance. He worships pity and
tenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on very
largely the original rôle of woman. Woman meanwhile becomes the
fearless, inwardly relentless, determined positive party. She grips
the responsibility. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
Nay, she makes man discover that cradles should not be rocked, in
order that her hands may be left free. She is now a queen of the
earth, and inwardly a fearsome tyrant. She keeps pity and tenderness
emblazoned on her banners. But God help the man whom she pities.
Ultimately she tears him to bits.
Therefore we see the reversal of the old poles. Man becomes the
emotional party, woman the positive and active. Man begins to show
strong signs of the peculiarly strong passive sex desire, the desire
to be taken, which is considered characteristic of woman. Man begins
to have all the feelings of woman--or all the feelings which he
attributed to woman. He becomes more feminine than woman ever was, and
worships his own femininity, calling it the highest. In short, he
begins to exhibit all signs of sexual complexity. He begins to imagine
he really is half female. And certainly woman seems very male. So the
hermaphrodite fallacy revives again.
But it is all a fallacy. Man, in the midst of all his effeminacy, is
still male and nothing but male. And woman, though she harangue in
Parliament or patrol the streets with a helmet on her head, is still
completely female. They are only playing each other's rôles, because
the poles have swung into reversion. The compass is reversed. But that
doesn't mean that the north pole has become the south pole, or that
each is a bit of both.
Of course a woman should stick to her own natural emotional
positivity. But then man must stick to his own positivity of _being_,
of action, _disinterested, non-domestic, male_ action, which is not
devoted to the increase of the female. Once man vacates his camp of
sincere, passionate positivity in disinterested being, his supreme
responsibility to fulfill his own profoundest impulses, with reference
to none but God or his own soul, not taking woman into count at all,
in this primary responsibility to his own deepest soul; once man
vacates this strong citadel of his own genuine, not spurious,
divinity; then in comes woman, picks up the scepter and begins to
conduct a rag-time band.
Man remains man, however he may put on wistfulness and tenderness like
petticoats, and sensibilities like pearl ornaments. Your sensitive
little big-eyed boy, so much more gentle and loving than his harder
sister, is male for all that, believe me. Perhaps evilly male, so
mothers may learn to their cost: and wives still more.
Of course there should be a great balance between the sexes. Man, in
the daytime, must follow his own soul's greatest impulse, and give
himself to life-work and risk himself to death. It is not woman who
claims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul that
drives him on beyond woman, to his supreme activity. For his highest,
man is responsible to God alone. He may not pause to remember that he
has a life to lose, or a wife and children to leave. He must carry
forward the banner of life, though seven worlds perish, with all the
wives and mothers and children in them. Hence Jesus, "Woman, what have
I to do with thee?" Every man that lives has to say it again to his
wife or mother, once he has any work or mission in hand, that comes
from his soul.
But again, no man is a blooming marvel for twenty-four hours a day.
Jesus or Napoleon or any other of them ought to have been man enough
to be able to come home at tea-time and put his slippers on and sit
under the spell of his wife. For there you are, the woman has her
world, her positivity: the world of love, of emotion, of sympathy. And
it behooves every man in his hour to take off his shoes and relax and
give himself up to his woman and her world. Not to give up his
purpose. But to give up himself for a time to her who is his
mate.--And so it is one detests the clock-work Kant, and the
petit-bourgeois Napoleon divorcing his Josephine for a Hapsburg--or
even Jesus, with his "Woman, what have I to do with thee?"--He might
have added "just now."--They were all failures.
CHAPTER IX
THE BIRTH OF SEX
The last chapter was a chapter of semi-digression. We now return to
the straight course. Is the straightness none too evident? Ah well,
it's a matter of relativity. A child is born with one sex only, and
remains always single in his sex. There is no intermingling, only a
great change of rôles is possible. But man in the female rôle is still
male.
Sex--that is to say, maleness and femaleness--is present from the
moment of birth, and in every act or deed of every child. But sex in
the real sense of dynamic sexual relationship, this does not exist in
a child, and cannot exist until puberty and after. True, children have
a sort of sex consciousness. Little boys and little girls may even
commit indecencies together. And still it is nothing vital. It is a
sort of shadow activity, a sort of dream-activity. It has no very
profound effect.
But still, boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible,
that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf that
lies between them in nature, and for the great strangeness which each
has to offer the other, finally. We are all wrong when we say there is
no vital difference between the sexes. There is every difference.
Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a
woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And
in the reverse men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do.
Man, acting in the passive or feminine polarity, is still man, and he
doesn't have one single unmanly feeling. And women, when they speak
and write, utter not one single word that men have not taught them.
Men learn their feelings from women, women learn their mental
consciousness from men. And so it will ever be. Meanwhile, women live
forever by feeling, and men live forever from an inherent sense of
_purpose_. Feeling is an end in itself. This is unspeakable truth to a
woman, and never true for one minute to a man. When man, in the
Epicurean spirit, embraces feeling, he makes himself a martyr to
it--like Maupassant or Oscar Wilde. Woman will _never_ understand the
depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man
will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will
play at the other's game, but they will remain apart.
The whole mode, the whole everything is really different in man and
woman. Therefore we should keep boys and girls apart, that they are
pure and virgin in themselves. On mixing with one another, in becoming
familiar, in being "pals," they lose their own male and female
integrity. And they lose the treasure of the future, the vital sex
polarity, the dynamic magic of life. For the magic and the dynamism
rests on _otherness_.
For actual sex is a vital polarity. And a polarity which rouses into
action, as we know, at puberty.
And how? As we know, a child lives from the great field of dynamic
consciousness established between the four poles of the dynamic
psyche, two great poles of sympathy, two great poles of will. The
solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion, great nerve-centers below the
diaphragm, act as the dynamic origin of all consciousness in man, and
are immediately polarized by the other two nerve-centers, the cardiac
plexus and the thoracic ganglion above the diaphragm. At these four
poles the whole flow, both within the individual and from without
him, of dynamic consciousness and dynamic creative relationship is
centered. These four first poles constitute the first field of dynamic
consciousness for the first twelve or fourteen years of the life of
every child.
And then a change takes place. It takes place slowly, gradually and
inevitably, utterly beyond our provision or control. The living soul
is unfolding itself in another great metamorphosis.
What happens, in the biological psyche, is that deeper centers of
consciousness and function come awake. Deep in the lower body the
great sympathetic center, the hypogastric plexus has been acting all
the time in a kind of dream-automatism, balanced by its corresponding
voluntary center, the sacral ganglion. At the age of twelve these two
centers begin slowly to rumble awake, with a deep reverberant force
that changes the whole constitution of the life of the individual.
And as these two centers, the sympathetic center of the deeper
abdomen, and the voluntary center of the loins, gradually sparkle into
wakeful, _conscious_ activity, their corresponding poles are roused in
the upper body. In the region of the throat and neck, the so-called
cervical plexuses and the cervical ganglia dawn into activity.
We have now another field of dawning dynamic consciousness, that will
extend far beyond the first. And now various things happen to us.
First of all actual sex establishes its strange and troublesome
presence within us. This is the massive wakening of the lower body.
And then, in the upper body, the breasts of a woman begin to develop,
her throat changes its form. And in the man, the voice breaks, the
beard begins to grow round the lips and on to the throat. There are
the obvious physiological changes resulting from the gradual bursting
into free activity of the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion,
in the lower body, and of the cervical plexuses and ganglia of the
neck, in the upper body.
Why the growth of hair should start at the lower and upper sympathetic
regions we cannot say. Perhaps for protection. Perhaps to preserve
these powerful yet supersensitive nodes from the inclemency of changes
in temperature, which might cause a derangement. Perhaps for the sake
of protective warning, as hair warns when it is touched. Perhaps for a
screen against various dynamic vibrations, and as a receiver of other
suited dynamic vibrations. It may be that even the hair of the head
acts as a sensitive vibration-medium for conveying currents of
physical and vitalistic activity to and from the brain. And perhaps
from the centers of intense vital surcharge hair springs as a sort of
annunciation or declaration, like a crest of life-assertion. Perhaps
all these things, and perhaps others.
But with the bursting awake of the four new poles of dynamic
consciousness and being, change takes place in everything, the
features now begin to take individual form, the limbs develop out of
the soft round matrix of child-form, the body resolves itself into
distinctions. A strange creative change in being has taken place. The
child before puberty is quite another thing from the child after
puberty. Strange indeed is this new birth, this rising from the sea of
childhood into a new being. It is a resurrection which we fear.
And now, a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. Now new
relationships are formed, the old ones retire from their prominence.
Now mother and father inevitably give way before masters and
mistresses, brothers and sisters yield to friends. This is the period
of _Schwärmerei_, of young adoration and of real initial friendships.
A child before puberty has playmates. After puberty he has friends and
enemies.
A whole new field of passional relationship. And the old bonds
relaxing, the old love retreating. The father and mother bonds now
relax, though they never break. The family love wanes, though it never
dies.
It is the hour of the stranger. Let the stranger now enter the soul.
And it is the first hour of true individuality, the first hour of
genuine, responsible solitariness. A child knows the abyss of
forlornness. But an adolescent alone knows the strange pain of growing
into his own isolation of individuality.
All this change is an agony and a bliss. It is a cataclysm and a new
world. It is our most serious hour, perhaps. And yet we cannot be
responsible for it.
Now sex comes into active being. Until puberty, sex is submerged,
nascent, incipient only. After puberty, it is a tremendous factor.
What is sex, really? We can never say, satisfactorily. But we know so
much: we know that it is a dynamic polarity between human beings, and
a circuit of force _always_ flowing. The psychoanalyst is right so
far. There can be no vivid relation between two adult individuals
which does not consist in a dynamic polarized flow of vitalistic force
or magnetism or electricity, call it what you will, between these two
people. Yet is this dynamic flow inevitably sexual in nature?
This is the moot point for psychoanalysis. But let us look at sex, in
its obvious manifestation. The _sexual_ relation between man and woman
consummates in the act of coition. Now what is the act of coition? We
know its functional purpose of procreation. But, after all our
experience and all our poetry and novels we know that the procreative
purpose of sex is, to the individual man and woman, just a side-show.
To the individual, the act of coition is a great psychic experience, a
vital experience of tremendous importance. On this vital individual
experience the life and very being of the individual largely depends.
But what is the experience? Untellable. Only, we know something. We
know that in the act of coition the _blood_ of the individual man,
acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity--we know no word, so
say "electricity," by analogy--rises to a culmination, in a tremendous
magnetic urge towards the magnetic blood of the female. The whole of
the living blood in the two individuals forms a field of intense,
polarized magnetic attraction. So, the two poles must be brought into
contact. In the act of coition, the two seas of blood in the two
individuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible,
clash into a oneness. A great flash of interchange occurs, like an
electric spark when two currents meet or like lightning out of the
densely surcharged clouds. There is a lightning flash which passes
through the blood of both individuals, there is a thunder of sensation
which rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of each--and then
the tension passes.
The two individuals are separate again. But are they as they were
before? Is the air the same after a thunder-storm as before? No. The
air is as it were new, fresh, tingling with newness. So is the blood
of man and woman after successful coition. After a false coition, like
prostitution, there is not newness but a certain disintegration.
But after coition, the actual chemical constitution of the blood is so
changed, that usually sleep intervenes, to allow the time for
chemical, biological readjustment through the whole system.
So, the blood is changed and renewed, refreshed, almost recreated,
like the atmosphere after thunder. Out of the newness of the living
blood pass the new strange waves which beat upon the great dynamic
centers of the nerves: primarily upon the hypogastric plexus and the
sacral ganglion. From these centers rise new impulses, new vision, new
being, rising like Aphrodite from the foam of the new tide of blood.
And so individual life goes on.
Perhaps, then, we will allow ourselves to say what, in psychic
individual reality, is the act of coition. It is the bringing together
of the surcharged electric blood of the male with the polarized
electric blood of the female, with the result of a tremendous flashing
interchange, which alters the constitution of the blood, and the very
quality of _being_, in both.
And this, surely, is sex. But is this the whole of sex? That is the
question.
After coition, we say the blood is renewed. We say that from the new,
finely sparkling blood new thrills pass into the great affective
centers of the lower body, new thrills of feeling, of impulse, of
energy.--And what about these new thrills?
Now, a new story. The new thrills are passed on to the great upper
centers of the dynamic body. The individual polarity now changes,
within the individual system. The upper centers, cardiac plexus and
cervical plexuses, thoracic ganglion and cervical ganglia now assume
positivity. These, the upper polarized centers, have now the positive
rôle to play, the solar and the hypogastric plexuses, the lumbar and
the sacral ganglia, these have the submissive, negative rôle for the
time being.
And what then? What now, that the upper centers are finely active in
positivity? Now it is a different story. Now there is new vision in
the eyes, new hearing in the ears, new voice in the throat and speech
on the lips. Now the new song rises, the brain tingles to new thought,
the heart craves for new activity.
The heart craves for new activity. For new _collective_ activity. That
is, for a new polarized connection with other beings, other men.
Is this new craving for polarized communion with others, this craving
for a new unison, is it sexual, like the original craving for the
woman? Not at all. The whole polarity is different. Now, the positive
poles are the poles of the breast and shoulders and throat, the poles
of activity and full consciousness. Men, being themselves made new
after the act of coition, wish to make the world new. A new,
passionate polarity springs up between men who are bent on the same
activity, the polarity between man and woman sinks to passivity. It is
now daytime, and time to forget sex, time to be busy making a new
world.
Is this new polarity, this new circuit of passion between comrades and
co-workers, is this also sexual? It is a vivid circuit of polarized
passion. Is it hence sex?
It is not. Because what are the poles of positive connection?--the
upper, busy poles. What is the dynamic contact?--a unison in spirit,
in understanding, and a pure commingling in one great _work_. A
mingling of the individual passion into one great _purpose_. Now this
is also a grand consummation for men, this mingling of many with one
great impassioned purpose. But is this sex? Knowing what sex is, can
we call this other also sex? We cannot.
This meeting of many in one great passionate purpose is not sex, and
should never be confused with sex. It is a great motion in the
opposite direction. And I am sure that the ultimate, greatest desire
in men is this desire for great _purposive_ activity. When man loses
his deep sense of purposive, creative activity, he feels lost, and is
lost. When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation,
even in his _secret_ soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair.
When he makes woman, or the woman and child the great center of life
and of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair.
Man must bravely stand by his own soul, his own responsibility as the
creative vanguard of life. And he must also have the courage to go
home to his woman and become a perfect answer to her deep sexual call.
But he must never confuse his two issues. Primarily and supremely man
is _always_ the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown,
alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists
only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening
and the night are hers.
The psychoanalysts, driving us back to the sexual consummation always,
do us infinite damage.
We have to break away, back to the great unison of manhood in some
passionate _purpose_. Now this is not like sex. Sex is always
individual. A man has his own sex: nobody else's. And sexually he goes
as a single individual; he can mingle only singly. So that to make sex
a general affair is just a perversion and a lie. You can't get people
and talk to them about their sex, as if it were a common interest.
We have got to get back to the great purpose of manhood, a passionate
unison in actively making a world. This is a real commingling of many.
And in such a commingling we forfeit the individual. In the
commingling of sex we are alone with _one_ partner. It is an
individual affair, there is no superior or inferior. But in the
commingling of a passionate purpose, each individual sacredly abandons
his individual. In the living faith of his soul, he surrenders his
individuality to the great urge which is upon him. He may have to
surrender his name, his fame, his fortune, his life, everything. But
once a man, in the integrity of his own individual soul, _believes_,
he surrenders his own individuality to his belief, and becomes one of
a united body. He knows what he does. He makes the surrender
honorably, in agreement with his own soul's deepest desire. But he
surrenders, and remains responsible for the purity of his surrender.
But what if he believes that his sexual consummation is his supreme
consummation? Then he serves the great purpose to which he pledges
himself only as long as it pleases him. After which he turns it down,
and goes back to sex. With sex as the one accepted prime motive, the
world drifts into despair and anarchy.
Of all countries, America has most to fear from anarchy, even from one
single moment's lapse into anarchy. The old nations are _organically_
fixed into classes, but America not. You can shake Europe to atoms.
And yet peasants fall back to peasantry, artisans to industrial labor,
upper classes to their control--inevitably. But can you say the same
of America?
America must not lapse for one single moment into anarchy. It would be
the end of her. She must drift no nearer to anarchy. She is near
enough.
Well, then, Americans must make a choice. It is a choice between
belief in man's creative, spontaneous soul, and man's automatic power
of production and reproduction. It is a choice between serving _man_,
or woman. It is a choice between yielding the soul to a leader,
leaders, or yielding only to the woman, wife, mistress, or mother.
The great collective passion of belief which brings men together,
comrades and co-workers, passionately obeying their soul-chosen leader
or leaders, this is not a sex passion. Not in any sense. Sex holds
any _two_ people together, but it tends to disintegrate society,
unless it is subordinated to the great dominating male passion of
collective _purpose_.
But when the sex passion submits to the great purposive passion, then
you have fulness. And no great purposive passion can endure long
unless it is established upon the fulfillment in the vast majority of
individuals of the true sexual passion. No great motive or ideal or
social principle can endure for any length of time unless based upon
the sexual fulfillment of the vast majority of individuals concerned.
It cuts both ways. Assert sex as the predominant fulfillment, and you
get the collapse of living purpose in man. You get anarchy. Assert
_purposiveness_ as the one supreme and pure activity of life, and you
drift into barren sterility, like our business life of to-day, and our
political life. You become sterile, you make anarchy inevitable. And
so there you are. You have got to base your great purposive activity
upon the intense sexual fulfillment of all your individuals. That was
how Egypt endured. But you have got to keep your sexual fulfillment
even then subordinate, just subordinate to the great passion of
purpose: subordinate by a hair's breadth only: but still, by that
hair's breadth, subordinate.
Perhaps we can see now a little better--to go back to the child--where
Freud is wrong in attributing a sexual motive to all human activity.
It is obvious there is no real sexual motive in a child, for example.
The great sexual centers are not even awake. True, even in a child of
three, rudimentary sex throws strange shadows on the wall, in its
approach from the distance. But these are only an uneasy intrusion
from the as-yet-uncreated, unready biological centers. The great
sexual centers of the hypogastric plexus, and the immensely powerful
sacral ganglion are slowly prepared, developed in a kind of prenatal
gestation during childhood before puberty. But even an unborn child
kicks in the womb. So do the great sex-centers give occasional blind
kicks in a child. It is part of the phenomenon of childhood. But we
must be most careful not to charge these rather unpleasant apparitions
or phenomena against the individual boy or girl. We must be _very_
careful not to drag the matter into mental consciousness. Shoo it
away. Reprimand it with a pah! and a faugh! and a bit of contempt. But
do not get into any heat or any fear. Do not startle a passional
attention. Drive the whole thing away like the shadow it is, and be
_very_ careful not to drive it into the consciousness. Be very careful
to plant no seed of burning shame or horror. Throw over it merely the
cold water of contemptuous indifference, dismissal.
After puberty, a child may as well be told the simple and necessary
facts of sex. As things stand, the parent may as well do it. But
briefly, coldly, and with as cold a dismissal as possible.--"Look
here, you're not a child any more; you know it, don't you? You're
going to be a man. And you know what that means. It means you're going
to marry a woman later on, and get children. You know it, and I know
it. But in the meantime, leave yourself alone. I know you'll have a
lot of bother with yourself, and your feelings. I know what is
happening to you. And I know you get excited about it. But you
needn't. Other men have all gone through it. So don't you go creeping
off by yourself and doing things on the sly. It won't do you any
good.--I know what you'll do, because we've all been through it. I
know the thing will keep coming on you at night. But remember that I
know. Remember. And remember that I want you to leave yourself alone.
I know what it is, I tell you. I've been through it all myself. You've
got to go through these years, before you find a woman you want to
marry, and whom you can marry. I went through them myself, and got
myself worked up a good deal more than was good for me.--Try to
contain yourself. Always try to contain yourself, and be a man. That's
the only thing. Always try and be manly, and quiet in yourself.
Remember I know what it is. I've been the same, in the same state that
you are in. And probably I've behaved more foolishly and perniciously
than ever you will. So come to me if anything _really_ bothers you.
And don't feel sly and secret. I do know just what you've got and what
you haven't. I've been as bad and perhaps worse than you. And the only
thing I want of you is to be manly. Try and be manly, and quiet in
yourself."
That is about as much as a father can say to a boy, at puberty. You
have to be _very_ careful what you do: especially if you are a parent.
To translate sex into mental ideas is vile, to make a scientific fact
of it is death.
As a matter of fact there should be some sort of initiation into true
adult consciousness. Boys should be taken away from their mothers and
sisters as much as possible at adolescence. They should be given into
some real manly charge. And there should be some actual initiation
into sex life. Perhaps like the savages, who make the boy die again,
symbolically, and pull him forth through some narrow aperture, to be
born again, and make him suffer and endure terrible hardships, to make
a great dynamic effect on the consciousness, a terrible dynamic sense
of change in the very being. In short, a long, violent initiation,
from which the lad emerges emaciated, but cut off forever from
childhood, entered into the serious, responsible pale of manhood. And
with his whole consciousness convulsed by a great change, as his
dynamic psyche actually is convulsed.--And something in the same way,
to initiate girls into womanhood.
There should be the intense dynamic reaction: the physical suffering
and the physical realization sinking deep into the soul, changing the
soul for ever. Sex should come upon us as a terrible thing of
suffering and privilege and mystery: a mysterious metamorphosis come
upon us, and a new terrible power given us, and a new responsibility.
Telling?--What's the good of telling?--The mystery, the terror, and
the tremendous power of sex should never be explained away. The mass
of mankind should _never_ be acquainted with the scientific biological
facts of sex: _never_. The mystery must remain in its dark secrecy,
and its dark, powerful dynamism. The reality of sex lies in the great
dynamic convulsions in the soul. And as such it should be realized, a
great creative-convulsive seizure upon the soul.--To make it a matter
of test-tube mixtures, chemical demonstrations and trashy lock-and-key
symbols is just blasting. Even more sickening is the line: "You see,
dear, one day you'll love a man as I love Daddy, more than anything
else in the _whole_ world. And then, dear, I hope you'll marry him.
Because if you do you'll be happy, and I want you to be happy, my
love. And so I hope you'll marry the man you really love (kisses the
child).--And then, darling, there will come a lot of things you know
nothing about now. You'll want to have a dear little baby, won't you,
darling? Your own dear little baby. And your husband's as well.
Because it'll be his, too. You know that, don't you, dear? It will be
born from both of you. And you don't know how, do you? Well, it will
come from right inside you, dear, out of your own inside. You came
out of mother's inside, etc., etc."
But I suppose there's really nothing else to be done, given the world
and society as we've got them now. The mother is doing her best.
But it is all wrong. It is wrong to make sex appear as if it were part
of the dear-darling-love smarm: the spiritual love. It is even worse
to take the scientific test-tube line. It all kills the great
effective dynamism of life, and substitutes the mere ash of mental
ideas and tricks.
The scientific fact of sex is no more sex than a skeleton is a man.
Yet you'd think twice before you stock a skeleton in front of a lad
and said, "You see, my boy, this is what you are when you come to know
yourself."--And the ideal, lovey-dovey "explanation" of sex as
something wonderful and extra lovey-dovey, a bill-and-coo process of
obtaining a sweet little baby--or else "God made us so that we must do
this, to bring another dear little baby to life"--well, it just makes
one sick. It is disastrous to the deep sexual life. But perhaps that
is what we want.
When humanity comes to its senses it will realize what a fearful Sodom
apple our understanding is. What terrible mouths and stomachs full of
bitter ash we've all got. And then we shall take away "knowledge" and
"understanding," and lock them up along with the rest of poisons, to
be administered in small doses only by competent people.
We have almost poisoned the mass of humanity to death with
_understanding_. The period of actual death and race-extermination is
not far off. We could have produced the same barrenness and frenzy of
nothingness in people, perhaps, by dinning it into them that every man
is just a charnel-house skeleton of unclean bones. Our "understanding,"
our science and idealism have produced in people the same strange frenzy
of self-repulsion as if they saw their own skulls each time they looked
in the mirror. A man is a thing of scientific cause-and-effect and
biological process, draped in an ideal, is he? No wonder he sees the
skeleton grinning through the flesh.
Our leaders have not loved men: they have loved ideas, and have been
willing to sacrifice passionate men on the altars of the
blood-drinking, ever-ash-thirsty ideal. Has President Wilson, or Karl
Marx, or Bernard Shaw ever felt one hot blood-pulse of love for the
working man, the half-conscious, deluded working man? Never. Each of
these leaders has wanted to abstract him away from his own blood and
being, into some foul Methuselah or abstraction of a man.
And me? There is no danger of the working man ever reading my books,
so I shan't hurt him that way. But oh, I would like to save him alive,
in his living, spontaneous, original being. I can't help it. It is my
passionate instinct.
I would like him to give me back the responsibility for general
affairs, a responsibility which he can't acquit, and which saps his
life. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for the
future. I would like him to give me back the responsibility for
thought, for direction. I wish we could take hope and belief together.
I would undertake my share of the responsibility, if he gave me his
belief.
I would like him to give me back books and newspapers and theories.
And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and
rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life.
CHAPTER X
PARENT LOVE
In the serious hour of puberty, the individual passes into his second
phase of accomplishment. But there cannot be a perfect transition
unless all the activity is in full play in all the first four poles of
the psyche. Childhood is a chrysalis from which each must extricate
himself. And the struggling youth or maid cannot emerge unless by the
energy of all powers; he can never emerge if the whole mass of the
world and the tradition of love hold him back.
Now we come to the greater peril of our particular form of idealism.
It is the idealism of love and of the spirit: the idealism of
yearning, outgoing love, of pure sympathetic communion and
"understanding." And this idealism recognizes as the highest earthly
love, the love of mother and child.
And what does this mean? It means, for every delicately brought up
child, indeed for all the children who matter, a steady and
persistent pressure upon the upper sympathetic centers, and a steady
and persistent starving of the lower centers, particularly the great
voluntary center of the lower body. The center of sensual, manly
independence, of exultation in the sturdy, defiant self, willfulness
and masterfulness and pride, this center is steadily suppressed. The
warm, swift, sensual self is steadily and persistently denied, damped,
weakened, throughout all the period of childhood. And by sensual we do
not mean greedy or ugly, we mean the deeper, more impulsive reckless
nature. Life must be always refined and superior. Love and happiness
must be the watchword. The willful, critical element of the spiritual
mode is never absent, the silent, if forbearing disapproval and
distaste is always ready. Vile bullying forbearance.
With what result? The center of upper sympathy is abnormally, inflamedly
excited; and the centers of will are so deranged that they operate in
jerks and spasms. The true polarity of the sympathetic-voluntary system
within the child is so disturbed as to be almost deranged. Then we have
an exaggerated sensitiveness alternating with a sort of helpless fury:
and we have delicate frail children with nerves or with strange whims.
And we have the strange cold obstinacy of the spiritual will, cold as
hell, fixed in a child.
Then one parent, usually the mother, is the object of blind devotion,
whilst the other parent, usually the father, is an object of
resistance. The child is taught, however, that both parents should be
loved, and only loved: and that love, gentleness, pity, charity, and
all "higher" emotions, these alone are genuine feelings, all the rest
are false, to be rejected.
With what result? The upper centers are developed to a degree of
unnatural acuteness and reaction--or again they fall numbed and
barren. And then between parents and children a painfully false
relation grows up: a relation as of two adults, either of two pure
lovers, or of two love-appearing people who are really trying to bully
one another. Instead of leaving the child with its own limited but
deep and incomprehensible feelings, the parent, hopelessly involved in
the sympathetic mode of selfless love, and spiritual love-will,
stimulates the child into a consciousness which does not belong to it,
on the one plane, and robs it of its own spontaneous consciousness and
freedom on the other plane.
And this is the fatality. Long before puberty, by an exaggeration and
an intensity of spiritual love from the parents, the second centers
of sympathy are artificially aroused into response. And there is an
irreparable disaster. Instead of seeing as a child should see, through
a glass, darkly, the child now opens premature eyes of sympathetic
cognition. Instead of knowing in part, as it should know, it begins,
at a fearfully small age, to know in full. The cervical plexuses and
the cervical ganglia, which should only begin to awake after
adolescence, these centers of the higher dynamic sympathy and
cognition, are both artificially stimulated, by the adult personal
love-emotion and love-will into response, in a quite young child,
sometimes even in an infant. This is a holy obscenity.
Our particular mode of idealism causes us to suppress as far as
possible the sensual centers, to make them negative. The whole of the
activity is concentrated, as far as possible, in the upper or
spiritual centers, the centers of the breast and throat, which we will
call the centers of dynamic cognition, in contrast to the centers of
sensual comprehension below the diaphragm.
And then a child arrives at puberty, with its upper nature already
roused into precocious action. The child nowadays is almost invariably
precocious in "understanding." In the north, spiritually precocious,
so that by the time it arrives at adolescence it already has
experienced the extended sympathetic reactions which should have lain
utterly dark. And it has experienced these extended reactions with
whom? With the parent or parents.
Which is man devouring his own offspring. For to the parents belongs,
once and for all, the dynamic reaction on the first plane of
consciousness only, the reaction and relationship at the first four
poles of dynamic consciousness. When the second, the farther plane of
consciousness rouses into action, the relationship is with strangers.
All human instinct and all ethnology will prove this to us. What
sex-instinct there is in a child is always _adverse_ to the parents.
But also, the parents are all too quick. They all proceed to swallow
their children before the children can get out of their clutches. And
even if parents do send away their children at the age of puberty--to
school or elsewhere--it is not much good. The mischief has been done
before. For the first twelve years the parents and the whole community
forcibly insist on the child's living from the upper centers only, and
particularly the upper sympathetic centers, without the balance of the
warm, deep sensual self. Parents and community alike insist on
rousing an adult sympathetic response, and a mental answer in the
child-schools, Sunday-schools, books, home-influence--all works in
this one pernicious way. But it is the home, the parents, that work
most effectively and intensely. There is the most intimate mesh of
love, love-bullying, and "understanding" in which a child is
entangled.
So that a child arrives at the age of puberty already stripped of its
childhood's darkness, bound, and delivered over. Instead of waking now
to a whole new field of consciousness, a whole vast and wonderful new
dynamic impulse towards new connections, it finds itself fatally
bound. Puberty accomplishes itself. The hour of sex strikes. But there
is your child, bound, helpless. You have already aroused in it the
dynamic response to your own insatiable love-will. You have already
established between your child and yourself the dynamic relation in
the further plane of consciousness. You have got your child as sure as
if you had woven its flesh again with your own. You have done what it
is vicious for any parent to do: you have established between your
child and yourself the bond of adult love: the love of man for man,
woman for woman, or man for woman. All your tenderness, your
cherishing will not excuse you. It only deepens your guilt. You have
established between your child and yourself the bond of further
sympathy. I do not speak of sex. I speak of pure sympathy, sacred
love. The parents establish between themselves and their child the
bond of the higher love, the further spiritual love, the sympathy of
the adult soul.
And this is fatal. It is a sort of incest. It is a dynamic _spiritual_
incest, more dangerous than sensual incest, because it is more
intangible and less instinctively repugnant. But let psychoanalysis
fall into what discredit it may, it has done us this great service of
proving to us that the intense upper sympathy, indeed the dynamic
relation either of love-will or love-sympathy, between parent and
child, upon the upper plane, inevitably involves us in a conclusion of
incest.
For although it is our aim to establish a purely spiritual dynamic
relation on the upper plane only, yet, because of the inevitable
polarity of the human psychic system, we shall arouse at the same time
a dynamic sensual activity on the lower plane, the deeper sensual
plane. We may be as pure as angels, and yet, being human, this will
and must inevitably happen. When Mrs. Ruskin said that John Ruskin
should have married his mother she spoke the truth. He _was_ married
to his mother. For in spite of all our intention, all our creed, all
our purity, all our desire and all our will, once we arouse the
dynamic relation in the upper, higher plane of love, we inevitably
evoke a dynamic consciousness on the lower, deeper plane of sensual
love. And then what?
Of course, parents can reply that their love, however intense, is
pure, and has absolutely no sensual element. Maybe--and maybe not. But
admit that it is so. It does not help. The intense excitement of the
upper centers of sympathy willy-nilly arouses the lower centers. It
arouses them to activity, even if it denies them any expression or any
polarized connection. Our psyche is so framed that activity aroused on
one plane provokes activity on the corresponding plane, automatically.
So the intense _pure_ love-relation between parent and child
inevitably arouses the lower centers in the child, the centers of sex.
Now the deeper sensual centers, once aroused, should find response
from the sensual body of some other, some friend or lover. The
response is impossible between parent and child. Myself, I believe
that biologically there is radical sex-aversion between parent and
child, at the deeper sensual centers. The sensual circuit _cannot_
adjust itself spontaneously between the two.
So what have you? Child and parent intensely linked in adult
love-sympathy and love-will, on the upper plane, and in the child, the
deeper sensual centers aroused, but finding no correspondent, no
objective, no polarized connection with another person. There they
are, the powerful centers of sex, acting spasmodically, without
balance. They must be polarized somehow. So they are polarized to the
active upper centers within the child, and you get an introvert.
This is how introversion begins. The lower sexual centers are aroused.
They find no sympathy, no connection, no response from outside, no
expression. They are dynamically polarized by the upper centers within
the individual. That is, the whole of the sexual or deeper sensual
flow goes on upwards in the individual, to his own upper, from his own
lower centers. The upper centers hold the lower in positive polarity.
The flow goes on upwards. There _must_ be some reaction. And so you
get, first and foremost, self-consciousness, an intense consciousness
in the upper self of the lower self. This is the first disaster. Then
you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands
exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in
masturbation. You get a pornographic longing with regard to the self.
You get the obscene post cards which most youths possess. You get the
absolute lust for dirty stories, which so many men have. And you get
various mild sex perversions, such as masturbation, and so on.
What does all this mean? It means that the activity of the lower
psyche and lower body is polarized by the upper body. Eyes and ears
want to gather sexual activity and knowledge. The mind becomes full of
sex: and always, in an introvert, of his _own_ sex. If we examine the
apparent extroverts, like the flaunting Italian, we shall see the same
thing. It is his own sex which obsesses him.
And to-day what have we but this? Almost inevitably we find in a child
now an intense, precocious, secret sexual preoccupation. The upper
self is rabidly engaged in exploiting the lower self. A child and its
own roused, inflamed sex, its own shame and masturbation, its own
cruel, secret sexual excitement and sex _curiosity_, this is the
greatest tragedy of our day. The child does not so much want to _act_
as to _know_. The thought of actual sex connection is usually
repulsive. There is an aversion from the normal coition act. But the
craving to feel, to see, to taste, to _know_, mentally in the head,
this is insatiable. Anything, so that the sensation and experience
shall come through the _upper_ channels. This is the secret of our
introversion and our perversion to-day. Anything rather than
spontaneous direct action from the sensual self. Anything rather than
the merely normal passion. Introduce any trick, any idea, any mental
element you can into sex, but make it an affair of the upper
consciousness, the mind and eyes and mouth and fingers. This is our
vice, our dirt, our disease.
And the adult, and the ideal are to blame. But the tragedy of our
children, in their inflamed, solitary sexual excitement, distresses us
beyond any blame.
It is time to drop the word love, and more than time to drop the ideal
of love. Every frenzied individual is told to find fulfillment in
love. So he tries. Whereas, there is no fulfillment in love. Half of
our fulfillment comes _through_ love, through strong, sensual love.
But the central fulfillment, for a man, is that he possess his own
soul in strength within him, deep and alone. The deep, rich aloneness,
reached and perfected through love. And the passing beyond any further
_quest_ of love.
This central fullness of self-possession is our goal, if goal there be
any. But there are two great _ways_ of fulfillment. The first, the way
of fulfillment through complete love, complete, passionate, deep love.
And the second, the greater, the fulfillment through the
accomplishment of religious purpose, the soul's earnest purpose. We
work the love way falsely, from the upper self, and work it to death.
The second way, of active unison in strong purpose, and in faith, this
we only sneer at.
But to return to the child and the parent. The coming to the
fulfillment of single aloneness, through love, is made impossible for
us by the ideal, the monomania of more love. At the very _âge
dangereuse_, when a woman should be accomplishing her own fulfillment
into maturity and rich quiescence, she turns rabidly to seek a new
lover. At the very crucial time when she should be coming to a state
of pure equilibrium and rest with her husband, she turns rabidly
against rest or peace or equilibrium or husband in any shape or form,
and demands more love, more love, a new sort of lover, one who will
"understand" her. And as often as not she turns to her son.
It is true, a woman reaches her goal of fulfillment through feeling.
But through being "understood" she reaches nowhere, unless the lover
understands what a vice it is for a woman to get herself and her sex
into her head. A woman reaches her fulfillment through love, deep
sensual love, and exquisite sensitive communion. But once she reaches
the point of fulfillment, she should not break off to ask for more
excitements. She should take the beauty of maturity and peace and
quiet faithfulness upon her.
This she won't do, however, unless the man, her husband, goes on
beyond her. When a man approaches the beginning of maturity and the
fulfillment of his individual self, about the age of thirty-five, then
is not his time to come to rest. On the contrary. Deeply fulfilled
through marriage, and at one with his own soul, he must now undertake
the responsibility for the next step into the future. He must now give
himself perfectly to some further purpose, some passionate purposive
activity. Till a man makes the great resolution of aloneness and
singleness of being, till he takes upon himself the silence and
central appeasedness of maturity; and _then, after this_, assumes a
sacred responsibility for the next purposive step into the future,
there is no rest. The great resolution of aloneness and appeasedness,
and the further deep assumption of responsibility in purpose--this is
necessary to every parent, every father, every husband, at a certain
point. If the resolution is never made, the responsibility never
embraced, then the love-craving will run on into frenzy, and lay waste
to the family. In the woman particularly the love-craving will run on
to frenzy and disaster.
Seeking, seeking the fulfillment in the deep passional self; diseased
with self-consciousness and sex in the head, foiled by the very loving
weakness of the husband who has not the courage to withdraw into his
own stillness and singleness, and put the wife under the spell of his
fulfilled decision; the unhappy woman beats about for her insatiable
satisfaction, seeking whom she may devour. And usually, she turns to
her child. Here she provokes what she wants. Here, in her own son who
belongs to her, she seems to find the last perfect response for which
she is craving. He is a medium to her, she provokes from him her own
answer. So she throws herself into a last great love for her son, a
final and fatal devotion, that which would have been the richness and
strength of her husband and is poison to her boy. The husband,
irresolute, never accepting his own higher responsibility, bows and
accepts. And the fatal round of introversion and "complex" starts once
more. If man will never accept his own ultimate being, his final
aloneness, and his last responsibility for life, then he must expect
woman to dash from disaster to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled.
"_On revient toujours à son premier amour._" It sounds like a cynicism
to-day. As if we really meant: "_On ne revient jamais à son premier
amour._" But as a matter of fact, a man never leaves his first love,
once the love is established. He may leave his first attempt at love.
Once a man establishes a full dynamic communication at the deeper and
the higher centers, with a woman, this can never be broken. But sex in
the head breaks down, and half circuits break down. Once the full
circuit is established, however, this can never break down.
Nowadays, alas, we start off self-conscious, with sex in the head. We
find a woman who is the same. We marry because we are "pals." The sex
is a rather nasty fiasco. We keep up a pretense of "pals"--and nice
love. Sex spins wilder in the head than ever. There is either a
family of children whom the dissatisfied parents can devote themselves
to, thereby perverting the miserable little creatures: or else there
is a divorce. And at the great dynamic centers nothing has happened at
all. Blank nothing. There has been no vital interchange at all in the
whole of this beautiful marriage affair.
Establish between yourself and another individual a dynamic connection
at only _two_ of the four further poles, and you will have the devil
of a job to break the connection. Especially if it be the first
connection you have made. Especially if the other individual be the
first in the field.
This is the case of the parents. Parents are first in the field of the
child's further consciousness. They are criminal trespassers in that
field. But that makes no matter. They are first in the field. They
establish a dynamic connection between the two upper centers, the
centers of the throat, the centers of the higher dynamic sympathy and
cognition. They establish this circuit. And break it if you can. Very
often not even death can break it.
And as we see, the establishment of the upper love-and-cognition
circuit inevitably provokes the lower sex-sensual centers into action,
even though there be no correspondence on the sensual plane between
the two individuals concerned. Then see what happens. If you want to
see the real desirable wife-spirit, look at a mother with her boy of
eighteen. How she serves him, how she stimulates him, how her true
female self is his, is wife-submissive to him as never, never it could
be to a husband. This is the quiescent, flowering love of a mature
woman. It is the very flower of a woman's love: sexually asking
nothing, asking nothing of the beloved, save that he shall be himself,
and that for his living he shall accept the gift of her love. This is
the perfect flower of married love, which a husband should put in his
cap as he goes forward into the future in his supreme activity. For
the husband, it is a great pledge, and a blossom. For the son also it
seems wonderful. The woman now feels for the first time as a true wife
might feel. And her feeling is towards her son.
Or, instead of mother and son, read father and daughter.
And then what? The son gets on swimmingly for a time, till he is faced
with the actual fact of sex necessity. He gleefully inherits his
adolescence and the world at large, without an obstacle in his way,
mother-supported, mother-loved. Everything comes to him in glamour,
he feels he sees wondrous much, understands a whole heaven,
mother-stimulated. Think of the power which a mature woman thus
infuses into her boy. He flares up like a flame in oxygen. No wonder
they say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad
fates.
And then?--and then, with this glamorous youth? What is he actually to
do with his sensual, sexual self? Bury it? Or make an effort with a
stranger? For he is taught, even by his mother, that his manhood must
not forego sex. Yet he is linked up in ideal love already, the best he
will ever know.
No woman will give to a stranger that which she gives to her son, her
father or her brother: that beautiful and glamorous submission which
is truly the wife-submission. To a stranger, a husband, a woman
insists on being queen, goddess, mistress, the positive, the adored,
the first and foremost and the one and only. This she will not ask
from her near blood-kin. Of her blood-kin, there is always one she
will love devotedly.
And so, the charming young girl who adores her father, or one of her
brothers, is sought in marriage by the attractive young man who loves
his mother devotedly. And a pretty business the marriage is. We can't
think of it. Of course they may be good pals. It's the only thing
left.
And there we are. The game is spoilt before it is begun. Within the
circle of the family, owing to our creed of insatiable love, intense
adult sympathies are provoked in quite young children. In Italy, the
Italian stimulates adult sex-consciousness and sex-sympathy in his
child, almost deliberately. But with us, it is usually spiritual
sympathy and spiritual criticism. The adult experiences are provoked,
the adult devotional sympathies are linked up, prematurely, as far as
the child is concerned. We have the heart-wringing spectacle of
intense parent-child love, a love intense as the love of man and
woman, but not sexual; or else the great brother-sister devotion. And
thus, the great love-experience which should lie in the future is
forestalled. Within the family, the love-bond forms quickly, without
the shocks and ruptures inevitable between strangers. And so, it is
easiest, intensest--and seems the best. It seems the highest. You will
not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he
has made his wife is as high a love as that he felt for his mother or
sister.
The cream is licked off from life before the boy or the girl is
twenty. Afterwards--repetition, disillusion, and barrenness.
And the cause?--always the same. That parents will not make the great
resolution to come to rest within themselves, to possess their own
souls in quiet and fullness. The man has not the courage to withdraw
at last into his own soul's stillness and aloneness, and _then_,
passionately and faithfully, to strive for the living future. The
woman has not the courage to give up her hopeless insistence on love
and her endless demand for love, demand of being loved. She has not
the greatness of soul to relinquish her own self-assertion, and
believe in the man who believes in himself and in his own soul's
efforts:--if there _are_ any such men nowadays, which is very
doubtful.
Alas, alas, the future! Your son, who has tasted the real beauty of
wife-response in his mother or sister. Your daughter, who adores her
brother, and who marries some woman's son. They are so charming to
look at, such a lovely couple. And at first it is all such a good
game, such good sport. Then each one begins to fret for the beauty of
the lost, non-sexual, partial relationship. The sexual part of
marriage has proved so--so empty. While that other loveliest
thing--the poignant touch of devotion felt for mother or father or
brother--why, this is missing altogether. The best is missing. The
rest isn't worth much. Ah well, such is life. Settle down to it, and
bring up the children carefully to more of the same.--The
future!--You've had all your good days by the time you're twenty.
And, I ask you, what good will psychoanalysis do you in this state of
affairs? Introduce an extra sex-motive to excite you for a bit and
make you feel how thrillingly immoral things really are. And then--it
all goes flat again. Father complex, mother complex, incest dreams:
pah, when we've had the little excitement out of them we shall forget
them as we have forgotten so many other catch-words. And we shall be
just where we were before: unless we are worse, with _more_ sex in the
head, and more introversion, only more brazen.
CHAPTER XI
THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
Here is a very vicious circle. And how to get out of it? In the first
place, we have to break the love-ideal, once and for all. Love, as we
see, is not the only dynamic. Taking love in its greatest sense, and
making it embrace every form of sympathy, every flow from the great
sympathetic centers of the human body, still it is not the whole of
the dynamic flow, it is only the one-half. There is always the other
voluntary flow to reckon with, the intense motion of independence and
singleness of self, the pride of isolation, and the profound
fulfillment through power.
The very first thing of all to be recognized is the danger of
idealism. It is the one besetting sin of the human race. It means the
fall into automatism, mechanism, and nullity.
We know that life issues spontaneously at the great nodes of the
psyche, the great nerve-centers. At first these are four only: then,
after puberty, they become eight: later there may still be an
extension of the dynamic consciousness, a further polarization. But
eight is enough at the moment.
First at four, and then at eight dynamic centers of the human body,
the human nervous system, life starts spontaneously into being. The
soul bursts day by day into fresh impulses, fresh desire, fresh
purpose, at these our polar centers. And from these dynamic generative
centers issue the vital currents which put us into connection with our
object. We have really no will and no choice, in the first place. It
is our soul which acts within us, day by day unfolding us according to
our own nature.
From the objective circuits and from the subjective circuits which
establish and fulfill themselves at the first four centers of
consciousness we derive our first being, our child-being, and also our
first mind, our child-mind. By the objective circuits we mean those
circuits which are established between the self and some external
object: mother, father, sister, cat, dog, bird, or even tree or plant,
or even further still, some particular place, some particular
inanimate object, a knife or a chair or a cap or a doll or a wooden
horse. For we must insist that every object which really enters
effectively into our lives does so by direct connection. If I love my
mother, it is because there is established between me and her a
direct, powerful circuit of vital magnetism, call it what you will,
but a direct flow of dynamic _vital_ interchange and intercourse. I
will not call this vital flow a _force_, because it depends on the
incomprehensible initiative and control of the individual soul or
self. Force is that which is directed only from some universal will or
law. Life is _always_ individual, and therefore never controlled by
one law, one God. And therefore, since the living really sway the
universe, even if unknowingly; therefore there is no one universal
law, even for the physical forces. Because we insist that even the sun
depends, for its heartbeat, its respiration, its pivotal motion, on
the beating hearts of men and beast, on the dynamic of the
soul-impulse in individual creatures. It is from the aggregate
heartbeat of living individuals, of we know not how many or what sort
of worlds, that the sun rests stable.
Which may be dismissed as metaphysics, although it is quite as valid
or even as demonstrable as Newton's Law of Gravitation, which law
still remains a law, even if not quite so absolute as heretofore.
But this is a digression. The argument is, that between an individual
and any external object with which he has an affective connection,
there exists a definite vital flow, as definite and concrete as the
electric current whose polarized circuit sets our tram-cars running
and our lamps shining, or our Marconi wires vibrating. Whether this
object be human, or animal, or plant, or quite inanimate, there is
still a circuit. My dog, my canary has a polarized connection with me.
Nay, the very cells in the ash-tree I loved as a child had a dynamic
vibratory connection with the nuclei in my own centers of primary
consciousness. And further still, the boots I have worn are so
saturated with my own magnetism, my own vital activity, that if anyone
else wear them I feel it is a trespass, almost as if another man used
my hand to knock away a fly. I doubt very much if a blood-hound, when
it takes a scent, _smells_, in our sense of the word. It receives at
the infinitely sensitive telegraphic center of the dog's nostrils the
vital vibration which remains in the inanimate object from the
individual with whom the object was associated. I should like to know
if a dog would trace a pair of quite new shoes which had merely been
dragged at the end of a string. That is, does he follow the smell of
the leather itself, or the vibration track of the individual whose
vitality is communicated to the leather?
So, there is a definite vibratory rapport between a man and his
surroundings, once he definitely gets into contact with these
surroundings. Any particular locality, any house which has been lived
in has a vibration, a transferred vitality of its own. This is either
sympathetic or antipathetic to the succeeding individual in varying
degree. But certain it is that the inhabitants who live at the foot of
Etna will always have a certain pitch of life-vibration, antagonistic
to the pitch of vibration even of a Palermitan, in some measure. And
old houses are saturated with human presence, at last to a degree of
indecency, unbearable. And tradition, in its most elemental sense,
means the continuing of the same peculiar pitch of vital vibration.
Such is the objective dynamic flow between the psychic poles of the
individual and the substance of the external object, animate or
inanimate. The subjective dynamic flow is established between the four
primary poles within the individual. Every dynamic connection begins
from one or the other of the sympathetic centers: is, or should be,
almost immediately polarized from the corresponding voluntary center.
Then a complete flow is set up, in one plane. But this always rouses
the activity on the other, corresponding plane, more or less intense.
There is a whole field of consciousness established, with positive
polarity of the first plane, negative polarity of the second. Which
being so, a whole fourfold field of dynamic consciousness now working
within the individual, direct cognition takes place. The mind begins
to know, and to strive to know.
The business of the mind is first and foremost the pure joy of knowing
and comprehending the pure joy of consciousness. The second business
is to act as medium, as interpreter, as agent between the individual
and his object. The mind should _not_ act as a director or controller
of the spontaneous centers. These the soul alone must control: the
soul being that forever unknowable reality which causes us to rise
into being. There is continual conflict between the soul, which is for
ever sending forth incalculable impulses, and the psyche, which is
conservative, and wishes to persist in its old motions, and the mind,
which wishes to have "freedom," that is spasmodic, idea-driven
control. Mind, and conservative psyche, and the incalculable soul,
these three are a trinity of powers in every human being. But there is
something even beyond these. It is the individual in his pure
singleness, in his totality of consciousness, in his oneness of being:
the Holy Ghost which is with us after our Pentecost, and which we may
not deny. When I say to myself: "I am wrong," knowing with sudden
insight that I _am_ wrong, then this is the whole self speaking, the
Holy Ghost. It is no piece of mental inference. It is not just the
soul sending forth a flash. It is my whole being speaking in one
voice, soul and mind and psyche transfigured into oneness. This voice
of my being I may _never_ deny. When at last, in all my storms, my
whole self speaks, then there is a pause. The soul collects itself
into pure silence and isolation--perhaps after much pain. The mind
suspends its knowledge, and waits. The psyche becomes strangely still.
And then, after the pause, there is fresh beginning, a new life
adjustment. Conscience is the being's consciousness, when the
individual is conscious _in toto_, when he knows in full. It is
something which includes and which far surpasses mental consciousness.
Every man must live as far as he can by his own soul's conscience.
But not according to any ideal. To submit the conscience to a creed,
or an idea, or a tradition, or even an impulse, is our ruin.
To make the mind the absolute ruler is as good as making a Cook's
tourist-interpreter a king and a god, because he can speak several
languages, and make an Arab understand that an Englishman wants fish
for supper. And to make an ideal a ruling principle is about as stupid
as if a bunch of travelers should never cease giving each other and
their dragoman sixpence, because the dragoman's main idea of virtue is
the virtue of sixpence-giving. In the same way, we _know_ we cannot
live purely by impulse. Neither can we live solely by tradition. We
must live by all three, ideal, impulse, and tradition, each in its
hour. But the real guide is the pure conscience, the voice of the self
in its wholeness, the Holy Ghost.
We have fallen now into the mistake of idealism. Man always falls into
one of the three mistakes. In China, it is tradition. And in the South
Seas, it seems to have been impulse. Ours is idealism. Each of the
three modes is a true life-mode. But any one, alone or dominant,
brings us to destruction. We must depend on the wholeness of our
being, ultimately only on that, which is our Holy Ghost within us.
Whereas, in an ideal of love and benevolence, we have tried to
automatize ourselves into little love-engines always stoked with the
sorrows or beauties of other people, so that we can get up steam of
charity or righteous wrath. A great trick is to pour on the fire the
oil of our indignation at somebody else's wickedness, and then, when
we've got up steam like hell, back the engine and run bish! smash!
against the belly of the offender. Because he said he didn't want to
love any more, we hate him for evermore, and try to run over him,
every bit of him, with our love-tanks. And all the time we yell at
him: "Will you deny love, you villain? Will you?" And by the time he
faintly squeaks, "I want to be loved! I want to be loved!" we have got
so used to running over him with our love-tanks that we don't feel in
a hurry to leave off.
"_Sois mon frère, ou je te tue._"
"_Sois mon frère, ou je me tue._"
There are the two parrot-threats of love, on which our loving
centuries have run as on a pair of railway-lines. Excuse me if I want
to get out of the train. Excuse me if I can't get up any love-steam
any more. My boilers are burst.
We have made a mistake, laying down love like the permanent way of a
great emotional transport system. There we are, however, running on
wheels on the lines of our love. And of course we have only two
directions, forwards and backwards. "Onward, Christian soldiers,
towards the great terminus where bottles of sterilized milk for the
babies are delivered at the bedroom windows by noiseless aeroplanes
each morn, where the science of dentistry is so perfect that teeth are
planted in a man's mouth without his knowing it, where twilight sleep
is so delicious that every woman longs for her next confinement, and
where nobody ever has to do anything except turn a handle now and then
in a spirit of universal love--" That is the forward direction of the
English-speaking race. The Germans unwisely backed their engine. "We
have a city of light. But instead of lying ahead it lies direct behind
us. So reverse engines. Reverse engines, and away, away to our city,
where the sterilized milk is delivered by noiseless aeroplanes, _at
the very precise minute when our great doctors of the Fatherland have
diagnosed that it is good for you_: where the teeth are not only so
painlessly planted that they grow like living rock, but where their
composition is such that the friction of eating stimulates the cells
of the jaw-bone and develops the _superman strength of will which
makes us gods_: and where not only is twilight sleep serene, but into
the sleeper are inculcated the most useful and instructive dreams,
calculated to perfect the character of the young citizen at this
crucial period, and to enlighten permanently the mind of the happy
mother, with regard to her new duties towards her child and towards
our great Fatherland--"
Here you see we are, on the railway, with New Jerusalem ahead, and New
Jerusalem away behind us. But of course it was very wrong of the
Germans to reverse their engines, and cause one long collision all
along the line. Why should we go _their_ way to the New Jerusalem,
when of course they might so easily have kept on going our way. And
now there's wreckage all along the line! But clear the way is our
motto--or make the Germans clear it. Because get on we will.
Meanwhile we sit rather in the cold, waiting for the train to get a
start. People keep on signaling with green lights and red lights. And
it's all very bewildering.
As for me, I'm off. I'm damned if I'll be shunted along any more. And
I'm thrice damned if I'll go another yard towards that sterilized New
Jerusalem, either forwards or backwards. New Jerusalem may rot, if it
waits for me. I'm not going.
So good-by! There we leave humanity, encamped in an appalling mess
beside the railway-smash of love, sitting down, however, and having
not a bad time, some of 'em, feeding themselves fat on the plunder:
others, further down the line, with mouths green from eating grass.
But all grossly, stupidly, automatically gabbling about getting the
love-service running again, the trains booked for the New Jerusalem
well on the way once more. And occasionally a good engine gives a
screech of love, and something seems to be about to happen. And
sometimes there is enough steam to set the indignation-whistles
whistling. But never any more will there be enough love-steam to get
the system properly running. It is done.
Good-by, then! You may have laid your line from one end to the other
of the infinite. But still there's plenty of hinterland. I'll go.
Good-by. Ach, it will be so nice to be alone: not to hear you, not to
see you, not to smell you, humanity. I wish you no ill, but wisdom.
Good-by!
To be alone with one's own soul. Not to be alone without my own soul,
mind you. But to be alone with one's own soul! This, and the joy of
it, is the real goal of love. My own soul, and myself. Not my ego, my
conceit of myself. But my very soul. To be at one in my own self. Not
to be questing any more. Not to be yearning, seeking, hoping,
desiring, aspiring. But to pause, and be alone.
And to have one's own "gentle spouse" by one's side, of course, to dig
one in the ribs occasionally. Because really, being alone in peace
means being two people together. Two people who can be silent
together, and not conscious of one another outwardly. Me in my
silence, she in hers, and the balance, the equilibrium, the pure
circuit between us. With occasional lapses of course: digs in the ribs
if one gets too vague or self-sufficient.
They say it is better to travel than to arrive. It's not been my
experience, at least. The journey of love has been rather a
lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey. But to come at last to a nice
place under the trees, with your "amiable spouse" who has at last
learned to hold her tongue and not to bother about rights and wrongs:
her own particularly. And then to pitch a camp, and cook your rabbit,
and eat him: and to possess your own soul in silence, and to feel all
the clamor lapse. That is the best I know.
I think it is terrible to be young. The ecstasies and agonies of love,
the agonies and ecstasies of fear and doubt and drop-by-drop
fulfillment, realization. The awful process of human relationships,
love and marital relationships especially. Because we all make a very,
very bad start to-day, with our idea of love in our head, and our sex
in our head as well. All the fight till one is bled of one's
self-consciousness and sex-in-the-head. All the bitterness of the
conflict with this devil of an amiable spouse, who has got herself so
stuck in her own head. It is terrible to be young.--But one fights
one's way through it, till one is cleaned: the self-consciousness and
sex-idea burned out of one, cauterized out bit by bit, and the self
whole again, and at last free.
The best thing I have known is the stillness of accomplished marriage,
when one possesses one's own soul in silence, side by side with the
amiable spouse, and has left off craving and raving and being only
half one's self. But I must say, I know a great deal more about the
craving and raving and sore ribs, than about the accomplishment. And I
must confess that I feel this self-same "accomplishment" of the
fulfilled being is only a preparation for new responsibilities ahead,
new unison in effort and conflict, the effort to make, with other men,
a little new way into the future, and to break through the hedge of
the many.
But--to your tents, my Israel. And to that precious baby you've left
slumbering there. What I meant to say was, in each phase of life you
have a great circuit of human relationship to establish and fulfill.
In childhood, it is the circuit of family love, established at the
first four consciousness centers, and gradually fulfilling itself,
completing itself. At adolescence, the first circuit of family love
should be completed, dynamically finished. And then, it falls into
quiescence. After puberty, family love should fall quiescent in a
child. The love never breaks. It continues static and basic, the basis
of the emotional psyche, the foundation of the self. It is like the
moon when the moon at last subsides into her eternal orbit, round the
earth. She travels in her orbit so inevitably that she forgets, and
becomes unaware. She only knits her brows over the earth's greater
aberrations in space.
The circuit of parental love, once fulfilled, is not done away with,
but only established into silence. The child is then free to establish
the new connections, in which he surpasses his parents. And let us
repeat, parents should never try to establish adult relations, of
sympathy or interest or anything else, between themselves and their
children. The attempt to do so only deranges the deep primary circuit
which is the dynamic basis of our living. It is a clambering upwards
only by means of a broken foundation. Parents should remain parents,
children children, for ever, and the great gulf preserved between the
two. Honor thy father and thy mother should always be a leading
commandment. But this can only take place when father and mother keep
their true parental distances, dignity, reserve, and limitation. As
soon as father and mother try to become the _friends_ and _companions_
of their children, they break the root of life, they rupture the
deepest dynamic circuit of living, they derange the whole flow of life
for themselves and their children.
For let us reiterate and reiterate: you cannot mingle and confuse the
various modes of dynamic love. If you try, you produce horrors. You
cannot plant the heart below the diaphragm or put an ocular eye in the
navel. No more can you transfer parent love into friend love or adult
love. Parent love is established at the great primary centers, where
man is father and child, playmate and brother, but where he _cannot_
be comrade or lover. Comrade and lover, this is the dynamic activity
of the further centers, the second four centers. And these second four
centers must be active in the parent, their intense circuit
established even if not fulfilled, long before the child is born. The
circuit of friendship, of personal companionship, of sexual love must
needs be established before the child is begotten, or at least before
it attains to adolescence. These circuits of the extended field are
already fully established in the parent before the centers of
correspondence in the child are even formed. When therefore the four
great centers of the extended consciousness arouses in a child, at
adolescence, they must needs seek a strange complement, a foreign
conjunction.
Not only is this the case, but the actual dynamic impulse of the new
life which rouses at puberty is _alien_ to the original dynamic flow.
The new wave-length by no means corresponds. The new vibration by no
means harmonizes. Force the two together, and you cause a terrible
frictional excitement and jarring. It is this instinctive recognition
of the different dynamic vibrations from different centers, in
different modes, and in different directions of positive and negative,
which lies at the base of savage taboo. After puberty, members of one
family should be taboo to one another. There should be the most
definite limits to the degree of contact. And mothers-in-law should be
taboo to their daughters' husbands, and fathers-in-law to their sons'
wives. We must again begin to learn the great laws of the first
dynamic life-circuits. These laws we now make havoc of, and
consequently we make havoc of our own soul, psyche, mind and health.
This book is written primarily concerning the child's consciousness.
It is not intended to enter the field of the post-puberty
consciousness. But yet, the dynamic relation of the child is
established so directly with the physical and psychical soul of the
parent, that to get any inkling of dynamic child-consciousness we must
understand something of parent-consciousness.
We assert that the parent-child love-mode excludes the possibility of
the man-and-woman, or friend-and-friend love mode. We assert that the
polarity of the first four poles is inconsistent with the polarity of
the second four poles. Nay, between the two great fields is a certain
dynamic opposition, resistance, even antipathy. So that in the natural
course of life there is no possibility of confusing parent love and
adult love.
But we are mental creatures, and with the explosive and mechanistic
aid of ideas we can pervert the whole psyche. Only, however, in a
destructive degree, not in a positive or constructive.
Let us return then. In the ordinary course of development, by the time
that the child is born and grown to puberty the whole dynamic soul of
the mother is engaged: first, with the children, and second, on the
further, higher plane, with the husband, and with her own friends. So
that when the child reaches adolescence it must inevitably cast abroad
for connection.
But now let us remember the actual state of affairs to-day, when the
poles are reversed between the sexes. The woman is now the responsible
party, the law-giver, the culture-bearer. She is the conscious guide
and director of the man. She bears his soul between her two hands. And
her sex is just a function or an instrument of power. This being so,
the man is really the servant and the fount of emotion, love and
otherwise.
Which is all very well, while the fun lasts. But like all perverted
processes, it is exhaustive, and like the fun wears out. Leaving an
exhaustion, and an irritation. Each looks on the other as a perverter
of life. Almost invariably a married woman, as she passes the age of
thirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt of her husband, or a pity
which is too near contempt. Particularly if he be a good husband, a
true modern. And he, for his part, though just as jarred inside
himself, resents only the fact that he is not loved as he ought to be.
Then starts a new game. The woman, even the most virtuous, looks
abroad for new sympathy. She will have a new man-friend, if nothing
more. But as a rule she has got something more. She has got her
children.
A relation between mother and child to-day is practically _never_
parental. It is personal--which means, it is critical and deliberate,
and adult in provocation. The mother, in her new rôle of idealist and
life-manager never, practically for one single moment, gives her child
the unthinking response from the deep dynamic centers. No, she gives
it what is good for it. She shoves milk in its mouth as the clock
strikes, she shoves it to sleep when the milk is swallowed, and she
shoves it ideally through baths and massage, promenades and practice,
till the little organism develops like a mushroom to stand on its own
feet. Then she continues her ideal shoving of it through all the
stages of an ideal up-bringing, she loves it as a chemist loves his
test-tubes in which he analyzes his salts. The poor little object is
his mother's ideal. But of her head she dictates his providential
days, and by the force of her deliberate mentally-directed love-will
she pushes him up into boyhood. The poor little devil never knows one
moment when he is not encompassed by the beautiful, benevolent,
idealistic, Botticelli-pure, and finally obscene love-will of the
mother. Never, never one mouthful does he drink of the milk of human
kindness: always the sterilized milk of human benevolence. There is no
mother's milk to-day, save in tigers' udders, and in the udders of
sea-whales. Our children drink a decoction of ideal love, at the
breast.
Never for one moment, poor baby, the deep warm stream of love from the
mother's bowels to his bowels. Never for one moment the dark proud
recoil into rest, the soul's separation into deep, rich independence.
Never this lovely rich forgetfulness, as a cat trots off and utterly
forgets her kittens, utterly, richly forgets them, till suddenly,
click, the dynamic circuit reverses itself in her, and she remembers,
and rages round in a frenzy, shouting for her young.
Our miserable infants never know this joy and richness and pang of real
maternal warmth. Our wonderful mothers never let us out of their minds
for one single moment. Not for a second do they allow us to escape from
their ideal benevolence. Not one single breath does a baby draw, free
from the imposition of the pure, unselfish, Botticelli-holy, detestable
_love-will_ of the mother. Always the _will_, the will, the love-will,
the ideal will, directed from the ideal mind. Always this stone, this
scorpion of maternal nourishment. Always this infernal self-conscious
Madonna starving our living guts and bullying us to death with her love.
We have made the idea supplant both impulse and tradition. We have no
spark of wholeness. And we live by an evil love-will. Alas, the great
spontaneous mode is abrogated. There is no lovely great flux of vital
sympathy, no rich rejoicing of pride into isolation and independence.
There is no reverence for great traditions of parenthood. No, there is
substitute for everything--life-substitute--just as we have
butter-substitute, and meat-substitute, and sugar-substitute, and
leather-substitute, and silk-substitute, so we have life-substitute.
We have beastly benevolence, and foul good-will, and stinking charity,
and poisonous ideals.
The poor modern brat, shoved horribly into life by an effort of will,
and shoved up towards manhood by every appliance that can be applied
to it, especially the appliance of the maternal will, it is really too
pathetic to contemplate. The only thing that prevents us wringing our
hands is the remembrance that the little devil will grow up and beget
other similar little devils of his own, to invent more aeroplanes and
hospitals and germ-killers and food-substitutes and poison gases. The
problem of the future is a question of the strongest poison-gas. Which
is certainly a very sure way out of our vicious circle.
There is no way out of a vicious circle, of course, except breaking
the circle. And since the mother-child relationship is to-day the
viciousest of circles, what are we to do? Just wait for the results of
the poison-gas competition presumably.
Oh, ideal humanity, how detestable and despicable you are! And how you
deserve your own poison-gases! How you deserve to perish in your own
stink.
It is no use contemplating the development of the modern child, born
out of the mental-conscious love-will, born to be another unit of
self-conscious love-will: an ideal-born beastly little entity with a
devil's own will of its own, benevolent, of course, and a Satan's own
seraphic self-consciousness, like a beastly Botticelli brat.
Once we really consider this modern process of life and the love-will,
we could throw the pen away, and spit, and say three cheers for the
inventors of poison-gas. Is there not an American who is supposed to
have invented a breath of heaven whereby, drop one pop-cornful in
Hampstead, one in Brixton, one in East Ham, and one in Islington, and
London is a Pompeii in five minutes! Or was the American only
bragging? Because anyhow, whom has he experimented on? I read it in
the newspaper, though. London a Pompeii in five minutes. Makes the
gods look silly!
CHAPTER XII
LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS
I thought I'd better turn over a new leaf, and start a new chapter.
The intention of the last chapter was to find a way out of the vicious
circle. And it ended in poison-gas.
Yes, dear reader, so it did. But you've not silenced me yet, for all
that.
We're in a nasty mess. We're in a vicious circle. And we're making a
careful study of poison-gases. The secret of Greek fire was lost long
ago, when the world left off being wonderful and ideal. Now it is
wonderful and ideal again, much wonderfuller and _much_ more ideal. So
we ought to do something rare in the way of poison-gas. London a
Pompeii in five minutes! How to outdo Vesuvius!--title of a new book
by American authors.
There is only one single other thing to do. And it's more difficult
than poison-gas. It is to leave off loving. It is to leave off
benevolenting and having a good will. It is to cease utterly. Just
leave off. Oh, parents, see that your children get their dinners and
clean sheets, but don't love them. Don't love them one single grain,
and don't let anybody else love them. Give them their dinners and
leave them alone. You've already loved them to perdition. Now leave
them alone, to find their own way out.
Wives, don't love your husbands any more: even if they cry for it, the
great babies! Sing: "I've had enough of that old sauce." And leave off
loving them or caring for them one single bit. Don't even hate them or
dislike them. Don't have any stew with them at all. Just boil the eggs
and fill the salt-cellars and be quite nice, and in your own soul, be
alone and be still. Be alone, and be still, preserving all the human
decencies, and abandoning the indecency of desires and benevolencies
and devotions, those beastly poison-gas apples of the Sodom vine of
the love-will.
Wives, don't love your husbands nor your children nor anybody. Sit
still, and say Hush! And while you shake the duster out of the
drawing-room window, say to yourself--"In the sweetness of solitude."
And when your husband comes in and says he's afraid he's got a cold
and is going to have double pneumonia, say quietly "surely not." And
if he wants the ammoniated quinine, give it him if he can't get it for
himself. But don't let him drive you out of your solitude, your
singleness within yourself. And if your little boy falls down the
steps and makes his mouth bleed, nurse and comfort him, but say to
yourself, even while you tremble with the shock: "Alone. Alone. Be
alone, my soul." And if the servant smashes three electric-light bulbs
in three minutes, say to her: "How very inconsiderate and careless of
you!" But say to yourself: "Don't hear it, my soul. Don't take fright
at the pop of a light-bulb."
Husbands, don't love your wives any more. If they flirt with men
younger or older than yourselves, let your blood not stir. If you can
go away, go away. But if you must stay and see her, then say to her,
"I would rather you didn't flirt in my presence, Eleanora." Then, when
she goes red and loosens torrents of indignation, don't answer any
more. And when she floods into tears, say quietly in your own self,
"My soul is my own"; and go away, be alone as much as possible. And
when she works herself up, and says she must have love or she will
die, then say: "Not my love, however." And to all her threats, her
tears, her entreaties, her reproaches, her cajolements, her
winsomenesses, answer nothing, but say to yourself: "Shall I be
implicated in this display of the love-will? Shall I be blasted by
this false lightning?" And though you tremble in every fiber, and feel
sick, vomit-sick with the scene, still contain yourself, and say, "My
soul is my own. It shall not be violated." And learn, learn, learn the
one and only lesson worth learning at last. Learn to walk in the
sweetness of the possession of your own soul. And whether your wife
weeps as she takes off her amber beads at night, or whether your
neighbor in the train sits in your coat bottoms, or whether your
superior in the office makes supercilious remarks, or your inferior is
familiar and impudent; or whether you read in the newspaper that Lloyd
George is performing another iniquity, or the Germans plotting another
plot, say to yourself: "My soul is my own. My soul is with myself, and
beyond implication." And wait, quietly, in possession of your own
soul, till you meet another man who has made the choice, and kept it.
Then you will know him by the look on his face: half a dangerous look,
a look of Cain, and half a look of gathered beauty. Then you two will
make the nucleus of a new society--Ooray! Bis! Bis!!
But if you should never meet such a man: and if your wife should
torture you every day with her love-will: and even if she should force
herself into a consumption, like Catherine Linton in "Wuthering
Heights," owing to her obstinate and determined love-will (which is
quite another matter than love): and if you see the world inventing
poison-gas and falling into its poisoned grave: never give in, but be
alone, and utterly alone with your own soul, in the stillness and
sweet possession of your own soul. And don't even be angry. And
_never_ be sad. Why should you? It's not your affair.
But if your wife should accomplish for herself the sweetness of her
own soul's possession, then gently, delicately let the new mode assert
itself, the new mode of relation between you, with something of
spontaneous paradise in it, the apple of knowledge at last digested.
But, my word, what belly-aches meanwhile. That apple is harder to
digest than a lead gun-cartridge.
CHAPTER XIII
COSMOLOGICAL
Well, dear reader, Chapter XII was short, and I hope you found it
sweet.
But remember, this is an essay on Child Consciousness, not a tract on
Salvation. It isn't my fault that I am led at moments into
exhortation.
Well, then, what about it? One fact now seems very clear--at any rate
to me. We've got to pause. We haven't got to gird our loins with a new
frenzy and our larynxes with a new Glory Song. Not a bit of it. Before
you dash off to put salt on the tail of a new religion or of a new
Leader of Men, dear reader, sit down quietly and pull yourself
together. Say to yourself: "Come now, what is it all about?" And
you'll realize, dear reader, that you're all in a fluster, inwardly.
Then say to yourself: "Why am I in such a fluster?" And you'll see
you've no reason at all to be so: except that it's rather exciting to
be in a fluster, and it may seem rather stale eggs to be in no fluster
at all about anything. And yet, dear little reader, once you consider
it quietly, it's _so_ much nicer _not_ to be in a fluster. It's so
much nicer not to feel one's deeper innards storming like the Bay of
Biscay. It is so much better to get up and say to the waters of one's
own troubled spirit: Peace, be still ...! And they will be still ...
perhaps.
And then one realizes that all the wild storms of anxiety and frenzy
were only so much breaking of eggs. It isn't our business to live
anybody's life, or to die anybody's death, except our own. Nor to save
anybody's soul, nor to put anybody in the right; nor yet in the wrong,
which is more the point to-day. But to be still, and to ignore the
false fine frenzy of the seething world. To turn away, now, each one
into the stillness and solitude of his own soul. And there to remain
in the quiet with the Holy Ghost which is to each man his own true
soul.
This is the way out of the vicious circle. Not to rush round on the
periphery, like a rabbit in a ring, trying to break through. But to
retreat to the very center, and there to be filled with a new strange
stability, polarized in unfathomable richness with the center of
centers. We are so silly, trying to invent devices and machines for
flying off from the surface of the earth. Instead of realizing that
for us the deep satisfaction lies not in escaping, but in getting into
the perfect circuit of the earth's terrestrial magnetism. Not in
breaking away. What is the good of trying to break away from one's
own? What is the good of a tree desiring to fly like a bird in the
sky, when a bird is rooted in the earth as surely as a tree is? Nay,
the bird is only the topmost leaf of the tree, fluttering in the high
air, but attached as close to the tree as any other leaf. Mr.
Einstein's Theory of Relativity does not supersede the Newtonian Law
of Gravitation or of Inertia. It only says, "Beware! The Law of
Inertia is not the simple ideal proposition you would like to make of
it. It is a vast complexity. Gravitation is not one elemental uncouth
force. It is a strange, infinitely complex, subtle aggregate of
forces." And yet, however much it may waggle, a stone does fall to
earth if you drop it.
We should like, vulgarly, to rejoice and say that the new Theory of
Relativity releases us from the old obligation of centrality. It does
no such thing. It only makes the old centrality much more strange,
subtle, complex, and vital. It only robs us of the nice old ideal
simplicity. Which ideal simplicity and logicalness has become such a
fish-bone stuck in our throats.
The universe is once more in the mental melting-pot. And you can melt
it down as long as you like, and mutter all the jargon and
abracadabra, _aldeboronti fosco fornio_ of science that mental
monkey-tricks can teach you, you won't get anything in the end but a
formula and a lie. The atom? Why, the moment you discover the atom it
will explode under your nose. The moment you discover the ether it
will evaporate. The moment you get down to the real basis of anything,
it will dissolve into a thousand problematic constituents. And the
more problems you solve, the more will spring up with their fingers at
their nose, making a fool of you.
There is only one clue to the universe. And that is the individual
soul within the individual being. That outer universe of suns and
moons and atoms is a secondary affair. It is the death-result of
living individuals. There is a great polarity in life itself. Life
itself is dual. And the duality is life and death. And death is not
just shadow or mystery. It is the negative reality of life. It is what
we call Matter and Force, among other things.
Life is individual, always was individual and always will be. Life
consists of living individuals, and always did so consist, in the
beginning of everything. There never was any universe, any cosmos, of
which the first reality was anything but living, incorporate
individuals. I don't say the individuals were exactly like you and me.
And they were never wildly different.
And therefore it is time for the idealist and the scientist--they are
one and the same, really--to stop his monkey-jargon about the atom and
the origin of life and the mechanical clue to the universe. There
isn't any such thing. I might as well say: "Then they took the cart,
and rubbed it all over with grease. Then they sprayed it with white
wine, and spun round the right wheel five hundred revolutions to the
minute and the left wheel, in the opposite direction, seven hundred
and seventy-seven revolutions to the minute. Then a burning torch was
applied to each axle. And lo, the footboard of the cart began to
swell, and suddenly as the cart groaned and writhed, the horse was
born, and lay panting between the shafts." The whole scientific theory
of the universe is not worth such a tale: that the cart conceived and
gave birth to the horse.
I do not believe one-fifth of what science can tell me about the sun.
I do not believe for one second that the moon is a dead world
spelched off from our globe. I do not believe that the stars came
flying off from the sun like drops of water when you spin your wet
hanky. I have believed it for twenty years, because it seemed so
ideally plausible. Now I don't accept any ideal plausibilities at all.
I look at the moon and the stars, and I know I don't believe anything
that I am told about them. Except that I like their names, Aldebaran
and Cassiopeia, and so on.
I have tried, and even brought myself to believe in a clue to the
outer universe. And in the process I have swallowed such a lot of
jargon that I would rather listen now to a negro witch-doctor than to
Science. There is nothing in the world that is true except empiric
discoveries which work in actual appliances. I know that the sun is
hot. But I won't be told that the sun is a ball of blazing gas which
spins round and fizzes. No, thank you.
At length, for _my_ part, I know that life, and life only is the clue
to the universe. And that the living individual is the clue to life.
And that it always was so, and always will be so.
When the living individual dies, then is the realm of death
established. Then you get Matter and Elements and atoms and forces and
sun and moon and earth and stars and so forth. In short, the outer
universe, the Cosmos. The Cosmos is nothing but the aggregate of the
dead bodies and dead energies of bygone individuals. The dead bodies
decompose as we know into earth, air, and water, heat and radiant
energy and free electricity and innumerable other scientific facts.
The dead souls likewise decompose--or else they don't decompose. But
if they _do_ decompose, then it is not into any elements of Matter and
physical energy. They decompose into some psychic reality, and into
some potential will. They reënter into the living psyche of living
individuals. The living soul partakes of the dead souls, as the living
breast partakes of the outer air, and the blood partakes of the sun.
The soul, the individuality, never resolves itself through death into
physical constituents. The dead soul remains always soul, and always
retains its individual quality. And it does not disappear, but
reënters into the soul of the living, of some living individual or
individuals. And there it continues its part in life, as a
death-witness and a life-agent. But it does not, ordinarily, have any
separate existence there, but is incorporate in the living individual
soul. But in some extraordinary cases, the dead soul may really act
separately in a living individual.
How this all is, and what are the laws of the relation between life
and death, the living and the dead, I don't know. But that this
relation exists, and exists in a manner as I describe it, for my own
part I know. And I am fully aware that once we direct our living
attention this way, instead of to the absurdity of the atom, then we
have a whole _living_ universe of knowledge before us. The universe of
life and death, of which we, whose business it is to live and to die,
know nothing. Whilst concerning the universe of Force and Matter we
pile up theories and make staggering and disastrous discoveries of
machinery and poison-gas, all of which we were much better without.
It is life we have to live by, not machines and ideals. And life means
nothing else, even, but the spontaneous living soul which is our
central reality. The spontaneous, living, individual soul, this is the
clue, and the only clue. All the rest is derived.
How it is contrived that the individual soul in the living sways the
very sun in its centrality, I do not know. But it is so. It is the
peculiar dynamic polarity of the living soul in every weed or bug or
beast, each one separately and individually polarized with the great
returning pole of the sun, that maintains the sun alive. For I take it
that the sun is the great sympathetic center of our inanimate
universe. I take it that the sun breathes in the effluence of all that
fades and dies. Across space fly the innumerable vibrations which are
the basis of all matter. They fly, breathed out from the dying and the
dead, from all that which is passing away, even in the living. These
vibrations, these elements pass away across space, and are breathed
back again. The sun itself is invisible as the soul. The sun itself is
the soul of the inanimate universe, the aggregate clue to the
substantial death, if we may call it so. The sun is the great active
pole of the sympathetic death-activity. To the sun fly the vibrations
or the molecules in the great sympathy-mode of death, and in the sun
they are renewed, they turn again as the great gift back again from
the sympathetic death-center towards life, towards the living. But it
is not even the dead which _really_ sustain the sun. It is the dynamic
relation between the solar plexus of individuals and the sun's core, a
perfect circuit. The sun is materially composed of all the effluence
of the dead. But the _quick_ of the sun is polarized with the living,
the sun's quick is polarized in dynamic relation with the quick of
life in all living things, that is, with the solar plexus in mankind.
A direct dynamic connection between my solar plexus and the sun.
Likewise, as the sun is the great fiery, vivifying pole of the
inanimate universe, the moon is the other pole, cold and keen and
vivifying, corresponding in some way to a _voluntary_ pole. We live
between the polarized circuit of sun and moon. And the moon is
polarized with the lumbar ganglion, primarily, in man. Sun and moon
are dynamically polarized to our actual tissue, they affect this
tissue all the time.
The moon is, as it were, the pole of our particular terrestrial
_volition_, in the universe. What holds the earth swinging in space is
first, the great dynamic attraction to the sun, and then counterposing
assertion of independence, singleness, which is polarized in the moon.
The moon is the clue to our earth's individual identity, in the wide
universe.
The moon is an immense magnetic center. It is quite wrong to say she
is a dead snowy world with craters and so on. I should say she is
composed of some very intense element, like phosphorus or radium, some
element or elements which have very powerful chemical and kinetic
activity, and magnetic activity, affecting us through space.
It is not the sun which we see in heaven. It is the rushing thither
and the rushing thence of the vibrations expelled by death from the
body of life, and returned back again to the body of life. Possibly
even a dead soul makes its journey to the sun and back, before we
receive it again in our breast. Just as the breath we breathe out
flies to the sun and back, before we breathe it in again. And as the
water that evaporates rises right to the sun, and returns here. What
we see is the great golden rushing thither, from the death exhalation,
towards the sun, as a great cloud of bees flying to swarm upon the
invisible queen, circling round, and loosing again. This is what we
see of the sun. The center is invisible for ever.
And of the moon the same. The moon has her back to us for ever. Not
her face, as we like to think. The moon also pulls the water, as the
sun does. But not in evaporation. The moon pulls by the magnetic force
we call gravitation. Gravitation not being quite such a Newtonian
simple apple as we are accustomed to find it, we are perhaps farther
off from understanding the tides of the ocean than we were before the
fruit of the tree fell to Sir Isaac's head. It is certainly not simple
little-things tumble-towards-big-things gravitation. In the moon's
pull there is peculiar, quite special force exerted over those
water-born substances, phosphorus, salt, and lime. The dynamic energy
of salt water is something quite different from that of fresh water.
And it is this dynamic energy which the sea gives off, and which
connects it with the moon. And the moon is some strange coagulation of
substance such as salt, phosphorus, soda. It certainly isn't a snowy
cold world, like a world of our own gone cold. Nonsense. It is a globe
of dynamic substance like radium or phosphorus, coagulated upon a
certain vivid pole of energy, which pole of energy is directly
polarized with our earth, in opposition with the sun.
The moon is born from the death of individuals. All things, in their
oneing, their unification into the pure, universal oneness, evaporate
and fly like an imitation breath towards the sun. Even the crumbling
rocks breathe themselves off in this rocky death, to the sun of
heaven, during the day.
But at the same time, during the night they breathe themselves off to
the moon. If we come to think of it, light and dark are a question
both of the third body, the intervening body, what we will call, by
stretching a point, the individual. As we all know, apart from the
existence of molecules of individual matter, there is neither light
nor dark. A universe utterly without matter, we don't know whether it
is light or dark. Even the pure space between the sun and moon, the
blue space, we don't know whether, in itself, it is light or dark. We
can say it is light, we can say it is dark. But light and dark are
terms which apply only to ourselves, the third, the intermediate, the
substantial, the individual.
If we come to think of it, light and dark only mean whether we have
our face or our back towards the sun. If we have our face to the sun,
then we establish the circuit of cosmic or universal or material or
infinite sympathy. These four adjectives, cosmic, universal, material,
and infinite are almost interchangeable, and apply, as we see, to that
realm of the non-individual existence which we call the realm of the
substantial death. It is the universe which has resulted from the
death of individuals. And to this universe alone belongs the quality
of infinity: to the universe of death. Living individuals have no
infinity save in this relation to the total death-substance and
death-being, the summed-up cosmos.
Light and dark, these great wonders, are relative to us alone. These
are two vast poles of the cosmic energy and of material existence.
These are the vast poles of cosmic sympathy, which we call the sun,
and the other white pole of cosmic volition, which we call the moon.
To the sun belong the great forces of heat and radiant energy, to the
moon belong the great forces of magnetism and electricity,
radium-energy, and so on. The sun is not, in any sense, a material
body. It is an invariable intense pole of cosmic energy, and what we
see are the particles of our terrestrial decomposition flying thither
and returning, as fine grains of iron would fly to an intense magnet,
or better, as the draught in a room veers towards the fire, attracted
infallibly, as a moth towards a candle. The moth is drawn to the
candle as the draught is drawn to the fire, in the absolute spell of
the material polarity of fire. And air escapes again, hot and
different, from the fire. So is the sun.
Fire, we say, is combustion. It is marvelous how science proceeds like
witchcraft and alchemy, by means of an abracadabra which has no
earthly sense. Pray, what is combustion? You can try and answer
scientifically, till you are black in the face. All you can say is
that it is _that which happens_ when matter is raised to a certain
temperature--and so forth and so forth. You might as well say, a word
is that which happens when I open my mouth and squeeze my larynx and
make various tricks with my throat muscles. All these explanations are
so senseless. They describe the apparatus, and think they have
described the event.
Fire may be accompanied by combustion, but combustion is not
necessarily accompanied by fire. All A is B, but all B is not A. And
therefore fire, no matter how you jiggle, is not identical with
combustion. Fire. FIRE. I insist on the absolute word. You may say
that fire is a sum of various phenomena. I say it isn't. You might as
well tell me a fly is a sum of wings and six legs and two bulging
eyes. It is the fly which has the wings and legs, and not the legs and
wings which somehow nab the fly into the middle of themselves. A fly
is not a sum of various things. A fly is a fly, and the items of the
sum are still fly.
So with fire. Fire is an absolute unity in itself. It is a dynamic
polar principle. Establish a certain polarity between the
moon-principle and the sun-principle, between the positive and
negative, or sympathetic and volitional dynamism in any piece of
matter, and you have fire, you have the sun-phenomenon. It is the
sudden flare into the one mode, the sun mode, the material sympathetic
mode. Correspondingly, establish an opposite polarity between the
sun-principle and the water-principle, and you have decomposition into
water, or towards watery dissolution.
There are two sheer dynamic principles in our universe, the
sun-principle and the moon-principle. And these principles are known
to us in immediate contact as fire and water. The sun is not fire. But
the principle of fire is the sun-principle. That is, fire is the
sudden swoop towards the sun, of matter which is suddenly
sun-polarized. Fire is the sudden sun-assertion, the release towards
the one pole only. It is the sudden revelation of the cosmic One
Polarity, One Identity.
But there is another pole. There is the moon. And there is another
absolute and visible principle, the principle of water. The moon is
not water. But it is the soul of water, the invisible clue to all the
waters.
So that we begin to realize our visible universe as a vast dual
polarity between sun and moon. Two vast poles in space, invisible in
themselves, but visible owing to the circuit which swoops between
them, round them, the circuit of the universe, established at the
cosmic poles of the sun and moon. This then is the infinite, the
positive infinite of the positive pole, the sun-pole, negative
infinite of the negative pole, the moon-pole. And between the two
infinites all existence takes place.
But wait. Existence is truly a matter of propagation between the two
infinites. But it needs a third presence. Sun-principle and
moon-principle, embracing through the æons, could never by themselves
propagate one molecule of matter. The hailstone needs a grain of dust
for its core. So does the universe. Midway between the two cosmic
infinites lies the third, which is more than infinite. This is the
Holy Ghost Life, individual life.
It is so easy to imagine that between them, the two infinites of the
cosmos propagated life. But one single moment of pause and silence,
one single moment of gathering the whole soul into knowledge, will
tell us that it is a falsity. It was the living individual soul which,
dying, flung into space the two wings of the infinite, the two poles
of the sun and the moon. The sun and the moon are the two eternal
death-results of the death of individuals. Matter, all matter, is the
Life-born. And what we know as inert matter, this is only the result
of death in individuals, it is the dead bodies of individuals
decomposed and resmelted between the hammer and anvil, fire and sand
of the sun and the moon. When time began, the first individual died,
the poles of the sun and moon were flung into space, and between the
two, in a strange chaos and battle, the dead body was torn and melted
and smelted, and rolled beneath the feet of the living. So the world
was formed, always under the feet of the living.
And so we have a clue to gravitation. We, mankind, are all one family.
In our individual bodies burns the positive quick of all things. But
beneath our feet, in our own earth, lies the intense center of our
human, individual death, our grave. The earth has one center, to which
we are all polarized. The circuit of our life is balanced on the
living soul within us, as the positive center, and on the earth's dark
center, the center of our abiding and eternal and substantial death,
our great negative center, away below. This is the circuit of our
immediate individual existence. We stand upon our own grave, with our
death fire, the sun, on our right hand, and our death-damp, the moon,
on our left.
The earth's center is no accident. It is the great individual pole of
us who die. It is the center of the first dead body. It is the first
germ-cell of death, which germ-cell threw out the great nuclei of the
sun and the moon. To this center of our earth we, as humans, are
eternally polarized, as are our trees. Inevitably, we fall to earth.
And the clue of us sinks to the earth's center, the clue of our death,
of our _weight_. And the earth flings us out as wings to the sun and
moon: or as the death-germ dividing into two nuclei. So from the earth
our radiance is flung to the sun, our marsh-fire to the moon, when we
die.
We fall into the earth. But our rising was not from the earth. We rose
from the earthless quick, the unfading life. And earth, sun, and moon
are born only of our death. But it is only their polarized dynamic
connection with us who live which sustains them all in their place
and maintains them all in their own activities. The inanimate
universe rests absolutely on the life-circuit of living creatures, is
built upon the arch which spans the duality of living beings.
CHAPTER XIV
SLEEP AND DREAMS
This is going rather far, for a book--nay, a booklet--on the child
consciousness. But it can't be helped. Child-consciousness it is. And
we have to roll away the stone of a scientific cosmos from the
tomb-mouth of that imprisoned consciousness.
Now, dear reader, let us see where we are. First of all, we are
ourselves--which is the refrain of all my chants. We are ourselves. We
are living individuals. And as living individuals we are the one, pure
clue to our own cosmos. To which cosmos living individuals _have
always_ been the clue, since time began, and _will always_ be the
clue, while time lasts.
I know it is not so fireworky as the sudden evolving of life,
somewhere, somewhen and somehow, out of force and matter with a pop.
But that pop never popped, dear reader. The boot was on the other leg.
And I wish I could mix a few more metaphors, like pops and legs and
boots, just to annoy you.
Life never evolved, or evoluted, out of force and matter, dear reader.
There is no such thing as evolution, anyhow. There is only
development. Man was man in the very first plasm-speck which was his
own individual origin, and is still his own individual origin. As for
the origin, I don't know much about it. I only know there is but one
origin, and that is the individual soul. The individual soul
originated everything, and has itself no origin. So that time is a
matter of living experience, nothing else, and eternity is just a
mental trick. Of course every living speck, amoeba or newt, has its
own individual soul.
And we sit on our own globe, dear reader, here individually located.
Our own individual being is our own single reality. But the single
reality of the individual being is dynamically and directly polarized
to the earth's center, which is the aggregate negative center of all
terrestrial existence. In short, the center which in life we thrust
away from, and towards which we fall, in death. For, our individual
existence being positive, we must have a negative pole to thrust away
from. And when our positive individual existence breaks, and we fall
into death, our wonderful individual gravitation-center succumbs to
the earth's gravitation-center.
So there we are, individuals, single, life-born, life-living, yet all
the while poised and polarized to the aggregate center of our
substantial death, our earth's quick, powerful center-clue.
There may be other individuals, alive, and having other worlds under
their feet, polarized to their own globe's center. But the very
sacredness of my own individuality prevents my pronouncing about them,
lest I, in attributing qualities to them, transgress against the pure
individuality which is theirs, beyond me.
If, however, there be truly other people, with their own world under
their feet, then I think it is fair to say that we all have our
infinite identity in the sun. That in the rush and swirl of death we
pass through fiery ways to the same sun. And from the sun, can the
spores of souls pass to the various worlds? And to the worlds of the
cosmos seed across space, through the wild beams of the sun? Is there
seed of Mars in my veins? And is astrology not altogether nonsense?
But if the sun is the center of our infinite oneing in death with all
the other after-death souls of the cosmos: and in that great central
station of travel, the sun, we meet and mingle and change trains for
the stars: then ought we to assume that the moon is likewise a
meeting-place of dead souls? The moon surely is a meeting-place of
cold, dead, angry souls. But from our own globe only.
The moon is the center of our terrestrial individuality in the cosmos.
She is the declaration of our existence in separateness. Save for the
intense white recoil of the moon, the earth would stagger towards the
sun. The moon holds us to our own cosmic individuality, as a world
individual in space. She is the fierce center of retraction, of
frictional withdrawal into separateness. She it is who sullenly stands
with her back to us, and refuses to meet and mingle. She it is who
burns white with the intense friction of her withdrawal into
separation, that cold, proud white fire of furious, almost malignant
apartness, the struggle into fierce, frictional separation. Her white
fire is the frictional fire of the last strange, intense watery
matter, as this matter fights its way out of combination and out of
combustion with the sun-stuff. To the pure polarity of the moon fly
the essential waters of our universe. Which essential waters, at the
moon's clue, are only an intense invisible energy, a polarity of the
moon.
There are only three great energies in the universal life, which is
always individual and which yet sways all the physical forces as well
as the vital energy; and then the two great dynamisms of the sun and
the moon. To the dynamism of the sun belong heat, expansion-force, and
all that range. To the dynamism of the moon the _essential_ watery
forces: not just gravitation, but electricity, magnetism,
radium-energy, and so on.
The moon likewise is the pole of our night activities, as the sun is
the pole of our day activities. Remember that the sun and moon are but
great self-abandons which individual life has thrown out, to the right
hand and to the left. When individual life dies, it flings itself on
the right hand to the sun, on the left hand to the moon, in the dual
polarity, and sinks to earth. When any man dies, his soul divides in
death; as in life, in the first germ, it was united from two germs. It
divides into two dark germs, flung asunder: the sun-germ and the
moon-germ. Then the material body sinks to earth. And so we have the
cosmic universe such as we know it.
What is the exact relationship between us and the death-realm of the
afterwards we shall never know. But this relation is none the less
active every moment of our lives. There is a pure polarity between
life and death, between the living and the dead, between each living
individual and the outer cosmos. Between each living individual and
the earth's center passes a never-ceasing circuit of magnetism. It is
a circuit which in man travels up the right side, and down the left
side of the body, to the earth's center. It never ceases. But while we
are awake it is entirely under the control and spell of the total
consciousness, the individual consciousness, the soul, or self. When
we sleep, however, then this individual consciousness of the soul is
suspended for the time, and we lie completely within the circuit of
the earth's magnetism, or gravitation, or both: the circuit of the
earth's centrality. It is this circuit which is busy in all our tissue
removing or arranging the dead body of our past day. For each time we
lie down to sleep we have within us a body of death which dies with
the day that is spent. And this body of death is removed or laid in
line by the activities of the earth-circuit, the great active
death-circuit, while we sleep.
As we sleep the current sweeps its own way through us, as the streets
of a city are swept and flushed at night. It sweeps through our nerves
and our blood, sweeping away the ash of our day's spent consciousness
towards one form or other of excretion. This earth-current actively
sweeping through us is really the death-activity busy in the service
of life. It behooves us to know nothing of it. And as it sweeps it
stimulates in the primary centers of consciousness vibrations which
flash images upon the mind. Usually, in deep sleep, these images pass
unrecorded; but as we pass towards the twilight of dawn and
wakefulness, we begin to retain some impression, some record of the
dream-images. Usually also the images that are accidentally swept into
the mind in sleep are as disconnected and as unmeaning as the pieces
of paper which the street cleaners sweep into a bin from the city
gutters at night. We should not think of taking all these papers,
piecing them together, and making a marvelous book of them, prophetic
of the future and pregnant with the past. We should not do so,
although every rag of printed paper swept from the gutter would have
some connection with the past day's event. But its significance, the
significance of the words printed upon it is so small, that we
relegate it into the limbo of the accidental and meaningless. There
is no vital connection between the many torn bits of paper--only an
accidental connection. Each bit of paper has reference to some actual
event: a bus-ticket, an envelope, a tract, a pastry-shop bag, a
newspaper, a hand-bill. But take them all together, bus-ticket, torn
envelope, tract, paper-bag, piece of newspaper and hand-bill, and they
have no individual sequence, they belong more to the mechanical
arrangements than to the vital consequence of our existence. And the
same with most dreams. They are the heterogeneous odds and ends of
images swept together accidentally by the besom of the night-current,
and it is beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them.
It is always beneath our dignity to go degrading the integrity of the
individual soul by cringing and scraping among the rag-tag of accident
and of the inferior, mechanic coincidence and automatic event. Only
those events are significant which derive from or apply to the soul in
its full integrity. To go kow-towing before the facts of change, as
gamblers and fortune-readers and fatalists do, is merely a perverting
of the soul's proud integral priority, a rearing up of idiotic idols
and fetishes.
Most dreams are purely insignificant, and it is the sign of a weak
and paltry nature to pay any attention to them whatever. Only
occasionally they matter. And this is only when something _threatens_
us from the outer mechanical, or accidental _death_-world. When
anything threatens us from the world of death, then a dream may become
so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is so
intense that it arouses the soul--then we must attend to it.
But we may have the most appalling nightmare because we eat pancakes
for supper. Here again, we are threatened with an arrest of the
mechanical flow of the system. This arrest becomes so serious that it
affects the great organs of the heart and lungs, and these organs
affect the primary conscious-centers.
Now we shall see that this is the direct reverse of real living
consciousness. In living consciousness the primary affective centers
control the great organs. But when sleep is on us, the reverse takes place.
The great organs, being obstructed in their spontaneous-automatism, at last
with violence arouse the active conscious-centers. And these flash images
to the brain.
These nightmare images are very frequently purely mechanical: as of
falling terribly downwards, or being enclosed in vaults. And such
images are pure physical transcripts. The image of falling, of flying,
of trying to run and not being able to lift the feet, of having to
creep through terribly small passages, these are direct transcripts
from the physical phenomena of circulation and digestion. It is the
directly transcribed image of the heart which, impeded in its action
by the gases of indigestion, is switched out of its established
circuit of earth-polarity, and is as if suspended over a void, or
plunging into a void: step by step, falling downstairs, maybe,
according to the strangulation of the heart beats. The same paralytic
inability to lift the feet when one needs to run, in a dream, comes
directly from the same impeded action of the heart, which is thrown
off its balance by some material obstruction. Now the heart swings
left and right in the pure circuit of the earth's polarity. Hinder
this swing, force the heart over to the left, by inflation of gas from
the stomach or by dead pressure upon the blood and nerves from any
obstruction, and you get the sensation of being unable to lift the
feet from earth: a gasping sensation. Or force the heart to
over-balance towards the right, and you get the sensation of flying or
of falling. The heart telegraphs its distress to the mind, and wakes
us. The wakeful soul at once begins to deal with the obstruction,
which was too much for the mechanical night-circuits. The same holds
good of dreams of imprisonment, or of creeping through narrow
passages. They are direct transfers from the squeezing of the blood
through constricted arteries or heart chambers.
Most dreams are stimulated from the blood into the nerves and the
nerve-centers. And the heart is the transmission station. For the
blood has a unity and a consciousness of its own. It has a deeper,
elemental consciousness of the mechanical or material world. In the
blood we have the body of our most elemental consciousness, our almost
material consciousness. And during sleep this material consciousness
transfers itself into the nerves and to the brain. The transfer in
wakefulness results in a feeling of pain or discomfort--as when we
have indigestion, which is pure blood-discomfort. But in sleep the
transfer is made through the dream-images which are mechanical
phenomena like mirages.
Nightmares which have purely mechanical images may terrify us, give us
a great shock, but the shock does not enter our souls. We are
surprised, in the morning, to find that the bristling horror of the
night seems now just nothing--dwindled to nothing. And this is because
what was a purely material obstruction in the physical flow, temporary
only, is indeed a nothingness to the living, integral soul. We are
subject to such accidents--if we will eat pancakes for supper. And
that is the end of it.
But there are other dreams which linger and haunt the soul. These are
true soul-dreams. As we know, life consists of reactions and
interrelations from the great centers of primary consciousness. I may
start a chain of connection from one center, which inevitably
stimulates into activity the corresponding center. For example, I may
develop a profound and passional love for my mother, in my days of
adolescence. This starts, willy-nilly, the whole activity of adult
love at the lower centers. But admission is made only of the upper,
spiritual love, the love dynamically polarized at the upper centers.
Nevertheless, whether the admission is made or not, once establish the
circuit in the upper or spiritual centers of adult love, and you will
get a corresponding activity in the lower, passional centers of adult
love.
The activity at the lower center, however, is denied in the daytime.
There is a repression. Then the friction of the night-flow liberates
the repressed psychic activity explosively. And then the image of the
mother figures in passionate, disturbing, soul-rending dreams.
The Freudians point to this as evidence of a repressed incest desire.
The Freudians are too simple. It is _always_ wrong to accept a
dream-meaning at its face value. Sleep is the time when we are given
over to the automatic processes of the inanimate universe. Let us not
forget this. Dreams are automatic in their nature. The psyche
possesses remarkably few dynamic images. In the case of the boy who
dreams of his mother, we have the aroused but unattached sex plunging
in sleep, causing a sort of obstruction. We have the image of the
mother, the dynamic emotional image. And the automatism of the
dream-process immediately unites the sex-sensation to the great stock
image, and produces an incest dream. But does this prove a repressed
incest desire? On the contrary.
The truth is, every man has, the moment he awakes, a hatred of his
dream, and a great desire to be free of the dream, free of the
persistent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. It is a ghoul,
it haunts his dreams, this image, with its hateful conclusions. And
yet he cannot get free. As long as a man lives he may, in his dreams
of passion or conflict, be haunted by the mother-image or
sister-image, even when he knows that the cause of the disturbing
dream is the wife. But even though the actual subject of the dream is
the wife, still, over and over again, for years, the dream-process
will persist in substituting the mother-image. It haunts and terrifies
a man.
Why does the dream-process act so? For two reasons. First, the reason
of simple automatic continuance. The mother-image was the first great
emotional image to be introduced in the psyche. The dream-process
mechanically reproduces its stock image the moment the intense
sympathy-emotion is aroused. Again, the mother-image refers only to
the upper plane. But the dream-process is mechanical in its logic.
Because the mother-image refers to the great dynamic stress of the
upper plane, therefore it refers to the great dynamic stress of the
lower. This is a piece of sheer automatic logic. The living soul is
_not_ automatic, and automatic logic does not apply to it.
But for our second reason for the image. In becoming the object of
great emotional stress for her son, the mother also becomes an object
of poignancy, of anguish, of arrest, to her son. She arrests him from
finding his proper fulfillment on the sensual plane. Now it is almost
always the object of arrest which becomes impressed, as it were, upon
the psyche. A man very rarely has an image of a person with whom he is
livingly, vitally connected. He only has dream-images of the persons
who, in some way, _oppose_ his life-flow and his soul's freedom, and
so become impressed upon his plasm as objects of resistance. Once a
man is dynamically caught on the upper plane by mother or sister, then
the dream-image of mother or sister will persist until the dynamic
_rapport_ between himself and his mother or sister is finally broken.
And the dream-image from the upper plane will be automatically applied
to the disturbance of the lower plane.
Because--and this is very important--the dream-process _loves_ its own
automatism. It would force everything to an automatic-logical
conclusion in the psyche. But the living, wakeful psyche is so
flexible and sensitive, it has a horror of automatism. While the soul
really lives, its deepest dread is perhaps the dread of automatism.
For automatism in life is a forestalling of the death process.
The living soul has its great fear. The living soul _fears_ the
automatically logical conclusion of incest. Hence the sleep-process
invariably draws this conclusion. The dream-process, fiendishly, plays
a triumph of automatism over us. But the dream-conclusion is almost
invariably just the _reverse_ of the soul's desire, in any
distress-dream. Popular dream-telling understood this, and pronounced
that you must read dreams backwards. Dream of a wedding, and it means
a funeral. Wish your friend well, and fear his death, and you will
dream of his funeral. Every desire has its corresponding fear that the
desire shall not be fulfilled. It is _fear_ which forms an
arrest-point in the psyche, hence an image. So the dream automatically
produces the fear-image as the desire-image. If you secretly wished
your enemy dead, and feared he might flourish, the dream would present
you with his wedding.
Of course this rule of inversion is too simple to hold good in all
cases. Yet it is one of the most general rules for dreams, and applies
most often to desire-and-fear dreams of a psychic nature.
So that an incest-dream would not prove an incest-desire in the living
psyche. Rather the contrary, a living fear of the automatic
conclusion: the soul's just dread of automatism. And though this may
sound like casuistry, I believe it does explain a good deal of the
dream-trick.--That which is lovely to the automatic process is hateful
to the spontaneous soul. The wakeful living soul fears automatism as
it fears death: death being automatic.
It seems to me these are the first two dream-principles, and the two
most important: the principle of automatism and the principle of
inversion. They will not resolve everything for us, but they will help
a great deal. We have to be _very_ wary of giving way to dreams. It is
really a sin against ourselves to prostitute the living spontaneous
soul to the tyranny of dreams, or of chance, or fortune or luck, or
any of the processes of the automatic sphere.
Then consider other dynamic dreams. First, the dream-image generally.
Any _significant_ dream-image is usually an image or a symbol of some
arrest or scotch in the living spontaneous psyche. There is another
principle. But if the image is a symbol, then the only safe way to
explain the symbol is to proceed from the quality of emotion
connected with the symbol.
For example, a man has a persistent passionate fear-dream about
horses. He suddenly finds himself among great, physical horses, which
may suddenly go wild. Their great bodies surge madly round him, they
rear above him, threatening to destroy him. At any minute he may be
trampled down.
Now a psychoanalyst will probably tell you off-hand that this is a
father-complex dream. Certain symbols seem to be put into complex
catalogues. But it is all too arbitrary.
Examining the emotional reference we find that the feeling is sensual,
there is a great impression of the powerful, almost beautiful physical
bodies of the horses, the nearness, the rounded haunches, the rearing.
Is the dynamic passion in a horse the danger-passion? It is a great
sensual reaction at the sacral ganglion, a reaction of intense,
sensual, dominant volition. The horse which rears and kicks and neighs
madly acts from the intensely powerful sacral ganglion. But this
intense activity from the sacral ganglion is male: the sacral ganglion
is at its highest intensity in the male. So that the horse-dream
refers to some arrest in the deepest sensual activity in the male.
The horse is presented as an object of terror, which means that to the
man's automatic dream-soul, which loves automatism, the great sensual
male activity is the greatest menace. The automatic pseudo-soul, which
has got the sensual nature repressed, would like to keep it repressed.
Whereas the greatest desire of the living spontaneous soul is that
this very male sensual nature, represented as a menace, shall be
actually accomplished in life. The spontaneous self is secretly
yearning for the liberation and fulfillment of the deepest and most
powerful sensual nature. There may be an element of father-complex.
The horse may also refer to the powerful sensual being in the father.
The dream may mean a love of the dreamer for the sensual male who is
his father. But it has nothing to do with _incest_. The love is
probably a just love.
The bull-dream is a curious reversal. In the bull the centers of power
are in the breast and shoulders. The horns of the head are symbols of
this vast power in the upper self. The woman's fear of the bull is a
great terror of the dynamic _upper_ centers in man. The bull's horns,
instead of being phallic, represent the enormous potency of the upper
centers. A woman whose most positive dynamism is in the breast and
shoulders is fascinated by the bull. Her dream-fear of the bull and
his horns which may run into her may be reversed to a significance of
desire for connection, not from the centers of the lower, sensual
self, but from the intense physical centers of the upper body: the
phallus polarized from the upper centers, and directed towards the
great breast center of the woman. Her wakeful fear is terror of the
great breast-and-shoulder, _upper_ rage and power of man, which may
pierce her defenseless lower self. The terror and the desire are near
together--and go with an admiration of the slender, abstracted bull
loins.
Other dream-fears, or strong dream-impressions, may be almost
imageless. They may be a great terror, for example, of a purely
geometric figure--a figure from pure geometry, or an example of pure
mathematics. Or they may have no image, but only a sensation of smell,
or of color, or of sound.
These are the dream-fears of the soul which is falling out of human
integrity into the purely mechanical mode. If we idealize ourselves
sufficiently, the spontaneous centers do at last work only, or almost
only, in the mechanical mode. They have no dynamic relation with
another being. They cannot have. Their whole power of dynamic
relationship is quenched. They act now in reference purely to the
mechanical world, of force and matter, sensation and law. So that in
dream-activity sensation or abstraction, abstract law or calculation
occurs as the predominant or exclusive image. In the dream there may
be a sensation of admiration or delight. The waking sensation is fear.
Because the soul fears above all things its fall from individual
integrity into the mechanic activity of the outer world, which is the
automatic death-world.
And this is our danger to-day. We tend, through deliberate idealism or
deliberate material purpose, to destroy the soul in its first nature
of spontaneous, integral being, and to substitute the second nature,
the automatic nature of the mechanical universe. For this purpose we
stay up late at night, and we rise late in the morning.
To stay up late into the night is always bad. Let us be as ideal as we
may, when the sun goes down the natural mode of life changes in us.
The mind changes its activity. As the soul gradually goes passive,
before yielding up its sway, the mind falls into its second phase of
activity. It collects the results of the spent day into consciousness,
lays down the honey of quiet thought, or the bitter-sweet honey of the
gathered flower. It is the consciousness of that which is past.
Evening is our time to read history and tragedy and romance--all of
which are the utterance of that which is past, that which is over,
that which is finished, is concluded: either sweetly concluded, or
bitterly. Evening is the time for this.
But evening is the time also for revelry, for drink, for passion.
Alcohol enters the blood and acts as the sun's rays act. It inflames
into life, it liberates into energy and consciousness. But by a
process of combustion. That life of the day which we have not lived,
by means of sun-born alcohol we can now flare into sensation,
consciousness, energy and passion, and live it out. It is a liberation
from the laws of idealism, a release from the restriction of control
and fear. It is the blood bursting into consciousness. But naturally
the course of the liberated consciousness may be in either direction:
sharper mental action, greater fervor of spiritual emotion, or deeper
sensuality. Nowadays the last is becoming much more unusual.
The active mind-consciousness of the night is a form of
retrospection, or else it is a form of impulsive exclamation, direct
from the blood, and unbalanced. Because the active physical
consciousness of the night is the blood-consciousness, the most
elemental form of consciousness. Vision is perhaps our highest form of
_dynamic_ upper consciousness. But our deepest lower consciousness is
blood-consciousness.
And the dynamic lower centers are swayed from the blood. When the
blood rouses into its night intensity, it naturally kindles first the
lowest dynamic centers. It transfers its voice and its fire to the
great hypogastric plexus, which governs, with the help of the sacral
ganglion, the flow of urine through us, but which also voices the deep
swaying of the blood in sex passion. Sex is our deepest form of
consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure
blood-consciousness. It is the basic consciousness of the blood, the
nearest thing in us to pure material consciousness. It is the
consciousness of the night, when the soul is _almost_ asleep.
The blood-consciousness is the first and last knowledge of the living
soul: the depths. It is the soul acting in part only, speaking with
its first hoarse half-voice. And blood-consciousness cannot operate
purely until the soul has put off all its manifold degrees and forms
of upper consciousness. As the self falls back into quiescence, it
draws itself from the brain, from the great nerve-centers, into the
blood, where at last it will sleep. But as it draws and folds itself
livingly in the blood, at the dark and powerful hour, it sends out its
great call. For even the blood is alone and in part, and needs an
answer. Like the waters of the Red Sea, the blood is divided in a dual
polarity between the sexes. As the night falls and the consciousness
sinks deeper, suddenly the blood is heard hoarsely calling. Suddenly
the deep centers of the sexual consciousness rouse to their
spontaneous activity. Suddenly there is a deep circuit established
between me and the woman. Suddenly the sea of blood which is me heaves
and rushes towards the sea of blood which is her. There is a moment of
pure frictional crisis and contact of blood. And then all the blood in
me ebbs back into its ways, transmuted, changed. And this is the
profound basis of my renewal, my deep blood renewal.
And this has nothing to do with pretty faces or white skin or rosy
breasts or any of the rest of the trappings of sexual love. These
trappings belong to the day. Neither eyes nor hands nor mouth have
anything to do with the final massive and dark collision of the blood
in the sex crisis, when the strange flash of electric transmutation
passes through the blood of the man and the blood of the woman. They
fall apart and sleep in their transmutation.
But even in its profoundest, and most elemental movements, the soul is
still individual. Even in its most material consciousness, it is still
integral and individual. You would think the great blood-stream of
mankind was one and homogeneous. And it is indeed more nearly one,
more near to homogeneity than anything else within us. The
blood-stream of mankind is almost homogeneous.
But it isn't homogeneous. In the first place, it is dual in a perfect
dark dynamic polarity, the sexual polarity. No getting away from the
fact that the blood of woman is dynamically polarized in opposition,
or in difference to the blood of man. The crisis of their contact in
sex connection is the moment of establishment of a new flashing
circuit throughout the whole sea: the dark, burning red waters of our
under-world rocking in a new dynamic rhythm in each of us. And then in
the second place, the blood of an individual is his _own_ blood. That
is, it is individual. And though we have a potential dynamic sexual
connection, we men, with almost every woman, yet the great outstanding
fact of the individuality even of the blood makes us need a
corresponding individuality in the woman we are to embrace. The more
individual the man or woman, the more unsatisfactory is a
non-individual connection: promiscuity. The more individual, the more
does our blood cry out for its own specific answer, an individual
woman, blood-polarized with us.
We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that the
woman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer. And we
force it to be so. To our disaster. The woman who thinks and talks as
we do is almost sure to have no dynamic blood-polarity with us. The
dynamic blood-polarity would make her different from me, and not like
me in her thought mode. Blood-sympathy is so much deeper than
thought-mode, that it may result in very different expression,
verbally.
We have made the mistake of turning life inside out: of dragging the
day-self into the night, and spreading the night-self over into the
day. We have made love and sex a matter of seeing and hearing and of
day-conscious manipulation. We have made men and women come together
on the grounds of this superficial likeness and commonalty--their
mental, and upper sympathetic consciousness. And so we have forced the
blood to submission. Which means we force it into disintegration.
We have too much light in the night, and too much sleep in the day. It
is an evil thing for us to prolong as we do the mental, visual, ideal
consciousness far into the night when the hour has come for this upper
consciousness to fade, for the blood alone to know and to act. By
provoking the reaction of the great blood-stress, the sex-reaction,
from the upper, outer mental consciousness and mental lasciviousness
of conscious purpose, we thereby destroy the very blood in our bodies.
We prevent it from having its own dynamic sway. We prevent it from
coming to its own dynamic crisis and connection, from finding its own
fundamental being. No matter how we work our sex, from the upper or
outer consciousness, we don't achieve anything but the falsification
and impoverishment of our own blood-life. We have no choice. Either we
must withdraw from interference, or slowly deteriorate.
We have made a corresponding mistake in sleeping on into the day.
Once the sun rises our constitution changes. Once the sun is well up
our sleep--supposing our life fairly normal--is no longer truly sleep.
When the sun comes up the centers of active dynamic upper
consciousness begin to wake. The blood changes its vibration and even
its chemical constitution. And then we too ought to wake. We do
ourselves great damage by sleeping too long into the day. The
half-hour's sleep after midday meal is a readjustment. But the long
hours of morning sleep are just a damage. We submit our now active
centers of upper consciousness to the dominion of the blood-automatic
flow. We chain ourselves down in our morning sleep. We transmute the
morning's blood-strength into false dreams and into an ever-increasing
force of inertia. And naturally, in the same line of inertia we
persist from bad to worse.
With the result that our chained-down, active nerve-centers are
half-shattered before we arise. We never become newly day-conscious,
because we have subjected our powerful centers of day-consciousness to
be trampled and wasted into dreams and inertia by the heavy flow of
the blood-automatism in the morning sleeps. Then we arise with a
feeling of the monotony and automatism of life. There is no good,
glad refreshing. We feel tired to start with. And so we protract our
day-consciousness on into the night, when we _do_ at last begin to
come awake, and we tell ourselves we must sleep, sleep, sleep in the
morning and the daytime. It is better to sleep only six hours than to
prolong sleep on and on when the sun has risen. Every man and woman
should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly
the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn
the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will
soon be nervously diseased.
CHAPTER XV
THE LOWER SELF
So it comes about that the moon is the planet of our nights, as the
sun of our days. And this is not just accidental, or even mechanical.
The influence of the moon upon the tides and upon us is not just an
accident in phenomena. It is the result of the creation of the
universe by life itself. It was life itself which threw the moon apart
on the one hand, the sun on the other. And it is life itself which
keeps the dynamic-vital relation constant between the moon and the
living individuals of the globe. The moon is as dependent upon the
life of individuals, for her continued existence, as each single
individual is dependent upon the moon.
The same with the sun. The sun sets and has his perfect polarity in
the life-circuit established between him and all living individuals.
Break that circuit, and the sun breaks. Without man, beasts,
butterflies, trees, toads, the sun would gutter out like a spent lamp.
It is the life-emission from individuals which feeds his burning and
establishes his sun-heart in its powerful equilibrium.
The same with the moon. She lives from us, primarily, and we from her.
Everything is a question of relativity. Not only is every force
relative to other force or forces, but every existence is relative to
other existences. Not only does the life of man depend on man, beast,
and herb, but on the sun and moon, and the stars. And in another
manner, the existence of the moon depends absolutely on the life of
herb, beast, and man. The existence of the moon depends upon the life
of individuals, that which alone is original. Without the life of
individuals the moon would fall asunder. And the moon particularly,
because she is polarized dynamically to this, our own earth. We do not
know what far-off life breathes between the stars and the sun. But our
life alone supports the moon. Just as the moon is the pole of our
single terrestrial individuality.
Therefore we must know that between the moon and each individual being
exists a vital dynamic flow. The life of individuals depends directly
upon the moon, just as the moon depends directly upon the life of
individuals.
But in what way does the life of individuals depend directly upon the
moon?
The moon is the mother of darkness. She is the clue to the active
darkness. And we, below the waist, we have our being in darkness.
Below the waist we are sightless. When, in the daytime, our life is
polarized upwards, towards the open, sun-wakened eyes and the mind
which sees in vision, then the powerful dynamic centers of the lower
body act in subservience, in their negative polarity. And then we flow
upwards, we go forth seeking the universe, in vision, speech, and
thought--we go forth to see all things, to hear all things, to know
all things by acquaintance and by knowledge. One flood of dynamic flow
are we, upwards polarized, in our tallness and our wide-eyed spirit
seeking to bring all the universe into the range of our conscious
individuality, and eager always to make new worlds, out of this old
world, to bud new green tips on the tree of life. Just as a tree would
die if it were not making new green tips upon all its vast old world
of a body, so the whole universe would perish if man and beast and
herb were not always putting forth a newness: the toad taking a
vivider color, spreading his hands a little more gently, developing a
more rusé intelligence, the birds adding a new note to their speech
and song, a new sharp swerve to their flight, a new nicety to their
nests; and man, making new worlds, new civilizations. If it were not
for this striving into new creation on the part of living individuals,
the universe would go dead, gradually, gradually and fall asunder.
Like a tree that ceases to put forth new green tips, and to advance
out a little further.
But each new tip arises out of the apparent death of the old, the
preceding one. Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And if
men must at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must
the leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold.
And so dead men. Even dead men's souls.
So if death has to be the goal for a great number, then let it be so.
If America must invent this poison-gas, let her. When death is our
goal of goals we shall invent the means of death, let our professions
of benevolence be what they will.
But this time, it seems to me, we have consciously and responsibly to
carry ourselves through the winter-period, the period of death and
denudation: that is, some of us have, some _nation_ even must. For
there are not now, as in the Roman times, any great reservoirs of
energetic barbaric life. Goths, Gauls, Germans, Slavs, Tartars. The
world is very full of people, but all fixed in civilizations of their
own, and they all have all our vices, all our mechanisms, and all our
means of destruction. This time, the leading civilization cannot die
out as Greece, Rome, Persia died. It must suffer a great collapse,
maybe. But it must carry through all the collapse the living clue to
the next civilization. It's no good thinking we can leave it to China
or Japan or India or Africa--any of the great swarms.
And here we are, we don't look much like carrying through to a new
era. What have we got that will carry through? The latest craze is Mr.
Einstein's Relativity Theory. Curious that everybody catches fire at
the word Relativity. There must be something in the mere suggestion,
which we have been waiting for. But what? As far as I can see,
Relativity means, for the common amateur mind, that there is no one
absolute force in the physical universe, to which all other forces may
be referred. There is no one single absolute central principle
governing the world. The great cosmic forces or mechanical principles
can only be known in their relation to one another, and can only exist
in their relation to one another. But, says Einstein, this relation
between the mechanical forces is constant, and may be expressed by a
mathematical formula: which mathematical formula may be used to equate
all mechanical forces of the universe.
I hope that is not scientifically all wrong. It is what I understand
of the Einstein theory. What I doubt is the equation formula. It seems
to me, also, that the velocity of light through space is the _deus ex
machina_ in Einstein's physics. Somebody will some day put salt on the
tail of light as it travels through space, and then its simple
velocity will split up into something complex, and the Relativity
formula will fall to bits.--But I am a confirmed outsider, so I'll
hold my tongue.
All I know is that people have got the word Relativity into their
heads, and catch-words always refer to some latent idea or conception
in the popular mind. It has taken a Jew to knock the last center-pin
out of our ideally spinning universe. The Jewish intelligence for
centuries has been picking holes in our ideal system--scientific and
sociological. Very good thing for us. Now Mr. Einstein, we are glad to
say, has pulled out the very axle pin. At least that is how the vulgar
mind understands it. The equation formula doesn't count.--So now, the
universe, according to the popular mind, can wobble about without
being pinned down.--Really, an anarchical conclusion. But the Jewish
mind insidiously drives us to anarchical conclusions. We are glad to
be driven from false, automatic fixities, anyhow. And once we are
driven right on to nihilism we may find a way through.
So, there is nothing absolute left in the universe. Nothing. Lord
Haldane says pure knowledge is absolute. As far as it goes, no doubt.
But pure knowledge is only such a tiny bit of the universe, and always
relative to the thing known and to the knower.
I feel inclined to Relativity myself. I think there is no one absolute
principle in the universe. I think everything is relative. But I also
feel, most strongly, that in itself each individual living creature is
absolute: in its own being. And that all things in the universe are
just relative to the individual living creature. And that individual
living creatures are relative to each other.
And what about a goal? There is no final goal. But every step taken
has its own little relative goal. So what about the next step?
Well, first and foremost, that every individual creature shall come to
its own particular and individual fullness of being.--Very nice, very
pretty--but _how_? Well, through a living dynamic relation to other
creatures.--Very nice again, pretty little adjectives. But what _sort_
of a living dynamic relation?--Well, _not_ the relation of love,
that's one thing, nor of brotherhood, nor equality. The next relation
has got to be a relationship of men towards men in a spirit of
unfathomable trust and responsibility, service and leadership,
obedience and pure authority. Men have got to choose their leaders,
and obey them to the death. And it must be a system of culminating
aristocracy, society tapering like a pyramid to the supreme leader.
All of which sounds very distasteful at the moment. But upon all the
vital lessons we have learned during our era of love and spirit and
democracy we can found our new order.
We wanted to be all of a piece. And we couldn't bring it off. Because
we just _aren't_ all of a piece. We wanted first to have nothing but
nice daytime selves, awfully nice and kind and refined. But it didn't
work. Because whether we want it or not, we've got night-time selves.
And the most spiritual woman ever born or made has to perform her
natural functions just like anybody else. We must _always_ keep in
line with this fact.
Well, then, we have night-time selves. And the night-self is the very
basis of the dynamic self. The blood-consciousness and the
blood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can
_stay_ at the source. Nor even make a _goal_ of the source, as Freud
does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But
you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise
every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood.
When you go to sleep at night, you have to say: "Here dies the man I
am and know myself to be." And when you rise in the morning you have
to say: "Here rises an unknown quantity which is still myself."
The self which rises naked every morning out of the dark sleep of the
passionate, hoarsely-calling blood: this is the unit for the next
society. And the polarizing of the passionate blood in the individual
towards life, and towards leader, this must be the dynamic of the next
civilization. The intense, passionate yearning of the soul towards the
soul of a stronger, greater individual, and the passionate
blood-belief in the fulfillment of this yearning will give men the
next motive for life.
We have to sink back into the darkness and the elemental consciousness
of the blood. And from this rise again. But there is no rising until
the bath of darkness and extinction is accomplished.
As social units, as civilized men we have to do what we do as physical
organisms. Every day, the sun sets from the sky, and darkness falls,
and every day, when this happens, the tide of life turns in us.
Instead of flowing upwards and outwards towards mental consciousness
and activity, it turns back, to flow downwards. Downwards towards the
digestion processes, downwards further to the great sexual
conjunctions, downwards to sleep.
This is the soul now retreating, back from the outer life of day, back
to the origins. And so, it stays its hour at the first great sensual
stations, the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion. But the tide ebbs
on, down to the immense, almost inhuman passionate darkness of sex,
the strange and moon-like intensity of the hypogastric plexus and the
sacral ganglion, then deep, deeper, past the last great station of the
darkest psyche, down to the earth's center. Then we sleep.
And the moon is the tide-turner. The moon is the great cosmic pole
which calls us back, back out of our day-self, back through the
moonlit darknesses of the sensual planes, to sleep. It is the moon
that sways the blood, and sways us back into the extinction of the
blood.--And as the soul retreats back into the sea of its own
darkness, the mind, stage by stage, enjoys the mental consciousness
that belongs to this retreat back into the sensual deeps; and then it
goes extinguished. There is sleep.
And so we resolve back towards our elementals. We dissolve back, out
of the upper consciousness, out of mind and sight and speech, back,
down into the deep and massive, swaying consciousness of the dark,
living blood. At the last hour of sex I am no more than a powerful
wave of mounting blood. Which seeks to surge and join with the
answering sea in the other individual. When the sea of individual
blood which I am at that hour heaves and finds its pure contact with
the sea of individual blood which is the woman at that hour, then each
of us enters into the wholeness of our deeper infinitude, our profound
fullness of being, in the ocean of our oneness and our consciousness.
This is under the spell of the moon, of sea-born Aphrodite, mother and
bitter goddess. For I am carried away from my sunny day-self into
this other tremendous self, where knowledge will not save me, but
where I must obey as the sea obeys the tides. Yet however much I go, I
know that I am all the while myself, in my going.
This then is the duality of my day and my night being: a duality so
bitter to an adolescent. For the adolescent thinks with shame and
terror of his night. He would wish to have no night-self. But it is
Moloch, and he cannot escape it.
The tree is born of its roots and its leaves. And we of our days and
our nights. Without the night-consummation we are trees without roots.
And the night-consummation takes place under the spell of the moon. It
is one pure motion of meeting and oneing. But even so, it is a
circuit, not a straight line. One pure motion of meeting and oneing,
until the flash breaks forth, when the two are one. And this, this
flashing moment of the ignition of two seas of blood, this is the
moment of begetting. But the begetting of a child is less than the
begetting of the man and the woman. Woman is begotten of man at that
moment, into her greater self: and man is begotten of woman. This is
the main. And that which cannot be fulfilled, perfected in the two
individuals, that which cannot take fire into individual life, this
trickles down and is the seed of a new life, destined ultimately to
fulfill that which the parents could not fulfill. So it is for ever.
Sex then is a polarization of the individual blood in man towards the
individual blood in woman. It is more, also. But in its prime
functional reality it is this. And sex union means bringing into
connection the dynamic poles of sex in man and woman.
In sex we have our basic, most elemental being. Here we have our most
elemental contact. It is from the hypogastric plexus and the sacral
ganglion that the dark forces of manhood and womanhood sparkle. From
the dark plexus of sympathy run out the acute, intense sympathetic
vibrations direct to the corresponding pole. Or so it should be, in
genuine passionate love. There is no mental interference. There is
even no interference of the upper centers. Love is supposed to be
blind. Though modern love wears strong spectacles.
But love is really blind. Without sight or scent or hearing the
powerful magnetic current vibrates from the hypogastric plexus in the
female, vibrating on to the air like some intense wireless message.
And there is immediate response from the sacral ganglion in some
male. And then sight and day-consciousness begin to fade. In the lower
animals apparently any male can receive the vibration of any female:
and if need be, even across long distances of space. But the higher
the development the more individual the attunement. Every wireless
station can only receive those messages which are in its own vibration
key. So with sex in specialized individuals. From the powerful dynamic
center the female sends out her dark summons, the intense dark
vibration of sex. And according to her nature, she receives her
responses from the males. The male enters the magnetic field of the
female. He vibrates helplessly in response. There is established at
once a dynamic circuit, more or less powerful. It would seem as if,
while ever life remains free and wild and independent, the
sex-circuit, while it lasts, is omnipotent. There is one electric flow
which encompasses one male and one female, or one male and one
particular group of females all polarized in the same key of
vibration.
This circuit of vital sex magnetism, at first loose and wide,
gradually closes and becomes more powerful, contracts and grows more
intense, until the two individuals arrive into contact. And even then
the pulse and flow of attraction and recoil varies. In free wild life,
each touch brings about an intense recoil, and each recoil causes an
intense sympathetic attraction. So goes on the strange battle of
desire, until the consummation is reached.
It is the precise parallel of what happens in a thunder-storm, when
the dynamic forces of the moon and the sun come into collision. The
result is threefold: first, the electric flash, then the birth of pure
water, new water.
So it is in sex relation. There is a threefold result. First, the
flash of pure sensation and of real electricity. Then there is the
birth of an entirely new state of blood in each partner. And then
there is the liberation.
But the main thing, as in the thunder-storm, is the absolute renewal
of the atmosphere: in this case, the blood. It would no doubt be found
that the electro-dynamic condition of the white and red corpuscles of
the blood was quite different after sex union, and that the chemical
composition of the fluid of the blood was quite changed.
And in this renewal lies the great magic of sex. The life of an
individual goes on apparently the same from day to day. But as a
matter of fact there is an inevitable electric accumulation in the
nerves and the blood, an accumulation which weighs there and broods
there with intolerable pressure. And the only possible means of relief
and renewal is in pure passional interchange. There is and must be a
pure passional interchange from the upper self, as when men unite in
some great creative or religious or constructive activity, or as when
they fight each other to the death. The great goal of creative or
constructive activity, or of heroic victory in fight, _must_ always be
the goal of the daytime self. But the very possibility of such a goal
arises out of the vivid dynamism of the conscious blood. And the blood
in an individual finds its great renewal in a perfected sex circuit.
A perfected sex circuit and a successful sex union. And there can be
no successful sex union unless the greater hope of purposive,
constructive activity fires the soul of the man all the time: or the
hope of passionate, purposive _destructive_ activity: the two amount
religiously to the same thing, within the individual. Sex as an end in
itself is a disaster: a vice. But an ideal purpose which has no roots
in the deep sea of passionate sex is a greater disaster still. And now
we have only these two things: sex as a fatal goal, which is the
essential theme of modern tragedy: or ideal purpose as a deadly
parasite. Sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to tragedy.
There must be the great purposive inspiration always present. But the
automatic ideal-purpose is not even a tragedy, it is a slow
humiliation and sterility.
The great thing is to keep the sexes pure. And by pure we don't mean
an ideal sterile innocence and similarity between boy and girl. We
mean pure maleness in a man, pure femaleness in a woman. Woman is
really polarized downwards, towards the center of the earth. Her deep
positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull. And man is
polarized upwards, towards the sun and the day's activity. Women and
men are dynamically different, in everything. Even in the mind, where
we seem to meet, we are really utter strangers. We may speak the same
verbal language, men and women: as Turk and German might both speak
Latin. But _whatever_ a man says, his meaning is something quite
different and changed when it passes through a woman's ears. And
though you reverse the sexual polarity, the flow between the sexes,
still the difference is the same. The _apparent_ mutual understanding,
in companionship between a man and a woman, is always an illusion,
and always breaks down in the end.
Woman can polarize her consciousness upwards. She can obtain a hand
even over her sex receptivity. She can divert even the electric spasm
of coition into her upper consciousness: it was the trick which the
snake and the apple between them taught her. The snake, whose
consciousness is _only_ dynamic, and non-cerebral. The snake, who has
no mental life, but only an intensely vivid dynamic mind, he envied
the human race its mental consciousness. And he knew, this intensely
wise snake, that the one way to make humanity pay more than the price
of mental consciousness was to pervert woman into mentality: to
stimulate her into the upper flow of consciousness.
For the true polarity of consciousness in woman is downwards. Her
deepest consciousness is in the loins and belly. Even when perverted,
it is so. The great flow of female consciousness is downwards, down to
the weight of the loins and round the circuit of the feet. Pervert
this, and make a false flow upwards, to the breast and head, and you
get a race of "intelligent" women, delightful companions, tricky
courtesans, clever prostitutes, noble idealists, devoted friends,
interesting mistresses, efficient workers, brilliant managers, women
as good as men at all the manly tricks: and better, because they are
so very headlong once they go in for men's tricks. But then, after a
while, pop it all goes. The moment woman has got man's ideals and
tricks drilled into her, the moment she is competent in the manly
world--there's an end of it. She's had enough. She's had more than
enough. She hates the thing she has embraced. She becomes absolutely
perverse, and her one end is to prostitute herself and her ideals to
sex. Which is her business at the present moment.
We bruise the serpent's head: his flat and brainless head. But his
revenge of bruising our heel is a good one. The heels, through which
the powerful downward circuit flows: these are bruised in us, numbed
with a horrible neurotic numbness. The dark strong flow that polarizes
us to the earth's center is hampered, broken. We become flimsy fungoid
beings, with no roots and no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. The
serpent has bruised our heel till we limp. The lame gods, the enslaved
gods, the toiling limpers moaning for the woman. You don't find the
sun and moon playing at pals in the sky. Their beams cross the great
gulf which is between them.
So with man and woman. They must stand clear again. They must fight
their way out of their self-consciousness: there is nothing else. Or,
rather, each must fight the other out of self-consciousness. Instead
of this leprous forbearance which we are taught to practice in our
intimate relationships, there should be the most intense open
antagonism. If your wife flirts with other men, and you don't like it,
say so before them all, before wife and man and all, say you won't
have it. If she seems to you false, in any circumstance, tell her so,
angrily, furiously, and stop her. Never mind about being justified. If
you hate anything she does, turn on her in a fury. Harry her, and make
her life a hell, so long as the real hot rage is in you. Don't
silently hate her, or silently forbear. It is such a dirty trick, so
mean and ungenerous. If you feel a burning rage, turn on her and give
it to her, and _never_ repent. It'll probably hurt you much more than
it hurts her. But never repent for your real hot rages, whether
they're "justifiable" or not. If you care one sweet straw for the
woman, and if she makes you that you can't bear any more, give it to
her, and if your heart weeps tears of blood afterwards, tell her
you're thankful she's got it for once, and you wish she had it worse.
The same with wives and their husbands. If a woman's husband gets on
her nerves, she should fly at him. If she thinks him too sweet and
smarmy with other people, she should let him have it to his nose,
straight out. She should lead him a dog's life, and never swallow her
bile.
With wife or husband, you should never swallow your bile. It makes you
go all wrong inside. Always let fly, tooth and nail, and never repent,
no matter what sort of a figure you make.
We have a vice of love, of softness and sweetness and smarminess and
intimacy and promiscuous kindness and all that sort of thing. We think
it's so awfully nice of us to be like that, in ourselves. But in our
wives or our husbands it gets on our nerves horribly. Yet we think it
oughtn't to, so we swallow our spleen.
We shouldn't. When Jesus said "if thine eye offend thee, pluck it
out," he was beside the point. The eye doesn't really offend us. We
are rather fond of our own squint eye. It only offends the person who
cares for us. And it's up to this person to pluck it out.
This holds particularly good of the love and intimacy vice. It'll
never offend us in ourselves. While it will be gall and wormwood to
our wife or husband. And it is on this promiscuous love and intimacy
and kindness and sweetness, all a vice, that our self-consciousness
really rests. If we are battered out of this, we shall be battered out
of self-consciousness.
And so, men, drive your wives, beat them out of their
self-consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely idea of
themselves. Absolutely tear their lovely opinion of themselves to
tatters, and make them look a holy ridiculous sight in their own eyes.
Wives, do the same to your husbands.
But fight for your life, men. Fight your wife out of her own
self-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it till
she's stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice
superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her. Reduce
her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying.
Make her yield to her own real unconscious self, and absolutely stamp
on the self that she's got in her head. Drive her forcibly back, back
into her own true unconscious.
And then you've got a harder thing still to do. Stop her from looking
on you as her "lover." Cure her of that, if you haven't cured her
before. Put the fear of the Lord into her that way. And make her know
she's got to believe in you again, and in the deep purpose you stand
for. But before you can do that, you've got to _stand_ for some deep
purpose. It's no good faking one up. You won't take a woman in, not
really. Even when she _chooses_ to be taken in, for prettiness' sake,
it won't do you any good.
But combat her. Combat her in her sexual pertinacity, and in her
secret glory or arrogance in the sexual goal. Combat her in her
cock-sure belief that she "knows" and that she is "right." Take it all
out of her. Make her yield once more to the male leadership: if you've
got anywhere to lead to. If you haven't, best leave the woman alone;
she has _one_ goal of her own, anyhow, and it's better than your
nullity and emptiness.
You've got to take a new resolution into your soul, and break off from
the old way. You've got to know that you're a man, and being a man
means you must go on alone, ahead of the woman, to break a way through
the old world into the new. And you've got to be alone. And you've got
to start off ahead. And if you don't know which direction to take,
look round for the man your heart will point out to you. And
follow--and never look back. Because if Lot's wife, looking back, was
turned to a pillar of salt, these miserable men, for ever looking back
to their women for guidance, they are miserable pillars of half-rotten
tears.
You'll have to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, a
real pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer.
You'll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours:
her night goal to your day goal. The moon, the planet of women, sways
us back from our day-self, sways us back from our real social unison,
sways us back, like a retreating tide, in a friction of criticism and
separation and social disintegration. That is woman's inevitable mode,
let her words be what they will. Her goal is the deep, sensual
individualism of secrecy and night-exclusiveness, hostile, with
guarded doors. And you'll have to fight very hard to make a woman
yield her goal to yours, to make her, in her own soul, _believe_ in
your goal as the goal beyond, in her goal as the way by which you go.
She'll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profound
and absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, least
of all to her. She'll never believe until, in your soul, you are cut
off and gone ahead, into the dark.
She may of course already love you, and love you for yourself. But the
love will be a nest of scorpions unless it is overshadowed by a little
fear or awe of your further purpose, a living _belief_ in your going
beyond her, into futurity.
But when once a woman _does_ believe in her man, in the pioneer which
he is, the pioneer who goes on ahead beyond her, into the darkness in
front, and who may be lost to her for ever in this darkness; when once
she knows the pain and beauty of this belief, knows that the
loneliness of waiting and following is inevitable, that it must be so;
ah, then, how wonderful it is! How wonderful it is to come back to
her, at evening, as she sits half in fear and waits! How good it is to
come home to her! How good it is then when the night falls! How richly
the evening passes! And then, for her, at last, all that she has lost
during the day to have it again between her arms, all that she has
missed, to have it poured out for her, and a richness and a wonder she
had never expected. It is her hour, her goal. That's what it is to
have a wife.
Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she _believes_ in
you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her. Then, how
wonderful this nightfall is! How rich you feel, tired, with all the
burden of the day in your veins, turning home! Then you too turn to
your other goal: to the splendor of darkness between her arms. And you
know the goal is there for you: how rich that feeling is. And you feel
an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes in
your purpose and receives you into the magnificent dark gratification
of her embrace. That's what it is to have a wife.
But no man ever had a wife unless he served a great predominant
purpose. Otherwise, he has a lover, a mistress. No matter how much she
may be married to him, unless his days have a living purpose,
constructive or destructive, but a purpose beyond her and all she
stands for; unless his days have this purpose, and his soul is really
committed to his purpose, she will not be a wife, she will be only a
mistress and he will be her lover.
If the man has no purpose for his days, then to the woman alone
remains the goal of her nights: the great sex goal. And this goal is
no goal, but always cries for the something beyond: for the rising in
the morning and the going forth beyond, the man disappearing ahead
into the distance of futurity, that which his purpose stands for, the
future. The sex goal needs, absolutely needs, this further departure.
And if there _be_ no further departure, no great way of belief on
ahead: and if sex is the starting point and the goal as well: then sex
becomes like the bottomless pit, insatiable. It demands at last the
departure into death, the only available beyond. Like Carmen, or like
Anna Karenina. When sex is the starting point and the returning point
both, then the only issue is death. Which is plain as a pike-staff in
"Carmen" or "Anna Karenina," and is the theme of almost _all_ modern
tragedy. Our one hackneyed, hackneyed theme. Ecstasies and agonies of
love, and final passion of death. Death is the only pure, beautiful
conclusion of a great passion. Lovers, pure lovers should say "Let it
be so."
And one is always tempted to say "Let it be so." But no, let it be not
so. Only I say this, let it be a great passion and then death, rather
than a false or faked purpose. Tolstoi said "No" to the passion and
the death conclusion. And then drew into the dreary issue of a false
conclusion. His books were better than his life. Better the woman's
goal, sex and death, than some _false_ goal of man's.
Better Anna Karenina and Vronsky a thousand times than Natasha and
that porpoise of a Pierre. This pretty, slightly sordid couple tried
so hard to kid themselves that the porpoise Pierre was puffing with
great purpose. Better Vronsky than Tolstoi himself, in my mind. Better
Vronsky's final statement: "As a soldier I am still some good. As a
man I am a ruin"--better that than Tolstoi and Tolstoi-ism and that
beastly peasant blouse the old man wore.
Better passion and death than any more of these "isms." No more of the
old purpose done up in aspic. Better passion and death.
But still--we _might_ live, mightn't we?
For heaven's sake answer plainly "No," if you feel like it. No good
temporizing.
EPILOGUE
"_Tutti i salmi finiscono in gloria._"
All the psalms wind up with the Gloria.--"As it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be, World without end. Amen."
Well, then, Amen.
I hope you say Amen! along with me, dear little reader: if there be
any dear little reader who has got so far. If not, I say Amen! all by
myself.--But don't you think the show is all over. I've got another
volume up my sleeve, and after a year or two years, when I have shaken
it down my sleeve, I shall bring it and lay it at the foot of your
Liberty statue, oh Columbia, as I do this one.
I suppose Columbia means the States.--"Hail Columbia!"--I suppose,
etymologically, it is a nest of turtle-doves, Lat. _columba_, a dove.
Coo me softly, then, Columbia; don't roar me like the sucking doves of
the critics of my "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious."
And when I lay this little book at the foot of the Liberty statue,
that brawny lady is not to look down her nose and bawl: "Do you see
any green in my eye?" Of course I don't, dear lady. I only see the
reflection of that torch--or is it a carrot?--which you are holding up
to light the way into New York harbor. Well, many an ass has strayed
across the uneasy paddock of the Atlantic, to nibble your carrot, dear
lady. And I must say, you can keep on slicing off nice little
carrot-slices of guineas and doubloons for an extraordinarily
inexhaustible long time. And innumerable asses can collect themselves
nice little heaps of golden carrot-slices, and then lift up their
heads and brag over them with fairly pan-demoniac yells of
gratification. Of course I don't see any green in your eye, dear
Libertas, unless it is the smallest glint from the carrot-tips. The
gleam in your eye is golden, oh Columbia!
Nevertheless, and in spite of all this, up trots this here little ass
and makes you a nice present of this pretty book. You needn't sniff,
and glance at your carrot-sceptre, lady Liberty. You needn't throw
down the thinnest carrot-paring you can pare off, and then say: "Why
should I pay for this tripe, this wordy mass of rather revolting
nonsense!" You can't pay for it, darling. If I didn't make you a
present of it you could never buy it. So don't shake your
carrot-sceptre and feel supercilious. Here's a gift for you, Missis.
You can look in its mouth, too. Mind it doesn't bite you.--No, you
needn't bother to put your carrot behind your back, nobody wants to
snatch it.
How do you do, Columbia! Look, I brought you a posy: this nice little
posy of words and wisdom which I made for you in the woods of
Ebersteinburg, on the borders of the Black Forest, near Baden Baden,
in Germany, in this summer of scanty grace but nice weather. I made it
specially for you--Whitman, for whom I have an immense regard, says
"These States." I suppose I ought to say: "Those States." If the
publisher would let me, I'd dedicate this book to you, to "Those
States." Because I wrote this book entirely for you, Columbia. You may
not take it as a compliment. You may even smell a tiny bit of
Schwarzwald sap in it, and be finally disgusted. I admit that trees
ought to think twice before they flourish in such a disgraced place as
the Fatherland. "_Chi va coi zoppi, all' anno zoppica._" But you've
not only to gather ye rosebuds while ye may, but _where_ ye may. And
so, as I said before, the Black Forest, etc.
I know, Columbia, dear Libertas, you'll take my posy and put your
carrot aside for a minute, and smile, and say: "I'm sure, Mr.
Lawrence, it is a _long_ time since I had such a perfectly beautiful
bunch of ideas brought me." And I shall blush and look sheepish and
say: "So glad you think so. I believe you'll find they'll keep fresh
quite a long time, if you put them in water." Whereupon you, Columbia,
with real American gallantry: "Oh, they'll keep for _ever_, Mr.
Lawrence. They _couldn't_ be so cruel as to go and die, such perfectly
lovely-colored ideas. Lovely! Thank you ever, ever so much."
Just think of it, Columbia, how pleased we shall be with one another:
and how much nicer it will be than if you snorted "High-falutin'
Nonsense"--or "Wordy mass of repulsive rubbish."
When they were busy making Italy, and were just going to put it in
the oven to bake: that is, when Garibaldi and Vittorio Emmanuele had
won their victories at Caserta, Naples prepared to give them a
triumphant entry. So there sat the little king in his carriage: he had
short legs and huge swagger mustaches and a very big bump of
philoprogeniture. The town was all done up, in spite of the rain. And
down either side of the wide street were hasty statues of large,
well-fleshed ladies, each one holding up a fore-finger. We don't know
what the king thought. But the staff held their breath. The king's
appetite for strapping ladies was more than notorious, and naturally
it looked as if Naples had done it on purpose.
As a matter of fact, the fore-finger meant _Italia Una_! "Italy shall
be one." Ask Don Sturzo.
Now you see how risky statues are. How many nice little asses and
poets trot over the Atlantic and catch sight of Liberty holding up
this carrot of desire at arm's length, and fairly hear her say, as one
does to one's pug dog, with a lump of sugar: "Beg! Beg!"--and "Jump!
Jump, then!" And each little ass and poodle begins to beg and to jump,
and there's a rare game round about Liberty, zap, zap, zapperty-zap!
Do lower the carrot, gentle Liberty, and let us talk nicely and
sensibly. I don't like you as a _carotaia_, precious.
Talking about the moon, it is thrilling to read the announcements of
Professor Pickering of Harvard, that it's almost a dead cert that
there's life on our satellite. It is almost as certain that there's
life on the moon as it is certain there is life on Mars. The professor
bases his assertions on photographs--hundreds of photographs--of a
crater with a circumference of thirty-seven miles. I'm not satisfied.
I demand to know the yards, feet and inches. You don't come it over me
with the triteness of these round numbers.
"Hundreds of photographic reproductions have proved irrefutably the
springing up at dawn, with an unbelievable rapidity, of vast fields of
foliage which come into blossom just as rapidly (sic!) and which
disappear in a maximum period of eleven days."--Again I'm not
satisfied. I want to know if they're cabbages, cress, mustard, or
marigolds or dandelions or daisies. Fields of foliage, mark you. And
_blossom_! Come now, if you can get so far, Professor Pickering, you
might have a shrewd guess as to whether the blossoms are good to eat,
or if they're purely for ornament.
I am only waiting at last for an aeroplane to land on one of these
fields of foliage and find a donkey grazing peacefully. Hee-haw!
"The plates moreover show that great blizzards, snow-storms, and
volcanic eruptions are also frequent." So no doubt the blossoms are
edelweiss.
"We find," says the professor, "a living world at our very doors where
life in some respects resembles that of Mars." All I can say is:
"Pray come in, Mr. Moony. And how is your cousin Signor Martian?"
Now I'm sure Professor Pickering's photographs and observations are
really wonderful. But his _explanations_! Come now, Columbia, where is
your High-falutin' Nonsense trumpet? Vast fields of foliage which
spring up at dawn (!!!) and come into blossom just as quickly (!!!!)
are rather too flowery even for my flowery soul. But there, truth is
stranger than fiction.
I'll bet my moon against the Professor's, anyhow.
So long, Columbia. _A riverderci._
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