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Title: Reflections on the death of a porcupine and other essays
Author: D. H. Lawrence
Release date: May 24, 2024 [eBook #73691]
Language: English
Original publication: Philadelphia: The Centaur Press, 1925
Credits: Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH OF A PORCUPINE AND OTHER ESSAYS ***
REFLECTIONS
ON THE
DEATH OF A
PORCUPINE
[Illustration: colophon]
REFLECTIONS ON THE
DEATH OF A PORCUPINE
AND OTHER ESSAYS
_By_
D. H. LAWRENCE
[Illustration: colophon]
THE CENTAUR PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
1925
COPYRIGHT, 1925
THE CENTAUR PRESS
CONTENTS
PAGES
THE CROWN 1
THE NOVEL 103
HIM WITH HIS TAIL IN HIS MOUTH 127
BLESSED ARE THE POWERFUL 145
.... LOVE WAS ONCE A LITTLE BOY 161
REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH
OF A PORCUPINE 193
ARISTOCRACY 223
THE CROWN
_NOTE TO THE CROWN_
_The Crown was written in 1915, when the war was already twelve months
old, and had gone pretty deep. John Middleton Murry said to me: “Let us
do something.”_
_The doing consisted in starting a tiny monthly paper, which Murry
called The Signature, and in having weekly meetings somewhere in
London--I have now no idea where it was--up a narrow stair-case over a
green-grocer’s shop: or a cobbler’s shop. The only thing that made any
impression on me was the room over the shop, in some old Dickensey part
of London, and the old man downstairs._
_We scrubbed the room and colour-washed the walls and got a long table
and some windsor chairs from the Caledonian market. And we used to make
a good warm fire: it was dark autumn, in that unknown bit of London.
Then on Thursday nights we had meetings of about a dozen people. We
talked, but there was absolutely nothing in it. And the meetings didn’t
last two months._
_The Signature was printed by some little Jewish printer away in the
east end. We sold it by subscription, half-a-crown for six copies. I
don’t know how many subscriptions there were: perhaps fifty. The
helpless little brown magazine appeared three times, then we dropped it.
The last three of the Crown essays were never printed._
_To me the venture meant nothing real: a little escapade. I can t
believe in “doing things” like that. In a great issue like the war,
there was nothing to be “done”, in Murry’s sense. There is still nothing
to be “done”. Probably not for many, many years will men start to “do”
something. And even then, only after they have changed gradually, and
deeply._
_I knew then, and I know now, it is no use trying to do anything--I
speak only for myself--publicly. It is no use trying merely to modify
present forms. The whole great form of our era will have to go. And
nothing will really send it down but the new shoots of life springing up
and slowly bursting the foundations. And one can do nothing, but fight
tooth and nail to defend the new shoots of life from being crushed out,
and let them grow. We can’t make life. We can but fight for the life
that grows in us._
_So that, personally, little magazines mean nothing to me: nor groups,
nor parties of people. I have no hankering after quick response, nor the
effusive, semi-intimate back-chat of literary communion. So it was
ridiculous to offer The Crown in a little six-penny pamphlet. I always
felt ashamed, at the thought of the few who sent their half-crowns.
Happily they were few; and they could read Murry. If one publishes in
the ordinary way, people are not asked for their sixpences._
_I alter The Crown only a very little. It says what I still believe. But
it’s no use for a five minutes’ lunch._
THE CROWN
I
THE LION AND THE UNICORN WERE FIGHTING FOR THE CROWN
What is it then, that they want, that they are forever rampant and
unsatisfied, the king of beasts and the defender of virgins? What is
this Crown that hovers between them, unattainable? Does either of them
ever hope to get it?
But think of the king of beasts lying serene with the crown on his head!
Instantly the unicorn prances from every heart. And at the thought of
the lord of chastity with the crown ledged above his golden horn, lying
in virgin lustre of sanctity, the lion springs out of his lair in every
soul, roaring after his prey.
It is a strange and painful position, the king of beasts and the beast
of purity, rampant for ever on either side of the crown. Is it to be so
for ever?
Who says lion?--who says unicorn? A lion, a lion!! Hi, a unicorn! Now
they are at it, they have forgotten all about the crown. It is a
greater thing to have an enemy than to have an object. The lion and the
unicorn were fighting, it is no question any more of the crown. We know
this, because when the lion beat the unicorn, he did not take the crown
and put it on his head, and say, “Now Mr. Purity, I’m king”. He drove
the unicorn out of town, expelled him, obliterated him, expurgated him
from the memory, exiled him from the kingdom. Instantly the town was all
lion, there was no unicorn at all, no scent nor flavour of unicorn.
“Unicorn!” they said in the city. “That is a mythological beast that
never existed.”
There was no question any more of rivalry. The unicorn was erased from
the annals of fact.
Why did the lion fight the unicorn? Why did the unicorn fight the lion?
Why must the one obliterate the other? Was it the _raison d’être_ of
each of them, to obliterate the other?
But think, if the lion really destroyed, killed the unicorn: not merely
drove him out of town, but annihilated him! Would not the lion at once
expire, as if he had created a vacuum around himself? Is not the unicorn
necessary to the very existence of the lion, is not each opposite kept
in stable equilibrium by the opposition of the other.
This is a terrible position: to have for a _raison d’être_ a purpose
which, if once fulfilled, would of necessity entail the cessation from
existence of both opponents. They would both cease to be, if either of
them really won in the fight which is their sole reason for existing.
This is a troublesome thought.
It makes us at once examine our own hearts. What do we find there?--a
want, a need, a crying out, a divine discontent. Is it the lion, is it
the unicorn?--one, or both? But certainly there is this crying aloud,
this infant crying in the night, born into a blind want.
What do we find at the core of our hearts?--a want, a void, a hollow
want. It is the lion that must needs fight the unicorn, the unicorn that
must needs fight the lion. Supposing the lion refuses the obligation of
his being, and says, “I won’t fight, I’ll just lie down. I’ll be a lion
couchant.”
What _then_ is the lion? A void, a hollow ache, a want. “What am I?”
says the lion, as he lies with his head between his paws, or walks by
the river feeding on raspberries, peacefully, like a unicorn. “I am a
hollow void, my roaring is the resonance of a hollow drum, my strength
is the power of the vacuum, drawing all things within itself.”
Then he groans with horrible self-consciousness. After all, there is
nothing for it but to set upon the unicorn, and so forget, forget,
obtain the precious self-oblivion.
Thus are we, then, rounded upon a void, a hollow want, like the lion.
And this want makes us draw all things into ourselves, to fill up the
void. But it is a bottomless pit, this void. If ever it were filled,
there would be a great cessation from being, of the whole universe.
Thus we portray ourselves in the field of the royal arms. The whole
history is the fight, the whole _raison d’être_. For the whole field is
occupied by the lion and the unicorn. These alone are the living
occupants of the immortal and mortal field.
We have forgotten the Crown, which is the keystone of the fight. We are
like the lion and the unicorn, we go on fighting underneath the Crown,
entirely oblivious of its supremacy.
It is modest common sense for us to acknowledge, all of us, nowadays,
that we are built round a void and hollow want which, if satisfied,
would imply our collapse, our utter ceasing to be. Therefore we regard
our craving with complacence, we feel the great aching of the Want, and
we say, with conviction, “I know I exist, I know I am I, because I feel
the divine discontent which is personal to me, and eternal, and present
always in me.”
That is because we are incomplete, we stand upon one side of the shield,
or on the other. On the one side we are in darkness, our eyes gleam
phosphorescent like cat’s eyes. And with these phosphorescent gleaming
eyes we look across at the opposite pure beast, and we say, “Yes, I am
a lion, my _raison d’être_ is to devour that unicorn, I am moulded upon
an eternal void, a Want.” Gleaming bright, we see ourselves reflected
upon the surface of the darkness and we say: “I am the pure unicorn, it
is for me to oppose and resist for ever that avid lion. If he ceased to
exist, I should be supreme and unique and perfect. Therefore I will
destroy him.”
But the lion will not be destroyed. If he were, if he were swallowed
into the belly of the unicorn, the unicorn would fly asunder into chaos.
This is like being a creature who walks by night, who says: “Men see by
darkness, and in the darkness they have their being.” Or like a creature
that walks by day, and says: “Men live by the light.”
We are enveloped in the darkness, like the lion: or like the unicorn,
enveloped in the light.
For the womb is full of darkness, and also flooded with the strange
white light of eternity. And we, the peoples of the world, we are
enclosed within the womb of our era, we are there begotten and
conceived, but not brought forth.
A myriad, myriad people, we roam in the belly of our era, seeking,
seeking, wanting. And we seek and want deliverance. But we say we want
to overcome the lion that shares with us this universal womb, the walls
of which are shut, and have no window to inform us that we are in
prison. We roam within the vast walls of the womb, unnourished now,
because the time of our deliverance is ripe, even overpast, and the body
of our era is lean and withered because of us, withered and inflexible.
We roam unnourished, moulded each of us around a core of want, a void.
We stand in the darkness of the womb and we say: “Behold, there is the
light, the white light of eternity, which we want.” And we make war upon
the lion of darkness, annihilate him, so that we may be free in the
eternal light. Or else, suddenly, we admit ourselves the lion, and we
rush rampant on the unicorn of chastity.
We stand in the light of Virginity, in the wholeness of our unbroached
immortality, and we say: “Lo the darkness surrounds us, to envelop us.
Let us resist the powers of darkness.” Then like the bright and virgin
unicorn we make war upon the ravening lion. Or we cry: “Ours is the
strength and glory of the Creator, who precedes Creation, and all is
unto us.” So we open a ravening mouth, to swallow back all time has
brought forth.
And there is no rest, no cessation from the conflict. For we are two
opposites which exist by virtue of our inter-opposition. Remove the
opposition and there is collapse, a sudden crumbling into universal
nothingness.
The darkness, this has nourished us. The darkness, this is a vast
infinite, an origin, a Source. The Beginning, this is the great sphere
of darkness, the womb wherein the universe is begotten.
But this universal, infinite darkness conceives of its own opposite. If
there is universal, infinite darkness, then there is universal, infinite
light, for there cannot exist a specific infinite save by virtue of the
opposite and equivalent specific infinite. So that if there be
universal, infinite darkness in the beginning, there must be universal,
infinite light in the end. And these are two relative halves.
Into the womb of the primary darkness enters the ray of ultimate light,
and time is begotten, conceived, there is the beginning of the end. We
are the beginning of the end. And there, within the womb, we ripen upon
the beginning, till we become aware of the end.
We are fruit, we are an integral part of the tree. Till the time comes
for us to fall, and we hang in suspense, realising that we are an
integral part of the vast beyond, which stretches under us and grasps us
even before we drop into it.
We are the beginning, which has conceived us within its womb of
darkness, and nourished us to the fulness of our growth. This is ours
that we adhere to. This is our God, Jehovah, Zeus, the Father of Heaven,
this that has conceived and created us, in the beginning, and brought us
the fulness of our strength.
And when we have come to the fulness of our strength, like lions which
have been fed till they are full grown, then the strange necessity comes
upon us, we must travel away, roam like falling fruit, fall from the
initial darkness of the tree, of the cave which has reared us, into the
eternal light of germination and begetting, the eternal light, shedding
our darkness like the fruit that rots on the ground.
We travel across between the two great opposites of the Beginning and
the End, the eternal night and everlasting day, and the transit is a
stride taken, the night gives us up for the day to receive us. And what
are we between the two?
But before the transit is accomplished, whilst we are yet like fruit
heavy and ripe on the trees, we realise the delirious freedom of the
end, the goal, and we cry: “Behold, I, who am here within the darkness,
I am the light! I am the light, I am Unicorn, the beam of chastity.
Behold, the beam of Virginity gleams within my loins, in this
circumambient darkness. Behold, I am not the Beginning, I am the End.
The End is universal light, the achieving again of infinite unblemished
being, the infinite oneness of the Light, the escape from the infinite
not-being of the darkness.”
All the time, these cries take place within the womb, these are the
myriad unborn uttering themselves as they come towards maturity, cry
after cry as the darkness develops itself over the sea of Light, and
flesh is born, and limbs; cry after cry as the light develops within the
darkness, and mind is born, and the consciousness of that which is
outside my own flesh and limbs, and the desire for everlasting life
grows more insistent.
These are the cries of the two adversaries, the two opposites.
First of all the flesh develops in splendour and glory out of the
prolific darkness, begotten by the light it develops to a great triumph,
till it dances naked in glory of itself, before the Ark, naked in glory
of itself in the procession of heroes travelling towards the wise
goddess, the white light, the Mind, the light which the vessel of living
darkness has caught and captured within itself, and holds in triumph.
The flesh of darkness triumphant circles round the treasure of light
which it has enveloped, which it calls Mind, and this is the ecstasy,
the dance before the Ark, the Bacchic delirium.
And then, within the womb, the light grows stronger and finds voice, it
cries out: “Behold, I am free, I am not enveloped within this darkness.
Behold, I am the everlasting light, the Eternity that stretches forward
for ever, utterly the opposite of that darkness which departs backward,
backward for ever. Come over to me, to the light, to the light that
streams into the glorious eternity. For now the darkness is revoked for
ever.”
It is the voice of the unicorn crying in the wilderness, it is the Son
of Man. And behold, in the fight, the unicorn beats the lion, and drives
him out of town.
But all of this is within the Womb. The darkness builds up the warm
shadow of the flesh in splendour and triumph, enclosing the light. This
is the zenith of David and Solomon, and of Assyria and Egypt. Then the
light, wrestling within the vessel, throws up a white gleam of universal
love, which is St. Francis of Assisi, and Shelley.
Then each has reached its maximum of self-assertion. The flesh is made
perfect within the womb, the spirit is at last made perfect also, within
the womb. They are equally perfect, equally supreme, the one adhering to
the infinite darkness of the beginning, the other adhering to the
infinite light of the end.
Yet, within the womb, they are eternally opposite. Darkness stands over
against light, light stands over against dark. The lion is reared
against the unicorn, the unicorn is reared against the lion. One says,
“Behold, the darkness which gave us birth is eternal and infinite: this
we belong to.” The other says, “We are of the Light, which is
everlasting and infinite.”
And there is no reconciliation, save in negation. From the present, the
stream flows in opposite directions, back to the past, on to the future.
There are two goals, at opposite ends of time. There is the vast
original dark out of which Creation issued, there is the Eternal light
into which all mortality passes. And both are equally infinite, both are
equally the goal, and both equally the beginning.
And we, fully equipped in flesh and spirit, fully built up of darkness,
perfectly composed out of light, what are we but light and shadow lying
together in opposition, or lion and unicorn fighting, the one to
vanquish the other. This is our eternal life, in these two eternities
which nullify each other. And we, between them both, what are we but
nullity?
And this is because we see in part, always in part. We are enclosed
within the womb, we are the seed from the loins of the eternal light, or
we are the darkness which is enveloped by the body of the past, by our
era.
Unless the sun were enveloped in the body of darkness, would a cast
shadow run with me as I walk? Unless the night lay within the embrace of
light, would the fish gleam phosphorescent in the sea, would the light
break out of the black coals of the hearth, would the electricity gleam
out of itself, suddenly declaring an opposite being?
Love and power, light and darkness, these are the temporary conquest of
the one infinite by the other. In love, the Christian love, the End
asserts itself supreme: in power, in strength like the lion’s the
Beginning re-establishes itself unique. But when the opposition is
complete on either side, then there is perfection. It is the perfect
opposition of dark and light that brindles the tiger with gold flame and
dark flame. It is the surcharge of darkness that opens the ravening
mouth of the tiger, and drives his eyes to points of phosphorescence. It
is the perfect balance of light and darkness that flickers in the
stepping of a deer. But it is the conquered darkness that flares and
palpitates in her eyes.
There are the two eternities fighting the fight of Creation, the light
projecting itself into the darkness, the darkness enveloping herself
within the embrace of light. And then there is the consummation of each
in the other, the consummation of light in darkness and darkness in
light, which is absolute: our bodies cast up like foam of two meeting
waves, but foam which is absolute, complete, beyond the limitation of
either infinity, consummate over both eternities. The direct opposites
of the Beginning and the End, by their very directness, imply their own
supreme relation. And this supreme relation is made absolute in the
clash and the foam of the meeting waves. And the clash and the foam are
the Crown, the Absolute.
The lion and the unicorn are not fighting for the Crown. They are
fighting beneath it. And the Crown is upon their fight. If they made
friends and lay down side by side, the Crown would fall on them both
and kill them. If the lion really beat the unicorn, then the Crown
pressing on the head of the king of beasts alone would destroy him.
Which it has done and is doing. As it is destroying the unicorn who has
achieved supremacy in another field.
So that now, in Europe, both the lion and the unicorn are gone mad, each
with a crown tumbled on his bound-in head. And without rhyme or reason
they tear themselves and each other, and the fight is no fight, it is a
frenzy of blind things dashing themselves and each other to pieces.
Now the unicorn of virtue and virgin spontaneity has got the Crown
slipped over the eyes, like a circle of utter light, and has gone mad
with the extremity of light: whilst the lion of power and splendour, its
own Crown of supreme night settled down upon it, roars in an agony of
imprisoned darkness.
Now within the withered body of our era, within the husk of the past,
the seed of light has come to supreme self-consciousness and has gone
mad with the flare of eternal light in its eyes, whilst the fruit of
darkness, unable to fall from the tree, has turned round towards the
tree and is become mad, clinging faster upon the utter night whence it
should have dropped away long ago.
For the stiffened, exhausted, inflexible loins of our era are too dry to
give us forth in labour, the tree is withered, we are pent in, fastened,
and now have turned round, some to the source of darkness, some to the
source of light, and gone mad, purely given up to frenzy. For the dark
has travelled to the light, and the light towards the dark. But when
they reached the bound, neither could leap forth. The fruit could not
fall from the tree, the lion just full grown could not get out of the
cave, the unicorn could not enter the illimitable forest, the lily could
not leap out of the darkness of her bulb straight into the sun. What
then? The road was stopped. Whither then? Backward, back to the known
eternity. There was a great, horrible huddle backwards. The process of
birth had been arrested, the inflexible, withered loins of the
mother-era were too old and set, the past was taut around us all. Then
began chaos, the going asunder, the beginning of nothingness. Then we
leaped back, by reflex from the bound and limit, back upon ourselves
into madness.
There is a dark beyond the darkness of the womb, there is a light beyond
the light of knowledge. There is the darkness of all the heavens for the
seed of man to invest, and the light of all the heavens for the womb to
receive. But we don’t know it. How can the unborn within the womb know
of the heavens outside; how can they?
How can they know of the tides beyond? On the one hand murmurs the
utter, infinite sea of darkness, full of unconceived creation: on the
other the infinite light stirs with eternal procreation. They are two
seas which eternally attract and oppose each other, two tides which
eternally advance to repel each other, which foam upon one another, as
the ocean foams on the land, and the land rushes down into the sea.
And we, in the great movement, are begotten, conceived and brought
forth, like the waves which meet and clash and burst up into foam,
sending the foam like light, like shadow, into the zenith of the
absolute, beyond the grasp of either eternity.
We are the foam and the foreshore, that which, between the oceans, is
not, but that which supersedes the oceans in utter reality, and gleams
in absolute Eternity.
The Beginning is-not, nor the eternity which lies behind us, save in
part. Partial also is the eternity which lies in front. But that which
is not partial, but whole, that which is not relative, but absolute, is
the clash of the two into one, the foam of being thrown up into
consummation.
It is the music which comes when the cymbals clash one upon the other:
this is absolute and timeless. The cymbals swing back in one or the
other direction of time, towards one or the other relative eternity. But
absolute, timeless, beyond time or eternity, beyond space or infinity,
is the music that was the consummation of the two cymbals in
opposition.
It is that which comes when night clashes on day, the rainbow, the
yellow and rose and blue and purple of dawn and sunset, which leaps out
of the breaking of light upon darkness, of darkness upon light, absolute
beyond day or night; the rainbow, the iridescence which is darkness at
once and light, the two-in-one; the crown that binds them both.
It is the lovely body of foam that walks for ever between the two seas,
perfect and consummate, the revealed consummation, the oneness that has
taken being out of the two.
We say the foam is evanescent, the wind passes over it and it is
gone--he who would save his life must lose it.
But if indeed the foam were-not, if the two seas fell apart, if the sea
fell departed from the land, and the land from the sea, if the two
halves, day and night, were ripped asunder, without attraction or
opposition, what then? Then there would be between them nothingness,
utter nothingness. Which is meaningless.
So that the foam and the iridescence, the music that comes from the
cymbals, all formed things that come from perfect union in opposition,
all beauty and all truth and being, all perfection, these are the be-all
and the end-all, absolute, timeless, beyond time or eternity, beyond the
Limit or the Infinite.
This lovely body of foam, this iris between the two floods, this music
between the cymbals, this truth between the surge of facts, this supreme
reason between conflicting desires, this holy spirit between the
opposite divinities, this is the Absolute made visible between the two
Infinities, the Timelessness into which are assumed the two Eternities.
It is wrong to try to make the lion lie down with the lamb. This is the
supreme sin, the unforgivable blasphemy of which Christ spoke. This is
the creating of nothingness, the bringing about, or the striving to
bring about the nihil which is pure meaninglessness.
The great darkness of the lion must gather into itself the little,
feeble darkness of the lamb. The great light of the lamb must absorb
elsewhere, in the whole world, the small, weak light of the lion. The
lamb indeed will inherit the world, rather than the lion. It is the
triumph of the meek, but the meek, like the merciless, shall perish in
their own triumph. Anything that _triumphs_, perishes. The consummation
comes from perfect relatedness. To this a man may _win_. But he who
triumphs, perishes.
The crown is upon the perfect balance of the fight, it is not the fruit
of either victory. The crown is not prize of either combatant. It is the
_raison d’être_ of both. It is the absolute within the fight.
And those alone are evil, who say, “The lion shall lie down with the
lamb, the eagle shall mate with the dove, the lion shall munch in the
stable of the unicorn.” For they blaspheme against the _raison d’être_
of all life, they try to destroy the essential, intrinsic nature of God.
But it is the fight of opposites which is holy. The fight of like things
is evil. For if a thing turn round upon itself in blind frenzy of
destruction, this is to say: “The lamb shall roar like the lion, the
dove strike down her prey like the eagle, and the unicorn shall devour
the innocent virgin in her path”. Which is precisely the equivalent
blasphemy to the blasphemy of universal meekness, or peace.
And this, this last, is our blasphemy of the war. We would have the lamb
roar like the lion, all doves turn into eagles.
II
THE LION BEAT THE UNICORN AND DROVE HIM OUT OF TOWN
Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken. We
cannot know beforehand. We are driven from behind, always as over the
edge of the precipice. It is a leap taken, into the beyond, as a lark
leaps into the sky, a fragment of earth which travels to be fused out,
sublimated, in the shining of the heavens.
But it is not death. Death is neither here nor there. Death is a
temporal, relative fact. In the absolute, it means nothing. The lark
falls from the sky and goes running back to her nest. This is the ebb of
the wave. The wave of earth flung up in spray, a lark, a cloud of larks,
against the white wave of the sun. The spray of earth and the foam of
heaven are one, consummated, a rainbow mid-way, a song. The larks return
to earth, the rays go back to heaven. But these are only the shuttles
that weave the iris, the song, mid-way, in absoluteness, timelessness.
Out of the dark, original flame issues a tiny green flicker, a weed
coming alive. On the edge of the bright, ultimate, spiritual flame of
the heavens is revealed a fragment of iris, a touch of green, a weed
coming into being. The two flames surge and intermingle, casting up a
crest of leaves and stems, their battlefield, their meeting-ground,
their marriage bed, the embrace becomes closer, more unthinkably vivid,
it leaps to climax, the battle grows fiercer, fiercer, intolerably, till
there is the swoon, the climax, the consummation, the little yellow disk
gleams absolute between heaven and earth, radiant of both eternities,
framed in the two infinities. Which is a weed, a sow-thistle bursting
into blossom. And we, the foreshore in whom the waves of dark and light
are unequally seething, we can see this perfection, this absolute, as
time opens to disclose it for a moment, like the Dove that hovered
incandescent from heaven, before it is closed again in utter
timelessness.
“But the wind passeth over it and is gone.”
The wind passes over it and we are gone. It is time which blows in like
a wind, closing up the clouds again upon the perfect gleam. It is the
wind of time, out of either eternity, a wind which has a source and an
issue, which swirls past the light of this absolute, like waves past a
lighted buoy. For the light is not temporal nor eternal, but absolute.
And we, who are temporal and eternal, at moments only we cease from our
temporality. In these, our moments, we see the sow-thistle gleaming,
light within darkness, darkness within light, consummated, we are with
the song and the iris.
And then it is we, not the iris, not the song, who are blown away. We
are blown for a moment against the yellow light of the window, the
flower, then on again into the dark turmoil.
We have made a mistake. We are like travellers travelling in a train,
who watch the country pass by and pass away; all of us who watch the sun
setting, sliding down into extinction, we are mistaken. It is not the
country which passes by and fades, it is not the sun which sinks to
oblivion. Neither is it the flower that withers, nor the song that dies
out.
It is we who are carried past in the seethe of mortality. The flower is
timeless and beyond condition. It is we who are swept on in the
condition of time. So we shall be swept as long as time lasts. Death is
part of the story. But we have being also in timelessness, we shall
become again absolute, as we have been absolute, as we are absolute.
We know that we are purely absolute. We know in the last issue we are
absolved from all opposition. We know that in the process of life we are
purely relative. But timelessness is our fate, and time is subordinate
to our fate. But time is eternal.
And the life of man is like a flower that comes into blossom and passes
away. In the beginning, the light touches the darkness, the darkness
touches the light, and the two embrace. They embrace in opposition, only
in their desire is their unanimity. There are two separate statements,
the dark wants the light, and the light wants the dark. But these two
statements are contained within the one: “They want each other.” And
this is the condition of absoluteness, this condition of their wanting
each other, that which makes light and dark consummate even in
opposition. The interrelation between them, this is constant and
absolute, let it be called love or power or what it may. It is all the
things that it can be called.
In the beginning, light touches darkness and darkness touches light.
Then life has begun. The light enfolds and implicates and involves the
dark, the dark receives and interpenetrates the light, they come nearer,
they are more finely combined, till they burst into the crisis of
oneness, the blossom, the utter being, the transcendent and timeless
flame of the iris.
Then time passes on. Out of the swoon the waves ebb back, dark towards
the dark, light towards the light. They ebb back and away, the leaves
return unto the darkness of the earth, the quivering glimmer of
substance returns into the light, the green of the last wavering iris
disappears, the waves ebb apart, further, further, further.
Yet they never separate. The whole flood recedes, the tides are going to
separate. And they separate entirely, save for one enfolded ripple, the
tiny, silent, scarce-visible enfolded pools of the seeds. These lie
potent, the meeting-ground, the well-head wherein the tides will surge
again, when the turn comes.
This is the life of man. In him too the tide sweeps together towards the
utter consummation, the consummation with the darkness, the consummation
with the light, flesh and spirit, one culminating crisis, when man
passes into timelessness and absoluteness.
The residue of imperfect fusion and unfulfilled desire remains, the
child, the well-head where the tides will flow in again, the seed. The
absolute relation is never fully revealed. It leaps to its maximum of
revelation in the flower, the mature life. But some of it rolls aside,
lies potent in the enfolded seed. My desire is fulfilled, I, as
individual am become timeless and absolute, perfect. But the whole
desire of which I am part remains yet to be consummated. In me the two
waves clash to perfect consummation. But immediately upon the clash come
the next waves of the tide rippling in, the ripples, forerunners, which
tinily meet and enfold each other, the seed, the unborn child. For we
are all waves of the tide. But the tide contains all the waves.
It may happen that waves which meet and mingle come to no consummation,
only a confusion and a swirl and a falling away again. These are the
myriad lives of human beings which pass in confusion of nothingness, the
uncreated lives. There are myriads of human lives that are not absolute
nor timeless, myriads that just waver and toss temporarily, never become
more than relative, never come into being. They have no being, no
immortality. There are myriads of plants that never come to flower, but
which perish away for ever, always separated in the fringe of time,
never united, never consummated, never brought forth.
I know I am compound of two waves, I, who am temporal and mortal. When I
am timeless and absolute, all duality has vanished. But whilst I am
temporal and mortal, I am framed in the struggle and embrace of the two
opposite waves of darkness and of light.
There is the wave of light in me which seeks the darkness, which has for
its goal the Source and the Beginning, for its God the Almighty Creator
to Whom is all power and glory. Thither the light of the seed of man
struggles and aspires, into the infinite darkness, the womb of all
creation.
What way is it that leads me on to the Source, to the Beginning? It is
the way of the blood, the way of power. Down the road of the blood,
further and further into the darkness, I come to the Almighty God Who
was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. I come to the Source
of Power. I am received back into the utter darkness of the Creator, I
am once again with Him.
This is a consummation, a becoming eternal. This is an arrival into
eternity. But eternity is only relative.
I can become one with God, consummated into eternity, by taking the road
down the senses into the utter darkness of power, till I am one with the
darkness of initial power, beyond knowledge of any opposite.
It is thus, seeking consummation in the utter darkness, that I come to
the woman in desire. She is the doorway, she is the gate to the dark
eternity of power, the creator’s power. When I put my hand on her, my
heart beats with a passion of fear and ecstasy, for I touch my own
passing away, my own ceasing-to-be, I apprehend my own consummation in a
darkness which obliterates me in its infinity. My veins rock as if they
were being destroyed, the blood takes fire on the edge of oblivion, and
beats backward and forward. I resist, yet I am compelled; the woman
resists, yet she is compelled. And we are the relative parts dominated
by the strange compulsion of the absolute.
Gradually my veins relax their gates, gradually the rocking blood goes
forward, quivers on the edge of oblivion, then yields itself up, passes
into the borderland of oblivion. Oh, and then I would die, I would
quickly die, to have all power, all life at once, to come instantly to
pure, eternal oblivion, the source of life. But patience is fierce at
the bottom of me; fierce, indomitable, abiding patience. So my blood
goes forth in shock after shock of delirious passing-away, in shock
after shock entering into consummation, till my soul is slipping its
moorings, my mind, my will fuses down, I melt out and am gone into the
eternal darkness, the primal creative darkness reigns, and I am not, and
at last _I am_.
Shock after shock of ecstasy and the anguish of ecstasy, death after
death of trespass into the unknown, till I fall down into the flame, I
lapse into the intolerable flame, a pallid shadow I am transfused into
the flux of unendurable darkness, and am gone. No spark nor vestige
remains within the supreme dark flow of the flame, I am contributed
again to the immortal source. I am with the dark Almighty of the
beginning.
Till, new-created, I am thrown forth again on the shore of creation,
warm and lustrous, goodly, new born from the darkness out of which all
time has issued.
And then, new-born on the knees of darkness, new-issued from the womb of
creation, I open my eyes to the light and know the goal, the end, the
light which stands over the end of the journey, the everlasting day, the
oneness of the spirit.
The new journey, the new life has begun, the travelling to the opposite
eternity, to the infinite light of the Spirit, the consummation in the
Spirit.
My source and issue is in two eternities, I am founded in the two
infinities. But absolute is the rainbow that goes between; the iris of
my very being.
It may be, however, that the seed of light never propagates within the
darkness, that the light in me is sterile, that I am never re-born
within the womb, the Source, to be issued towards the opposite eternity.
It may be there is a great inequality, disproportion, within me, that I
am nearly all darkness, like the night, with a few glimmers of cold
light, moonlight, like the tiger with white eyes of reflected light
brindled in the flame of darkness. Then I shall return again and again
to the womb of darkness, avid, never satisfied, my spirit will fall
unfertile into the womb, will never be conceived there, never brought
forth. I shall know the one consummation, the one direction only, into
the darkness. It will be with me for ever the almost, almost, almost, of
satisfaction, of fulfilment. I shall know the one eternity, the one
infinite, the one immortality, I shall have partial being; but never the
whole, never the full. There is an infinite which does not know me. I am
always relative, always partial, always, in the last issue,
unconsummate.
The barren womb can never be satisfied, if the quick of darkness be
sterile within it. But neither can the unfertile loins be satisfied, if
the seed of light, of the spirit, be dead within them. They will return
again and again and again to the womb of darkness, asking, asking, and
never satisfied.
Then the unconsummated soul, unsatisfied, uncreated in part, will seek
to make itself whole by bringing the whole world under its own order,
will seek to make itself absolute and timeless by devouring its
opposite. Adhering to the one eternity of darkness, it will seek to
devour the eternity of light. Realising the one infinite of the Source,
it will endeavour to absorb into its oneness the opposite infinite of
the Goal. This is the infinite with its tail in its mouth.
Consummated in one infinite, and one alone, this soul will assert the
oneness of all things, that all things are one in the One Infinite of
the Darkness, of the Source. One is one and all alone and ever more
shall be so. This is the cry of the Soul consummated in one eternity
only.
There is one eternity, one infinite, one God. “Thou shalt have no other
god before me.”
But why this Commandment, unless there were in truth another god, at
least the equal of Jehovah?
Consummated in the darkness only, having not enough strength in the
light, the partial soul cries out in a convulsion of insistence that
the darkness alone is infinite and eternal, that all light is from the
small, contained sources, the lamps lighted at will by the desire of the
Creator, the sun, the moon and stars. These are the lamps and candles of
the Almighty, which He blows out at will. These are little portions of
special darkness, darkness transfigured, these lights.
There is one God, one Creator, one Almighty; there is one infinite and
one eternity, it is the infinite and the eternity of the Source. There
is One Way: it is the Way of the Law. There is one Life, the Life of
Creation, there is one Goal, the Beginning, there is one immortality,
the immortality of the great I Am. All is God, the One God. Those who
deny this are to be stamped out, tortured, tortured for ever.
It is possible then to deny it?
Having declared the One God, then the partial soul, fulfilled of the
darkness only, proceeds to establish this God on earth, to devour and
obliterate all else.
Rising from the darkness of consummation in the flesh, with the woman,
it seeks to establish its kingdom over all the world. It strides forth,
the lord, the master, strong for mastery. It will dominate all, all, it
will bring all under the rules of itself, of the One, the Darkness
lighted with the lamps of its own choice.
This is the heroic tyrant, the fabulous king-warrior, like Sardanapolus
or Caesar, like Saul even. These warrior kings seek to pass beyond all
relatedness, to become absolute in might and power. And they fall
inevitably. Their Judas is a David, a Brutus: the individual who knows
something of both flames, but commits himself to neither. He holds
himself, in his own ego, superior either to the creative dark
power-flame, or the conscious love-flame. And so, he is the small man
slaying the great. He is virtuous egoistic Brutus, or David: David
slaying the preposterous Goliath, overthrowing the heroic Saul, taking
Bathsheba and sending Uriah to death: David dancing naked before the
Ark, asserting the oneness, his own oneness, the one infinity,
_himself_, the egoistic God, I AM. And David never went in unto Michal
any more, because she jeered at him. So that she was barren all her
life.
But it was David who really was barren. Michal, when she mocked, mocked
the sterility of David. For the spirit in him was blasted with
unfertility; he could not become born again, he could not be conceived
in the spirit. Michal, the womb of profound darkness, could not conceive
to the overweak seed of David’s spirit. David’s seed was too impure, too
feeble in sheer spirit, too egoistic, it bred and begot preponderant
egoists. The flood of vanity set in after David, the lamps and candles
began to gutter.
Power is sheer flame, and spirit is sheer flame, and between them is the
clue of the Holy Ghost. But David put a false clue between them: the
clue of his own ego, cunning and _triumphant_.
It is unfertility of spirit which sends man raging to the woman, and
sends him raging away again, unsatisfied. It is not the woman’s
barrenness: it is his own. It is sterility in himself which makes a Don
Juan.
And the course of the barren spirit is dogmatically to assert One God,
One Way, One Glory, one exclusive salvation. And this One God is indeed
God, this one Way is the way, but it is the way of egoism, and the One
God is the reflection, inevitably, of the worshipper’s ego.
This is the sham Crown, which the victorious lion and the victorious
unicorn alike puts on his own head. When either _triumphs_, the true
crown disappears, and the triumphant puts a false crown on his own head:
the crown of sterile egoism. The true Crown is above the fight itself,
and above the embrace itself, not upon the brow of either fighter or
lover. Or, if you like, in the true fight it shines equally upon the
brow of the defeated and the winner. For sometimes, it is blessed to be
beaten in a fight.
He who triumphs, perishes. As Caesar perished, and Napoleon. In the
fight they were wonderful, and the power was with them. But when they
would be supreme, sheer triumphers, exalted in their own ego, then they
fell. Triumph is a false absolution, the winner salutes his enemy, and
the light of victory is on _both_ their brows, since both are
consummated.
In the same way, Jesus triumphant perished. Any individual who will
triumph, in love or in war, perishes. There is no triumph. There is but
consummation in either case.
So Shelley also perishes. He wants to be love triumphant, as Napoleon
wanted to be power triumphant. Both fell.
In both, there is the spuriousness of the _ego_ trying to seize the
Crown that belongs only to the consummation.
In the Roman “Triumph” itself lay the source of Rome’s downfall. And in
the arrogance of England’s dispensation of Liberty in the world lies the
downfall of England. When Liberty triumphs, as in Russia, where then is
the British Empire? Where then is the British Lion, crowned _Fidei
Defensor_, Defender of the Faith of Liberty and Love? When liberty needs
no more defending, then the protective lion had better look out.
Take care of asserting any absolute, either of power or love, of empire
or democracy. The moment power _triumphs_, it becomes spurious with
sheer egoism, like Caesar and Napoleon. And the moment democracy
triumphs, it too becomes hideous with egoism, like Russia now.
Either lion or unicorn, triumphant, turns into a sheer beast of prey.
Foe it has none: only prey--or victims.
So we have seen in the world, every time that power has triumphed: every
time the lion and the eagle have jammed the crown down on their heads.
Now it will be given us to see democracy triumphant, the unicorn and the
dove seizing the crown, and on the instant turning into beasts of prey.
The true crown is upon the consummation itself, not upon the triumph of
one over another, neither in love nor in power. The ego is the false
absolute. And the ego crowned with the crown is the monster and the
tyrant, whether it represent one man, an Emperor, or a whole mass of
people, a Demos. A million egos summed up under a crown are not _better_
than one individual crowned ego. They are a million times worse.
III
THE FLUX OF CORRUPTION
The tiger blazed transcendent into immortal darkness. The unique phoenix
of the desert grew up to maturity and wisdom. Sitting upon her tree, she
was the only one of her kind in all creation, supreme, the zenith, the
perfect aristocrat. She attained to perfection, eagle-like she rose in
her nest and lifted her wings, surpassing the zenith of mortality; so
she was translated into the flame of eternity, she became one with the
fiery Origin.
It was not for her to sit tight, and assert her own tight ego. She was
gone as she came.
In the nest was a little ash, a little flocculent grey dust wavering
upon a blue-red, dying coal. The red coal stirred and gathered strength,
gradually it grew white with heat, it shot forth sharp gold flames. It
was the young phoenix within the nest, with curved beak growing hard and
crystal, like a scimitar, and talons hardening into pure jewels.
Wherein, however, is the immortality, in the constant occupation of the
nest, the widow’s cruse, or in the surpassing of the phoenix? She goes
gadding off into flame, into her consummation. In the flame she is
timeless. But the ash within the nest lies in the restless hollow of
time, shaken on the tall tree of the desert. It will rise to the same
consummation, become absolute in flame.
In a low, shady bush, far off, on the other side of the world, where the
rains are cold and the mists wrap the leaves in a chillness, the
ring-dove presses low on the bough, while her mate sends forth the last
ru-cuooo of peace. The mist darkens and ebbs-in in waves, the trees are
melted away, all things pass into a universal oneness, with the last
re-echoing dove, peace, all pure peace, ebbing in softer, softer waves
to a universal stillness.
The dark blue tranquillity is universal and infinite, the doves are
asleep in the sleeping boughs, all fruits are fallen and are silent and
cold, all the leaves melt away into pure mist of darkness.
It is strange, that away on the other side of the world, the tiger
gleams through the hot-purple darkness, and where the dawn comes
crimson, the phoenix lifts her wings in a yawn like an over-sumptuous
eagle, and passes into flame above the golden palpable fire of the
desert.
Here are the opposing hosts of angels, the ruddy choirs, the upright,
rushing flames, the lofty Cherubim that palpitate about the Presence,
the Source; and then the tall, still angels soft and pearly as mist, who
await round the Goal, the attendants that hover on the edge of the last
Assumption.
And from the seed two travellers set forth, in opposite directions, the
one concentrating towards the upper, ruddy, blazing sun, the zenith, the
creative fire; the other towards the blue, cold silence, dividing itself
and ever dividing itself till it is infinite in the universal darkness.
And at the summit, the zenith, there is a flash, a flame, as the
traveller enters into infinite, there is a red splash as the poppy leaps
into the upper, fiery eternity. And far below there is unthinkable
silence as the roots ramify and divide and pass into the oneness of
unutterable silence.
The flame is gone, the flower has leapt away, the fruit ripens and
falls. Then dark ebbs back to dark, and light to light, hot to hot, and
cold to cold. This is death and decay and corruption. And the worm, the
maggot, these are the ministers of separation, these are the tiny
clashing ripples that still ebb together, when the chief tide has set
back, to flow utterly apart.
This is the terror and wonder of dark returning to dark, and of light
returning to light, the two departing back to their Sources. This we
cannot bear to think of. It is the temporal flux of corruption, as the
flux together was the temporal flux of creation. The flux is temporal.
It is only the perfect meeting, the perfect interpenetration into
oneness, the kiss, the blow, the two-in-one, that is timeless and
absolute.
And dark is not willing to return to dark till it has known the light,
nor light to light till it has known the dark, till the two have been
consummated into oneness. But the act of death may itself be a
consummation, and life may be a state of negation.
It may be that our state of life is itself a denial of the consummation,
a prevention, a negation; that this life is our nullification, our
not-being.
It may be that the flower is held from the search of the light, and the
roots from the dark, like a plant that is pot-bound. It may be that, as
in the autumnal cabbage, the light and the dark are made prisoners in
us, their opposition is overcome, the ultimate moving has ceased. We
have forgotten our goal and our end. We have enclosed ourselves in our
exfoliation, there are many little channels that run out into the sand.
This is evil, when that which is temporal and relative asserts itself
eternal and absolute. This I, which I am, has no being save in
timelessness. In my consummation, when that which came from the
Beginning and that which came from the End are transfused into oneness,
then I come into being, I have existence. Till then I am only a part of
nature; I am not.
But as part of nature, as part of the flux, I have my instrumental
identity, my inferior I, my self-conscious ego.
If I say that _I am_, this is false and evil. I am not. Among us all,
how many have being?--too few. Our ready-made individuality, our
identity is no more than an accidental cohesion in the flux of time. The
cohesion will break down and utterly cease to be. The atoms will return
into the flux of the universe. And that unit of cohesion which I was
will vanish utterly. Matter is indestructible, spirit is indestructible.
This of us remains, in any case, general in the flux. But the soul that
has not come into being has no being for ever. The soul does not come
into being at birth. The soul comes into being in the midst of life,
just as the phoenix in her maturity becomes immortal in flame. That is
not her perishing: it is her becoming absolute: a blossom of fire. If
she did not pass into flame, _she_ would never really exist. It is by
her translation into fire that she is the phoenix. Otherwise she were
only a bird, a transitory cohesion in the flux.
It is absurd to talk about all men being immortal, all having souls.
Very few men have being at all. They perish utterly, as individuals.
Their endurance afterwards is the endurance of Matter within the flux,
non-individual: and spirit within the flux. Most men are just transitory
natural phenomena. Whether they live or die does not matter: except in
so far as every failure in the part is a failure in the whole. Their
death is of no more matter than the cutting of a cabbage in the garden,
an act utterly apart from grace.
They assert themselves as important, as absolute mortals. They are just
liars. When one cuts a fat autumnal cabbage, one cuts off a lie, to boil
it down in the pot.
They are all just fat lies, these people, these many people, these
mortals. They are innumerable cabbages in the regulated cabbage plot.
And our great men are no more than Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.
The cabbage is a nice fat lie. That is why we eat it. It is the business
of the truthful to eat up the lies. A fatted cow is a lie, and a fat pig
is a lie, and a fatted sheep is a lie, just the same: these sacrificial
beasts, these lambs and calves, become fat lies when they are merely
protected and fed full.
The cabbage is a lie because it asserts itself as a permanency, in the
state wherein it finds itself. In the swirl of the Beginning and the
End, stalk and leaves take place. But the stalk and leaves are only the
swirl of the waves. Yet they say, they are absolute, they have achieved
a permanent form. It is a lie. Their universal absolute is only the
far-off dawning of the truth, the false dawn which in itself is
nothing, nothing except in relation to that which comes after.
But they say, “We are the consummation and the reality, we are the
fulfilment.” This is pure amorphousness. Each one becomes a single,
separate entity, a single separate nullity. Having started along the way
to eternity, they say, “We are there, we have arrived,” and they enclose
themselves in the nullity of the falsehood.
And this is the state of man, when he falls into self-sufficiency, and
asserts that his self-conscious ego is It. He falls into the condition
of fine cabbages.
Then they are wealthy and fat. They go no further, so they become
wealthy. All that great force which would carry them naked over the edge
of time, into timelessness, into being, they convert into fatness, into
having. And they are full of self-satisfaction. Having no being, they
assert their artificial completeness, and the life within them becomes a
will-to-have; which is the expression of the will-to-persist, in the
temporary unit. Selfishness is the subjugating of all things to a false
entity, and riches is the great flux over the edge of the bottomless
pit, the falsity, the nullity. For where is the rich man who is not the
very bottomless pit? Travel nearer, nearer, nearer to him, and one comes
to the gap, the hole, the abyss where his soul should be. He is not. And
to stop up his hollowness, he drags all things unto himself.
And what are we all, all of us, collectively, even the poorest, now, in
this age? We are only potentially rich men. We are all alike. The
distinction between rich and poor is purely accidental. Rich and poor
alike are only, each one, a pit-head surrounding the bottomless pit. But
the rich man, by pouring vast quantities of matter down his void, gives
himself a more pleasant illusion of fulfilment than the poor man can
get: that is all. Yet we would give our lives, every one of us, for this
illusion.
There are no rich or poor, there are no masses and middle classes and
aristocrats. There are myriads of framed gaps, people, and a few
timeless fountains, men and women. That is all.
Myriads of framed gaps! Myriads of little egos, all wearing the crown of
life! Myriads of little Humpty-Dumpties, self-satisfied emptinesses, all
about to have a great fall.
The current ideal is to be a gap with a great heap of matter around it,
which can be sent clattering down. The most sacred thing is to give all
your having so that it can be put on the heaps that surround all the
other bottomless pits. If you give away all your having, even your life,
then, you are a bottomless pit with no sides to it. Which is infinite.
So that to become infinite, give away all your having, even to your
life. So that you will achieve immortality yourself. Like the heroes of
the war, you will become the bottomless pit itself; but more than this,
you will be contributing to the public good, you will be one of those
who make blessed history: which means, you will be heaping goods upon
the dwindling heaps of superfluity that surrounds these bottomless lives
of the myriad people. If we poor can each of us hire a servant, then the
servant will be like a stone tumbling always ahead of us down the
bottomless pit. Which creates an almost perfect illusion of having a
solid earth beneath us.
Long ago we agreed that we had fulfilled all purpose and that our only
business was to look after other people. We said; “It is marvellous, we
are really complete.” If the regulation cabbage, hide-bound and solid,
could walk about on his stalk, he would be very much as we are. He would
think of himself as we think of ourselves, he would talk, as we talk, of
the public good.
But inside him, proper and fine, the heart would be knocking and urgent,
the heart of the cabbage. Of course for a long time he would not hear
it. His good, enveloping green leaves outside, the heap round the hole,
would have closed upon him very early, like Wordsworth’s “Shades of the
prison house,” very close and complete and gratifying.
But the heart would beat within him, beat and beat, grow louder and
louder, till it was threshing the whole of his inside rotten, threshing
him hollow, till his inside began to devour his consciousness.
Then he would say: “I must do something.” Looking round he would see
little dwindly cabbages struggling in the patch, and would say: “So much
injustice, so much suffering and poverty in the world, it cannot be.”
Then he would set forth to make dwindly cabbages into proper, fine
cabbages. So he would be a reformer.
He would kick, kick, kick against the conditions which make some
cabbages poor and dwindly, most cabbages poorer and more dwindly than
himself. He would but be kicking against the pricks.
But it is very profitable to kick against the pricks. It gives one a
sensation, and saves one the necessity of bursting. If our reformers had
not had the prickly wrongs of the poor to kick, so that they hurt their
toe quite sorely, they might long ago have burst outwards from the
enclosed form in which we have kept secure.
Let no one suffer, they have said. No mouse shall be caught by a cat, no
mouse. It is a transgression. Every mouse shall become a pet, and every
cat shall lap milk in peace, from the saucer of utter benevolence.
This is the millennium, the golden age that is to be, when all shall be
domesticated, and the lion and the leopard and the hawk shall come to
our door to lap milk and to peck the crumbs, and no sound shall be heard
but the lowing of fat cows and the baa-ing of fat sheep.
This is the Green Age that is to be, the age of the perfect cabbage.
This was our hope and our fulfilment, for this, in this hope, we lived
and we died.
So the virtuous, public-spirited ones have suffered bitterly from the
aspect of their myriad more-or-less blighted neighbors, whom they love
as themselves. They have lived and died to right the wrong conditions of
social injustice.
Meanwhile the threshing has continued at the core of us, till
our entrails are threshed rotten. We are a wincing mass of
self-consciousness and corruption, within our plausible rind. The most
unselfish, the most humanitarian of us all, he is the hollowest and
fullest of rottenness. The more rotten we become, the more insistent and
insane becomes our desire to ameliorate the conditions of our poorer,
and maybe healthier neighbours.
Fools, vile fools! Why cannot we acknowledge and admit the
horrible pulse and thresh of corruption within us. What is this
self-consciousness that palpitates within us like a disease? What is it
that threshes and threshes within us, drives us mad if we see a cat
catch a sparrow?
We dare not know. Oh, we are convulsed with shame long before we come to
the point. It is indecent beyond endurance to think of it.
Yet here let it be told. It was the living desire for immortality, for
being, which urged us ceaselessly. It was the bud within the cabbage,
threshing, threshing, threshing. And now, oh our convulsion of shame,
when we must know this! We would rather die.
Yet it shall be made known. It was the struggling of the light and
darkness within us, towards consummation, towards absoluteness, towards
flowering. Oh, we shriek with anger of shame as the truth comes out:
that the cabbage is rotten within because it wanted to straddle up into
weakly fiery flower, wanted to straddle forth in a spire of ragged,
yellow, inconsequential blossom.
Oh God, it is unendurable, this revelation, this disclosure, it is not
to be borne. Our souls perish in an agony of self-conscious shame, we
will not have it.
Yet had we listened, the hide-bound cabbage might have burst, might have
opened apart, for a venturing forth of the tender, timid, ridiculous
cluster of aspirations, that issue in little yellow tips of flame, the
flowers naked in eternity, naked above the staring unborn crowd of
amorphous entities, the cabbages: the myriad egos.
But the crowd of assertive egos, of tough entities, they were too
strong, too many. Quickly they extinguished any shoot of tender
immortality from among them, violently they adhered to the null rind and
to the thresh of rottenness within.
Still the living desire beat and threshed at the heart of us,
relentlessly. And still the fixed will of the temporal form we have so
far attained, the static, mid-way form, triumphed in assertion.
Still the false I, the ego, held down the real, unborn I, which is a
blossom with all a blossom’s fragility.
Yet constantly the rising flower pushed and thrust at the belly and
heart of us, thrashed and beat relentlessly. If it could not beat its
way through into being, it must thrash us hollow. Let it do so then, we
said. This also we enjoy, this being threshed rotten inside. This is
sensationalism, reduction of the complex tissue back through rottenness
to its elements. And this sensationalism, this reduction back, has
become our very life, our only form of life at all. We enjoy it, it is
our lust.
It became at last a collective activity, a war, when, within the great
rind of virtue we thresh destruction further and further, till our whole
civilization is like a great rind full of corruption, of breaking down,
a mere shell threatened with collapse upon itself.
And the road of corruption leads back to one eternity. The activity of
utter going apart has, in eternity, a result equivalent to the result of
utter coming together. The tiger rises supreme, the last brindled flame
upon the darkness; the deer melts away, a blood-stained shadow received
into the utter pallor of light; each having leapt forward into eternity,
at opposite extremes. Within the closed shell of the Christian
conception, we lapse utterly back, through reduction, back to the
Beginning. It is the triumph of death, of decomposition.
And the process is that of the serpent lying prone in the cold, watery
fire of corruption, flickering with the flowing-apart of the two
streams. His belly is white with the light flowing forth from him, his
back is dark and brindled where the darkness returns to the Source. He
is the ridge where the two floods flow apart. So in the orange-speckled
belly of the newt, the light is taking leave of the darkness, and
returning to the light; the imperious, demon-like crest is the flowing
home of the darkness. He is the god within the flux of corruption, from
him proceeds the great retrogression back to the Beginning and back to
the End. These are our gods.
There are elsewhere the golden angels of the Kiss, the golden, fiery
angels of strife, those that have being when we come together, as
opposites, as complements coming to consummation. There is delight and
triumph elsewhere, these angels sound their loud trumpets. Then men are
like brands that have burst spontaneously into flame, the phoenix, the
tiger, the glistening dove, the white-burning unicorn.
But here are only the angels that cleave asunder, terrible and
invincible. With cold, irresistible hands they put us apart, they send
like unto like, darkness unto darkness. They thrust the seas backward
from embrace, backward from the locked strife. They set the cold
phosphorescent flame of light flowing back to the light, and cold heavy
darkness flowing back to the darkness. They are the absolute angels of
corruption, they are the snake, the newt, the water-lily, as reflected
from below.
I cease to be, my darkness lapses into utter, stone darkness, my light
into a light that is keen and cold as frost.
This goes on within the rind. But the rind remains permanent, falsely
absolute, my false absolute self, my self-conscious ego. Till the work
of corruption is finished; then the rind also, the public form, the
civilization, the established consciousness of mankind disappears as
well in the mouth of the worm, taken unutterably asunder by the hands of
the angels of separation. It ceases to be, all the civilization and all
the consciousness, it passes utterly away, a temporary cohesion in the
flux. It was this, this rind, this persistent temporary cohesion, that
was evil, this alone was evil. And it destroys us all before itself is
destroyed.
IV
WITHIN THE SEPULCHRE
Within the womb of the established past, the light has entered the
darkness, the future is conceived. It is conceived, the beginning of the
end has taken place. Light is within the grip of darkness, darkness
within the embrace of light, the Beginning and the End are closed upon
one another.
They come nearer and nearer, till the oneness is full grown within the
womb of the past, within the belly of Time, it must move out, must be
brought forth, into timelessness.
But something withholds it. The pregnancy is accomplished, the hour of
labour has come. Yet the labour does not begin. The loins of the past
are withered, the young unborn is shut in.
All the time, within the womb, light has been travelling to the dark,
the interfusion of the two into a oneness has continued. Now that it is
fulfilled, it meets with some arrest. It is the dry walls of the womb
which cannot relax.
There is a struggle. Then the darkness, having overcome the light,
reaching the dead null wall of the womb, reacts into self-consciousness,
and recoils upon itself. At the same time the light has surpassed its
limit, become conscious, and starts in reflex to recoil upon itself.
Thus the false I comes into being: the I which thinks itself supreme and
infinite, and which is, in fact, a sick foetus shut up in the walls of
an unrelaxed womb.
Here, at this moment when the birth pangs should begin, when the great
opposition between the old and the young should take place, when the
young should beat back the old body that surrounds it, and the old womb
and loins should expel the young body, there is a deadlock. The two
cannot fight apart. The walls of the old body are inflexible and
insensible, the unborn does not know that there can be any travelling
forth. It conceives itself as the whole universe, surrounded by dark
nullity. It does not know that it is in prison. It believes itself to
have filled up the whole of the universe, right to the extremes where is
nothing but blank nullity.
It is tremendously conceited. It can only react upon itself. And the
reaction can only take the form of self-consciousness. For the self is
everything, universal, the surrounding womb is just the outer darkness
in which that which _is_, exists. Therefore there remains either to die,
to pass into the outer darkness, or to enter into self-knowledge.
So the unborn recoils upon itself, dark upon dark, light upon light.
This is the horror of corruption begun already within the unborn,
already dissolution and corruption set in before birth. And this is the
triumph of the ego.
Mortality has usurped the Crown. The unborn, reacting upon the null
walls of the womb, assumes that it has reached the limit of all space
and all being. It concludes that its self is fulfilled, that all
consummation is achieved. It takes for certain that itself has filled
the whole of space and the whole of time.
And this is the glory of the ego.
There is no more fight to be fought, there is no more to be sought and
embraced. All is fought and overcome, all is embraced and contained. It
is all concluded, there is nothing remaining but the outer nothingness,
the only activity is the reaction against the outer nothingness, into
the achieved being of the self, all else is fulfilled and concluded. To
die is merely to assume nothingness. The limit of all life is reached.
And this is the apotheosis of the ego.
So there is the great turning round upon the self, dark upon dark, light
upon light, the flux of separation, corruption within the unborn. The
tides which are set towards each other swirl back as from a promontory
which intervenes. There has been no consummation. There can be no
consummation. The only thing is to return, to go back--that which came
from the Beginning to go back to the Beginning, that which came from the
End to return to the End. In the return lies the fulfilment.
And this is the unconscious undoing of the ego.
That which we _are_ is absolute. There is no adding to it, no
superseding this accomplished self. It is final and universal. All that
remains is thoroughly to explore it.
That is, to analyse it. Analysis presupposes a corpse.
It is at this crisis in the human history that tragic art appears again,
that art becomes the only absolute, the only watchword among the people.
This achieved self, which we are, is absolute and universal. There is
nothing beyond. All that remains is to state this self, and the
reactions upon this self, perfectly. And the perfect statement presumes
to be art. It is aestheticism.
At this crisis there is a great cry of loneliness. Every man conceives
himself as a complete unit surrounded by nullity. And he cannot bear it.
Yet his pride is in this also. The greatest conceit of all is the cry of
loneliness.
At this crisis, emotion turns into sentiment, and sentimentalism takes
the place of feeling. The ego has no feeling, it has only sentiments.
And the myriad egos sway in tides of sentimentalism.
But the _tacit_ utterance of every man, when this state is reached, is
“_Après moi le Déluge_.” And when the deluge begins to set in, there is
profound secret satisfaction on every hand. For the ego in a man
secretly hates every other ego. In a democracy where every little ego is
crowned with the false crown of its own supremacy, every other ego is a
false usurper, and nothing more. We can only tolerate those whose crowns
are not yet manufactured, because they can’t _afford_ it.
And again, the supreme little ego in man hates an unconquered universe.
We shall never rest till we have heaped tin cans on the North Pole and
the South Pole, and put up barb-wire fences on the moon. Barb-wire
fences are our sign of conquest. We have wreathed the world with them.
The back of creation is broken. We have killed the mysteries and
devoured the secrets. It all lies now within our skin, within the ego of
humanity.
So circumscribed within the outer nullity, we give ourselves up to the
flux of death, to analysis, to introspection, to mechanical war and
destruction, to humanitarian absorption in the body politic, the poor,
the birth-rate, the mortality of infants, like a man absorbed in his own
flesh and members, looking for ever at himself. It is the continued
activity of disintegration--disintegration, separating, setting apart,
investigation, research, the resolution back to the original void.
All this goes on within the glassy, insentient, insensible envelope of
nullity. And within this envelope, like the glassy insects within their
rind, we imagine we fill the whole cosmos, that we contain within
ourselves the whole of time, which shall tick forth from us as from a
clock, now everlastingly.
We are capable of nothing but reduction within the envelope. Our every
activity is the activity of disintegration, of corruption, of
dissolution, whether it be our scientific research, our social
activity--(the social activity is largely concerned with reducing all
the parts contained within the envelope to an equality, so that there
shall be no unequal pressure, tending to rupture the envelope, which is
divine)--our art, or our anti-social activity, sensuality,
sensationalism, crime, war. Everything alike contributes to the flux of
death, to corruption, and liberates the static data of the
consciousness.
Whatever single act is performed by any man now, in this condition, it
is an act of reduction, disintegration. The scientist in his laboratory,
the artist in his study, the statesman, the artisan, the sensualist
obtaining keen gratification, every one of these is reducing down that
which is himself to its simpler elements, reducing the compound back to
its parts. It is the pure process of corruption in all of us. The
activity of death is the only activity. It is like the decay of our
flesh, and every new step in decay liberates a sensation, keen,
momentarily gratifying, or a conscious knowledge of the parts that made
a whole; knowledge equally gratifying.
It is like Dmitri Karamazov, who seeks and experiences sensation after
sensation, reduction after reduction, till finally he is stripped
utterly naked before the police, and the quick of him perishes. There
_is_ no more any physical or integral Dmitri Karamazov. That which is in
the hospital, afterwards, is a conglomeration of qualities, strictly an
idiot, a nullity.
And Dostoevsky has shown us perfectly the utter subjection of all human
life to the flux of corruption. That is his theme, the theme of
reduction through sensation after sensation, consciousness after
consciousness, until nullity is reached, all complexity is broken down,
an individual becomes an amorphous heap of elements, qualities.
There are the two types, the dark Dmitri Karamazov, or Rogozhin; and the
Myshkin on the other hand. Dmitri Karamazov and Rogozhin will each of
them plunge the flesh within the reducing agent, the woman, obtain the
sensation and the reduction within the flesh, add to the sensual
experience, and progress towards utter dark disintegration, to nullity.
Myshkin on the other hand will react upon the achieved consciousness or
personality or ego of every one he meets, disintegrate this
consciousness, this ego, and his own as well, obtaining the knowledge of
the factors that made up the complexity of the consciousness, the ego,
in the woman and in himself, reduce further and further back, till
himself is a babbling idiot, a vessel full of disintegrated parts, and
the woman is reduced to a nullity.
This is real death. The actual physical fact of death is part of the
life-stream. It is an incidental point when the flux of light and dark
has flowed sufficiently apart for the conjunction, which we call life,
to disappear.
We live with the pure flux of death, it is part of us all the time. But
our blossoming is transcendent, beyond death and life.
Only when we fall into egoism do we lose all chance of blossoming, and
then the flux of corruption is the breath of our existence. From top to
bottom, in the whole nation, we are engaged, fundamentally engaged in
the process of reduction and dissolution. Our reward is sensational
gratification in the flesh, or sensational gratification within the
mind, the utter gratification we experience when we can pull apart the
whole into its factors. This is the reward in scientific and
introspective knowledge, this is the reward in the pleasure of cheap
sensuality.
In each case, the experience remains as it were absolute. It is the
statement of what is, or what was. And a statement of what _is_, is the
absolute footstep in the progress backward towards the starting place,
it is the _undoing_ of a complete unit into the factors which previously
went to making its oneness. It is the reduction of the iris back into
its component waves.
There was the bliss when the iris came into being. There is now the
bliss when the iris passes out of being, and the whole is torn apart.
The secret of the whole is never captured. Certain data are captured.
The secret escapes down the sensual, or the sensational, or
intellectual, thrill of pleasure.
So there goes on reduction after reduction within the shell. And we, who
find our utmost gratification in this process of reduction, this flux of
corruption, this retrogression of death, we will preserve with might and
main the glassy envelope, the insect rind, the tight-shut shell of the
cabbage, the withered, null walls of the womb. For by virtue of this
null envelope alone do we proceed uninterrupted in this process of
gratifying reduction.
And this is utter evil, this secret, silent worship of the null envelope
that preserves us intact for our gratification with the flux of
corruption.
Intact within the null envelope, which we have come to worship as the
preserver of this our life-activity of reduction, we re-act back upon
what we are. We do not seek any more the consummation of union. We seek
the consummation of reduction.
When a man seeks a woman in love, or in positive desire, he seeks a
union, he seeks a consummation of himself with that which is not
himself, light with dark, dark with light.
But within the glassy, null envelope of the enclosure, no union is
sought, no union is possible; after a certain point, only reduction. Ego
reacts upon ego only in friction. There are small egos, many small
people, who have not reached the limit of the confines which we worship.
They may still have small consummation in union. But all those who are
strong and have travelled far have met and reacted from the nullity.
And then, when a man seeks a woman, he seeks not a consummation in
union, but a frictional reduction. He seeks to plunge his compound flesh
into the cold acid that will reduce him, in supreme sensual experience,
down to his parts. This is Rogozhin seeking Nastasia Filippovna, Dmitri
his Grushenka, or D’Annunzio in Fuoco seeking his Foscarina. This is
more or less what happens when a soldier, maddened with lust of pure
destructiveness, violently rapes the woman of his captivity. It is that
he may destroy another being by the very act which is called the act of
creation, or procreation. In the brute soldier it is cruelty-lust: as it
was in the Red Indian. But when we come to civilized man, it is not so
simple. His cruelty-lust is directed almost as much against himself as
against his victim. He is destroying, reducing, breaking down that of
himself which is within the envelope. He is immersing himself within a
keen, fierce, terrible reducing agent. This is true of the hero in Edgar
Allan Poe’s tales, _Ligeia_, or the _Fall of the House of Usher_. The
man seeks his own sensational reduction, but he disintegrates the woman
even more, in the name of love. In the name of love, what horrors men
perpetrate, and are applauded!
It is only in supreme crises that man reaches the supreme pitch of
annihilation. The difference, however, is only a difference in degree,
not in kind. The bank-clerk performs in a mild degree what Poe performed
intensely and deathlily.
These are the men in whom the development is rather low, whose souls are
coarsely compounded, so that the reduction is coarse, a sort of activity
of coarse hate.
But the men of finer sensibility and finer development, sensuous or
conscious, they must proceed more gradually and subtly and finely in the
process of reduction. It is necessary for a finely compounded nature to
reduce itself more finely, to know the subtle gratification of its own
reduction.
A subtle nature like Myshkin’s would find no pleasure of reduction in
connection with Grushenka, scarcely any with Nastasia. He must proceed
more delicately. He must give up his soul to the reduction. It is his
mind, his conscious self he wants to reduce. He wants to dissolve it
back. He wants to become infantile, like a child, to reduce and resolve
back all the complexity of his consciousness, to the rudimentary
condition of childhood. That is his ideal.
So he seeks mental contacts, mental re-actions. It is in his mental or
conscious contacts that he seeks to obtain the gratification of
self-reduction. He reaches his crisis in his monologue of self-analysis,
self-dissolution, in the drawing-room scene where he falls in a fit.
And of course, all this reducing activity is draped in alluring
sentimentalism. The most evil things in the world, today, are to be
found under the chiffon folds of sentimentalism. Sentimentality is the
garment of our vice. It covers viciousness as inevitably as greenness
covers a bog.
With all our talk of advance, progress, we are all the time working
backwards. Our heroines become younger and younger. In the movies, the
heroine is becoming more and more childish, and touched with infantile
idiocy. We cannot bear honest maturity. We want to reduce ourselves
back, back to the _corruptive_ state of childishness.
Now it is all very well for a child to be a child. But for a grown
person to be slimily, pornigraphically reaching out for
child-gratifications, is disgusting. The same with the prevalent love of
boys. It is the desire to be reduced back, reduced back, in our
accomplished ego: always within the unshattered rind of our completeness
and complacency, to go backwards, in sentimentalised disintegration, to
the states of childhood.
And no matter _what_ happens to us, now, we sentimentalise it and use it
as a means of sensational reduction. Even the great war does not alter
our civilization one iota, in its total nature. The form, the whole
form, remains intact. Only inside the complete envelope we writhe with
sensational experiences of death, hurt, horror, reduction.
The goodness of anything depends on the direction in which it is moving.
Childhood, like a bud, striving and growing and struggling towards
blossoming full maturity, is surely beautiful. But childhood as a
_goal_, for which grown people aim: childishness futile and sentimental,
for which men and women lust, and which always retreats when grasped,
like the _ignis fatuus_ of a poisonous marsh of corruption: this is
disgusting.
While we live, we are balanced between the flux of life and the flux of
death. All the while our bodies are being composed and decomposed. But
while every man fully lives, all the time the two streams keep fusing
into the third reality, of real creation. Every new gesture, every
fresh smile of a child is a new emergence into creative being: a glimpse
of the Holy Ghost.
But when grown people start grimacing with childishness, or lusting
after child-gratifications, it is corruption pure and simple.
And the still clear look on an old face, and the stillness of old,
withered hands, which have gathered the long repose of autumn, this is
the purity of the two streams consummated, and the bloom, like autumn
crocuses, of age.
But the painted, silly child-face that old women make nowadays: or the
harpy’s face that many have, lusting for the sensations of youth: the
hard, voracious, selfish faces of old men, seeking their own ends,
devouring the shoots of young life: this is vile.
While we live, we are balanced between the flux of life and the flux of
death. But the real clue is the Holy Ghost, that moves us on into the
state of blossoming. And each year the blossoming is different: from the
delicate blue speedwells of childhood to the equally delicate, frail
farewell flowers of old age: through all the poppies and sunflowers:
year after year of difference.
While we live, we change, and our flowering is a constant change.
But once we fall into the state of egoism, we cannot change. The ego,
the self-conscious ego remains fixed, a final envelope around us. And
we are then safe inside the mundane egg of our own self-consciousness
and self-esteem.
Safe we are! Safe as houses! Shut up like unborn chickens that cannot
break the shell of the egg. That’s how safe we are! And as we can’t be
born, we can only rot. That’s how safe we are!
Safe within the everlasting walls of the egg-shell we have not the
courage, nor the energy, to crack, we fall, like the shut-up chicken,
into a pure flux of corruption, and the worms are our angels.
And mankind falls into the state of innumerable little worms bred within
the unbroken shell: all clamoring for food, food, food, all feeding on
the dead body of creation, all crying peace! peace! universal peace!
brotherhood of man! Everything must be “universal”, to the conquering
worm. It is only _life_ which is different.
V
THE NUPTIALS OF DEATH AND THE ATTENDANT VULTURE
To those who are in prison, whose being is prisoner within the walls of
unliving fact, there are only two forms of triumph: the triumph of
inertia, or the triumph of the Will. There is no flowering possible.
And the experience _en route_ to either triumph, is the experience of
sensationalism.
Stone walls need not a prison make: that is, not an _absolute_ prison.
If the great sun has shone into a man’s soul, even prison-walls cannot
blot it out. Yet prison-walls, unless they be a temporary shelter are
deadly things.
So, if we are imprisoned within walls of accomplished fact, experience,
or knowledge, we are prisoned indeed. The living sun is shut out
finally. A false sun, like a lamp, shines.
All absolutes are prison-walls. These “laws” which science has invented,
like conservation of energy, indestructibility of matter, gravitation,
the will-to-live, survival of the fittest: and even these absolute
facts, like--the earth goes round the sun, or the doubtful atoms,
electrons, or ether--they are all prison-walls, unless we realise that
we don’t know what they mean. We don’t know what we mean, ultimately, by
_conservation_, or _indestructibility_. Our atoms, electrons, ether, are
caps that fit exceeding badly. And our will-to-live contains a germ of
suicide, and our survival-of-the-fittest the germ of degeneracy. As for
the earth going round the sun: it goes round as the blood goes round my
body, absolutely mysteriously, with the rapidity and hesitation of life.
But the human ego, in its pettifogging arrogance, sets up these things
for you as absolutes, and unless you kick hard and kick in time, they
are your prison walls forever. Your spirit will be like a dead bee in a
cell.
Once you are in prison, you have no experience left, save the experience
of reduction, destruction going on inwardly. Your sentimentalism is only
the smell of your own rottenness.
This reduction within the self is sensationalism. And sensationalism, of
course, is progressive. You can’t have your cake and eat it. To get a
sensation, you eat your cake. That is, to get a sensation, you reduce
down some part of your complex psyche, physical and psychic. You get a
flash, as when you strike a match. But a match once struck can never be
struck again. It is finished--sensationalism is an exhaustive process.
The resolving down is progressive. It can apparently go on _ad
infinitum_. But in infinity it means what we call utter death, utter
nothingness, opposites released from opposition, and from conjunction,
till there _is_ nothing left at all, only nullity itself.
Sensationalism progresses in the individual. This is the doom of it.
This is the doom of egoistic sex. Egoistic sex-excitement means the
reacting of the sexes against one another in a purely reducing activity.
The reduction progresses. When I have finally reduced one complexity,
one unit, I must proceed to the next, the lower. It is the progressive
activity of dissolution within the soul.
And the climax of this progression is in perversity, degradation and
death. But only the very powerful and energetic ego can go through all
the phases of its own violent reduction. The ordinary crude soul, after
having enjoyed the brief reduction in the sex, is finished there, blasé,
empty. And alcohol is slow and crude, and opium is only for the
imaginative, the somewhat spiritual nature. Then remain the opium-drugs,
for a finisher, a last reducer.
There remains only the reduction of the contact with death. So that as
the sex is exhausted, gradually, a keener desire, the desire for the
touch of death follows on, in an intense nature. Then come the fatal
drugs. Or else those equally fatal wars and revolutions which really
create nothing at all, but destroy, and leave emptiness.
When a man is cleaving like a fly with spread arms upon the face of a
rock, with infinite space beneath him, and he feels his foothold going,
and he cries out to the men on the rope, and falls away, dangling into
endless space, jerked back by the thin rope, then he perishes, he is
fused in the reducing flame of death. He knows another keen anguish of
reduction. What matters to that man, afterwards? Does any of the complex
life of the world below matter? None. All that is left is the triumph of
his will in having gone so far and recovered. And all that lies ahead is
another risk, another slip, another agony of the fall, or a demonish
triumph of the will. And the _final_ consummation of such a man is the
last fall of all, the few horrible seconds whilst he drops, like a
meteorite, to extinction. This is his final and utter satisfaction, the
smash of extinction at the bottom.
But even this man is not a pure egoist. This man still has his soul open
to the mystery of the mountains, he still feels the passion of the
_contact_ with death.
If he wins, however, in the contest: if his will triumphs in the test:
then there is danger of his falling into final egoism, the more-or-less
inert complacency of a self-satisfied old man.
The soul is still alive, while it has passion: any sort of passion, even
for the brush with death, or for the final and utter reduction. And in
the brush with death it may be released again into positive life. A man
may be sufficiently released by a fall on the rope and the dangling for
a few minutes of agony, in space. That may finally reduce his soul to
its elements, set it free and child-like, and break-down that egoistic
entity which has developed upon it from the past. The near touch of
death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic
will, and release that other flow.
But if a man, having fallen very near to death, gets up at length and
says: “I did it! It’s my triumph! I beat the mountains that
time!”--then, of course, his ego has only pulled itself in triumph out
of the menace, and the individual will go on more egoistic and barrenly
complacent.
If a man says: “I fell! But the unseen goodness helped me, when I
struggled for life, and so I was saved”--then this man will go on in
life unimprisoned, the channels of his heart open, and passion still
flowing through him.
But if the brush with death only gave the brilliant sensational thrill
of fear, followed immediately, by the _gamin_ exultance: “Yah! I got
myself out all right!”--then the ego continues intact, having enjoyed
the sensation, and remaining vulgarly triumphant in the power of the
Will. And it will continue inert and complacent till the next thrill.
So it is with war. Whoever goes to war in his own might alone, will even
if he come out victorious, come out barren: a barren triumpher, whose
strength is in inertia. A man must do his own utmost: but even then, the
final stroke will be delivered, or the final strength will be given from
the unseen, and the man must feel it. If he doesn’t feel it, he will be
an inert victor, or equally inert vanquished, complacent and sterile in
either case.
There must be a certain faith. And that means, an ultimate reliance on
that which is beyond our will, and not contained in our ego.
We have gone to war. For a hundred years we have been piling up safety
upon safety, we have grown enormously within the shell of our
civilization, we have rounded off our own ego and grown almost
complacent about our own triumphs of will. Till we come to a point where
sex seems exhausted, and passion falls flat. When even criticism and
analysis now only fatigue the mind and weary the soul.
Then we gradually, gradually formulate the desire: Oh, give us the brush
with death, and let us see if we can win out all right!
We go into a war like this in order to get once more the final reduction
under the touch of death. That the death is so inhuman, cold,
mechanical, sordid, the giving of the body to the grip of cold,
stagnant mud and stagnant water, whilst one awaits for some falling
death, the knowledge of the gas clouds that may lacerate and reduce the
lungs to a heaving mass, this, this sort of self-inflicted Sadism,
brings almost a final satisfaction to our civilized and still passionate
men.
Almost! And when it is over, and we have won out, shall we be released
into a new lease of life? Or shall we only extend our dreary lease of
egoism and complacency? Shall we know the barren triumph of the
will?--or the equally barren triumph inertia, helplessness, barren
irresponsibility.
And still, as far as there is any passion in the war, it is a passion
for the embrace with death. The desire to deal death and to take death.
The enemy is the bride, whose body we will reduce with rapture of agony
and wounds. We are the bridegroom, engaged with him in the long,
voluptuous embrace, the giving of agony, the rising and rising of the
slow unwilling transport of misery, the soaking-in of day after day of
wet mud, in penetration of the heavy, sordid, unendurable cold, on and
on to the climax, the laceration of the blade, like a frost through the
tissue, blasting it.
This is the desire and the consummation, this is the war. But at length,
we shall be satisfied, at length we shall have consummation. Then the
war will end. And what then?
It is not really a question of victories or defeats. It is a question of
fulfilment, and release from the old prison-house of a dead form. The
war is one bout in the terrific, horrible labour, our civilization
laboring in child-birth, and unable to bring forth.
How will it end? Will there be a release, a relaxation of the horrible
walls, and a real issuing, a birth?
Or will it end in nothing, all the agony going to stiffen the old form
deader, to enclose the unborn more helplessly and drearily.
It may easily be. For behind us all, in the war, stand the old and the
elderly, complacent with egoism, bent on maintaining the old form. Oh,
they are the monkey grinning with anxiety and anticipation, behind us,
waiting for the burnt young cat to pull the chestnut out of the fire.
And in the end, they will thrill with the triumph of their egoistic
will, and harden harder still with vulture-like enertia, rapacious
inertia.
In sex, we have plunged the quick of creation deep into the cold flux of
reduction, corruption, till the quick is extinguished. In war we have
plunged the whole quick of the living, sentient body into a cold, cold
flux. Much has died and much will die. But if the whole quick dies, and
there remain only the material, mechanical unquickened tissue, acting at
the bidding of the mechanical will, and the sterile ego triumphant, then
it is a poor tale, a barrenly poor tale.
I have seen a soldier at the seaside who was maimed. One leg was only a
small stump, with the trouser folded back on it. He was a handsome man
of about thirty, finely built. His face was sun-browned, and
extraordinarily beautiful, still, with a strange placidity, something
like perfection, abstract, complete. He had known his consummation. It
seemed he could never desire corruption or reduction again, he had had
his satisfaction of death. He was become almost impersonal, a simple
abstraction, all his personality loosed and undone. He was now like a
babe just born, new to begin life. Yet in a sense, still-born. The
newness and candour, like a flower just unloosed, was something strange
and rare in him. Yet unloosed, curiously, into the light of death.
So he came forward down the pier, in the sunshine, slowly on his
crutches. Behind, the sea was milk-white and vague, as if full of
ghosts, and silent, except when a long white wave plunged to silence out
of the smooth, milky silence of the sea, coming from very far out of the
ghostly stillness.
The maimed soldier, strong and handsome, with some of the frail candour
of a newly-wakened child in his face, came slowly down the pier on his
crutches, looking at everybody who looked at him. He was naïve like a
child, wondering. The people stared at him with a sort of fascination.
So he was rather vain, rather proud, like a vain child.
He did not know he was maimed, it had not entered his consciousness. His
soul, so clean and new and fine, could not conceive of such a thing. He
was rather vain and slightly ostentatious, not as a man with a wound, a
trophy, more as a child who is conspicuous among envious elders.
The women particularly were fascinated. They could not look away from
him. The strange abstraction of horror and death was so perfect in his
face, like the horror of birth on a new-born infant, that they were
almost hysterical. They gravitated towards him, helplessly, they could
not move away from him.
They wanted him, they wanted him so badly, that they were almost beside
themselves. They wanted his consummation, his perfect completeness in
horror and death. They too wanted the consummation. They followed him,
they made excuses to talk to him. And he, strange, abstract, glowing
still from the consummation of destruction and pain and horror, like a
bridegroom just come from the bride, seemed to glow before the women, to
give off a strange, unearthly radiance, which was like an embrace, a
most poignant embrace to their souls.
But still his eyes were looking, looking, looking for someone who was
not eager for him, to know him, to devour him, like women round a
perfect child. He had not realized yet what all the attention meant,
which he received. He was so strong in his new birth. And he was
looking for his own kind, for the living, the new-born, round about. But
he was surrounded by greedy, voracious people, like birds seeking the
death in him, pecking at the death in him.
It was horrible, rather sinister, the women round the man, there on the
pier stretched from the still, sunny land over the white sea, noiseless
and inhuman.
The spirit of destruction is divine, when it breaks the ego and opens
the soul to the wide heavens. In corruption there is divinity. Aphrodite
is, on one side, the great goddess of destruction in sex, Dionysus in
the spirit. Moloch and some gods of Egypt are gods also of the knowledge
of death. In the soft and shiny voluptuousness of decay, in the marshy
chill heat of reptiles, there is the sign of the Godhead. It is the
activity of departure. And departure is the opposite equivalent of
coming together; decay, corruption, destruction, breaking down is the
opposite equivalent of creation. In infinite going-apart there is
revealed again the pure absolute, the absolute relation: this time truly
as a Ghost: the ghost of what was.
We who live, we can only live or die. And when, like the maimed soldier
on the pier with the white sea behind, when we have come right back into
life, and the wonder of death fades off our faces again, what then?
Shall we go on with wide, careless eyes and the faint astonished smile
waiting all our lives for the accomplished death? Waiting for death
finally? And continuing the sensational reduction process? Or shall we
fade into a dry empty egoism? Which will the maimed soldier do? He
cannot remain as he is, clear and peaceful.
Are we really doomed, and smiling with the wonder of doom?
Even if we are, we need not say: “It is finished.” It is never finished.
That is one time when Jesus spoke a fatal half-truth, in his
_Consummatum Est!_ Death consummates nothing. It can but abruptly close
the individual life. But Life itself, and even the forms men have given
it, will persist and persist. There is no consummation into death. Death
leaves still further deaths.
Leonardo knew this: he knew the strange endlessness of the flux of
corruption. It is Mona Lisa’s ironic smile. Even Michael Angelo knew it.
It is in his _Leda and the Swan_. For the swan is one of the symbols of
divine corruption with its reptile feet buried in the ooze and mud, its
voluptuous form yielding and embracing the ooze of water, its beauty
white and cold and terrifying, like the dead beauty of the moon, like
the water-lily, the sacred lotus, its neck and head like the snake, it
is for us a flame of the cold white fire of flux, the phosphorescence of
corruption, the salt, cold burning of the sea which corrodes all it
touches, coldly reduces every sun-built form to ash, to the original
elements. This is the beauty of the swan, the lotus, the snake, this
cold white salty fire of infinite reduction. And there was some
suggestion of this in the Christ of the early Christians, the Christ who
was the Fish.
So that, when Leonardo and Michael Angelo represent Leda in the embrace
of the swan, they are painting mankind in the clasp of the divine flux
of corruption, the singing death. Mankind _turned back_, to cold, bygone
consummations.
When the swan first rose out of the marshes, it was a glory of creation.
But when we turn back, to seek its consummation again, it is a fearful
flower of corruption.
And corruption, like growth, is only divine when it is pure, when all is
given up to it. If it be experienced as a controlled activity within an
intact whole, this is vile. When the cabbage flourishes round a hollow
rottenness, this is vile. When corruption goes on within the living
womb, this is unthinkable. The chicken dead in the egg is an
abomination. We cannot subject a divine process to a static will, not
without blasphemy and loathsomeness. The static will must be subject to
the process of reduction, also. For the pure absolute, the Holy Ghost,
lies also in the relationship which is made manifest by the departure,
the departure _ad infinitum_, of the opposing elements.
Corruption will at last break down for us the deadened forms, and
release us into the infinity. But the static ego, with its
will-to-persist, neutralises both life and death, and utterly defies the
Holy Ghost. The unpardonable sin!
It is possible for this static will, this vile rind of nothingness, to
triumph for a long while over the divine relation in the flux, to assert
an absolute nullity of static form.
This we do who preserve intact our complete null concept of life, as an
envelope around this flux of destruction, the war. The whole concept and
form of life remains absolute and static, around the gigantic but
contained seething of the fight. It is the rottenness seething within
the cabbage, corruption within the old, fixed body. The cabbage does not
relax, the body is not broken open. The reduction is sealed and
contained.
That is our attitude now. It is the attitude of the women who flutter
round and peck at death in us. This is the carrion process set in, the
process of obscenity, the baboon, the vulture in us.
In so far as we fight to remain ideally intact, in so far as we seek to
give and to have the experience of death, so that we may remain
unchanged in our whole conscious form, may preserve the static entity of
our conception, around the fight, we are obscene. We are like vultures
and obscene insects.
We may give ourselves utterly to destruction. Then our conscious forms
are destroyed along with us, and something new must arise. But we may
not have corruption within ourselves as sensationalism, our skin and
outer form intact. To destroy life for the preserving of a static, rigid
form, a shell, a glassy envelope, this is the lugubrious activity of the
men who fight to save democracy and to end all fighting. The fight
itself is divine, the relation betrayed in the fight is absolute. But
the glassy envelope of the established concept is only a foul nullity.
Destruction and Creation are the two relative absolutes between the
opposing infinites. Life is in both. Life may even, for a while be
almost entirely in one, or almost entirely in the other. The end of
either oneness is death. For life is really in the two, the absolute is
the pure relation, which is both.
If we have our fill of destruction, then we shall turn again to
creation. We shall need to live again, and live hard, for once our great
civilized form is broken, and we are at last born into the open sky, we
shall have a whole new universe to grow up into, and to find relations
with. The future will open its delicate, dawning icons in front of us,
unfathomable.
But let us watch that we do not preserve an enveloping falsity around
our destructive activity, some nullity of virtue and self-righteousness,
some conceit of the “general good” and the salvation of the world by
bringing it all within our own conceived whole form. This is the utter
lie and obscenity. The ego, like Humpty Dumpty, sitting for ever on the
wall.
The vulture was once, perhaps, an eagle. It became a supreme strong
bird, almost like the phoenix. But at a certain point, it said: “I am
It.” And then it proceeded to preserve its own static form crystal about
the flux of corruption, fixed, absolute as a crystal, about the horrible
seethe of corruption. Then the eagle became a vulture.
And the dog, through cowardice, arrested itself at a certain point and
became domestic, or a hyæna, preserving a glassy, fixed form about a
voracious seethe of corruption.
And the baboon, almost a man, or almost a high beast, arrested himself
and became obscene, a grey, hoary rind closed upon an activity of strong
corruption.
And the louse, in its little glassy envelope, brings everything into the
corrupting pot of its little belly.
And these are all perfectly-arrested egoists, asserting themselves
static and foul, triumphant in inertia and in will.
Let us watch that we do not turn either into carrion or into carrion
eaters. Let us watch that we do not become, in the vulgar triumph of our
will, and the obscene inertia of our ego, vultures who feed on
putrescence. The lust for death, for pain, for torture, is even then
better than this fatal triumph of inertia and the egoistic will.
Anything is better than that. The Red Indians, full of Sadism and
self-torture and death, destroyed themselves. But the eagle, when it
gets stuck and can know no more blossoming turns into a vulture with a
naked head, and becomes carrion-foul.
There must always be some balance between the passion for destruction
and the passion for creation, in every living activity; for in the race
to destruction we can utterly destroy the vital quick of our being,
leave us amorphous, undistinguished, vegetable; and in the race for
creation we can lose ourselves in mere production, and pile ourselves
over with dead null monstrosities of obsolete form. All birth comes with
the reduction of old tissue. But the reduction is not the birth. That is
the fallacy of all of us, who represent the old tissue now. In this
fallacy we go careering down the slope in our voluptuousness of death
and horror, careering into oblivion, like Hippolytus trammelled up and
borne away in the traces of his maddened horses.
Who says that the spirit of destruction will outrun itself? Not till the
driver be annihilated. Then the destructive career will run itself out.
And then what?
But neither destruction nor production is, in itself, evil. The danger
lies in the fall into egoism, which neutralises both. When destruction
and production alike are mechanical, meaningless.
The race of destruction may outrun itself. But still the form may remain
intact, the old imprisoning laws. Only those who have not travelled to
the confines will be left, the mean, the average, the laborers, the
slaves: all of them little crowned egos.
Still the ancient mummy will have the people within its belly. There
they will be slaves: not to the enemy, but to themselves, the concept
established about them: being slaves, they will be happy enclosed within
the tomb-like belly of a concept, like goldfish in a bowl, which think
themselves the centre of the universe.
This is like the vultures of the mountains. They have kept the form and
height of eagles. But their souls have turned into the souls of slaves
and carrion eaters. Their size, their strength, their supremacy of the
mountains, remains intact. But they have become carrion eaters.
This is the tomb, the whited sepulchre, this very form, this liberty,
this ideal for which we are fighting. The Germans are fighting for
another sepulchre. Theirs is the sepulchre of the Eagle become vulture,
ours is the sepulchre of the lion become dog: soon to become hyæna.
But we would have our own sepulchre, in which we shall dwell secure
when the rage of destruction is over. Let it be the sepulchre of the dog
or the vulture, the sepulchre of democracy or aristocracy, what does it
matter! Inside it, the worms will jig the same jazzy dances, and heave
and struggle to get hold of vast and vaster stores of carrion, or its
equivalent, gold.
The carrion birds, aristocrats, sit up high and remote, on the sterile
rocks of the old absolute, their obscene heads gripped hard and small,
like knots of stone clenched upon themselves forever. The carrion dogs
and hyænas of the old, arid, democratic absolute, prowl among the bare
stones of the common earth, in numbers, their loins cringing, their
heads sharpened to stone.
Those who will hold power, afterwards, they will sit on their rocks and
heights of unutterable morality, which have become foul through the
course of ages, like vultures upon the unchangeable mountain-tops. The
fixed, existing form will persist forever beneath them, about them, they
will have become the spirit incarnate of the fixed form of life. They
will eat carrion, having become a static hunger for keen putrescence.
This alone will support the incarnation of hoary fixity which they are.
And beside the carrion they will fight the multitudes of hoary, obscene
dogs, which also persist. It is the mortal form become null and fixed
and enduring, glassy, horrible, beyond life and death, beyond
consummation, the awful, stony nullity. It is timeless, almost as the
rainbow.
But it is not utterly timeless. It is only unthinkably slow, static in
its passing away, perpetuated.
Its very aspect of timelessness is a fraud.
What is evil?--not death, nor the blood-devouring Moloch, but this
spirit of perpetuation and apparent timelessness, this obscenity which
holds the great carrion birds, and the carrion dogs. The tiger, the
hawk, the weasel, are beautiful things to me; and as they strike the
dove and the hare, that is the will of God, it is a consummation, a
bringing together of two extremes, a making perfect one from the
duality.
But the baboon, and the hyæna, the vulture, the condor, and the carrion
crow, these fill me with fear and horror. These are the highly developed
life-forms, now arrested, petrified, frozen, falsely, timeless. The
baboon was almost as man, the hyæna as the lion: the vulture and the
condor are greater than the eagle, the carrion crow is stronger than the
hawk. And these obscene beasts are not ashamed. They are stark and
static, they are not mixed. Their will is hoary, ageless. Before us, the
Egyptians have known them and worshipped them.
The baboon, with his intelligence and his unthinkable loins, the cunning
hyæna with his cringing, stricken loins, these are the static form of
one achieved ego, the egoistic Christian, the democratic, the
unselfish. The vulture, with her naked neck and naked, small stony
head, this is the static form of the other achieved ego, the eagle, the
Self, aristocratic, lordly, pagan.
It is unthinkable and unendurable. Yet we are drawn more and more in
this direction. After the supreme intelligence, the baboon, after the
supreme pride, the vulture. The millionaire: the international
financier: the bankers of this world. The baboons, the hyænas, the
vultures.
The snake is the spirit of the great corruptive principle, the festering
cold of the marsh. This is how he seems, as we look back. We revolt from
him, but we share the same life and tide of life as he. He struggles as
we struggle, he enjoys the sun, he comes to the water to drink, he curls
up, hides himself to sleep. And under the low skies of the far past
æons, he emerged a king out of chaos, a long beam of new life. But the
vulture looms out in sleep like a rock, invincible within the hoary,
static form, invincible against the flux of both eternities.
One day there was a loud, terrible scream from the garden, tearing the
soul. Oh, and it was a snake lying on the warm garden bed, and in his
teeth the leg of a frog, a frog spread out, screaming with horror. We
ran near. The snake glanced at us sharply, holding fast to the frog,
trying to get further hold. In so trying, it let the frog escape, which
leaped convulsed, away. Then the snake slid noiselessly under cover,
sullenly, never looking at us again.
We were all white with fear. But why? In the world of twilight as in the
world of light, one beast shall devour another. The world of corruption
has its stages, where the lower shall devour the higher, _ad infinitum_.
So a snake, also, devours the fascinated bird, the little, static bird
with its tiny skull. Yet is there no great reptile that shall swallow
the vulture?
As yet, the vulture is beyond life or change. It stands hard, immune
within the principle of corruption, and the principle of creation,
unbreakable. It is kept static by the fire of putrescence, which makes
the void within balance the void without. It is a changeless tomb
wherein the latter stages of corruption take place, counteracting
perfectly the action of life. Life devours death to keep the static
nullity of the form.
So the ragged, grey-and-black vulture sits hulked, motionless, like a
hoary, foul piece of living rock, its naked head and neck sunk in, only
the curved beak protruding, the naked eyelids lowered. Motionless,
beyond life, it sits on the sterile heights.
It does not sleep, it stays utterly static. When it spreads its great
wings and floats down the air, still it is static, still this is the
sleep, a dream-floating. When it rips up carrion and swallows it, it is
still the same dream-motion, static, beyond the inglutination. The
naked, obscene head is always fast locked, like stone.
It is this naked, obscene head of a bird, sleep-locked, a petrified knot
of sleep, that I cannot bear to think of. When I think of it, I neither
live nor die, I am petrified into foulness. The knot of volition, the
will knotted upon a perpetuated moment, will not now be unloosed for
ever. It will remain hoary, unchanging, timeless. Till it disappears,
suddenly. Amid all the flux of time, of the two eternities, this head
remains unbroken in a cold, rivetted sleep. But one day it will be
broken.
I am set utterly against this small, naked, stone-clinched head, it is a
foul vision I want to wipe away. But I am set utterly also against the
loathsome, cringing, imprisoned loins of the hyæna, that cringe down the
hind legs of the beast with their static weight. Again the static will
has knotted into rivetted, endless nullity, but here upon the loins. In
the vulture, the head is turned to stone, the fire is in the talons and
the beak. In the hoary, glassy hyæna, the loins are turned to stone,
heavy, sinking down to earth, almost dragged along, the fire is in the
white eyes, and in the fangs. The hyæna can scarcely see and hear the
living world; it draws back on to the stony fixity of its own loins,
draws back upon its own nullity, sightless save for carrion. The
vulture can neither see nor hear the living world, it is one supreme
glance, the glance in search of carrion, its own absolute quenching,
beyond which is nothing.
This is the end, and beyond the end. This is beyond the beginning and
the end. Here the beginning and the end are revoked. The vulture,
revoking the end, the end petrified upon the beginning, is a nullity.
The hyæna, the beginning petrified beneath the end, is a nullity. This
is beyond the beginning and the end, this is aristocracy gone beyond
aristocracy, the I gone beyond the I; the other is democracy gone beyond
democracy, the not-me surpassed upon itself.
This is the changelessness of the kingdoms of the earth, null,
unthinkable.
This is the last state into which man may fall, in the triumph of will
and the triumph of inertia, the state of the animated sepulchre.
VI
TO BE, AND TO BE DIFFERENT
Behind me there is time stretching back for ever, on to the unthinkable
beginnings, infinitely. And this is eternity. Ahead of me, where I do
not know, there is time stretching on infinitely, to eternity. These are
the two eternities.
We cannot say, they are one and the same. They are two and utterly
different. If I look at the eternity ahead, my back is towards the other
eternity, this latter is forgotten, it _is_ not. Which is the Christian
attitude. If I look at the eternity behind, back to the source, then
there is for me one eternity, one only. And this is the pagan eternity,
the eternity of Pan. This is the eternity some of us are veering round
to, in private life, during the past few years.
The two eternities are _not_ one eternity. It is only by denying the
very meaning of speech itself, that we can argue them into oneness. They
are two, relative to one another.
They are only _one_ in their mutual relation, which relation is timeless
and absolute. The eternities are temporal and relative. But their
relation is constant, absolute without mitigation.
The motion of the eternities is dual: they flow together, and they flow
apart, they flow for ever towards union, they start back forever in
opposition, to flow for ever back to the issue, back into the
unthinkable future, back into the unthinkable past.
We have known both directions. The Pagan, aristocratic, lordly,
sensuous, has declared the Eternity of the Origin, the Christian,
humble, spiritual, unselfish, democratic, has declared the Eternity of
the Issue, the End. We have heard both declarations, we have seen each
great ideal fulfilled, as far as is possible, at this time, on earth.
And now we say: “There is no eternity, there is no infinite, there is no
God, there is no immortality.”
And all the time we know we are cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Without God, without some sort of immortality, not necessarily
life-everlasting, but without _something_ absolute, we are nothing. Yet
now, in our spitefulness of self-frustration, we would rather be nothing
than listen to our own being.
God is not the one infinite, nor the other, our immortality is not in
the original eternity, neither in the ultimate eternity. God is the
utter relation between the two eternities, He is in the flowing together
and the flowing apart.
This utter relation is timeless, absolute and perfect. It is in the
Beginning and the End, just the same. Whether it be revealed or not, it
is the same. It is the Unrevealed God: what Jesus called the Holy Ghost.
My immortality is not from the beginning, in my endless ancestry. Nor is
it on ahead in life everlasting. My life comes to me from the great
Creator, the Beginner. And my spirit runs towards the Comforter, the
Goal far ahead. But I, what am I between?
These two halves I always am. But I am never _myself_ until they are
consummated into a spark of oneness, the gleam of the Holy Ghost. And in
this spark is my immortality, my non-mortal being, that which is not
swept away down either direction of time.
I am not immortal till I have achieved immortality. And immortality is
not a question of time, of everlasting life. It is a question of
consummate being. Most men die and perish away, unconsummated,
unachieved. It is not easy to achieve immortality, to win a consummate
being. It is supremely difficult. It means undaunted suffering and
undaunted enjoyment, both. And when a man has reached his ultimate of
enjoyment and his ultimate of suffering, _both_, then he knows the two
eternities, then he is made absolute, like the iris, created out of the
two. Then he is immortal. It is not a question of time. It is a question
of being. It is not a question of submission, submitting to the divine
grace: it is a question of submitting to the divine grace, in suffering
and self-obliteration, and it is a question of conquering by divine
grace, as the tiger leaps on the trembling deer, in utter satisfaction
of the Self, in complete fulfilment of desire. The fulfilment is dual.
And having known the dual fulfilment, then within the fulfilled soul is
established the divine relation, the Holy Spirit dwells there, the soul
has achieved immortality, it has attained to absolute being.
So the body of man is begotten and born in an ecstasy of delight and of
suffering. It is a flame kindled between the opposing confluent elements
of the air. It is the battle-ground and marriage-bed of the two
invisible hosts. It flames up to its full strength, and is consummate,
perfect, absolute, the human body. It is a revelation of God, it is the
foam-burst of the two waves, it is the iris of the two eternities. It is
a flame, flapping and travelling in the winds of mortality.
Then the pressure of the dark and the light relaxes, the flame sinks. We
watch the slow departure, till only the wick glows. Then there is the
dead body, cold, rigid, perfect in its absolute form, the revelation of
the consummation of the flux, a perfect jet of foam that has fallen and
is vanishing away. The two waves are fast going asunder, the snow-wreath
melts, corruption’s quick fire is burning in the achieved revelation.
We cannot bear it, that the body should decay. We cover it up, we cannot
bear it. It is the revelation of God, it is the most holy of all
revealed things. And it melts into slow putrescence.
We cannot bear it. We wish above all to preserve this achieved and
perfect form, this revelation of God. And despair comes over us when it
passes away. “_Sic transit_,” we say, in agony.
The perfect form was not achieved in time, but in timelessness. It does
not belong to today or tomorrow, or to eternity. It just _is_.
It is we who pass away, we and the whole flux of the two eternities,
these pass. This is the eternal flux. But the God-quick, which is the
constant within the flux, this is neither temporal nor eternal, it is
truly timeless. And this perfect body was a revelation of the timeless
God, timeless as He. If we, in our mortality are temporal, if we are
part of the flux of the eternities then we swirl away in our living
flux, the flesh decomposes and is lost.
But all the time, whether in the glad warm confluence of creation or in
the cold flowing-apart of corruption, the same quick remains absolute
and timeless, the revelation is in God, timeless. This alone of
mortality does not belong to the passing away, this consummation, this
revelation of God within the body, or within the soul. This revelation
of God _is_ God. But we who live, we are of the flux, we belong to the
two eternities.
Only perpetuation is a sin. The perfect relation is perfect. But it is
therefore timeless. And we must not think to tie a knot in Time, and
thus to make the consummation temporal or eternal. The consummation is
timeless, and we belong to Time, in our process of living.
Only Matter is a very slow flux, the waves ebbing slowly apart. So we
engrave the beloved image on the slow, slow wave. We have the image in
marble, or in pictured colour.
This is art, this transferring to a slow flux the form that was attained
at the maximum of confluence between the two quick waves. This is art,
the revelation of a pure, an absolute relation between the two
eternities.
Matter is a slow, big wave flowing back to the Origin. And Spirit is a
slow, infinite wave flowing back to the Goal, the ultimate Future. On
the slow wave of matter and spirit, on marble or bronze or colour or
air, and on the consciousness, we imprint a perfect revelation, and this
is art: whether it reveal the relation in creation or in corruption, it
is the same, it is a revelation of God: whether it be Piero della
Francesca or Leonardo da Vinci, the _garçon qui pisse_ or Phidias, or
Christ or Rabelais. Because the revelation is imprinted on stone or
granite, on the slow, last-receding wave, therefore it remains with us
for a long, long time, like the sculptures of Egypt. But it is all the
time slowly passing away, unhindered, in its own time.
It passes away, but it is not in any sense lost. Our souls are
established upon all the revelations, upon all the timeless achieved
relationships, as the seed contains a convoluted memory of all the
revelation in the plant it represents. The flower is the burning of God
in the bush: the flame of the Holy Ghost: the actual Presence of
accomplished oneness, accomplished out of twoness. The true God is
_created_ every time a pure relationship, or a consummation out of
twoness into oneness takes place. So that the poppy flower is God come
red out of the poppy-plant. And a man, if he win to a sheer fusion in
himself of all the manifold creation, a pure relation, a sheer gleam of
oneness out of manyness, then this man is God created where before God
was uncreate. He is the Holy Ghost in tissue of flame and flesh, whereas
before, the Holy Ghost was but Ghost. It is true of a man as it is true
of a dandelion or of a tiger or of a dove. Each creature, by some
mystery, achieved a consummation in itself of all the wandering sky and
sinking earth, and leaped into the other kingdom, where flowers are, of
the gleaming Ghost. So it is for ever. The two waves of Time flow in
from the eternities, towards a meeting, a consummation. And the meeting,
the consummation, is heaven, is absolute. All the while, as long as time
lasts, the shock of the two waves passed into oneness, there is a new
heaven. All the while, heaven is created from the flux of time, the
galaxies between the night. And we too may be heavenly bodies, however
we swirl back in the flux. When we have surged into being, when we have
caught fire with friction, we are the immortals of heaven, the invisible
stars that make the galaxy of night, no matter how the skies are tossed
about. We can forget, but we cannot cease to be. Life nor death makes
any difference, once we _are_.
For ever the kingdom of Heaven is established more perfectly, more
beautifully, between the flux of the two eternities.
One by one, in our consummation, we pass, a new star, into the galaxy
that arches between the nightfall and the dawn, one by one, like the
bushes in the desert, we take fire with God, and burn timelessly: and
within the flame is heaven that has come to pass. Every flower that
comes out, every bird that sings, every hawk that drops like a blade on
her prey, every tiger flashing his paws, every serpent hissing out
poison, every dove bubbling in the leaves, this is timeless heaven
established from the flood, in this we have our form and our being.
Every night new Heaven may ripple into being, every era a new Cycle of
God may take place.
But it is all timeless. The error of errors is to try to keep heaven
fixed and rocking like a boat anchored within the flux of time. Then
there is sure to be shipwreck: “_Die Wellen verschlingen am Ende
Schiffer und Kahn._” From the flux of time Heaven takes place in
timelessness. The flux must go on.
This is sin, this tying the knot in Time, this anchoring the ark of
eternal truth upon the waters. There is no ark, there is no eternal
system, there is no rock of eternal truth. In Time and in Eternity all
is flux. Only in the other dimension, which is not the time-space
dimension, is there Heaven. We can no more _stay_ in this heaven, than
the flower can stay on its stem. We come and go.
So the body that came into being and walked transfigured in heavenliness
must lie down and fuse away in the slow fire of corruption. Time swirls
away, out of sight of the heavenliness. Heaven is not here nor there nor
anywhere. Heaven is in the other dimension. In the young, in the unborn,
this kingdom of Heaven which was revealed and has passed away, is
established; of this Heaven the young and the unborn have their being.
And if in us the Heaven be not revealed, if there be no transfiguration,
no consummation, then the infants cry in the night, in want, void,
strong want.
This is evil, this desire for constancy, for fixity in the temporal
world. This is the denial of the absolute good, the revocation of the
Kingdom of Heaven.
We cannot know God, in terms of the permanent, temporal world; we
cannot. We can only know the _revelation_ of God in the physical world.
And the revelation of God is God. But it vanishes as the rainbow. The
revelation is a condition in the whole flux of time. When this condition
has passed away, the revelation is no more revealed. It has gone. And
then God is gone, except to memory, a remembering of a critical moment
within the flux. But there is no revelation of God in memory. Memory is
not truth. Memory is persistence, perpetuation of a momentary cohesion
in the flux. God is gone, until next time. But the next time will come.
And then again we shall _see_ God, and once more, it will be different.
It is always different.
And we are all, now, living on the stale memory of a revelation of God.
Which is purely a repetitive and temporal thing. But it contains us, it
is our prison.
Whereas, there is nothing for a man to do but to behold God, and to
become God. It is no good living on memory. When the flower opens, see
him, don’t remember him. When the sun shines, be him, and then cease
again.
So we seek war, death, to kill this memory within us. We hate this
imprisoning memory so much, we will kill the whole world rather than
remain in prison to it. But why do we not create a new revelation of
God, instead of seeking merely the destruction of the old revelations?
We do this, because we are cowards. We say “The great revelation cannot
be destroyed, but I, who am a failure, I can be destroyed”. So we
destroy the individual stones rather than decide to pull down the whole
edifice. The edifice must stand, but the individual bricks must
sacrifice themselves. So carefully we remove single lives from the
edifice, and we destroy these single lives, carefully supporting the
edifice in the weakened place.
And the soldier says: “I die for my God and my Country”. When, as a
matter of fact, in his death his God and his country are so much
destroyed.
But we must always lie, always convert our action to a lie. We know that
we are living in a state of falsity, that all our social and religious
form is dead, a crystallised lie. Yet we say: “We will die for our
social and religious form”.
In truth, we proceed to die because the whole frame of our life is a
falsity, and we know that, if we die sufficiently, the whole frame and
form and edifice will collapse upon itself. But it were much better to
pull it down and have a great clear space, than to have it collapse on
top of us. For we shall be like Samson, buried among the ruins.
And moreover, if we are like Samson, trying to pull the temple down, we
must remember that the next generation will be none the less slaves,
sightless, in Gaza, at the mill. And they will be by no means eager to
commit suicide by bringing more temple beams down with a bang on their
heads. They will say: “It is a very nice temple, quite weather-tight.
What’s wrong with it?” They will be near enough to extinction to be very
canny and cautious about imperilling themselves.
No, if we are to break through, it must be in the strength of life
bubbling inside us. The chicken does not break the shell out of
animosity against the shell. It bursts out in its blind desire to move
under a greater heavens.
And so must we. We must burst out, and move under a greater heavens. As
the chicken bursts out, and has a whole new universe to get into
relationship with.
Our universe is not much more than a mannerism with us now. If we break
through, we shall find, that man is not man, as he seems to be, nor
woman woman. The present seeming is a ridiculous travesty. And even the
sun is not the sun as it appears to be. It is something tingling with
magnificence.
And then starts the one glorious activity of man: the getting himself
into a new relationship with a new heaven and a new earth. Oh, if we
knew, the earth is everything and the sun is everything that we have
missed knowing. But if we persist in our attitude of parasites on the
body of earth and sun, the earth and the sun will be mere victims on
which we feed our louse-like complacency for a long time yet: we, a
myriad myriad little egos, five billion feeding like one.
The thing in itself! Why I never yet met a man who was anything but what
he had been _told_ to be. Let a man be a man-in-himself, and then he can
begin to talk about the _Ding an Sich_. Men may be utterly different
from the things they now seem. And then they will behold, to their
astonishment, that the sun is absolutely different from the thing they
now see, and that they call “sun”.
THE NOVEL
THE NOVEL
Somebody says the novel is doomed. Somebody else says it is the green
bay tree getting greener. Everybody says something, so why shouldn’t I!
Mr. Santayana sees the modern novel expiring because it is getting so
thin; which means, Mr. Santayana is bored.
I am rather bored myself. It becomes harder and harder to read the
_whole_ of any modern novel. One reads a bit, and knows the rest; or
else one doesn’t want to know any more.
This is sad. But again, I don’t think it’s the novel’s fault. Rather the
novelists’.
You can put anything you like in a novel. So why do people _always_ go
on putting the same thing? Why is the _vol au vent_ always chicken!
Chicken _vol au vents_ may be the rage. But who sickens first shouts
first for something else.
The novel is a great discovery: far greater than Galileo’s telescope or
somebody else’s wireless. The novel is the highest form of human
expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the
absolute.
In a novel, everything is relative to everything else, if that novel is
art at all. There may be didactic bits, but they aren’t the novel. And
the author may have a didactic “purpose” up his sleeve. Indeed most
great novelists have, as Tolstoi had his Christian-socialism, and Hardy
his pessimism, and Flaubert his intellectual desperation. But even a
didactic purpose so wicked as Tolstoi’s or Flaubert’s cannot put to
death the novel.
You can tell me, Flaubert had a “philosophy”, not a “purpose”. But what
is a novelist’s philosophy but a purpose on a rather higher level? And
since every novelist who amounts to anything has a philosophy--even
Balzac--any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the “purpose” be
large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.
Vronsky sinned, did he? But also the sinning was a consummation devoutly
to be wished. The novel makes that obvious: in spite of old Leo Tolstoi.
And the would-be-pious Prince in _Resurrection_ is a muff, with his
piety that nobody wants or believes in.
There you have the greatness of the novel itself. It won’t _let_ you
tell didactic lies, and put them over. Nobody in the world is anything
but delighted when Vronsky gets Anna Karénina. Then what about the
sin?--Why, when you look at it, all the tragedy comes from Vronsky’s
and Anna’s fear of _society_. The monster was social, not phallic at
all. They couldn’t live in the pride of their sincere passion, and spit
in Mother Grundy’s eye. And that, that cowardice, was the real “sin”.
The novel makes it obvious, and knocks all old Leo’s teeth out. “As an
officer I am still useful. But as a man, I am a ruin,” says Vronsky--or
words to that effect. Well what a skunk, collapsing as a man and a male,
and remaining merely as a social instrument; an “officer”, God love
us!--merely because people at the opera turn backs on him! As if
people’s backs weren’t preferable to their faces, anyhow!
And old Leo tries to make out, it was all because of the phallic sin.
Old liar! Because where would any of Leo’s books be, without the phallic
splendour? And then to blame the column of blood, which really gave him
all his life riches! The Judas! Cringe to a mangy, bloodless Society,
and try to dress up that dirty old Mother Grundy in a new bonnet and
face-powder of Christian-Socialism. Brothers indeed! Sons of a castrated
Father!
The novel itself gives Vronsky a kick in the behind, and knocks old
Leo’s teeth out, and leaves us to learn.
It is such a bore that nearly all great novelists have a didactic
purpose, otherwise a philosophy, directly opposite to their passional
inspiration. In their passional inspiration, they are all phallic
worshippers. From Balzac to Hardy, it is so. Nay, from Apuleius to E. M.
Forster. Yet all of them, when it comes to their philosophy, or what
they think-they-are, they are all crucified Jesuses. What a bore! And
what a burden for the novel to carry!
But the novel has carried it. Several thousands of thousands of
lamentable crucifixions of self-heroes and self-heroines. Even the silly
duplicity of _Resurrection_, and the wickeder duplicity of Salammbô,
with that flayed phallic Matho, tortured upon the Cross of a gilt
Princess.
You can’t fool the novel. Even with man crucified upon a woman: his
“dear cross”. The novel will show you how dear she was: dear at any
price. And it will leave you with a bad taste of disgust against these
heroes who _turn_ their women into a “dear cross”, and _ask_ for their
own crucifixion.
You can fool pretty nearly every other medium. You can make a poem
pietistic, and still it will be a poem. You can write _Hamlet_ in drama:
if you wrote him in a novel, he’d be half comic, or a trifle suspicious:
a suspicious character, like Dostoevsky’s Idiot. Somehow, you sweep the
ground a bit too clear in the poem or the drama, and you let the human
Word fly a bit too freely. Now in a novel there’s always a tom-cat, a
black tom-cat that pounces on the white dove of the Word, if the dove
doesn’t watch it; and there is a banana-skin to trip on; and you know
there is a water-closet on the premises. All these things help to keep
the balance.
If, in Plato’s _Dialogues_, somebody had suddenly stood on his head and
given smooth Plato a kick in the wind, and set the whole school in an
uproar, then Plato would have been put into a much truer relation to the
universe. Or if, in the midst of the Timaeus, Plato had only paused to
say: “And now, my dear Cleon--(or whoever it was)--I have a bellyache,
and must retreat to the privy: this too is part of the Eternal Idea of
man”, then we never need have fallen so low as Freud.
And if, when Jesus told the rich man to take all he had and give it to
the poor, the rich man had replied: “_All right, old sport! You are
poor, aren’t you? Come on, I’ll give you a fortune. Come on!_” Then a
great deal of snivelling and mistakenness would have been spared us all,
and we might never have produced a Marx and a Lenin. If only Jesus had
_accepted_ the fortune!
Yes, it’s a pity of pities that Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t
write straight novels. They did write novels; but a bit crooked. The
_Evangels_ are wonderful novels, by authors “with a purpose.” Pity
there’s so much Sermon-on-the-Mounting.
“Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John
Went to bed with their breeches on!”--
as every child knows. Ah, if only they’d taken them off!
Greater novels, to my mind, are the books of the Old Testament, Genesis,
Exodus, Samuel, Kings, by authors whose purpose was so big, it didn’t
quarrel with their passionate inspiration. The purpose and the
inspiration were almost one. Why, in the name of everything bad, the two
ever should have got separated, is a mystery! But in the modern novel
they are hopelessly divorced. When there _is_ any inspiration there, to
be divorced from.
This, then, is what is the matter with the modern novel. The modern
novelist is possessed, hag-ridden, by such a stale old “purpose”, or
idea-of-himself, that his inspiration succumbs. Of course he denies
having any didactic purpose at all: because a purpose is supposed to be
like catarrh, something to be ashamed of. But he’s got it. They’ve all
got it: the same snivelling purpose.
They’re all little Jesuses in their own eyes, and their “purpose” is to
prove it. Oh Lord!--_Lord Jim!_ _Sylvestre Bonnard!_ _If Winter Comes!_
_Main Street!_ _Ulysses!_ _Pan!_ They are all pathetic or sympathetic or
antipathetic little Jesuses _accomplis_ or _manqués_. And there is a
heroine who is always “pure”, usually, nowadays, on the muck-heap! Like
the Green Hatted Woman. She is all the time at the feet of Jesus, though
her behaviour there may be misleading. Heaven knows what the Saviour
really makes of it: whether she’s a Green Hat or a Constant Nymph
(eighteen months of constancy, and her heart failed), or any of the rest
of ’em. They are all, heroes and heroines, novelists and she-novelists,
little Jesuses or Jesusesses. They may be wallowing in the mire: but
then didn’t Jesus harrow Hell! _A la bonne heure!_
Oh, they are all novelists with an idea of themselves! Which is a
“purpose”, with a vengeance! For what a weary, false, sickening idea it
is nowadays! The novel gives them away. They can’t fool the novel.
Now really, it’s time we left _off_ insulting the novel any further. If
your purpose is to prove your own Jesus qualifications, and the thin
stream of your inspiration is “sin”, then dry up, for the interest is
dead. _Life as it is!_ What’s the good of pretending that the lives of a
set of tuppenny Green Hats and Constant Nymphs is Life-as-it-is, when
the novel itself proves that all it amounts to is life as it is isn’t
life, but a sort of everlasting and intricate and boring habit: of Jesus
peccant and _Jesusa peccante_.
These wearisome sickening little personal novels! After all, they aren’t
novels at all. In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not
any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them
all. Just as God is the pivotal interest in the books of the _Old
Testament_. But just a trifle too intimate, too _frére et cochon_,
there. In the great novel, the felt but unknown flame stands behind all
the characters, and in their words and gestures there is a flicker of
the presence. If you are _too personal, too human_, the flicker fades
out, leaving you with something awfully lifelike, and as lifeless as
most people are.
We have to choose between the quick and the dead. The quick is
God-flame, in everything. And the dead is dead. In this room where I
write, there is a little table that is dead: it doesn’t even weakly
exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove, which for some
unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for
some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books,
whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a
sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, that, alas, is dead.
What makes the difference? _Quien sabe!_ But difference there is. And I
_know_ it.
And the sum and source of all quickness, we will call God. And the sum
and total of all deadness we may call human.
And if one tries to find out, wherein the quickness of the quick lies,
it is in a certain weird relationship between that which is quick and--I
don’t know; perhaps all the rest of things. It seems to consist in an
odd sort of fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful relatedness. That
silly iron stove somehow _belongs_. Whereas this thin-shanked table
doesn’t belong. It is a mere disconnected lump, like a cut-off finger.
And now we see the great, great merits of the novel. It can’t exist
without being “quick”. The ordinary unquick novel, even if it be a best
seller, disappears into absolute nothingness, the dead burying their
dead with surprising speed. For even the dead like to be tickled. But
the next minute, they’ve forgotten both the tickling and the tickler.
Secondly, the novel contains no didactive absolute. All that is quick,
and all that is said and done by the quick, is, in some way godly. So
that Vronsky’s taking Anna Karénina we must count godly, since it is
quick. And that Prince in _Resurrection_, following the convict girl, we
must count dead. The convict train is quick and alive. But that
would-be-expiatory Prince is as dead as lumber.
The novel itself lays down these laws for us, and we spend our time
evading them. The man in the novel must be “quick”. And this means one
thing, among a host of unknown meaning: it means he must have a quick
relatedness to all the other things in the novel: snow, bed-bugs,
sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food,
diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and
toilet-paper. He must be in quick relation to all these things. What he
says and does must be relative to them all.
And this is why Pierre, for example, in _War and Peace_, is more dull
and less quick than Prince André. Pierre is quite nicely related to
ideas, tooth-paste, God, people, foods, trains, silk-hats, sorrow,
diphtheria, stars. But his relation to snow and sunshine, cats,
lightning and the phallus, fuchsias and toilet-paper, is sluggish and
mussy. He’s not quick enough.
The really quick, Tolstoi loved to kill them off or muss them over. Like
a true Bolshevist. One can’t help feeling Natasha is rather mussy and
unfresh, married to that Pierre.
Pierre was what we call, “so human”. Which means, “so limited”. Men
clotting together into social masses in order to limit their individual
liabilities: this is humanity. And this is Pierre. And this is Tolstoi,
the philosopher with a very nauseating Christian-brotherhood idea of
himself. Why limit man to a Christian-brotherhood? I myself, I could
belong to the sweetest Christian-brotherhood one day, and ride after
Attila with a raw beefsteak for my saddle-cloth, to see the red cock
crow in flame over all Christendom, next day.
And that is man! That, really, was Tolstoi. That, even, was Lenin, God
in the machine of Christian-brotherhood, that hashes men up into social
sausage-meat.
Damn all absolutes. Oh damn, damn, damn all absolutes! I tell you, no
absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless, like
the limerick, the lamb is inside.
“They returned from the ride
With lamb Leo inside
And a smile on the face of the tiger!
Sing fol-di-lol-lol!
Fol-di-lol-lol!
Fol-di-lol-ol-di-lol-olly!”
For man, there is neither absolute nor absolution. Such things should be
left to monsters like the right-angled triangle, which does only exist
in the ideal consciousness. A man can’t have a square on his hypotenuse,
let him try as he may.
Ay! Ay! Ay!--Man handing out absolutes to man, as if we were all books
of geometry with axioms, postulates and definitions in front. God with a
pair of compasses! Moses with a set square! Man a geometric bifurcation,
not even a radish!
Holy Moses!
“Honour thy father and thy mother!” That’s awfully cute! But supposing
they are not honorable? How then, Moses?
Voice of thunder from Sinai: “_Pretend to honour them!_”
“Love thy neighbour as thyself.”
Alas, my neighbour happens to be mean and detestable.
Voice of the lambent Dove, cooing: “_Put it over him, that you love
him._”
Talk about the cunning of serpents! I never saw even a serpent kissing
his instinctive enemy.
Pfui! I wouldn’t blacken my mouth, kissing my neighbour, who, I repeat,
to me is mean and detestable.
Dove, go home!
The Goat and Compasses, indeed!
Everything is relative. Every Commandment that ever issued out of the
mouth of God or man, is strictly relative: adhering to the particular
time, place and circumstance.
And this is the beauty of the novel; everything is true in its own
relationship, and no further.
For the relatedness and interrelatedness of all things flows and changes
and trembles like a stream, and like a fish in the stream the characters
in the novel swim and drift and float and turn belly-up when they’re
dead.
So, if a character in a novel wants two wives--or three--or thirty:
well, that is true of that man, at that time, in that circumstance. It
may be true of other men, elsewhere and elsewhen. But to infer that all
men at all times want two, three, or thirty wives; or that the novelist
himself is advocating furious polygamy; is just imbecility.
It has been just as imbecile to infer that, because Dante worshipped a
remote Beatrice, every man, all men, should go worshipping remote
Beatrices.
And that wouldn’t have been so bad, if Dante had put the thing in its
true light. Why do we slur over the actual fact that Dante had a cosy
bifurcated wife in his bed, and a family of lusty little Dantinos?
Petrarch, with his Laura in the distance, had _twelve_ little legitimate
Petrarchs of his own, between his knees. Yet all we hear is _Laura!
Laura! Beatrice! Beatrice! Distance! Distance!_
What bunk! Why didn’t Dante and Petrarch chant in chorus:
Oh be my spiritual concubine
Beatrice! }
Laura! }
My old girl’s got several babies that are mine, But _thou_ be my
spiritual concubine,
Beatrice! }
Laura! }
Then there would have been an honest relation between all the bunch.
Nobody grudges the gents their spiritual concubines. But keeping a wife
and family--twelve children--up one’s sleeve, has always been recognised
as a dirty trick.
Which reveals how _immoral_ the absolute is! Invariably keeping some
vital fact dark! Dishonorable!
Here we come upon the third essential quality of the novel. Unlike the
essay, the poem, the drama, the book of philosophy, or the scientific
treatise: all of which may beg the question, when they don’t downright
filch it; the novel inherently is and must be:
1. Quick.
2. Interrelated in all its parts, vitally, organically.
3. Honorable.
I call Dante’s _Commedia_ slightly dishonorable, with never a mention of
the cosy bifurcated wife, and the kids. And _War and Peace_ I call
downright dishonorable, with that fat, diluted Pierre for a hero, stuck
up as preferable and desirable, when everybody knows that he _wasn’t_
attractive, even to Tolstoi.
Of course Tolstoi, being a great creative artist, was true to his
characters. But being a man with a philosophy, he wasn’t true to his
_own character_.
Character is a curious thing. It is the flame of a man, which burns
brighter or dimmer, bluer or yellower or redder, rising or sinking or
flaring according to the draughts of circumstance and the changing air
of life, changing itself continually, yet remaining one single, separate
flame, flickering in a strange world: unless it be blown out at last by
too much adversity.
If Tolstoi had looked into the flame of his own belly, he would have
seen that he didn’t really like the fat, fuzzy Pierre, who was a poor
tool, after all. But Tolstoi was a personality even more than a
character. And a personality is a self-conscious _I am_: being all that
is left in us of a once-almighty Personal God. So being a personality
and an almighty _I am_, Leo proceeded deliberately to lionise that
Pierre, who was a domestic sort of house-dog.
Doesn’t anybody call that dishonorable on Leo’s part? He might just as
well have been true to _himself_! But no! His self-conscious personality
was superior to his own belly and knees, so he thought he’d improve on
himself, by creeping inside the skin of a lamb; the doddering old lion
that he was! Leo! Léon!
Secretly, Leo worshipped the human male, man as a column of rapacious
and living blood. He could hardly meet three lusty, roisterous young
guardsmen in the street, without crying with envy: and ten minutes
later, fulminating on them black oblivion and annihilation, utmost moral
thunder-bolts.
How boring, in a great man! And how boring, in a great nation like
Russia, to let its old-Adam manhood be so improved upon by these
reformers, who all feel themselves short of something, and therefore
live by spite, that at last there’s nothing left but a lot of shells of
men, improving themselves steadily emptier and emptier, till they rattle
with words and formulae, as if they’d swallowed the whole encyclopædia
of socialism.
But wait! There is life in the Russians. Something new and strange will
emerge out of their weird transmogrification into Bolshevists.
When the lion swallows the lamb, fluff and all, he usually gets a pain,
and there’s a rumpus. But when the lion tries to force himself down the
throat of the huge and popular lamb--a nasty old sheep, really--then
it’s a phenomenon. Old Leo did it: wedged himself bit by bit down the
throat of wooly Russia. And now out of the mouth of the bolshevist
lambkin still waves an angry, mistaken, tufted leonine tail, like an
agitated exclamation mark.
Meanwhile it’s a deadlock.
But what a dishonorable thing for that claw-biting little Leo to do! And
in his novels you see him at it. So that the papery lips of
_Resurrection_ whisper: “_Alas! I would have been a novel. But Leo
spoiled me._”
Count Tolstoi had that last weakness of a great man: he wanted the
absolute: the absolute of love, if you like to call it that. Talk about
the “last infirmity of noble minds”! It’s a perfect epidemic of
senility. He wanted to _be_ absolute: a universal brother. Leo was too
tight for Tolstoi. He wanted to puff, and puff, and puff, till he became
Universal Brotherhood itself, the great gooseberry of our globe.
Then pop went Leo! And from the bits sprang up bolshevists.
It’s all bunk. No man can be absolute. No man can be absolutely good or
absolutely right, nor absolutely lovable, nor absolutely beloved, nor
absolutely loving. Even Jesus, the paragon, was only relatively good
and relatively right. Judas could take him by the nose.
No god, that men can conceive of, could possibly be absolute or
absolutely right. All the gods that men ever discovered are still God:
and they contradict one another and fly down one another’s throats,
marvellously. Yet they are _all_ God: the incalculable Pan.
It is rather nice, to know what a lot of gods there are; and have been,
and will be, and that they are all of them God all the while. Each of
them utters an absolute: which, in the ears of all the rest of them,
falls flat. This makes even eternity lively.
But man, poor man, bobbing like a cork in the stream of time, must hitch
himself to some absolute star of righteousness overhead. So he throws
out his line, and hooks on. Only to find, after a while, that his star
is slowly falling: till it drops into the stream of time with a fizzle,
and there’s _another_ absolute star gone out.
Then we scan the heavens afresh.
As for the babe of love, we’re simply tired of changing its napkins. Put
the brat down, and let it learn to run about, and manage its own little
breeches.
But it’s nice to think that all the gods are God all the while. And if a
god only genuinely feels to you like God, then it _is_ God. But if it
doesn’t feel quite, quite altogether like God to you, then wait awhile,
and you’ll hear him fizzle.
The novel knows all this, irrevocably. “My dear,” it kindly says, “one
God is relative to another god, until he gets into a machine; and then
it’s a case for the traffic cop!”
“But what am I to do!” cries the despairing novelist. “From Amon and Ra
to Mrs. Eddy, from Ashtaroth and Jupiter to Annie Besant, I don’t know
where I am.”
“Oh yes you do, my dear!” replies the novel. “You are where you are, so
you needn’t hitch yourself on to the skirts either of Ashtaroth or Eddy.
If you meet them, say _how-do-you-do!_ to them quite courteously. But
don’t hook on, or I shall turn you down.”
“Refrain from hooking on!” says the novel.
“But be honorable among the host!” he adds.
Honour! Why, the gods are like the rainbow, all colours and shades.
Since light itself is invisible, a manifestation has got to be pink or
black or blue or white or yellow or vermilion, or “tinted”.
You may be a theosophist, and then you will cry: _Avaunt! Thou dark-red
aura! Away!!!--Oh come! Thou pale-blue or thou primrose aura, come!_
This you may cry if you are a theosophist. And if you put a theosophist
in a novel, he or she may cry _avaunt!_ to the heart’s content.
But a theosophist cannot be a novelist, as a trumpet cannot be a
regimental band. A theosophist, or a Christian, or a Holy Roller, may be
_contained_ in a novelist. But a novelist may not put up a fence. The
wind bloweth where it listeth, and auras will be red when they want to.
As a matter of fact, only the Holy Ghost knows truly what righteousness
is. And heaven only knows what the Holy Ghost is! But it sounds all
right. So the Holy Ghost hovers among the flames, from the red to the
blue and the black to the yellow, putting brand to brand and flame to
flame, as the wind changes, and life travels in flame from the unseen to
the unseen, men will never know how or why. Only travel it must, and not
die down in nasty fumes.
And the honour, which the novel demands of you, is only that you shall
be true to the flame that leaps in you. When that Prince in
_Resurrection_ so cruelly betrayed and abandoned the girl, at the
beginning of her life, he betrayed and wetted on the flame of his own
manhood. When, later, he bullied her with his repentant benevolence, he
again betrayed and slobbered upon the flame of his waning manhood, till
in the end his manhood is extinct, and he’s just a lump of half-alive
elderly meat.
It’s the oldest Pan-mystery. God is the flame-life in all the universe;
multifarious, multifarious flames, all colours and beauties and pains
and sombrenesses. Whichever flame flames in your manhood, that is you,
for the time being. It is your manhood, don’t make water on it, says the
novel. A man’s manhood is to honour the flames in him, and to know that
none of them is absolute: even a flame is only relative.
But see old Leo Tolstoi wetting on the flame. As if even his wet were
absolute!
Sex is flame, too, the novel announces. Flame burning against every
absolute, even against the phallic. For sex is so much more than
phallic, and so much deeper than functional desire. The flame of sex
singes your absolute, and cruelly scorches your ego. What, will you
assert your ego in the universe? Wait till the flames of sex leap at you
like striped tigers.
“They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And a smile on the face of the tiger.”
You will play with sex, will you! You will tickle yourself with sex as
with an ice-cold drink from a soda-fountain! You will pet your best
girl, will you, and spoon with her, and titillate yourself and her, and
do as you like with your sex?
Wait! Only wait till the flame you have dribbled on flies back at you,
later! Only wait!
Sex is a life-flame, a dark one, reserved and mostly invisible. It is a
deep reserve in a man, one of the core-flames of his manhood.
What, would you play with it? Would you make it cheap and nasty!
Buy a king-cobra, and try playing with that.
Sex is even a majestic reserve in the sun.
Oh, give me the novel! Let me hear what the novel says.
As for the novelist, he is usually a dribbling liar.
HIM WITH HIS TAIL IN HIS MOUTH
HIM WITH HIS TAIL IN HIS MOUTH
Answer a fool according to his folly, philosophy ditto.
Solemnity is a sign of fraud.
Religion and philosophy both have the same dual purpose: to get at the
beginning of things, and at the goal of things. They have both decided
that the serpent has got his tail in his mouth, and that the end is one
with the beginning.
It seems to me time someone gave that serpent of eternity another dummy
to suck.
They’ve all decided that the beginning of all things is the life-stream
itself, energy, ether, libido, not to mention the Sanskrit joys of
Purusha, Pradhana, Kala.
Having postulated the serpent of the beginning, now see all the heroes
from Moses and Plato to Bergson, wrestling with him might and main, to
push his tail into his mouth.
Jehovah creates man in his Own Image, according to His Own Will. If man
behaves according to the ready-made Will of God, formulated in a bunch
of somewhat unsavoury commandments, then lucky man will be received
into the bosom of Jehovah.
Man isn’t very keen. And that is Sin, original and perpetual.
Then Plato discovers how lovely the intellectual idea is: in fact, the
only perfection is ideal.
But the old dragon of creation, who fathered us all, didn’t have an idea
in his head.
Plato was prepared. He popped the Logos into the mouth of the dragon,
and the serpent of eternity was rounded off. The old dragon, ugly and
venomous, wore yet the precious jewel of the Platonic idea in his head.
Unable to find the dragon wholesale, modern philosophy sets up a retail
shop. You can’t lay salt on the old scoundrel’s tail, because, of
course, he’s got it in his mouth, according to postulate. He doesn’t
seem to be sprawling in his old lair, across the heavens. In fact, he
appears to have vamoosed. Perhaps, instead of being one big old boy, he
is really an infinite number of little tiny boys: atoms, electrons,
units of force or energy, tiny little birds all spinning with their
tails in their beaks. Just the same in detail as in the gross. Nothing
will come out of the egg that isn’t in it. Evolution sings away at the
same old song. Out of the amœba, or some such old-fashioned entity, the
dragon of evolved life stretches himself enormous and more enormous,
only, at last, to return each time, and put his tail into his own
mouth, and be an amœba once more. The amœba, or the electron, or
whatever it may lately be--the rose would be just as scentless--is the
constant, from which all manifest living creation starts out, and to
which it all returns.
There was a time when man was not, nor monkey, nor cow, not catfish. But
the amœba (or the electron, or the atom, or whatever it is) always was
and always will be.
Boom! tiddy-ra-ta! Boom!
Boom! tiddy-ra-ta! Boom!
How do you know? How does anyone know, what always was or wasn’t? Bunk
of geology, and strata, and all that, biology or evolution.
“One, two, three four five,
Catch a little fish alive.
Six, seven, eight nine ten,
I have let him go again....”
Bunk of beginnings and of ends, and heads and tails. Why does man always
want to know so damned much? Or rather, so damned little? If he can’t
draw a ring round creation, and fasten the serpent’s tail into its mouth
with the padlock of one final clinching idea, then creation can go to
hell, as far as man is concerned.
There is such a thing as life, or life energy. We know, because we’ve
got it, or had it. It isn’t a constant. It comes and it goes. But we
_want_ it.
This I think is incontestable.
More than anything else in the world, we want to have life, and
life-energy abundant in us. We think if we eat yeast, vitamines and
proteids, we’re sure of it. We’re had. We diddle ourselves for the
million millionth time.
What we want is life, and life-energy inside us. Where it comes from, or
what it is, we don’t know, and never shall. It is the capital X of all
our knowledge.
But we want it, we must have it. It is the all in all.
This we know, now, for good and all: that which is good, and moral, is
that which brings into us a stronger, deeper flow of life and
life-energy: evil is that which impairs the life-flow.
But man’s difficulty is, that he can’t have life for the asking. “He
asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest it him: even length of days for ever
and ever.” There’s a pretty motto for the tomb!
It isn’t length of days for ever and ever that a man wants. It is strong
life within himself, while he lives.
But how to get it? You may be as healthy as a cow, and yet have fear
inside you, because your life is not enough.
We know, really, that we can’t have life for the asking, nor find it by
seeking, nor get it by striving. The river flows into us from behind and
below. We must turn our backs to it, and go ahead. The faster we go
ahead, the stronger the river rushes into us. The moment we turn round
to embrace the river of life, it ebbs away, and we see nothing but a
stony fiumara.
We must go ahead.
But which way is ahead?
We don’t know.
We only know that, continuing in the way we are going, the river of life
flows feebler and feebler in us, and we lose all sense of vital
direction. We begin to talk about vitamines. We become idiotic. We
cunningly prepare our own suicide.
This is the philosophic problem: to find the way ahead.
_Allons!_--there is no road before us.
Plato said that ahead, ahead was the perfect Idea, gleaming in the brow
of the dragon.
We have pretty well caught up with the perfect Idea, and we find it a
sort of vast, white, polished tomb-stone.
If the mouth of the serpent is the open grave, into which the tail
disappears, then three cheers for the Logos, and down she goes.
We children of a later Pa, know that Life is real, Life is earnest, and
the Grave is not its Goal.
Let us side-step.
All goals become graves.
Every goal is a grave, when you get there.
Well, I came out of an egg-cell, like an amœba, and I go into the grave.
I can’t help it. It’s not my fault, and it’s not my business.
I don’t want eternal life, nor length of days for ever and ever. Nothing
so long drawn out.
I give up all that sort of stuff.
Yet while I live, I want to live. Death, no doubt, solves its own
problems. Let Life solve the problem of living.
“Teach me to live that so I may
Rise glorious at the Judgment Day.”
I have no desire to rise glorious at any Judgment Day, when the serpent
finally chokes himself with his own tail.
“Teach me to live that I may
Go gaily on from day to day.”
Nay, in all the world, I feel the life-urge weakening. It may be, there
are too many people alive. I feel it is, because there is too much
automatic consciousness and self-consciousness in the world.
We can’t live by loving life, alone. Life is like a capricious mistress:
the more you woo her the more she despises you. You have to get up and
go to something more interesting. Then she’ll pelt after you.
Life is the river, darkly sparkling, that enters into us from behind,
when we set our faces towards the unknown. Towards some goal!!!
But there is no eternal goal. Every attempt to find an eternal goal puts
the tail of the serpent into his mouth again, whereby he chokes himself
in one more last gasp.
What is there then, if there is no eternal goal?
By itself, the river of life just gets nowhere. It sinks into the sand.
The river of life follows the living. If the living don’t get anywhere,
the river of life doesn’t. The old serpent lays him down and goes into a
torpor, instead of dancing at our heels and sending the life-sparks up
our legs and spine, as we travel.
So we’ve got to get somewhere.
Is there no goal?
“Oh man! on your four legs, your two, and your three, where are you
going?”--says the Sphinx.
“I’m just going to say _How-do-you-do?_ to Susan,” replies the man. And
he passes without a scratch.
When the cock crows, he says “_How-do-you-do?_”
“_How-do-you-do Peter? How-do-you-do? old liar!_”
“_How-do-you-do, Oh Sun!_”
A challenge and a greeting.
We live in a multiple universe. I am a chick that absolutely refuses to
chirp inside the monistic egg. See me walk forth, with a bit of
egg-shell sticking to my tail!
When the cuckoo, the cow, and the coffee-plant chipped the Mundane Egg,
at various points, they stepped out, and immediately set off in
different directions. Not different directions of space and time, but
different directions in creation: within the fourth dimension. The
cuckoo went cuckoo-wards, the cow went cow-wise, and the coffee-plant
started coffing. Three very distinct roads across the fourth dimension.
The cow was dumb, and the cuckoo too.
They went their ways, as creatures do,
Till they chanced to meet, in the Lord’s green Zoo.
The bird gave a cluck, the cow gave a coo,
At the sight of each other the pair of them flew
Into tantrums, and started their hullabaloo.
They startled creation; and when they were through
Each said to the other: till I came across you
I wasn’t aware of the things I could do!
Cuckoo!
Moo!
Cuckoo!
And this, I hold, is the true history of evolution.
The Greeks made equilibrium their goal. Equilibrium is hardly a goal to
travel towards. Yet it’s something to attain. You travel in the fourth
dimension, not in yards and miles, like the eternal serpent.
Equilibrium argues either a dualistic or a pluralistic universe. The
Greeks, being sane, were pantheists and pluralists, and so am I.
Creation is a fourth dimension, and in it there are all sorts of things,
gods and what-not. That brown hen, scratching with her hind leg in such
common fashion, is a sort of goddess in the creative dimension. Of
course, if you stay outside the fourth dimension, and try to measure
creation in length, breadth and height, you’ve set yourself the
difficult task of measuring up the Monad, the Mundane Egg. Which is a
game, like any other. The solution is, of course (let me whisper): _put
his tail in his mouth!_
Once you realise that, willy nilly, you’re _inside_ the Monad, you give
it up. You’re inside it and you always will be. Therefore, Jonah, sit
still in the whale’s belly, and have a look round. For you’ll never
measure the whale, since you’re inside him.
And then you see it’s a fourth dimension, with all sorts of gods and
goddesses in it. That brown hen, who, being a Rhode Island Red, is big
and stuffy like plush-upholstery, is of course, a goddess in her own
rights. If I myself had to make a poem to her, I should begin:
Oh my flat-footed plush armchair
So commonly scratching in the yard--!
But this poem would only reveal my own limitations.
Because Flat-foot is the favourite of the white leghorn cock, and he
shakes the tid-bit for her with a most wooing noise, and when she lays
an egg, he bristles like a double white poppy, and rushes to meet her,
as she flounders down from the chicken-house, and his echo of her
_I’ve-laid-an-egg_ cackle is rich and resonant. Every pine-tree on the
mountains hears him:
She’s} _laid an egg_!
I’ve}
She’s} _laid an egg_!
I’ve}
And his poem would be:
“Oh you who make me feel so good, when you sit next me on the perch
At night! (temporarily, of course!)
Oh you who make my feathers bristle with the vanity of life!
Oh you whose cackle makes my throat go off like a rocket!
Oh you who walk so slowly, and make me feel swifter
Than my boss!
Oh you who bend your head down, and move in the under
Circle, while I prance in the upper!
Oh you, come! come! come! for here is a bit of fat from
The roast veal; I am shaking it for you.”
In the fourth dimension, in the creative world, we live in a pluralistic
universe, full of gods and strange gods and unknown gods; a universe
where that Rhode Island Red hen is a goddess in her own right and the
white cock is a god indisputable, with a little red ring on his leg:
which the boss put there.
Why? Why, I mean, is he a god?
Because he is something that nothing else is. Certainly he is something
that I am not.
And she is something that neither he is nor I am.
When she scratches and finds a bug in the earth, she seems fairly to
gobble down the monad of all monads; and when she lays, she certainly
thinks she’s put the Mundane Egg in the nest.
Just part of her naive nature!
As for the goal, which doesn’t exist, but which we are always coming
back to: well, it doesn’t spatially, or temporally, or eternally exist:
but in the fourth dimension, it does.
What the Greeks called equilibrium: what I call relationship.
Equilibrium is just a bit mechanical. It became very mechanical with the
Greeks: an intellectual nail put through it.
I don’t _want_ to be “good” or “righteous”--and I won’t even be
“virtuous”, unless “vir” means a man, and “vis” means the life-river.
But I _do_ want to be alive. And to be alive, I must have a goal in the
_creative_, not the _spatial_ universe.
I want, in the Greek sense, an equilibrium between me and the rest of
the universe. That is, I want a relationship between me and the brown
hen.
The Greek equilibrium took too much for granted. The Greek never asked
the brown hen, nor the horse, nor the swan, if it would kindly be
equilibrated with him. He took it for granted that hen and horse would
be only too delighted.
You can’t take it for granted. That brown hen is extraordinarily callous
to my god-like presence. She doesn’t even choose to know me to nod to.
If I’ve got to strike a balance between us, I’ve got to work at it.
But that is what I want: that she shall nod to me, with a
“_Howdy!_”--and I shall nod to her, more politely: “_How-do-you-do,
Flat-foot?_” And between us there shall exist the third thing, the
_connaissance_. That is the goal.
I shall not betray myself nor my own life-passion for her. When she
walks into my bedroom and makes droppings in my shoes, I shall chase her
with disgust, and she will flutter and squawk. And I shall not ask her
to be human for my sake.
That is the mistake the Greeks made. They talked about equilibrium, and
then, when they wanted to equilibrate themselves with a horse, or an ox,
or an acanthus, then horse, ox, and acanthus had to become nine-tenths
human, to accommodate them. Call that equilibrium?
As a matter of fact, we don’t call it equilibrium, we call it
anthropomorphism. And anthropomorphism is a bore. Too much anthropos
makes the world a dull hole.
So Greek sculpture tends to become a bore. If it’s a horse, it’s an
anthropomorphised horse. If it’s a Praxiteles _Hermes_, it’s a Hermes so
Praxitelised, that it begins sugarily to bore us.
Equilibrium, in its very best sense--in the sense the Greeks
_originally_ meant it--stands for the strange spark that flies between
two creatures, two things that are equilibrated, or in living
relationship. It is a goal: to come to that state when the spark will
fly from me to Flat-foot, the brown hen, and from her to me.
I shall leave off addressing her: “_Oh my flat-footed plush arm-chair!_”
I realise that is only impertinent anthropomorphism on my part. She
might as well address me: “_Oh my skin-flappy split pole!_” Which would
be like her impudence. Skin-flappy, of course, would refer to my blue
shirt and baggy cord trousers. How would _she_ know I don’t grow them
like a loose skin!
In the early Greeks, the spark between man and man, stranger and
stranger, man and woman, stranger and strangeress, was alive and vivid.
Even those Doric Apollos.
In the Egyptians, the spark between man and the living universe remains
alight for ever in those early, silent, motionless statues of Pharaohs.
They say, it is the statue of the soul of the man. But what is the soul
of a man, except _that_ in him which is himself alone, suspended in
immediate relationship to the sum of things? Not isolated or cut off.
The Greeks began the cutting apart business. And Rodin’s remerging was
only an intellectual tacking on again.
The serpent hasn’t got his tail in his mouth. He is on the alert, with
lifted head like a listening, sparky flower. The Egyptians knew.
But when the oldest Egyptians carve a hawk or a Sekhet-cat, or paint
birds or oxen or people: and when the Assyrians carve a she-lion: and
when the cave-men drew the charging bison, or the reindeer, in the caves
of Altamira: or when the Hindoo paints geese or elephants or lotus in
the great caves of India whose name I forget--Ajanta!--then how
marvellous it is! How marvellous is the living relationship between man
and his object! be it man or woman, bird, beast, flower or rock or rain:
the exquisite frail moment of pure conjunction, which, in the fourth
dimension, is timeless. An Egyptian hawk, a Chinese painting of a camel,
an Assyrian sculpture of a lion, an African fetish idol of a woman
pregnant, an Aztec rattlesnake, an early Greek Apollo, a cave-man’s
paintings of a Pre-historic mammoth, on and on, how perfect the timeless
moments between man and the other Pan-creatures of this earth of ours!
And by the way, speaking of cave-men, how did those prognathous
semi-apes of Altamira come to depict so delicately, so beautifully, a
female bison charging, with swinging udder, or deer stooping feeding, or
an antediluvian mammoth deep in contemplation. It is art on a pure, high
level, beautiful as Plato, far, far more “civilized” than Burne Jones.
Hadn’t somebody better write Mr. Wells’ History backwards, to prove how
we’ve degenerated, in our stupid visionlessness, since the cave-men?
The pictures in the cave represent moments of purity which are the quick
of civilization. The pure relation between the cave-man and the deer:
fifty per-cent. man, and fifty per-cent. bison, or mammoth, or deer. It
is not ninety-nine per-cent. man, and one per-cent. horse: as in a
Raphael horse. Or hundred per-cent. fool, as when F. G. Watts sculpts a
bronze horse and calls it Physical Energy.
If it is to be life, then it is fifty per-cent. me, fifty per-cent.
thee: and the third thing, the spark, which springs from out of the
balance, is timeless. Jesus, who saw it a bit vaguely, called it the
Holy Ghost.
Between man and woman, fifty per-cent. man and fifty per-cent. woman:
then the pure spark. Either this, or less than nothing.
As for ideal relationships, and pure love, you might as well start to
water tin pansies with carbolic acid (which is pure enough, in the
antiseptic sense) in order to get the Garden of Paradise.
BLESSED ARE THE POWERFUL
BLESSED ARE THE POWERFUL
The reign of love is passing, and the reign of power is coming again.
The day of popular democracy is nearly done. Already we are entering the
twilight, towards the night that is at hand.
Before the darkness comes, it is as well to take our directions.
It is time to enquire into the nature of power, so that we do not
crassly blunder into a new era: or fall down the gulf of anarchy, in the
dark, as we cross the borders.
We have a confused idea, that _will_ and power are somehow identical. We
think we can have a will-to-power.
A will-to-power seems to work out as bullying. And bullying is something
despicable and detestable.
Tyranny, too, which seems to us the apotheosis of power, is detestable.
It comes from our mistaken idea of power. It comes from the ancient
mistake, old as Moses, of confusing power with _will_. The _power_ of
God, and the _will_ of God, we have imagined identical. We need only
think for a moment, and we can see the vastness of difference between
the two.
The Jews, in Moses’ time, and again particularly in the time of the
Kings, came to look upon Jehovah as the apotheosis of arbitrary _will_.
This is the root of a very great deal of evil; an old, old root.
Will is no more than an attribute of the ego. It is, as it were, the
accelerator of the engine: or the instrument which increases the
pressure. A man may have a strong will, an iron will, as we say, and yet
be a stupid mechanical instrument, useful simply as an instrument,
without any _power_ at all.
An instrument, even an iron one, has no power. The power has to be put
into it. This is true of men with iron wills, just the same.
The Jews made the mistake of deifying Will, the ethical Will of God. The
Germans again made the mistake of deifying the egoistic Will of Man: the
will-to-power.
There is a certain inherent stupidity in apotheosised Will, and a
consequent inevitable inferiority in the devotees thereof. They all have
an inferiority complex.
Because power is not in the least like Will. Power comes to us, we know
not how, from beyond. Whereas our will is our own.
When a man prides himself on something that is just in himself, part of
his own ego, he falls into conceit, and conceit carries an inferiority
complex as its shadow.
If a man, or a race, or a nation is to be anything at all, he must have
the generosity to admit that his strength comes to him from beyond. It
is not his own, self-generated. It comes as electricity comes, out of
nowhere into somewhere.
It is no good trying to intellectualise about it. All attempts to argue
and intellectualise merely strangle the passages of the heart. We wish
to keep our hearts open. Therefore we brush aside argument and
intellectual haggling.
The intellect is one of the most curious instruments of the psyche. But,
like the will, it is only an instrument. And it works only under
pressure of the will.
By willing and by intellectualising we have done all we can, for the
time being. We only exhaust ourselves, and lose our lives--that is, our
livingness, our power to live--by any further straining of the will and
the intellect. It is time to take our hands off the throttle: knowing
well enough what we are about, and choosing our course of action with a
steady heart.
To take one’s hand off the throttle is not the same as to let go the
reins.
Man lives to live, and for no other reason. And life is not mere length
of days. Many people hang on, and hang on, into a corrupt old age, just
because they have _not_ lived, and therefore cannot let go.
We must live. And to live, life must be in us. It must come to us, the
power of life, and we must not try to get a strangle-hold upon it. From
beyond comes to us the life, the power to live, and we must wisely keep
our hearts open.
But the life will not come _unless_ we live. That is the whole point.
“To him that hath shall be given.” To him that hath life shall be given
life: on condition, of course, that he lives.
And again, life does not mean length of days. Poor old Queen Victoria
had length of days. But Emily Brontë had life. She died of it.
And again “living” doesn’t mean just doing certain things: running after
women, or digging a garden, or working an engine, or becoming a member
of Parliament. Just because, for Lord Byron, to sleep with a “crowned
head” was life itself, it doesn’t follow that it will be life for _me_
to sleep with a crowned head, or even a head uncrowned. Sleeping with
heads is no joke, anyhow. And living won’t even consist in jazzing or
motoring or going to Wembley, just because most folks do it. Living
consists in doing what you really, vitally want to do: what the _life_
in you wants to do, not what your ego imagines you want to do. And to
find out _how_ the life in you wants to be lived, and to live it, is
terribly difficult. Somebody has to give us a clue.
And this is the real _exercise_ of power.
That settles two points. First, power is life rushing in to us. Second,
the exercise of power is the setting of life in motion.
And this is very far from _Will_.
If you want a dictator, whether it is Lenin, or Mussolini, or Primo de
Rivera, ask, not whether he can set money in circulation, but if he can
set life in motion, by dictating to his people.
Now, although we hate to admit it, Lenin did set life a good deal in
motion, for the Russian proletariat. The Russian proletariat was like a
child that had been kept under too much. So it was dying to be free. It
was crazy to keep house for itself.
Now, like a child, it is keeping house for itself, without Papa or Mama
to interfere. And naturally it enjoys it. For the time it’s a game.
But for us, English or American or French or German people, it would not
be a game. We have more or less kept house for ourselves for a long
time, and it’s not very thrilling after years of it.
So a Lenin wouldn’t do us any good. He wouldn’t set any life going in us
at all.
The Gallic and Latin blood isn’t thrilled about keeping house, anyhow.
It wants Glory, or else Glory. Glory on horse-back, or Glory upset. If
there was any Glory to upset, either in France or Italy or Spain, then
communism might flourish. But since there isn’t even a spark of Glory to
blow out--Alfonso! Victor Emmanuel! Poincaré!--what’s the good of
blowing?
So they set up a little harmless Glory in baggy trousers--Papa
Mussolini--or a bit of fat, self-loving but amiable elder-brother Glory
in General de Rivera: and they call it power. And the democratic world
holds up its hands, and moans: “_Dictators! Tyranny!_” While the
conservative world cheers loudly, and cries: “_The Man! The Man! El
hombre! L’uomo! L’homme! Hooray!!!_”
Bunk!
We want life. And we want the power of life. We want to feel the power
of life in ourselves.
We’re sick of being soft, and amiable, and harmless. We’re sick to death
of even enjoying ourselves. We’re a bit ashamed of our own existence. Or
if we aren’t we ought to be.
But what then? Shall we exclaim, in a fat voice: “_Aha! Power! Glory!
Force! The Man!_”--and proceed to set up a harmless Mussolini, or a fat
Rivera? Well, let us, if we want to. Only it won’t make the slightest
difference to our real living. Except it’s probably a good thing to have
the press--the newspaper press--crushed under the up-to-date rubber heel
of a tyrannous but harmless dictator.
We won’t speak of poor old Hindenburg. Except, why didn’t they set up
his wooden statue with all the nails knocked into it, for a President?
For surely they drove _something_ in, with those nails!
We had a harmless dictator, in Mr. Lloyd George. Better go ahead with
the Houses of Representatives, than have another shot in that direction.
Power! How can there be power in politics, when politics is money?
Money is power, they say. Is it? Money is to power what margarine is to
butter: a nasty substitute.
No, power is something you’ve got to respect, even revere, before you
can have it. It isn’t bossing, or bullying, hiring a manservant or
Salvationising your social inferior, issuing loud orders and getting
your own way, doing your opponent down. That isn’t power.
Power is _pouvoir_: to be able to.
Might: the ability to make: to bring about that which may-be.
And where are we to get Power, or Might, or Glory, or Honour, or Wisdom?
Out of Lloyd George, or Lenin, or Mussolini, or Rivera, or anything else
political?
Bah! It has to be in the people, before it can come out in politics.
Do we _want_ Power, Might, Glory, Honour, and Wisdom?
If we do, we’d better start to get them, each man for himself.
But if we don’t, we’d better continue our lick-spittling course of being
as happy, as happy as Kings.
“The world is so full of a number of things
We ought all to be happy, as happy as Kings.”
Which Kings, might we ask? Better be careful!
Myself I want Power. But I don’t want to boss anybody.
I want Honour. But I don’t see any existing nation or government that
could give it me.
I want Glory. But heaven save me from mankind.
I want Might. But perhaps I’ve got it.
The first thing, of course, is to open one’s heart to the source of
Power, and Might, and Glory, and Honour. It just depends, which gates of
one’s heart one opens. You can open the humble gate, or the proud gate.
Or you can open both, and see what comes.
Best open both, and take the responsibility. But set a guard at each
gate, to keep out the liars, the snivellers, the mongrel and the greedy.
However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or
spiritual or impeccable, it doesn’t help us at all. The real power comes
in to us from beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are
sightless, and from below, where we do not understand.
And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and
honour and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue
empty. We may have length of days. But an empty tin can lasts longer
than Alexander lived.
So, anomalous as it may sound, if we want power, we must put aside our
own will, and our own conceit, and _accept_ power, from the beyond.
And having admitted the power from the beyond into us, we must abide by
it, and not traduce it. Courage, discipline, inward isolation, these are
the conditions upon which power will abide in us.
And between brave people there will be the communion of power, prior to
the communion of love. The communion of power does not exclude the
communion of love. It includes it. The communion of love is only a part
of the greater communion of power.
Power is the supreme quality of God and man: the power to cause, the
power to create, the power to make, the power to do, the power to
destroy. And then, between those things which are created or made, love
is the supreme binding relationship. And between those who, with a
single impulse, set out passionately to destroy what must be destroyed,
joy flies like electric sparks, within the communion of power.
Love is simply and purely a relationship, and in a pure relationship
there can be nothing but equality; or at least equipoise.
But Power is more than a relationship. It is like electricity, it has
different degrees. Men are powerful or powerless, more or less: we know
not how or why. But it is so. And the communion of power will always be
a communion in inequality.
In the end, as in the beginning, it is always Power that rules the
world! There _must be_ rule. And only Power can rule. Love cannot,
should not, does not seek to. The statement that love rules the camp,
the court, the grove, is a lie; and the fact that such love has to rhyme
with “grove”, proves it. Power rules and will always rule. Because it
was Power that created us all. The act of love itself is an act of
power, original as original sin. The power is given us.
As soon as there is an _act_, even in love, it is power. Love itself is
purely a relationship.
But in an age that, like ours, has lost the mystery of power, and the
reverence for power, a false power is substituted: the power of money.
This is a power based on the force of human envy and greed, nothing
more. So nations naturally become more envious and greedy every day.
While individuals ooze away in a cowardice that they call love. They
call it love, and peace, and charity, and benevolence, when it is mere
cowardice. Collectively they are hideously greedy and envious.
True power, as distinct from the spurious power, which is merely the
force of certain human vices directed and intensified by the human
will: true power never belongs to us. It is given us, from the beyond.
Even the simplest form of power, physical strength, is not our own, to
do as we like with. As Samson found.
But power is given differently, in varying degrees and varying kind to
different people. It always was so, it always will be so. There will
never be equality in power. There will always be unending inequality.
Nowadays, when the only power is the power of human greed and envy, the
greatest men in the world are men like Mr. Ford, who can satisfy the
modern lust, we can call it nothing else, for owning a motorcar: or men
like the great financiers, who can soar on wings of greed to uncanny
heights, and even can spiritualise greed.
They talk about “equal opportunity”: but it is bunk, ridiculous bunk. It
is the old fable of the fox asking the stork to dinner. All the food is
to be served in a shallow dish, levelled to perfect equality, and you
get what you can.
If you’re a fox, like the born financier, you get a bellyful and more.
If you’re a stork, or a flamingo, or even a _man_, you have the food
gobbled from under your nose, and you go comparatively empty.
Is the fox, then, or the financier, the highest animal in creation? Bah!
Humanity never bunked itself so thoroughly as with the bunk of
equality, even qualified down to “equal opportunity”.
In living life, we are all born with different powers, and different
degrees of power: some higher, some lower. The only thing to do is
honorably to accept it, and to live in the communion of power. Is it not
better to serve a man in whom power lives, than to clamour for equality
with Mr. Motor-car Ford, or Mr. Shady Stinnes? Pfui! to your equality
with such men! It gives me gooseflesh.
How much better it must have been, to be a colonel under Napoleon, than
to be a Marshal Foch! Oh! how much better it must have been, to live in
terror of Peter the Great--who was great--than to be a member of the
proletariat under Comrade Lenin: or even to _be_ Comrade Lenin: though
even he was greatish, far greater than any extant millionaire.
Power is beyond us. Either it is given us from the unknown, or we have
not got it. And better to touch it in another, than never to know it.
Better be a Russian and shoot oneself out of sheer terror of Peter the
Great’s displeasure, than to live like a well-to-do American, and never
know the mystery of Power at all. Live in blank sterility.
For Power is the first and greatest of all mysteries. It is the mystery
that is behind all our being, even behind all our existence. Even the
Phallic erection is a first blind movement of power. Love is said to
call the power into motion: but it is probably the reverse: that the
slumbering _power_ calls love into being.
Power is manifold. There is physical strength, like Samson’s. There is
racial power, like David’s or Mahomet’s. There is mental power, like
that of Socrates, and ethical power, like that of Moses, and spiritual
power, like Jesus’ or like Buddha’s, and mechanical power, like that of
Stephenson, or military power, like Napoleon’s, or political power, like
Pitt’s. These are all true manifestations of power, coming out of the
unknown.
Unlike the millionaire power, which comes out of the known forces of
human greed and envy.
Power puts something new into the world. It may be Edison’s gramaphone,
or Newton’s Law or Cæsar’s Rome or Jesus’ Christianity, or even Attila’s
charred ruins and emptied spaces. Something new displaces something old,
and sometimes room has to be cleared beforehand.
Then power is obvious. Power is much more obvious in its destructive
than in its constructive activity. A tree falls with a crash. It grew
without a sound.
Yet true destructive power is power just the same as constructive. Even
Attila, the Scourge of God, who helped to scourge the Roman world out of
existence, was great with power. He was the scourge of _God_: not the
scourge of the League of Nations, hired and paid in cash.
If it must be a scourge, let it be a scourge of God. But let it be
power, the old divine power. The moment the divine power manifests
itself, it is right: whether it be Attila or Napoleon or George
Washington. But Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson, and Lenin, they never
had the right smell. They never even roused real fear: no real passion.
Whereas a manifestation of real power arouses passion, and always will.
Time it should again.
Blessed are the powerful, for theirs is the kingdom of earth.
... LOVE WAS ONCE A LITTLE BOY
... LOVE WAS ONCE A LITTLE BOY
Collapse, as often as not, is the result of persisting in an old
attitude towards some important relationship, which, in the course of
time, has changed its nature.
Love itself is a relationship, which changes as all things change, save
abstractions. If you want something really more durable than diamonds
you must be content with eternal truths like “twice two are four”.
Love is a relationship between things that live, holding them together
in a sort of unison. There are other vital relationships. But love is
this special one.
In every living thing there is the desire, for love, or for the
relationship of unison with the rest of things. That a tree should
desire to develop itself between the power of the sun, and the opposite
pull of the earth’s centre, and to balance itself between the four winds
of heaven, and to unfold itself between the rain and the shine, to have
roots and feelers in blue heaven and innermost earth, both, this is a
manifestation of love: a knitting together of the diverse cosmos into a
oneness, a tree.
At the same time, the tree must most powerfully exert itself and defend
itself, to maintain its own integrity against the rest of things.
So that love, as a desire, is balanced against the opposite desire, to
maintain the integrity of the individual self.
Hate is not the opposite of love. The real opposite of love is
individuality.
We live in the age of individuality, we call ourselves the servants of
love. That is to say, we enact a perpetual paradox.
Take the love of a man and a woman, today. As sure as you start with a
case of “true love” between them, you end with a terrific struggle and
conflict of the two opposing egos or individualities. It is nobody’s
fault: it is the inevitable result of trying to snatch an intensified
individuality out of the mutual flame.
Love, as a relationship of unison, means and must mean, _to some
extent_, the sinking of the individuality. Woman for centuries was
expected to sink her individuality into that of her husband and family.
Nowadays the tendency is to insist that a man shall sink his
individuality into his job, or his business, primarily, and secondarily
into his wife and family.
At the same time, education and the public voice urges man and woman
into intenser individualism. The sacrifice takes the old symbolic form
of throwing a few grains of incense on the altar. A certain amount of
time, labor, money, emotion are sacrificed on the altar of love, by man
and woman: especially emotion. But each calculates the sacrifice. And
man and woman alike, each saves his individual ego, her individual ego,
intact, as far as possible, in the scrimmage of love. Most of our talk
about love is cant, and bunk. The treasure of treasures to man and woman
today is his own, or her own ego. And this ego, each hopes it will
flourish like a salamander in the flame of love and passion. Which it
well may: but for the fact that there are two salamanders in the same
flame, and they fight till the flame goes out. Then they become grey
cold lizards of the vulgar ego.
It is much easier, of course, when there _is_ no flame. Then there is no
serious fight.
You can’t worship love and individuality in the same breath. Love is a
mutual relationship, like a flame between wax and air. If either wax or
air insists on getting its own way, or getting its own back too much,
the flame goes out and the unison disappears. At the same time, if one
yields itself up to the other entirely, there is a guttering mess. You
have to balance love and individuality, and actually sacrifice a portion
of each.
You have to have some sort of balance.
The Greeks said equilibrium. But whereas you can quite nicely balance a
pound of butter against a pound of cheese, it is quite another matter to
balance a rose and a ruby. Still more difficult is it to put male man in
one scale and female woman in the other, and equilibrate that little
pair of opposites.
Unless, of course, you abstract them. It’s easy enough to balance a
citizen against a citizeness, a Christian against a Christian, a spirit
against a spirit, or a soul against a soul. There’s a formula for each
case. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, etc., etc.
But the moment you put young Tom in one scale, and young Kate in the
other: why, not God Himself has succeeded as yet in striking a nice
level balance. Probably doesn’t intend to, ever.
Probably it’s one of the things that are most fascinating because they
are _nearly_ possible, yet absolutely impossible. Still, a miss is
better than a mile. You can at least draw blood.
How can I equilibrate myself with my black cow Susan? I call her daily
at six o’clock. And sometimes she comes. But sometimes, again, she
doesn’t, and I have to hunt her away among the timber. Possibly she is
lying peacefully in cowy inertia, like a black Hindu statue, among the
oak-scrub. Then she rises with a sighing heave. My calling was a mere
nothing against the black stillness of her cowy passivity.
Or possibly she is away down in the bottom corner, lowing _sotto voce_
and blindly to some far-off, inaccessible bull. Then when I call at her,
and approach, she screws round her tail and flings her sharp, elastic
haunch in the air with a kick and a flick, and plunges off like a buck
rabbit, or like a black demon among the pine trees, her udder swinging
like a chime of bells. Or possibly the coyotes have been howling in the
night along the top fence. And then I call in vain. It’s a question of
saddling a horse and sifting the bottom timber. And there at last the
horse suddenly winces, starts: and with a certain pang of fear I too
catch sight of something black and motionless and alive, and terribly
silent, among the tree-trunks. It is Susan, her ears apart, standing
like some spider suspended motionless by a thread, from the web of the
eternal silence. The strange faculty she has, cow-given, of becoming a
suspended ghost, hidden in the very crevices of the atmosphere! It is
something in her _will_. It is her tarnhelm. And then, she doesn’t know
me. If I am afoot, she knows my voice, but not the advancing me, in a
blue shirt and cord trousers. She waits, suspended by the thread, till I
come close. Then she reaches forward her nose, to smell. She smells my
hand: gives a little snort, exhaling her breath, with a kind of
contempt, turns, and ambles up towards the homestead, perfectly assured.
If I am on horse-back, although she knows the grey horse perfectly well,
at the same time she _doesn’t_ know what it is. She waits till the
wicked Azul, who is a born cow-punching pony, advances mischievously at
her. Then round she swings, as if on the blast of some sudden wind, and
with her ears back, her head rather down, her black back curved, up she
goes, through the timber, with surprising, swimming swiftness. And the
Azul, snorting with jolly mischief, dashes after her. And when she is
safely in her milking place, still she watches with her great black eyes
as I dismount. And she has to smell my hand before the cowy peace of
being milked enters her blood. Till then, there is something _roaring_
in the chaos of her universe. When her cowy peace comes, then her
universe is silent, and like the sea with an even tide, without sail or
smoke: nothing.
That is Susan, my black cow.
And how am I going to equilibrate myself with her? Or even, if you
prefer the word, to get in harmony with her?
Equilibrium? Harmony? with that black blossom! Try it!
She doesn’t even know me. If I put on a pair of white trousers, she
wheels away as if the devil was on her back. I have to go behind her,
talk to her, stroke her, and let her smell my hand; and smell the white
trousers. She doesn’t know they are trousers. She doesn’t know that I am
a gentleman on two feet. Not she. Something mysterious happens in her
blood and her being, when she smells me and my nice white trousers.
Yet she knows me, too. She likes to linger, while one talks to her. She
knows quite well she makes me mad when she swings her tail in my face.
So sometimes she swings it, just on purpose: and looks at me out of the
black corner of her great, pure-black eye, when I yell at her. And when
I find her, away down the timber, when she is a ghost, and lost to the
world, like a spider dangling in the void of chaos, then she is
relieved. She comes to, out of a sort of trance, and is relieved,
trotting up home with a queer, jerky cowy gladness. But she is never
_really_ glad, as the horses are. There is always a certain untouched
chaos in her.
Where she is when she’s _in_ the trance, heaven only knows.
That’s Susan! I have a certain relation to her. But that she and I are
in equilibrium, or in harmony, I would never guarantee while the world
stands. As for her individuality being in balance with mine, one can
only feel the great blank of the gulf.
Yet a relationship there is. She knows my touch and she goes very still
and peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and
her feel. And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her. There
_is_ a sort of relation between us. And this relation is part of the
mystery of love: the individuality on each side, mine and Susan’s,
suspended in the relationship.
Cow Susan by the forest’s rim
A black-eyed Susan was to him
And nothing more--
One understands Wordsworth and the primrose and the yokel. The yokel had
no relation at all--or next to none--with the primrose. Wordsworth
gathered it into his own bosom and made it part of his own nature. “I,
William, am also a yellow primrose blossoming on a bank.” This, we must
assert, is an impertinence on William’s part. He ousts the primrose from
its own individuality. He doesn’t allow it to call its soul its own. It
must be identical with _his_ soul. Because, of course, by begging the
question, there is but One Soul in the universe.
This is bunk. A primrose has its own peculiar primrosy identity, and all
the oversouling in the world won’t melt it into a Williamish oneness.
Neither will the yokel’s remarking: “Nay, boy, that’s nothing. It’s only
a primrose!”--turn the primrose into nothing. The primrose will neither
be assimilated nor annihilated, and Boundless Love breaks on the rock of
one more flower. It has its own individuality, which it opens with
lovely naïveté to sky and wind and William and yokel, bee and beetle
alike. It _is_ itself. But its very floweriness is a kind of communion
with all things: the love unison.
In this lies the eternal absurdity of Wordsworth’s lines. His own
behaviour, primrosely, was as foolish as the yokel’s.
“A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And nothing more--”
A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And a great deal more--
A primrose by the river’s brim
Lit up its pallid yellow glim
Upon the floor--
And watched old Father William trim
His course beside the river’s brim
And trembled sore--
The yokel, going for a swim
Had very nearly trod on him
An hour before.
And now the poet’s fingers slim
Were reaching out to pluck at him
And hurt him more.
Oh gentlemen, hark to my hymn!
To be a primrose is my whim
Upon the floor,
And nothing more.
The sky is with me, and the dim
Earth clasps my roots. Your shadows skim
My face once more....
Leave me therefore
Upon the floor;
Say _au revoir_....
Ah William! The “something more” that the primrose was to you, was
yourself in the mirror. And if the yokel actually got as far as
beholding a “yellow primrose”, he got far enough.
You see it is not so easy even for a poet to equilibrate himself even
with a mere primrose. He didn’t leave it with a soul of its own. It had
to have his soul. And nature had to be sweet and pure, Williamish.
Sweet-Williamish at that! Anthropomorphised! Anthropomorphism, that
allows nothing to call its soul its own, save anthropos: and only a
special brand, even of him!
Poetry can tell alluring lies, when we let our feelings, or our ego, run
away with us.
And we must always beware of romance: of people who love nature, or
flowers, or dogs, or babies, or pure adventure. It means they are
getting into a love-swing where everything is easy and nothing opposes
their own egoism. Nature, babies, dogs are so lovable, because they
can’t answer back. The primrose, alas! couldn’t pipe up and say: “Hey!
Bill! get off the barrow!”
That’s the best of men and women. There’s bound to be a lot of back
chat. You can _Lucy Gray_ your woman as hard as you like, one day she’s
bound to come back at you: “Who are _you_ when you’re at home?”
A man isn’t going to spread his own ego over a woman, as he has done
over nature and primroses, and dogs, or horses, or babies, or “the
people”, or the proletariat or the poor-and-needy. The old hen takes the
cock by the beard, and says: “_That’s me, mind you!_”
Man is an individual, and woman is an individual. Which sounds easy.
But it’s not as easy as it seems. These two individuals are as different
as chalk and cheese. True, a pound of chalk weighs as much as a pound of
cheese. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the scales.
That is to say, you can announce that men and women should be equal and
_are_ equal. All right. Put them in the scales.
Alas! my wife is about twenty pounds heavier than I am.
Nothing to do but to abstract. _L’homme est né libre_: with a napkin
round his little tail.
Nevertheless, I am a citizen, my wife is a citizeness: I can vote, she
can vote, I can be sent to prison, she can be sent to prison, I can have
a passport, she can have a passport, I can be an author, she can be an
authoress. Ooray! OO-bloomin-ray!
You see, we are both British subjects. Everybody bow!
Subjects! Subjects! Subjects!
_Madame_ is already shaking herself like a wet hen.
But yes, my dear! we are both subjects. And as subjects, we enjoy a
lovely equality, liberty, my dear! Equality! Fraternity or Sorority! my
dear!
Aren’t you pleased?
But it’s no use talking to a wet hen. That “subject” was a cold douche.
As subjects, men and women may be equal.
But as objects, it’s another pair of shoes. Where, I ask you, is the
equality between an arrow and a horseshoe? or a serpent and a
squash-blossom? Find me the equation that equates the cock and the hen.
You can’t.
As inhabitants of my backyard, as loyal subjects of my _rancho_, they,
the cock and the hen, are equal. When he gets wheat, she gets wheat.
When sour milk is put out, it is as much for him as for her. She is just
as free to go where she likes, as he is. And if she likes to crow at
sunrise, she may. There is no law against it. And he can lay an egg, if
the fit takes him. Absolutely nothing forbids.
Isn’t that equality? If it isn’t, what is?
Even then, they’re two very different objects.
As equals, they are just a couple of barnyard fowls, clucking!
generalised!
But dear me, when he comes prancing up with his red beard shaking, and
his eye gleaming, and she comes slowly pottering after, with her nose to
the ground, they’re two very different objects. You never think of
equality: or of inequality, for that matter. They’re a cock and a hen,
and you accept them as such.
You don’t think of them as equals, or as unequals. But you think of them
_together_.
Wherein, then, lies the togetherness?
Would you call it love?
I wouldn’t.
Their two egos are absolutely separate. He’s a cock, she’s a hen. He
never thinks of her for a moment, as if she were a cock like himself;
and she never thinks for a moment that he is a hen like herself. I never
hear anything in her squawk which would seem to say: “_Aren’t I a fowl
as much as you are, you brute!_” Whereas I always hear women shrieking
at their men: “Aren’t I a human being as much as you are?”
It seems beside the point.
I always answer my spouse, with sweet reasonableness: “My dear, we are
both British Subjects. What can I say more, on the score of equality?
You are a British Subject as much as I am.”
Curiously, she hates to have it put that way. She wants to be a human
being as much as I am. But absolutely and honestly, I don’t know what a
human-being is. Whereas I do know what a British Subject is. It can be
defined.
And I can see how a _Civis Romanum_, or a British Subject can be free,
whether it’s he or she. The he-ness or the she-ness doesn’t matter. But
how a _man_ can consider himself free, I don’t know. Any more than a
cock-robin or a dandelion.
Imagine a dandelion suddenly hissing: “_I am free and I will be free!_”
Then wriggling on his root like a snake with his tail pegged down!
What a horrifying sight!
So it is when a man, with two legs and a penis, a belly and a mouth
begins to shout about being free. One wants to ask: which bit do you
refer to?
There’s a cock and there’s the hen, and their two egos or
individualities seem to stay apart without friction. They never coo at
one another, nor hold each other’s hand. I never see her sitting on his
lap and being petted. True, sometimes he calls for her to come and eat a
titbit. And sometimes he dashes at her and walks over her for a moment.
She doesn’t seem to mind. I never hear her squawking: “_Don’t you think
you can walk over me!_”
Yet she’s by no means downtrodden. She’s just herself, and seems to have
a good time: and she doesn’t like it if he is missing.
So there is this peculiar togetherness about them. You can’t call it
love. It would be too ridiculous.
What then?
As far as I can see, it is desire. And the desire has a fluctuating
intensity, but it is always there. His desire is always towards her,
even when he has absolutely forgotten her. And by the way she puts her
feet down, I can see she always walks in her plumes of desirableness,
even when she’s going broody.
The mystery about her, is her strange undying desirableness. You can see
it in every step she takes. She is desirable. And this is the breath of
her life.
It is the same with Susan. The queer cowy mystery of her is her
changeless cowy desirableness. She is far, alas, from any bull. She
never even remotely dreams of a bull, save at rare and brief periods.
Yet her whole being and motion is that of being desirable: or else
fractious. It seems to unite her with the very air, and the plants and
trees. Even to the sky and the trees and the grass and the running
stream, she is subtly, delicately and _purely_ desirable, in cowy
desirability. It is her cowy mystery. Then her fractiousness is the
fireworks of her desirableness.
To me she is fractious, tiresome, and a faggot. Yet the subtle
desirableness is in her, for me. As it is in a brown hen, or even a sow.
It is like a peculiar charm: the creature’s femaleness, her
desirableness. It is her sex, no doubt: but so subtle as to have nothing
to do with function. It is a mystery, like a delicate flame. It would be
false to call it love, because love complicates the ego. The ego is
always concerned in love. But in the frail, subtle desirousness of the
true male, towards everything female, and the equally frail,
indescribable desirability of every female for every male, lies the real
clue to the equating, or the _relating_, of things which otherwise are
incommensurable.
And this, this desire, is the reality which is inside love. The ego
itself plays a false part in it. The individual is like a deep pool, or
tarn, in the mountains, fed from beneath by unseen springs, and having
no obvious inlet or outlet. The springs which feed the individual at the
depths are sources of power, power from the unknown. But it is not until
the stream of desire overflows and goes running downhill into the open
world, that the individual has his further, secondary existence.
Now we have imagined love to be something absolute and personal. It is
neither. In its essence, love is no more than the stream of clear and
unmuddied, subtle desire which flows from person to person, creature to
creature, thing to thing. The moment this stream of delicate but potent
desire dries up, the love has dried up, and the joy of life has dried
up. It’s no good trying to turn on the tap. Desire is either flowing, or
gone, and the love with it, and the life too.
This subtle streaming of desire is beyond the control of the ego. The
ego says: “This is _my_ love, to do as I like with! This is _my_ desire,
given me for my own pleasure.”
But the ego deceives itself. The individual cannot possess the love
which he himself feels. Neither should he be entirely possessed by it.
Neither man nor woman should sacrifice individuality to love, nor love
to individuality.
If we lose desire out of our life, we become empty vessels. But if we
breakout own integrity, we become a squalid mess, like a jar of honey
dropped and smashed.
The individual has nothing, really, to do with love. That is, his
individuality hasn’t. Out of the deep silence of his individuality runs
the stream of desire, into the open squash-blossom of the world. And the
stream of desire may meet and mingle with the stream from a woman. But
it is never _himself_ that meets and mingles with _herself_: any more
than two lakes, whose waters meet to make one river, in the distance,
meet in themselves.
The two individuals stay apart, for ever and ever. But the two streams
of desire, like the Blue Nile and the White Nile, from the mountains one
and from the low hot lake the other, meet and at length mix their
strange and alien waters, to make a Nilus Flux.
See then the childish mistake we have made, about love. We have
_insisted_ that the two individualities should “fit”. We have insisted
that the “love” between man and woman must be “perfect”. What on earth
that means, is a mystery. What would a perfect Nilus Flux be?--one that
never overflowed its banks? or one that always overflowed its banks? or
one that had exactly the same overflow every year, to a hair’s-breadth?
My dear, it is absurd. Perfect love is an absurdity. As for casting out
fear, you’d better be careful. For fear, like curses and chickens, will
also come home to roost.
Perfect love, I suppose, means that a married man and woman never
contradict one another, and that they both of them always feel the same
thing at the same moment, and kiss one another on the strength of it.
What blarney! It means, I suppose, that they are absolutely intimate:
this precious intimacy that lovers insist on. They tell each other
_everything_: and if she puts on chiffon knickers, he ties the strings
for her: and if he blows his nose, she holds the hanky.
Pfui! Is anything so loathsome as intimacy, especially the married sort,
or the sort that “lovers” indulge in!
It’s a mistake and ends in disaster. Why? Because the individualities
of men and women are incommensurable, and they will no more meet than
the mountains of Abyssinia will meet with Lake Victoria Nyanza. It is
far more important to keep them distinct, than to join them. If they are
to join, they will join in the third land where the two streams of
desire meet.
Of course, as citizen and citizeness, as two persons, even as two
spirits, man and woman can be equal and intimate. But this is their
outer, more general or common selves. The individual man himself, and
the individual woman herself, this is another pair of shoes.
It is a pity that we have insisted on putting all our eggs in one
basket: calling love the basket, and ourselves the eggs. It is a pity we
have insisted on being individuals only in the communistic,
semi-abstract or generalised sense: as voters, money-owners, “free” men
and women: free in so far as we are all alike, and individuals in so far
as we are commensurable integers.
By turning ourselves into integers: every man to himself and every woman
to herself a Number One; an infinite number of Number Ones; we have
destroyed ourselves as desirous or desirable individuals, and broken the
inward sources of our power, and flooded all mankind into one dreary
marsh where the rivers of desire lie dead with everything else, except a
stagnant unity.
It is a pity of pities women have learned to think like men. Any husband
will say, “_they haven’t_.” But they have: they’ve all learned to think
like some other beastly man, who is not their husband. Our education
goes on and on, on and on, making the sexes alike, destroying the
original individuality of the blood, to substitute for it this dreary
individuality of the ego, the Number One. Out of the ego streams neither
Blue Nile nor White Nile. The infinite number of little human egos makes
a mosquito marsh, where nothing happens except buzzing and biting, ooze
and degeneration.
And they call this marsh, with its poisonous will-o-the-wisps, and its
clouds of mosquitos, _democracy_, and the reign of love!!
You can have it.
I am a man, and the Mountains of Abyssinia, and my Blue Nile flows
towards the desert. There should be a woman somewhere far South, like a
great lake, sending forth her White Nile towards the desert, too: and
the rivers will meet among the Slopes of the World, somewhere.
But alas, every woman I’ve ever met spends her time saying she’s as good
as any man, if not better, and she can beat him at his own game. So Lake
Victoria Nyanza gets up on end, and declares it’s the Mountains of
Abyssinia, and the Mountains of Abyssinia fall flat and cry: “_You’re
all that, and more, my dear!_”--and between them, you’re bogged.
I give it up.
But at any rate it’s nice to know _what’s_ wrong, since wrong it is.
If we were men, if we were women, our individualities would be lone and
a bit mysterious, like tarns, and fed with power, male power, female
power, from underneath, invisibly. And from us the streams of desire
would flow out in the eternal glimmering adventure, to meet in some
unknown desert.
_Mais nous avons changé tout cela._
I’ll bet the yokel, even then, was more himself, and the stream of his
desire was stronger and more gurgling, than William Wordsworth’s. For a
long time the yokel retains his own integrity, and his own real stream
of desire flows from him. Once you break this, and turn him, who was a
yokel, into still another Number One, an assertive newspaper-parcel of
an ego, you’ve done it!
But don’t, dear, darling reader, when I say “desire”, immediately
conclude that I mean a jungleful of rampaging Don Juans and raping buck
niggers. When I say that a woman should be eternally desirable, _don’t_
say that I mean every man should want to sleep with her, the instant he
sets eyes on her.
On the contrary. Don Juan was only Don Juan because he _had_ no real
desire. He had broken his own integrity, and was a mess to start with.
No stream of desire, with a course of its own, flowed from him. He was
a marsh in himself. He mashed and trampled everything up, and desired no
woman, so he ran after every one of them, with an itch instead of a
steady flame. And tortured by his own itch, he inflamed his itch more
and more. That’s Don Juan, the man who _couldn’t_ desire a woman. He
shouldn’t have tried. He should have gone into a monastery at fifteen.
As for the yokel, his little stream may have flowed out of commonplace
little hills, and been ready to mingle with the streams of any easy,
puddly little yokeless. But what does it matter! And men are far less
promiscuous, even then, than we like to pretend. It’s Don Juanery,
sex-in-the-head, no real desire, which leads to profligacy or squalid
promiscuity. The yokel usually met desire with desire: which is all
right: and sufficiently rare to ensure the moral balance.
Desire is a living stream. If we gave free rein, or a free course, to
our living flow of desire, we shouldn’t go far wrong. It’s quite
different from giving a free rein to an itching, prurient imagination.
That is our vileness.
The living stream of sexual desire itself does not often, in any man,
find its object, its confluent, the stream of desire in a woman into
which it can flow. The two streams flow together, spontaneously, not
often, in the life of any man or woman. Mostly, men and women alike rush
into a sort of prostitution, because our idiotic civilisation has never
learned to hold in reverence the true desire-stream. We force our desire
from our ego: and this is deadly.
Desire itself is a pure thing, like sunshine, or fire, or rain. It is
desire that makes the whole world living to me, keeps me in the flow
connected. It is my flow of desire that makes me move as the birds and
animals move through the sunshine and the night, in a kind of
accomplished innocence, not shut outside of the natural paradise. For
life is a kind of Paradise, even to my horse Azul, though he doesn’t get
his own way in it, by any means, and is sometimes in a real temper about
it. Sometimes he even gets a bellyache, with wet alfalfa. But even the
bellyache is part of the natural paradise. Not like human _ennui_.
So a man can go forth in desire, even to the primroses. But let him
refrain from falling all over the poor blossom, as William did. Or
trying to incorporate it in his own ego, which is a sort of lust. Nasty
anthropomorphic lust.
Everything that exists, even a stone, has two sides to its nature. It
fiercely maintains its own individuality, its own solidity. And it
reaches forth from itself in the subtlest flow of desire.
It fiercely resists all inroads. At the same time it sinks down in the
curious weight, or flow, of that desire which we call gravitation. And
imperceptibly, through the course of ages, it flows into delicate
combination with the air and sun and rain.
At one time, men worshipped stones: symbolically, no doubt, because of
their mysterious durability, their power of hardness, resistance, their
strength of remaining unchanged. Yet even then, worshipping man did not
rest till he had erected the stone into a pillar, a menhir, symbol of
the eternal desire, as the phallus itself is but a symbol.
And we, men and women, are the same as stones: the powerful resistance
and cohesiveness of our individuality is countered by the mysterious
flow of desire, from us and towards us.
It is the same with the worlds, the stars, the suns. All is alive, in
its own degree. And the centripetal force of spinning earth is the force
of earth’s individuality: and the centrifugal force is the force of
desire. Earth’s immense centripetal energy, almost passion, balanced
against her furious centrifugal force, holds her suspended between her
moon and her sun, in a dynamic equilibrium.
So instead of the Greek: _Know thyself!_ we shall have to say to every
man: “_Be Thyself! Be Desirous!_”--and to every woman: “_Be Thyself! Be
Desirable!_”
_Be Thyself!_ does not mean: _Assert thy ego!_ It means, be true to your
own integrity, as man, as woman: let your heart stay open, to receive
the mysterious inflow of power from the unknown: know that the power
comes to you from beyond, it is not generated by your own will:
therefore all the time, be watchful, and reverential towards the
mysterious coming of power into you.
_Be Thyself!_ is the grand cry of individualism. But individualism makes
the mistake of considering an individual as a fixed entity: a little
windmill that spins without shifting ground or changing its own nature.
And this is nonsense. When power enters us, it does not just move us
mechanically. It changes us. When the unseen wind blows, it blows upon
us, and through us. It carries us like a ship on a sea. And it roars to
flame in us, like a draught in a fierce fire. Or like a dandelion in
flower.
What is the difference between a dandelion and a windmill?
Heap on more wood!
Even the Nirvanists consider man as a fixed entity, a changeless ego,
which is capable of nothing, ultimately, but remerging into the
infinite. A little windmill that can turn faster and faster, till it
becomes actually invisible, and nothing remains in nothingness, except a
blur and a faint hum.
I am not a windmill. I am not even an ego. I am a man.
I am myself, and I remain myself only by the grave of the powers that
enter me, from the unseen, and make me forever newly myself.
And I am myself, also, by the grace of the desire that flows from me and
consummates me with the other unknown, the invisible, tangible
creation.
The powers that enter me fluctuate and ebb. And the desire that goes
forth from me waxes and wanes. Sometimes it is weak, and I am almost
isolated. Sometimes it is strong, and I am almost carried away.
But supposing the cult of Individualism, Liberty, Freedom, and so forth,
has landed me in the state of egoism, the state so prettily and
nauseously described by Henley in his _Invictus_: which, after all, is
but the yelp of a house-dog, a domesticated creature with an inferiority
complex!
“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll:
I am the master of my fate!
I am the captain of my soul!”
Are you, old boy? Then why hippety-hop?
He was a cripple at that!
As a matter of fact, it is the slave’s bravado! The modern slave is he
who does not receive his powers from the unseen, and give reverence, but
who thinks he is his own little boss. Only a slave would take the
trouble to shout: “_I am free!_” That is to say, to shout it in the face
of the open heavens. In the face of men, and their institutions and
prisons. Yes-yes! But in the face of the open heavens I would be ashamed
to talk about freedom. I have no life, no real power, unless it will
come to me. And I accomplish nothing, not even my own fulfilled
existence, unless I go forth, delicately, desirous, and find the mating
of my desire; even if it be only the sky itself, and trees, and the cow
Susan, and the inexpressible consolation of a statue of an Egyptian
Pharaoh, or the _Old Testament_, or even three rubies. These answer my
desire with fulfilment. What bunk then to talk about being master of my
fate! when my fate depends upon these things:--not to mention the unseen
reality that sends strength, or life into me, without which I am a gourd
rattle.
The ego, the little conscious ego that I am, that doll-like entity, that
mannikin made in ridiculous likeness of the Adam which I am: am I going
to allow that that is _all of me_? And shout about it?
Of course, if I am nothing but an ego, and woman is nothing but another
ego, then there is really no vital difference between us. Two little
dolls of conscious entities, squeaking when you squeeze them. And with a
tiny bit of an extraneous appendage to mark which is which.
“Woman is just the same as man,” loudly said the political speaker,
“Save for a very little difference.”
“Three cheers for the very little difference!” says a vulgar voice from
the crowd.
But that’s a chestnut.
“Quick! Sharp! On the alert!
Let every gentleman put on his shirt!
And be _quick_ if you please!
Let every lady put on her chemise!”
Though nowadays, a lady’s chemise won’t save her face.
In or out her chemise, however, doesn’t make much difference to the
modern woman. She’s a finished-off ego, an assertive conscious entity,
cut off like a doll from any mystery. And her nudity is about as
interesting as a doll’s. If you can _be_ interested in the nudity of a
doll, then jazz on, jazz on!
The same with the men. No matter how they pull their shirts off they
never arrive at their own nakedness. They have none. They can only be
undressed. Naked they cannot be. Without their clothes on, they are like
a dismantled street-car without its advertisements: sort of public
article that doesn’t refer to anything.
The ego! Anthropomorphism! Love! What it works out to in the end is that
even anthropos disappears, and leaves a sawdust mannikin wondrously
jazzing.
“My little sisters, the birds!” says Francis of Assisi.
“_Whew!_” goes the blackbird.
“Listen to me, my little sisters, you birds!”
“_Whew!_” goes the blackbird. “I’m a cock, mister!”
Love! What’s the good of woman who isn’t desirable, even though she’s as
pretty as paint, and the waves in her hair are as permanent as the
pyramids!
He buried his face in her permanent wave, and cried: “Help! Get me
out!”
Individualism! Read the advertisements! “Jew-jew’s hats give a man that
individual touch he so much desires. No man could lack individuality in
Poppem’s pyjamas.” Poor devil! If he was left to his own skin, where
would he be!
Pop goes the weasel!
REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH OF A PORCUPINE
REFLECTIONS ON THE DEATH OF A PORCUPINE
There are many bare places on the little pine trees, towards the top,
where the porcupines have gnawed the bark away and left the white flesh
showing. And some trees are dying from the top.
Everyone says, porcupines should be killed; the Indians, Mexicans,
Americans all say the same.
At full moon a month ago, when I went down the long clearing in the
brilliant moonlight, through the poor dry herbage a big porcupine began
to waddle away from me, towards the trees and the darkness. The animal
had raised all its hairs and bristles, so that by the light of the moon
it seemed to have a tall, swaying, moonlit aureole arching its back as
it went. That seemed curiously fearsome, as if the animal were emitting
itself demon-like on the air.
It waddled very slowly, with its white spiky spoon-tail steering flat,
behind the round bear-like mound of its back. It had a lumbering,
beetle’s, squalid motion, unpleasant. I followed it into the darkness
of the timber, and there, squat like a great tick, it began scrapily to
creep up a pine-trunk. It was very like a great aureoled tick, a bug,
struggling up.
I stood near and watched, disliking the presence of the creature. It is
a duty to kill the things. But the dislike of killing him was greater
than the dislike of him. So I watched him climb.
And he watched me. When he had got nearly the height of a man, all his
long hairs swaying with a bristling gleam like an aureole, he hesitated,
and slithered down. Evidently he had decided, either that I was
harmless, or else that it was risky to go up any further, when I could
knock him off so easily with a pole. So he slithered podgily down again,
and waddled away with the same bestial, stupid motion of that
white-spiky repulsive spoon-tail. He was as big as a middle-sized pig:
or more like a bear.
I let him go. He was repugnant. He made a certain squalor in the
moonlight of the Rocky Mountains. As all savagery has a touch of
squalor, that makes one a little sick at the stomach. And anyhow, it
seemed almost more squalid to pick up a pine-bough and push him over,
hit him and kill him.
A few days later, on a hot, motionless morning when the pine-trees put
out their bristles in stealthy, hard assertion; and I was not in a good
temper, because Black-eyed Susan, the cow, had disappeared into the
timber, and I had had to ride hunting her, so it was nearly nine
o’clock before she was milked: Madame came in suddenly out of the
sunlight, saying “I got such a shock! There are two strange dogs, and
one of them has got the most awful beard, all round his nose.”
She was frightened, like a child, at something unnatural.
“Beard! Porcupine quills, probably! He’s been after a porcupine.”
“Ah!” she cried in relief. “Very likely! Very likely!”--then with a
change of tone; “Poor thing, will they hurt him?”
“They will. I wonder when he came.”
“I heard dogs bark in the night.”
“Did you? Why didn’t you say so? I should have known Susan was hiding--”
The ranch is lonely, there is no sound in the night, save the
innumerable noises of the night, that you can’t put your finger on;
cosmic noises in the far deeps of the sky, and of the earth.
I went out. And in the full blaze of sunlight in the field, stood two
dogs, a black-and-white, and a big, bushy, rather handsome sandy-red
dog, of the collie type. And sure enough, this latter did look queer and
a bit horrifying, his whole muzzle set round with white spines, like
some ghastly growth; like an unnatural beard.
The black-and-white dog made off as I went through the fence. But the
red dog whimpered and hesitated, and moved on hot bricks. He was fat and
in good condition. I thought he might belong to some shepherds herding
sheep in the forest ranges, among the mountains.
He waited while I went up to him, wagging his tail and whimpering, and
ducking his head, and dancing. He daren’t rub his nose with his paws any
more: it hurt too much. I patted his head and looked at his nose, and he
whimpered loudly.
He must have had thirty quills, or more, sticking out of his nose, all
the way round: the white, ugly ends of the quills protruding an inch,
sometimes more, sometimes less, from his already swollen, blood-puffed
muzzle.
The porcupines here have quills only two or three inches long. But they
are devilish; and a dog will die if he does not get them pulled out.
Because they work further and further in, and will sometimes emerge
through the skin away in some unexpected place.
Then the fun began. I got him in the yard: and he drank up the whole
half-gallon of the chickens’ sour milk. Then I started pulling out the
quills. He was a big, bushy, handsome dog, but his nerve was gone, and
every time I got a quill out, he gave a yelp. Some long quills were
fairly easy. But the shorter ones, near his lips, were deep in, and hard
to get hold of, and hard to pull out when you did get hold of them. And
with every one that came out, came a little spurt of blood and another
yelp and writhe.
The dog wanted the quills out: but his nerve was gone. Every time he saw
my hand coming to his nose, he jerked his head away. I quieted him, and
stealthily managed to jerk out another quill, with the blood all over my
fingers. But with every one that came out, he grew more tiresome. I
tried and tried and tried to get hold of another quill, and he jerked
and jerked, and writhed and whimpered, and ran under the porch floor.
It was a curiously unpleasant, nerve-trying job. The day was blazing
hot. The dog came out and I struggled with him again for an hour or
more. Then we blindfolded him. But either he smelled my hand approaching
his nose, or some weird instinct told him. He jerked his head, this way,
that way, up, down, sideways, roundwise, as one’s fingers came slowly,
slowly, to seize a quill.
The quills on his lips and chin were deep in, only about a quarter of an
inch of white stub protruding from the swollen, blood-oozed, festering
black skin. It was very difficult to jerk them out.
We let him lie for an interval, hidden in the quiet cool place under the
porch floor. After half an hour, he crept out again. We got a rope round
his nose, behind the bristles, and one held while the other got the
stubs with the pliers. But it was too trying. If a quill came out, the
dog’s yelp startled every nerve. And he was frightened of the pain, it
was impossible to hold his head still any longer.
After struggling for two hours, and extracting some twenty quills, I
gave up. It was impossible to quiet the creature, and I had had enough.
His nose on the top was clear: a punctured, puffy, blood-darkened mess;
and his lips were clear. But just on his round little chin, where the
few white hairs are, was still a bunch of white quills, eight or nine,
deep in.
We let him go, and he dived under the porch, and there he lay invisible:
save for the end of his bushy, foxy tail, which moved when we came near.
Towards noon he emerged, ate up the chicken-food, and stood with that
doggish look of dejection, and fear, and friendliness, and greediness,
wagging his tail.
But I had had enough.
“Go home!” I said. “Go home! Go home to your master, and let him finish
for you.”
He would not go. So I led him across the blazing hot clearing, in the
way I thought he should go. He followed a hundred yards, then stood
motionless in the blazing sun. He was not going to leave the place.
And I! I simply did not want him.
So I picked up a stone. He dropped his tail, and swerved towards the
house. I knew what he was going to do. He was going to dive under the
porch, and there stick, haunting the place.
I dropped my stone, and found a good stick under the cedar tree. Already
in the heat was that sting-like biting of electricity, the thunder
gathering in the sheer sunshine, without a cloud, and making one’s whole
body feel dislocated.
I could not bear to have that dog around any more. Going quietly to him,
I suddenly gave him one hard hit with the stick, crying: “Go home!” He
turned quickly, and the end of the stick caught him on his sore nose.
With a fierce yelp, he went off like a wolf, downhill, like a flash,
gone. And I stood in the field full of pangs of regret, at having hit
him, unintentionally, on his sore nose.
But he was gone.
And then the present moon came, and again the night was clear. But in
the interval there had been heavy thunder-rains, the ditch was running
with bright water across the field, and the night, so fair, had not the
terrific, mirror-like brilliancy, touched with terror, so startling
bright, of the moon in the last days of June.
We were alone on the ranch. Madame went out into the clear night, just
before retiring. The stream ran in a cord of silver across the field, in
the straight line where I had taken the irrigation ditch. The pine tree
in front of the house threw a black shadow. The mountain slope came down
to the fence, wild and alert.
“Come!” said she excitedly. “There is a big porcupine drinking at the
ditch. I thought at first it was a bear.”
When I got out he had gone. But among the grasses and the coming wild
sunflowers, under the moon, I saw his greyish halo, like a pallid living
bush, moving over the field, in the distance, in the moonlit
_clair-obscur_.
We got through the fence, and following, soon caught him up. There he
lumbered, with his white spoon-tail spiked with bristles, steering
behind almost as if he were moving backwards, and this was his head. His
long, long hairs above the quills quivering with a dim grey gleam, like
a bush.
And again I disliked him.
“Should one kill him?”
She hesitated. Then with a sort of disgust:
“Yes!”
I went back to the house, and got the little twenty-two rifle. Now never
in my life had I shot at any live thing: I never wanted to. I always
felt guns very repugnant: sinister, mean. With difficulty I had fired
once or twice at a target: but resented doing even so much. Other people
could shoot if they wanted to. Myself, individually, it was repugnant to
me even to try.
But something slowly hardens in a man’s soul. And I knew now, it had
hardened in mine. I found the gun, and with rather trembling hands, got
it loaded. Then I pulled back the trigger and followed the porcupine. It
was still lumbering through the grass. Coming near, I aimed.
The trigger stuck. I pressed the little catch with a safety-pin I found
in my pocket, and released the trigger. Then we followed the porcupine.
He was still lumbering towards the trees. I went sideways on, stood
quite near to him, and fired, in the clear-dark of the moonlight.
And as usual I aimed too high. He turned, went scuttling back whence he
had come.
I got another shell in place, and followed. This time I fired full into
the mound of his round back, below the glistening grey halo. He seemed
to stumble on to his hidden nose, and struggled a few strides, ducking
his head under like a hedgehog.
“He’s not dead yet! Oh, fire again!” cried Madame.
I fired, but the gun was empty.
So I ran quickly, for a cedar pole. The porcupine was lying still, with
subsiding halo. He stirred faintly. So I turned him and hit him hard
over the nose; or where, in the dark, his nose should have been. And it
was done. He was dead.
And in the moonlight, I looked down on the first creature I had ever
shot.
“Does it seem mean?” I asked aloud, doubtful.
Again Madame hesitated. Then: “No!” she said resentfully.
And I felt she was right. Things like the porcupine, one must be able to
shoot them, if they get in one’s way.
One must be able to shoot. I, myself, must be able to shoot, and to
kill.
For me, this is a _volta face_. I have always preferred to walk round my
porcupine, rather than kill it.
Now, I know it’s no good walking ’round. One must kill.
I buried him in the adobe hole. But some animal dug down and ate him;
for two days later there lay the spines and bones spread out, with the
long skeletons of the porcupine-hands.
The only nice thing about him--or her, for I believe it was a female, by
the dugs on her belly--were the feet. They were like longish, alert
black hands, paw-hands. That is why a porcupine’s tracks in the snow
look almost as if a child had gone by, leaving naked little human
foot-prints, like a little boy.
So, he is gone: or she is gone. But there is another one, bigger and
blacker-looking, among the west timber. That too is to be shot. It is
part of the business of ranching: even when it’s only a little
half-abandoned ranch like this one.
Wherever man establishes himself, upon the earth, he has to fight for
his place, against the lower orders of life. Food, the basis of
existence, has to be fought for even by the most idyllic of farmers. You
plant, and you protect your growing crop with a gun. Food, food, how
strangely it relates man with the animal and vegetable world! How
important it is! And how fierce is the fight that goes on around it.
The same when one skins a rabbit, and takes out the inside, one realises
what an enormous part of the animal, comparatively, is intestinal, what
a big part of him is just for food-apparatus; for _living on_ other
organisms.
And when one watches the horses in the big field, their noses to the
ground, bite-bite-biting at the grass, and stepping absorbedly on, and
bite-bite-biting without ever lifting their noses, cropping off the
grass, the young shoots of alfalfa, the dandelions, with a blind,
relentless, unwearied persistence, one’s whole life pauses. One suddenly
realises again how all creatures devour, and _must_ devour the lower
forms of life.
So Susan, swinging across the field, snatches off the tops of the little
wild sunflowers as if she were mowing. And down they go, down her black
throat. And when she stands in her cowy oblivion chewing her cud, with
her lower jaw swinging peacefully, and I am milking her, suddenly the
camomiley smell of her breath, as she glances round with glaring,
smoke-blue eyes, makes me realise it is the sunflowers that are her ball
of cud. Sunflowers! And they will go to making her glistening black
hide, and the thick cream on her milk.
And the chickens, when they see a great black beetle, that the Mexicans
call a _toro_, floating past, they are after it in a rush. And if it
settles, instantly the brown hen stabs it with her beak. It is a great
beetle two or three inches long: but in a second it is in the crop of
the chicken. Gone!
And Timsy, the cat, as she spies on the chipmunks, crouches in another
sort of oblivion, soft, and still. The chipmunks come to drink the milk
from the chickens’ bowl. Two of them met at the bowl. They were little
squirrely things with stripes down their backs. They sat up in front of
one another, lifting their inquisitive little noses and humping their
backs. Then each put its two little hands on the other’s shoulders, they
reared up, gazing into each other’s faces; and finally they put their
two little noses together, in a sort of kiss.
But Miss Timsy can’t stand this. In a soft, white-and-yellow leap she is
after them. They skip with the darting jerk of chipmunks, to the
wood-heap, and with one soft, high-leaping sideways bound Timsy goes
through the air. Her snow-flake of a paw comes down on one of the
chipmunks. She looks at it for a second. It squirms. Swiftly and
triumphantly she puts her two flowery little white paws on it, legs
straight out in front of her, back arched, gazing concentratedly yet
whimsically. Chipmunk does not stir. She takes it softly in her mouth,
where it dangles softly, like a lady’s tippet. And with a proud,
prancing motion the Timsy sets off towards the house, her white little
feet hardly touching the ground.
But she gets shooed away. We refuse to loan her the sitting-room any
more, for her gladiatorial displays. If the chippy must be “butchered to
make a Timsy holiday”, it shall be outside. Disappointed, but still
high-stepping, the Timsy sets off towards the clay oven by the shed.
There she lays the chippy gently down, and soft as a little white cloud
lays one small paw on its striped back. Chippy does not move. Soft as
thistle-down she raises her paw a tiny, tiny bit, to release him.
And all of a sudden, with an elastic jerk, he darts from under the white
release of her paw. And instantly, she is up in the air and down she
comes on him, with the forward-thrusting bolts of her white paws. Both
creatures are motionless.
Then she takes him softly in her mouth again, and looks round, to see if
she can slip into the house. She cannot. So she trots towards the
wood-pile.
It is a game, and it is pretty. Chippy escapes into the wood-pile, and
she softly, softly reconnoitres among the faggots.
Of all the animals, there is no denying it, the Timsy is the most
pretty, the most fine. It is not her mere _corpus_ that is beautiful; it
is her bloom of aliveness. Her “infinite variety”; the soft, snow-flakey
lightness of her, and at the same time her lean, heavy ferocity. I had
never realised the latter, till I was lying in bed one day moving my
toe, unconsciously, under the bedclothes. Suddenly a terrific blow
struck my foot. The Timsy had sprung out of nowhere, with a hurling,
steely force, thud upon the bedclothes where the toe was moving. It was
as if someone had aimed a sudden blow, vindictive and unerring.
“Timsy!”
She looked at me with the vacant, feline glare of her hunting eyes. It
is not even ferocity. It is the dilation of the strange, vacant
arrogance of power. The power is in her.
And so it is. Life moves in circles of power and of vividness, and each
circle of life only maintains its orbit upon the subjection of some
lower circle. If the lower cycles of life are not _mastered_, there can
be no higher cycle.
In nature, one creature devours another, and this is an essential part
of all existence and of all being. It is not something to lament over,
nor something to try to reform. The Buddhist who refuses to take life is
really ridiculous, since if he eats only two grains of rice per day, it
is two grains of life. We did not make creation, _we_ are not the
authors of the universe. And if we see that the whole of creation is
established upon the fact that one life devours another life, one cycle
of existence can only come into existence through the subjugating of
another cycle of existence, then what is the good of trying to pretend
that it is not so? The only thing to do is to realise what is higher,
and what is lower, in the cycles of existence.
It is nonsense to declare that there _is_ no higher and lower. We know
full well that the dandelion belongs to a higher cycle of existence than
the hartstongue fern, that the ant’s is a higher form of existence than
the dandelion’s, that the thrush is higher than the ant, that Timsy the
cat, is higher than the thrush, and that I, a man, am higher than Timsy.
What do we mean by higher? Strictly, we mean more alive. More vividly
alive. The ant is more vividly alive than the pine-tree. We know it,
there is no trying to refute it. It is all very well saying that they
are both alive in two different ways, and therefore they are
incomparable, incommensurable. This is also true.
But one truth does not displace another. Even apparently contradictory
truths do not displace one another. Logic is far too coarse to make the
subtle distinctions life demands.
Truly, it is futile to compare an ant with a great pine-tree, in the
absolute. Yet as far as _existence_ is concerned, they are not only
placed in comparison to one another, they are occasionally pitted
against one another. And if it comes to a contest, the little ant will
devour the life of the huge tree. If it comes to a contest.
And, in the cycles of _existence_, this is the test. From the lowest
form of existence, to the highest, the test question is: _Can thy
neighbour finally overcome thee?_
If he can, then he belongs to a higher cycle of existence.
This is the truth behind the survival of the fittest. Every cycle of
existence is established upon the overcoming of the lower cycles of
existence. The real question is, wherein does _fitness_ lie? Fitness for
what? Fit merely to survive? That which is only fit to survive will
survive only to supply food or contribute in some way to the existence
of a higher form of life, which is able to do more than survive, which
can really _vive_, live.
Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern, or than in a
palm tree.
Life is more vivid in a snake than in a butterfly.
Life is more vivid in a wren than in an alligator.
Life is more vivid in a cat than in an ostrich.
Life is more vivid in the Mexican who drives the wagon, than in the two
horses in the wagon.
Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for
me.
We are speaking in terms of _existence_: that is, in terms of species,
race, or type.
The dandelion can take hold of the land, the palm tree is driven into a
corner, with the fern.
The snake can devour the fiercest insect.
The fierce bird can destroy the greatest reptile.
The great cat can destroy the greatest bird.
The man can destroy the horse, or any animal.
One race of man can subjugate and rule another race.
All this in terms of _existence_. As far as existence goes, that
life-species is the highest which can devour, or destroy, or subjugate
every other life-species against which it is pitted in contest.
This is a law. There is no escaping this law. Anyone, or any race,
trying to escape it, will fall a victim: will fall into subjugation.
But let us insist and insist again, we are talking now of existence, of
species, of types, of races, of nations, not of single individuals, nor
of _beings_. The dandelion in full flower, a little sun bristling with
sun-rays on the green earth, is a nonpareil, a nonsuch. Foolish,
foolish, foolish to compare it to anything else on earth. It is itself
incomparable and unique.
But that is the fourth dimension, of _being_. It is in the fourth
dimension, nowhere else.
Because, in the time-space dimension, any man may tread on the yellow
sun-mirror, and it is gone. Any cow may swallow it. Any bunch of ants
may annihilate it.
This brings us to the inexorable law of life.
1. Any creature that attains to its own fullness of being, its own
_living_ self, becomes unique, a nonpareil. It has its place in the
fourth dimension, the heaven of existence, and there it is perfect, it
is beyond comparison.
2. At the same time, every creature exists in time and space. And in
time and space it exists relatively to all other existence, and can
never be absolved. Its existence impinges on other existences, and is
itself impinged upon. And in the struggle for existence, if an effort on
the part of any one type or species or order of life, can finally
destroy the other species, then the destroyer is of a more vital cycle
of existence than the one destroyed. (When speaking of existence we
always speak in types, species, not individuals. Species exist. But even
an individual dandelion has _being_.)
3. The force which we call _vitality_, and which is the determining
factor in the struggle for existence, is, however, derived also from the
fourth dimension. That is to say, the ultimate source of all vitality is
in that other dimension, or region, where the dandelion blooms, and
which men have called heaven, and which now they call the fourth
dimension: which is only a way of saying that it is not to be reckoned
in terms of space and time.
4. The primary way, in our existence, to get vitality, is to absorb it
from living creatures lower than ourselves. It is thus transformed into
a new and higher creation. (There are many ways of absorbing: devouring
food is one way, love is often another. The best way is a pure
relationship, which includes the _being_ on each side, and which allows
the transfer to take place in a living flow, enhancing the life in both
beings.)
5. No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in
the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.
So we still find ourselves in the tangle of existence and being, a
tangle which man has never been able to get out of, except by
sacrificing the one to the other.
Sacrifice is useless.
The clue to all existence is being. But you can’t have being without
existence, any more than you can have the dandelion flower without the
leaves and the long tap root.
Being is _not_ ideal, as Plato would have it: nor spiritual. It is a
transcendant form of existence, and as much material as existence is.
Only the matter suddenly enters the fourth dimension.
All existence is dual, and surging towards a consummation into being. In
the seed of the dandelion, as it floats with its little umbrella of
hairs, sits the Holy Ghost in tiny compass. The Holy Ghost is that which
holds the light and the dark, the day and the night, the wet and the
sunny, united in one little clue. There it sits, in the seed of the
dandelion.
The seed falls to earth. The Holy Ghost rouses, saying: “_Come!_” And
out of the sky come the rays of the sun, and out of earth comes dampness
and dark and the death-stuff. They are called in, like those bidden to a
feast. The sun sits down at the hearth, inside the seed; and the dark,
damp death-returner sits on the opposite side, with the host between.
And the host says to them: “_Come! Be merry together!_” So the sun looks
with desirous curiosity on the dark face of the earth, and the dark damp
one looks with wonder on the bright face of the other, who comes from
the sun. And the host says: “_Here you are at home! Lift me up, between
you, that I may cease to be a Ghost. For it longs me to look out, it
longs me to dance with the dancers._”
So the sun in the seed, and the earthy one in the seed take hands, and
laugh, and begin to dance. And their dancing is like a fire kindled, a
bonfire with leaping flame. And the treading of their feet is like the
running of little streams, down into the earth. So from the dance of the
sun-in-the-seed with the earthy death-returner, green little flames of
leaves shoot up, and hard little trickles of roots strike down. And the
host laughs, and says: “_I am being lifted up! Dance harder! Oh wrestle,
you two, like wonderful wrestlers, neither of which can win._” So
sun-in-the-seed and the death-returner, who is earthy, dance faster and
faster and the leaves rising greener begin to dance in a ring
above-ground, fiercely overwhelming any outsider, in a whirl of swords
and lions’ teeth. And the earthy one wrestles, wrestles with the
sun-in-the-seed, so the long roots reach down like arms of a fighter
gripping the power of earth, and strangles all intruders, strangling any
intruder mercilessly. Till the two fall in one strange embrace, and from
the centre the long flower-stem lifts like a phallus, budded with a bud.
And out of the bud the voice of the Holy Ghost is heard crying: “_I am
lifted up! Lo! I am lifted up! I am here!_” So the bud opens, and there
is the flower poised in the very middle of the universe, with a ring of
green swords below, to guard it, and the octopus, arms deep in earth,
drinking and threatening. So the Holy Ghost, being a dandelion flower,
looks round, and says: “_Lo! I am yellow! I believe the sun has lent me
his body! Lo! I am sappy with golden, bitter blood! I believe death out
of the damp black earth has lent me his blood! I am incarnate! I like my
incarnation! But this is not all. I will keep this incarnation. It is
good! But oh! if I can win to another incarnation, who knows how
wonderful it will be! This one will have to give place. This one can
help to create the next._”
So the Holy Ghost leaves the clue of himself behind, in the seed, and
wanders forth in the comparative chaos of our universe, seeking another
incarnation.
And this will go on for ever. Man, as yet, is less than half grown. Even
his flower-stem has not appeared yet. He is all leaves and roots,
without any clue put forth. No sign of bud anywhere.
Either he will have to start budding, or he will be forsaken of the Holy
Ghost: abandoned as a failure in creation, as the ichthyosaurus was
abandoned. Being abandoned means losing his vitality. The sun and the
earth-dark will cease rushing together in him. Already it is ceasing. To
men, the sun is becoming stale, and the earth sterile. But the sun
itself will never become stale, nor the earth barren. It is only that
the _clue_ is missing inside men. They are like flowerless, seedless fat
cabbages, nothing inside.
Vitality depends upon the clue of the Holy Ghost inside a creature, a
man, a nation, a race. When the clue goes, the vitality goes. And the
Holy Ghost seeks for ever a new incarnation, and subordinates the old to
the new. You will know that any creature or race is still alive with the
Holy Ghost, when it can subordinate the lower creatures or races, and
assimilate them into a new incarnation.
No man, or creature, or race can have vivid vitality unless it be moving
towards a blossoming: and the most powerful is that which moves towards
the as-yet-unknown blossom.
Blossoming means the establishing of a pure, _new_ relationship with all
the cosmos. This is the state of heaven. And it is the state of a
flower, a cobra, a jenny-wren in spring, a man when he knows himself
royal and crowned with the sun, with his feet gripping the core of the
earth.
This too is the fourth dimension: this state, this mysterious other
reality of things in a perfected relationship. It is into this perfected
relationship that every straight line curves, as if to some core,
passing out of the time-space dimension.
But any man, creature, or race moving towards blossoming will have to
draw immense supplies of vitality from men, or creatures below,
passionate strength. And he will have to accomplish a perfected relation
with all things.
There will be conquest, always. But the aim of conquest is a perfect
relation of conquerors with conquered, for a new blossoming. Freedom is
illusory. Sacrifice is illusory. Almightyness is illusory. Freedom,
sacrifice, almightyness, these are all human side-tracks, cul-de-sacs,
bunk. All that is real is the overwhelmingness of a new inspirational
command, a new relationship with all things.
Heaven is always there. No achieved consummation is lost. Procreation
goes on for ever, to support the achieved revelation. But the torch of
revelation itself is handed on. And this is all important.
Everything living wants to procreate more living things.
But more important than this is the fact that every revelation is a
torch held out, to kindle new revelations. As the dandelion holds out
the sun to me, saying: “_Can you take it!_”
Every gleam of heaven that is shown--like a dandelion flower, or a green
beetle--quivers with strange passion to kindle a new gleam, never yet
beheld. This is not self-sacrifice: it is self-contribution: in which
the highest happiness lies.
The torch of existence is handed on, in the womb of procreation.
And the torch of revelation is handed on, by every living thing, from
the protococcus to a brave man or a beautiful woman, handed to
whomsoever can take it. He who can take it, has power beyond all the
rest.
The cycle of procreation exists purely for the keeping alight of the
torch of perfection, in any species: the torch being the dandelion in
blossom, the tree in full leaf, the peacock in all his plumage, the
cobra in all his colour, the frog at full leap, woman in all the mystery
of her fathomless desirableness, man in the fulness of his power: every
creature become its pure self.
One cycle of perfection urges to kindle another cycle, as yet unknown.
And with the kindling from the torch of revelation comes the inrush of
vitality, and the need to consume and _consummate_ the lower cycles of
existence, into a new thing. This consuming and this consummating means
conquest, and fearless mastery. Freedom lies in the honourable yielding
towards the new flame, and the honourable mastery of that which shall
be new, over that which must yield. As I must master my horses, which
are in a lower cycle of existence. And they, they are relieved and
_happy_ to serve. If I turn them loose into the mountain ranges, to run
wild till they die, the thrill of real happiness is gone out of their
lives.
Every lower order seeks in some measure to serve a higher order: and
rebels against being conquered.
It is always conquest, and it always will be conquest. If the conquered
be an old, declining race, they will have handed on their torch to the
conqueror: who will burn his fingers badly, if he is too flippant. And
if the conquered be a barbaric race, they will consume the fire of the
conqueror, and leave him flameless, unless he watch it. But it is always
conquest, conquered and conqueror, for ever. The Kingdom of heaven is
the Kingdom of conquerors, who can serve the conquest for ever, after
their own conquest is made.
In heaven, in the perfected relation, is peace: in the fourth dimension.
But there is getting there. And that, for ever, is the process of
conquest.
When the rose blossomed, then the great Conquest was made by the
Vegetable Kingdom. But even this conqueror of conquerors, the rose, had
to lend himself towards the caterpillar and the butterfly of a later
conquest. A conqueror, but tributary to the later conquest.
There is no such thing as equality. In the kingdom of heaven, in the
fourth dimension, each soul that achieves a perfect relationship with
the cosmos, from its own centre, is perfect, and incomparable. It has no
superior. It is a conqueror, and incomparable.
But every man, in the struggle of conquest towards his own consummation,
must master the inferior cycles of life, and never relinquish his
mastery. Also, if there be men beyond him, moving on to a newer
consummation than his own, he must yield to their greater demand, and
serve their greater mystery, and so be faithful to the kingdom of heaven
which is within him, which is gained by conquest and by loyal service.
Any man who achieves his own being will, like the dandelion or the
butterfly, pass into that other dimension which we call the fourth, and
the old people called heaven. It is the state of perfected relationship.
And here a man will have his peace for ever: whether he serve or
command, in the process of living.
But even this entails his faithful allegiance to the kingdom of heaven,
which must be for ever and for ever extended, as creation conquers
chaos. So that my perfection will but serve a perfection which still
lies ahead, unrevealed and unconceived, and beyond my own.
We have tried to build walls round the kingdom of heaven: but it’s no
good. It’s only the cabbage rotting inside.
Our last wall is the golden wall of money. This is a fatal wall. It cuts
us off from life, from vitality, from the alive sun and the alive earth,
as _nothing_ can. Nothing, not even the most fanatical dogmas of an
iron-bound religion, can insulate us from the inrush of life and
inspiration, as money can.
We are losing vitality: losing it rapidly. Unless we seize the torch of
inspiration, and drop our moneybags, the moneyless will be kindled by
the flame of flames, and they will consume us like old rags.
We are losing vitality, owing to money and money-standards. The torch in
the hands of the moneyless will set our house on fire, and burn us to
death, like sheep in a flaming corral.
ARISTOCRACY
ARISTOCRACY
Everything in the world is relative to everything else. And every living
thing is related to every other living thing.
But creation moves in cycles, and in degrees. There is higher and lower,
in the cycles of creation, and greater and less, in the degree of life.
Each thing that attains to purity in its own cycle of existence, is pure
and is itself, and, in its purity, is beyond compare.
But in relation to other things, it is either higher or lower, of
greater or less degree.
We have to admit that a daisy is more highly developed than a fern, even
if it be a tree-fern. The daisy belongs to a higher order of life. That
is, the daisy is more alive. The fern more torpid.
And a bee is more alive than a daisy: of a higher order of life. The
daisy, pure as it is in its own being, yet, when compared with the bee,
is limited in its being.
And birds are higher than bees: more alive. And mammals are higher than
birds. And man is the highest, most developed, most conscious, most
_alive_ of the mammals: master of them all.
But even within the species, there is a difference. The nightingale is
higher, purer, even more alive, more subtly, delicately alive, than the
sparrow. And the parrot is more highly developed, or more alive, than
the pigeon.
Among men, the difference in _being_ is infinite. And it is a difference
in degree as well as in kind. One man _is_, in himself, more, more
alive, more of a man, than another. One man has greater being than
another, a purer manhood, a more vivid livingness. The difference is
infinite.
And, seeing that the inferiors are vastly more numerous than the
superiors, when Jesus came, the inferiors, who are no means the meek
that they _should_ be, set out to inherit the earth.
Jesus, in a world of arrogant Pharisees and egoistic Romans, thought
that purity and poverty were one. It was a fatal mistake. Purity is
often enough poor. But poverty is only too rarely pure. Poverty too
often is only the result of _natural_ poorness, poorness in courage,
poorness in living vitality, poorness in manhood: poor life, poor
character. Now the poor in life are the most impure, the most easily
degenerate.
But the few men rich in life and pure in heart read purity into poverty,
and Christianity started. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind. Charity
envieth not. Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.”
They are the words of a noble manhood.
There happened what was bound to happen: the men with pure hearts left
the scramble for money and power to the impure.
Still the great appeal: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” acted
powerfully on the hearts of the poor, who were still full of life. The
rich were more active, but less alive. The poor still wanted, most of
all, the Kingdom of Heaven.
Until the pure men began to mistrust the figurative Kingdom of Heaven:
“Not much Kingdom of Heaven for a hungry man,” they said.
This was a mistake, and a fall into impurity. For even if I die of
hunger, the Kingdom of Heaven is within me, and I am within it, if I
truly choose.
But once the pure man said this: “_Not much Kingdom of Heaven for a
hungry man_,” the Soul began to die out of men.
By the old creed, every soul was equal in the sight of God. By the new
creed, every body should be equal in the sight of men. And being equal
meant, having equal possessions. And possessions were reckoned in terms
of money.
So that money became the one absolute. And man figures as a
money-possessor and a money-getter. The absolute, the God, the Kingdom
of Heaven itself, became money; hard, hard cash. “The Kingdom of Heaven
is within you” now means “The money is in your pocket.” “Then shall thy
peace be as a river” now means “Then shall thy investments bring thee a
safe and ample income.”
“_L’homme est né libre_” means “He is born without a son.” “_Et on le
trouve partout enchainé_” means “He wears breeches, and must fill his
pockets.”
So now there is a new (a new-old) aristocracy, completely unmysterious
and scientific: the aristocracy of money. Have you a million _gold_?
(for heaven’s sake, the gold standard!) Then you are a _king_. Have you
five hundred thousand? Then you are a lord.
“In _my_ country, we’re _all_ kings and queens,” as the American lady
said, being a bit sick of certain British snobbery. She was quite right:
they are all potential kings and queens. But until they come into their
kingdom--five hundred thousand dollars minimum--they might just as well
be commoners.
Yet even still, there is _natural_ aristocracy.
Aristocracy of birth is bunk, when a Kaiser Wilhelm and an Emperor
Franz-Josef and a Czar Nicolas is all that noble birth will do for you.
Yet the whole of life is established on a natural aristocracy. And
aristocracy of birth is a _little_ more natural than aristocracy of
money. (Oh, for God’s sake, the gold standard!)
But a millionaire can do without birth, whereas birth cannot do without
dollars. So, by the all-prevailing law of pragmatism, the dollar has it.
What then does _natural_ aristocracy consist in?
It’s not just brains! The mind is an instrument, and the _savant_, the
professor, the scientist, has been looked upon since the Ptolemies, as a
sort of upper servant. And justly. The millionaire has brains too: so
does a modern President or Prime Minister. They all belong to the class
of upper servants. They serve, forsooth, the public.
“Ca, Ca, Caliban!
Get a new master, be a new man.”
What does a natural aristocracy consist in? Count Keyserling says: “Not
in what a man can _do_, but what he _is_.” Unfortunately what a man
_is_, is measured by what he can do, even in nature. A nightingale,
being a nightingale, can sing: which a sparrow can’t. If you _are_
something you’ll _do_ something, _ipso facto_.
The question is what _kind_ of thing can a man do? Can he put more life
into us, and release in us the fountains of our vitality? Or can he only
help to feed us, and give us money or amusement.
The providing of food, money, and amusement belongs, truly, to the
servant class.
The providing of _life_ belongs to the aristocrat. If a man, whether by
thought or action, makes _life_, he is an aristocrat. So Cæsar and
Cicero are both strictly aristocrats. Lacking these two, the first
century B.C. would have been far less vital, less vividly alive. And
Antony, who seemed so much more vital, robust and robustious, was, when
we look at it, comparatively unimportant. Cæsar and Cicero lit the
flame.
How? It is easier asked than answered.
But one thing they did, whatever else: they put men into a new relation
with the universe. Cæsar opened Gaul, Germany and Britain, and let the
gleam of ice and snow, the shagginess of the north, the mystery of the
menhir and the mistletoe in upon the rather stuffy soul of Rome, and of
the Orient. And Cicero was discovering the moral nature of man, as
citizen chiefly, and so putting man in new relation to man.
But Cæsar was greater than Cicero. He put man in new relation to ice and
sun.
Only Cæsar was, perhaps, also too much an egoist; he never knew the
mysteries he moved amongst. But Cæsar was great _beyond_ morality.
Man’s life consists in a connection with all things in the universe.
Whoever can establish, or initiate a new connection between mankind and
the circumambient universe is, in his own degree, a saviour. Because
mankind is always exhausting its human possibilities, always
degenerating into repetition, torpor, _ennui_, lifelessness. When
_ennui_ sets in, it is a sign that human vitality is waning, and the
human connection with the universe is gone stale.
Then he who comes to make a new revelation, a new connection, whether he
be soldier, statesman, poet, philosopher, artist, he is a saviour.
When George Stephenson invented the locomotive engine, he provided a
_means of communication_, but he didn’t alter in the slightest man’s
vital relation to the universe. But Galileo and Newton, _discoverers_,
not inventors, they made a big difference. And the energy released in
mankind because of them was enormous. The same is true of Peter the
Great, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. The same is true of Voltaire,
Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Rousseau. They established a _new_
connection between mankind and the universe, and the result was a vast
release of energy. The _sun_ was reborn to man, so was the moon.
To man, the very sun goes stale, becomes a habit. Comes a saviour, a
seer, and the very sun dances new in heaven.
That is because the _sun_ is always _sun beyond sun beyond sun_. The sun
is every sun that ever has been, Helios or Mithras, the sun of China or
of Brahma, or of Peru or of Mexico: great gorgeous suns, besides which
our puny “envelope of incandescent gas” is a smoky candle-wick.
It is our fault. When man becomes stale and paltry, his sun is the mere
stuff that our sun is. When man is great and splendid, the sun of China
and Mithras blazes over him and gives him, not radiant energy in the
form of heat and light, but life, life, life!
The world is to us what we take from it. The sun is to us what we take
from it. And if we are puny, it is because we take punily from the
superb sun.
Man is great according as his relation to the living universe is vast
and vital.
Men are related to men: including women: and this, of course, is very
important. But one would think it were everything. One would think, to
read modern books, that the life of any tuppenny bank-clerk was more
important than sun, moon, and stars; and to read the pert drivel of the
critics, one would be led to imagine that every three-farthing
whipper-snapper who lifts up his voice in approval or censure were the
thrice-greatest Hermes speaking in judgment out of the mysteries.
This is the democratic age of cheap clap-trap, and it sits in jackdaw
judgment on all greatness.
And this is the result of making, in our own conceit, man the measure of
the universe. Don’t you be taken in. The universe, so vast and profound,
measures man up very accurately, for the yelping mongrel with his tail
between his legs, that he is. And the great sun, and the moon, with a
smile will soon start dropping the mongrel down the vast refuse-pit of
oblivion. Oh, the universe has a terrible hole in the middle of it, an
oubliette for all of you, whipper-snappering mongrels.
Man, of course, being measure of the universe, is measured only against
man. Has, of course, vital relationship only with his own cheap little
species. Hence the cheap little twaddler he has become.
In the great ages, man had vital relation with man, with woman: and
beyond that, with the cow, the lion, the bull, the cat, the eagle, the
beetle, the serpent. And beyond these, with narcissus and anemone,
mistletoe and oak-tree, myrtle, olive, and lotus. And beyond these with
humus and slanting water, cloud-towers and rainbow and the sweeping
sun-limbs. And beyond that, with sun, and moon, the living night and the
living day.
Do you imagine the great realities, even the ram of Amon, are only
_symbols_ of something human? Do you imagine the great symbols, the
dragon, the snake, the bull, only refer to bits, qualities or attributes
of little man? It is puerile. The puerilty, the puppyish conceit of
modern white humanity is almost funny.
Amon, the great ram, do you think he doesn’t stand alone in the
universe, without your permission, oh cheap little man? Because he’s
there, do you think _you_ bred him, out of your own almightiness, you
cheap-jack?
Amon, the great ram! Mithras, the great bull! The mistletoe on the tree.
Do you think, you stuffy little human fool sitting in a chair and
wearing lambs-wool underwear and eating your mutton and beef under the
Christmas decoration, do you think then that Amon, Mithras, Mistletoe,
and the whole Tree of Life were just invented to contribute to your
complacency?
You fool! You dyspeptic fool, with your indigestion tablets! You can eat
your mutton and your beef, and by sixpenn’orth of the golden bough, till
your belly turns sour, you fool. Do you think, because you keep a fat
castrated cat, the moon is upon your knees? Do you think, in your woolen
underwear, you are clothed in the might of Amon?
You idiot! You cheap-jack idiot!
Was not the ram created before you were, you twaddler? Did he not come
in night out of chaos? And is he not still clothed in might? To you, he
is mutton. Your wonderful perspicacity relates you to him just that far.
But any farther, he is--well, wool.
Don’t you see, idiot and fool, that you have _lost_ the ram out of your
life entirely, and it is one great connection gone, one great life-flow
broken? Don’t you see you are so much the emptier, mutton-stuffed and
wool-wadded, but lifeless, lifeless.
And the oak-tree, the slow great oak-tree, isn’t he alive? Doesn’t he
live where you don’t live, with a vast silence you shall never, never
penetrate, though you chop him into kindling shred from shred? He is
alive with life such as you have not got and will never have. And in so
far as he is a vast, powerful, silent life, you should worship him.
You should seek a living relation with him. Didn’t the old Englishman
have a living, vital relation to the oak-tree, a _mystic_ relation? Yes,
mystic! Didn’t the red-faced old Admirals who _made_ England, have a
living relation in _sacredness_, with the oak-tree which was their ship,
their ark? The last living vibration and power in pure connection,
between man and tree, coming down from the Druids.
And all you can do now is to twiddle-twaddle about golden boughs,
because you are empty, empty, empty, hollow, deficient, and cardboardy.
Do you think the tree is not, now and for ever, sacred and fearsome? The
trees have turned against you, fools, and you are running in imbecility
to your own destruction.
Do you think the bull is at your disposal, you zenith of creation? Why,
I tell you, the blood of the bull is indeed your poison. Your veins are
bursting, with beef. You may well turn vegetarian. But even milk is
bull’s blood: or Hathor’s.
My cow Susan is at my disposal indeed. But when I see her suddenly
emerging, jet-black, sliding through the gate of her little corral into
the open sun, does not my heart stand still, and cry out, in some
long-forgotten tongue, salutation to the fearsome one? Is not even now
my life widened and deepened in connection with her life, throbbing with
the other pulse, of the bull’s blood?
Is not this my life, this throbbing of the bull’s blood in my blood?
And as the white cock calls in the doorway, who calls? Merely a barnyard
rooster, worth a dollar-and-a-half. But listen! Under the old dawns of
creation the Holy Ghost, the Mediator, shouts aloud in the twilight. And
every time I hear him, a fountain of vitality gushes up in my body. It
is life.
So it is! Degree after degree after degree widens out the relation
between man and his universe, till it reaches the sun, and the night.
The impulse of existence, of course, is to _devour_ all the lower orders
of life. So man now looks upon the white cock, the cow, the ram, as good
to eat.
But _living_ and having _being_ means the relatedness between me and all
things. In so far as I am I, a being who is proud and in place, I have a
connection with my circumambient universe, and I know my place. When the
white cock crows, I do not hear myself, or some anthropomorphic conceit,
crowing. I hear the not-me, the voice of the Holy Ghost. And when I see
the hard, solid, longish green cones thrusting up at blue heaven from
the high bluish tips of the balsam pine, I say: “Behold! Look at the
strong, fertile silence of the thrusting tree! God is in the bush like a
clenched dark fist, or a thrust phallus.”
So it is with every natural thing. It has a vital relation with all
other natural things. Only the machine is absolved from vital relation.
It is based on the mystery of neuters. The neutralising of one great
natural force against another, makes mechanical power. Makes the
engine’s wheels go round.
Does the earth go round like a wheel, in the same way? No! In the
living, balanced, hovering flight of the earth, there is a strange
leaning, an unstatic equilibrium, a balance that is non-balance. This is
owing to the relativity of earth, moon, and sun, a vital, even sentient
relatedness, never perpendicular: nothing neutral or neuter.
Every natural thing has its own living relation to every other natural
thing. So the tiger, striped in gold and black, lies and stretches his
limbs in perfection between all that the day is, and all that is night.
He has a by-the-way relatedness with trees, soil, water, man, cobras,
deer, ants, and of course, the she-tiger. Of all these he is reckless as
Cæsar was. When he stretches himself superbly, he stretches himself
between the living day and the living night, the vast inexhaustible
duality of creation. And he is the fanged and brindled Holy Ghost, with
ice-shining whiskers.
The same with man. His life consists in a relation with all things:
stone, earth, trees, flowers, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures,
sun, rainbow, children, women, other men. But his greatest and final
relation is with the sun, the sun of suns: and with the night, which is
moon and dark and stars. In the last great connections, he lifts his
body speechless to the sun, and, the same body, but so different, to the
moon and the stars, and the spaces between the stars.
Sun! Yes, the actual sun! That which blazes in the day! Which scientists
call a sphere of blazing gas--what a lot of human gas there is, which
has never been set ablaze!--and which the Greeks call Helios!
The sun, I tell you, is alive, and more alive than I am, or a tree is.
It may have blazing gas, as I have hair, and a tree has leaves. But I
tell you, it is the Holy Ghost in full raiment, shaking and walking, and
alive as a tiger is, only more so, in the sky.
And when I can turn my body to the sun, and say: “Sun! Sun!” and we
meet--then I am come finally into my own. For the universe of day,
finally, is the sun. And when the day of the sun is my day too, I am a
lord of all the world.
And at night, when the silence of the moon, and the stars, and the
spaces between the stars, is the silence of me too, then I am come into
my own by night. For night is a vast untellable life, and the Holy Ghost
starry, beheld as we only behold night on earth.
In his ultimate and surpassing relation, man is given only to that which
he can never describe or account for; the sun, as it is alive, and the
living night.
A man’s supreme moment of active life is when he looks up and is with
the sun, and is with the sun as a woman is with child. The actual yellow
sun of morning.
This makes man a lord, an aristocrat of life.
And the supreme moment of quiescent life is when a man looks up into the
night, and is gone into the night, so the night is like a woman with
child, bearing him. And this, a man has to himself.
The true aristocrat is the man who has passed all the relationships and
has met the sun, and the sun is with him as a diadem.
Cæsar was like this. He passed through the great relationships, with
ruthlessness, and came to the sun. And he became a sun-man. But he was
too unconscious. He was not aware that the sun for ever was beyond him,
and that only in his _relation_ to the sun was he deified. He wanted to
be God.
Alexander was wiser. He placed himself a god among men. But when blood
flowed from a wound in him, he said, “Look! It is the blood of a man
like other men.”
The sun makes man a lord: an aristocrat: almost a deity. But in his
consummation with night and the moon, man knows for ever his own passing
away.
But no man is man in all his splendour till he passes further than
every relationship: further than mankind and womankind, in the last leap
to the sun, to the night. The man who can touch both sun and night, as
the woman touched the garment of Jesus, becomes a lord and a saviour, in
his own kind. With the sun he has his final and ultimate relationship,
beyond man or woman, or anything human or created. And in this final
relation is he most intensely alive, surpassing.
Every creature at its zenith surpasses creation and is alone in the face
of the sun, and the night: the sun that lives, and the night that lives
and survives. Then we pass beyond every other relationship, and every
other relationship, even the intensest passion of love, sinks into
subordination and obscurity. Indeed, every relationship, even that of
purest love, is only an approach nearer and nearer, to a man’s last
consummation with the sun, with the moon or night. And in the
consummation with the sun, even love is left behind.
He who has the sun in his face, in his body, he is the pure aristocrat.
He who has the sun in his breast, and the moon in his belly, he is the
first: the aristocrat of aristocrats, supreme in the aristocracy of
life.
Because he is _most alive_.
Being alive constitutes an aristocracy which there is no getting beyond.
He who is most alive, intrinsically, is King, whether men admit it or
not. In the face of the sun.
Life rises in circles, in degrees. The most living is the highest. And
the lower shall serve the higher, if there is to be any life among men.
More life! More _vivid_ life! Not more safe cabbages, or meaningless
masses of people.
Perhaps Dostoevsky was more vividly alive than Plato: culminating a more
vivid life circle, and giving the clue towards a higher circle still.
But the clue _hidden_, as it always is hidden, in every revelation,
underneath what is stated.
All creation contributes, and must contribute to this: towards the
achieving of a vaster, vivider cycle of life. That is the goal of
living. He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of
aristocrats. Or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our
not-being.
There is, of course, the power of mere conservatism and inertia. Deserts
made the cactus thorny. But the cactus still is a rose of roses.
Whereas a sort of cowardice made the porcupine spiny. There is a
difference between the cowardice of inertia, which now governs the
democratic masses, particularly the capitalist masses: and the
conservative fighting spirit which saved the cactus in the middle of the
desert.
The democratic mass, capitalist and proletariat alike, are a vast,
sluggish, ghastlily greedy porcupine, lumbering with inertia. Even
Bolshevism is the same porcupine: nothing but greed and inertia.
The cactus had a rose to fight for. But what has democracy to fight for,
against the living elements, except money, money, money!
The world is stuck solid inside an achieved form, and bristling with a
myriad spines, to protect its hulking body as it feeds: gnawing the bark
of the young tree of Life, and killing it from the top downwards.
Leaving its spines to fester and fester in the nose of the gay dog.
The actual porcupine, in spite of legend, cannot shoot its quills. But
mankind, the porcupine out-pigging the porcupine, can stick quills into
the face of the sun.
Bah! Enough of the squalor of democratic humanity. It is time to begin
to recognize the aristocracy of the sun. The children of the sun shall
be lords of the earth.
There will form a new aristocracy, irrespective of nationality, of men
who have reached the sun. Men of the sun, whether Chinese or Hottentot,
or Nordic, or Hindu, or Esquimo, if they touch the sun in the heavens,
are lords of the earth. And together they will form the aristocracy of
the world. And in the coming era they will rule the world; a
confraternity of the living sun, making the embers of financial
internationalism and industrial internationalism pale upon the hearth of
the earth.
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