CHAPTER I

E-text prepared by Michael Ciesielski, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Project

Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/c/)

FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

by

D. H. LAWRENCE

New York

Thomas Seltzer

1922

Copyright, 1922, by

Thomas Seltzer, Inc.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

FOREWORD

I. INTRODUCTION

II. THE HOLY FAMILY

III. PLEXUSES, PLANES AND SO ON

IV. TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS

V. THE FIVE SENSES

VI. FIRST GLIMMERINGS OF MIND

VII. FIRST STEPS IN EDUCATION

VIII. EDUCATION AND SEX IN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD

IX. THE BIRTH OF SEX

X. PARENT LOVE

XI. THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

XII. LITANY OF EXHORTATIONS

XIII. COSMOLOGICAL

XIV. SLEEP AND DREAMS

XV. THE LOWER SELF

EPILOGUE

FOREWORD

The present book is a continuation from "Psychoanalysis and the

Unconscious." The generality of readers had better just leave it

alone. The generality of critics likewise. I really don't want to

convince anybody. It is quite in opposition to my whole nature. I

don't intend my books for the generality of readers. I count it a

mistake of our mistaken democracy, that every man who can read print

is allowed to believe that he can read all that is printed. I count it

a misfortune that serious books are exposed in the public market, like

slaves exposed naked for sale. But there we are, since we live in an

age of mistaken democracy, we must go through with it.

I warn the generality of readers, that this present book will seem to

them only a rather more revolting mass of wordy nonsense than the

last. I would warn the generality of critics to throw it in the waste

paper basket without more ado.

As for the limited few, in whom one must perforce find an answerer, I

may as well say straight off that I stick to the solar plexus. That

statement alone, I hope, will thin their numbers considerably.

Finally, to the remnants of a remainder, in order to apologize for the

sudden lurch into cosmology, or cosmogony, in this book, I wish to say

that the whole thing hangs inevitably together. I am not a scientist.

I am an amateur of amateurs. As one of my critics said, you either

believe or you don't.

I am not a proper archaeologist nor an anthropologist nor an

ethnologist. I am no "scholar" of any sort. But I am very grateful to

scholars for their sound work. I have found hints, suggestions for

what I say here in all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga and

Plato and St. John the Evangel and the early Greek philosophers like

Herakleitos down to Fraser and his "Golden Bough," and even Freud and

Frobenius. Even then I only remember hints--and I proceed by

intuition. This leaves you quite free to dismiss the whole wordy mass

of revolting nonsense, without a qualm.

Only let me say, that to my mind there is a great field of science

which is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science which

proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living

experience and of sure intuition. Call it subjective science if you

like. Our objective science of modern knowledge concerns itself only

with phenomena, and with phenomena as regarded in their

cause-and-effect relationship. I have nothing to say against our

science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regard it as

exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems to

me just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. Even

biology never considers life, but only mechanistic functioning and

apparatus of life.

I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece

were the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded our

own era once, had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a

science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic

and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles.

I believe that this great science previous to ours and quite different

in constitution and nature from our science once was universal,

established all over the then-existing globe. I believe it was

esoteric, invested in a large priesthood. Just as mathematics and

mechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the same way in

the universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow to-day, so,

it seems to me, in the great world previous to ours a great science

and cosmology were taught esoterically in all countries of the globe,

Asia, Polynesia, America, Atlantis and Europe. Belt's suggestion of

the geographical nature of this previous world seems to me most

interesting. In the period which geologists call the Glacial Period,

the waters of the earth must have been gathered up in a vast body on

the higher places of our globe, vast worlds of ice. And the sea-beds

of to-day must have been comparatively dry. So that the Azores rose up

mountainous from the plain of Atlantis, where the Atlantic now washes,

and the Easter Isles and the Marquesas and the rest rose lofty from

the marvelous great continent of the Pacific.

In that world men lived and taught and knew, and were in one complete

correspondence over all the earth. Men wandered back and forth from

Atlantis to the Polynesian Continent as men now sail from Europe to

America. The interchange was complete, and knowledge, science was

universal over the earth, cosmopolitan as it is to-day.

Then came the melting of the glaciers, and the world flood. The

refugees from the drowned continents fled to the high places of

America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Isles. And some degenerated

naturally into cave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures, and some

retained their marvelous innate beauty and life-perfection, as the

South Sea Islanders, and some wandered savage in Africa, and some,

like Druids or Etruscans or Chaldeans or Amerindians or Chinese,

refused to forget, but taught the old wisdom, only in its

half-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten, as knowledge:

remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story.

And so, the intense potency of symbols is part at least memory. And so

it is that all the great symbols and myths which dominate the world

when our history first begins, are very much the same in every country

and every people, the great myths all relate to one another. And so it

is that these myths now begin to hypnotize us again, our own impulse

towards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent.

And so, besides myths, we find the same mathematic figures, cosmic

graphs which remain among the aboriginal peoples in all continents,

mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or scientific significance

is lost, yet which continue in use for purposes of conjuring or

divining.

If my reader finds this bosh and abracadabra, all right for him. Only

I have no more regard for his little crowings on his own little

dunghill. Myself, I am not so sure that I am one of the

one-and-onlies. I like the wide world of centuries and vast

ages--mammoth worlds beyond our day, and mankind so wonderful in his

distances, his history that has no beginning yet always the pomp and

the magnificence of human splendor unfolding through the earth's

changing periods. Floods and fire and convulsions and ice-arrest

intervene between the great glamorous civilizations of mankind. But

nothing will ever quench humanity and the human potentiality to evolve

something magnificent out of a renewed chaos.

I do not believe in evolution, but in the strangeness and

rainbow-change of ever-renewed creative civilizations.

So much, then, for my claim to remarkable discoveries. I believe I am

only trying to stammer out the first terms of a forgotten knowledge.

But I have no desire to revive dead kings, or dead sages. It is not

for me to arrange fossils, and decipher hieroglyphic phrases. I

couldn't do it if I wanted to. But then I can do something else. The

soul must take the hint from the relics our scientists have so

marvelously gathered out of the forgotten past, and from the hint

develop a new living utterance. The spark is from dead wisdom, but the

fire is life.

And as an example--a very simple one--of how a scientist of the most

innocent modern sort may hint at truths which, when stated, he would

laugh at as fantastic nonsense, let us quote a word from the already

old-fashioned "Golden Bough." "It must have appeared to the ancient

Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from the fire which

resided in the sacred oak."

Exactly. The fire which resided in the Tree of Life. That is, life

itself. So we must read: "It must have appeared to the ancient Aryan

that the sun was periodically recruited from life."--Which is what the

early Greek philosophers were always saying. And which still seems to

me the real truth, the clue to the cosmos. Instead of life being drawn

from the sun, it is the emanation from life itself, that is, from all

the living plants and creatures which nourish the sun.

Of course, my dear critic, the ancient Aryans were just doddering--the

old duffers: or babbling, the babes. But as for me, I have some

respect for my ancestors, and believe they had more up their sleeve

than just the marvel of the unborn me.

One last weary little word. This pseudo-philosophy of

mine--"pollyanalytics," as one of my respected critics might say--is

deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poems

come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need which one has

for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in

general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's

experiences as a writer and as a man. The novels and poems are pure

passionate experience. These "pollyanalytics" are inferences made

afterwards, from the experience.

And finally, it seems to me that even art is utterly dependent on

philosophy: or if you prefer it, on a metaphysic. The metaphysic or

philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated and may be quite

unconscious, in the artist, yet it is a metaphysic that governs men at

the time, and is by all men more or less comprehended, and lived. Men

live and see according to some gradually developing and gradually

withering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea or

metaphysic--exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and

art. Our vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing woefully thin,

and the art is wearing absolutely threadbare. We have no future;

neither for our hopes nor our aims nor our art. It has all gone gray

and opaque.

We've got to rip the old veil of a vision across, and find what the

heart really believes in, after all: and what the heart really wants,

for the next future. And we've got to put it down in terms of belief

and of knowledge. And then go forward again, to the fulfillment in

life and art.

Rip the veil of the old vision across, and walk through the rent. And

if I try to do this--well, why not? If I try to write down what I

see--why not? If a publisher likes to print the book--all right. And

if anybody wants to read it, let him. But why anybody should read one

single word if he doesn't want to, I don't see. Unless of course he is

a critic who needs to scribble a dollar's worth of words, no matter

how.

TAORMINA

October 8, 1921

FANTASIA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Let us start by making a little apology to Psychoanalysis. It wasn't

fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious; or perhaps it _was_

fair to jeer at the psychoanalytic unconscious, which is truly a

negative quantity and an unpleasant menagerie. What was really not

fair was to jeer at Psychoanalysis as if Freud had invented and

described nothing but an unconscious, in all his theory.

The unconscious is not, of course, the clue to the Freudian theory.

The real clue is sex. A sexual motive is to be attributed to all human

activity.

Now this is going too far. We are bound to admit than an element of

sex enters into all human activity. But so does an element of greed,

and of many other things. We are bound to admit that into all human

relationships, particularly adult human relationships, a large

element of sex enters. We are thankful that Freud has insisted on

this. We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to earth, out of

all our clouds of superfineness. What Freud says is always _partly_

true. And half a loaf is better than no bread.

But really, there is the other half of the loaf. All is _not_ sex. And

a sexual motive is _not_ to be attributed to all human activities. We

know it, without need to argue.

Sex surely has a specific meaning. Sex means the being divided into

male and female; and the magnetic desire or impulse which puts male

apart from female, in a negative or sundering magnetism, but which

also draws male and female together in a long and infinitely varied

approach towards the critical act of coition. Sex without the

consummating act of coition is never quite sex, in human

relationships: just as a eunuch is never quite a man. That is to say,

the act of coition is the essential clue to sex.

Now does all life work up to the one consummating act of coition? In

one direction, it does, and it would be better if psychoanalysis

plainly said so. In one direction, all life works up to the one

supreme moment of coition. Let us all admit it, sincerely.

But we are not confined to one direction only, or to one exclusive

consummation. Was the building of the cathedrals a working up towards

the act of coition? Was the dynamic impulse sexual? No. The sexual

element was present, and important. But not predominant. The same in

the building of the Panama Canal. The sexual impulse, in its widest

form, was a very great impulse towards the building of the Panama

Canal. But there was something else, of even higher importance, and

greater dynamic power.

And what is this other, greater impulse? It is the desire of the human

male to build a world: not "to build a world for you, dear"; but to

build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort

something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful.

Even the Panama Canal would never have been built _simply_ to let

ships through. It is the pure disinterested craving of the human male

to make something wonderful, out of his own head and his own self, and

his own soul's faith and delight, which starts everything going. This

is the prime motivity. And the motivity of sex is subsidiary to this:

often directly antagonistic.

That is, the essentially religious or creative motive is the first

motive for all human activity. The sexual motive comes second. And

there is a great conflict between the interests of the two, at all

times.

What we want to do, is to trace the creative or religious motive to

its source in the human being, keeping in mind always the near

relationship between the religious motive and the sexual. The two

great impulses are like man and wife, or father and son. It is no use

putting one under the feet of the other.

The great desire to-day is to deny the religious impulse altogether,

or else to assert its absolute alienity from the sexual impulse. The

orthodox religious world says faugh! to sex. Whereupon we thank Freud

for giving them tit for tat. But the orthodox scientific world says

fie! to the religious impulse. The scientist wants to discover a cause

for everything. And there is no cause for the religious impulse. Freud

is with the scientists. Jung dodges from his university gown into a

priest's surplice till we don't know where we are. We prefer Freud's

_Sex_ to Jung's _Libido_ or Bergson's _Elan Vital_. Sex has at least

_some_ definite reference, though when Freud makes sex accountable for

everything he as good as makes it accountable for nothing.

We refuse any _Cause_, whether it be Sex or Libido or Elan Vital or

ether or unit of force or _perpetuum mobile_ or anything else. But

also we feel that we cannot, like Moses, perish on the top of our

present ideal Pisgah, or take the next step into thin air. There we

are, at the top of our Pisgah of ideals, crying _Excelsior_ and trying

to clamber up into the clouds: that is, if we are idealists with the

religious impulse rampant in our breasts. If we are scientists we

practice aeroplane flying or eugenics or disarmament or something

equally absurd.

The promised land, if it be anywhere, lies away beneath our feet. No

more prancing upwards. No more uplift. No more little Excelsiors

crying world-brotherhood and international love and Leagues of

Nations. Idealism and materialism amount to the same thing on top of

Pisgah, and the space is _very_ crowded. We're all cornered on our

mountain top, climbing up one another and standing on one another's

faces in our scream of Excelsior.

To your tents, O Israel! Brethren, let us go down. We will descend.

The way to our precious Canaan lies obviously downhill. An end of

uplift. Downhill to the land of milk and honey. The blood will soon be

flowing faster than either, but we can't help that. We can't help it

if Canaan has blood in its veins, instead of pure milk and honey.

If it is a question of origins, the origin is always the same,

whatever we say about it. So is the cause. Let that be a comfort to

us. If we want to talk about God, well, we can please ourselves. God

has been talked about quite a lot, and He doesn't seem to mind. Why we

should take it so personally is a problem. Likewise if we wish to have

a tea party with the atom, let us: or with the wriggling little unit

of energy, or the ether, or the Libido, or the Elan Vital, or any

other Cause. Only don't let us have sex for tea. We've all got too

much of it under the table; and really, for my part, I prefer to keep

mine there, no matter what the Freudians say about me.

But it is tiring to go to any more tea parties with the Origin, or the

Cause, or even the Lord. Let us pronounce the mystic Om, from the pit

of the stomach, and proceed.

There's not a shadow of doubt about it, the First Cause is just

unknowable to us, and we'd be sorry if it wasn't. Whether it's God or

the Atom. All I say is Om!

The first business of every faith is to declare its ignorance. I don't

know where I come from--nor where I exit to. I don't know the origins

of life nor the goal of death. I don't know how the two parent cells

which are my biological origin became the me which I am. I don't in

the least know what those two parent cells were. The chemical analysis

is just a farce, and my father and mother were just vehicles. And yet,

I must say, since I've got to know about the two cells, I'm glad I do

know.

The Moses of Science and the Aaron of Idealism have got the whole

bunch of us here on top of Pisgah. It's a tight squeeze, and we'll be

falling very, very foul of one another in five minutes, unless some of

us climb down. But before leaving our eminence let us have a look

round, and get our bearings.

They say that way lies the New Jerusalem of universal love: and over

there the happy valley of indulgent Pragmatism: and there, quite near, is

the chirpy land of the Vitalists: and in those dark groves the home of

successful Analysis, surnamed Psycho: and over those blue hills the

Supermen are prancing about, though you can't see them. And there is

Besantheim, and there is Eddyhowe, and there, on that queer little

tableland, is Wilsonia, and just round the corner is Rabindranathopolis....

But Lord, I can't see anything. Help me, heaven, to a telescope, for I

see blank nothing.

I'm not going to try any more. I'm going to sit down on my posterior

and sluther full speed down this Pisgah, even if it cost me my trouser

seat. So ho!--away we go.

In the beginning--there never was any beginning, but let it pass.

We've got to make a start somehow. In the very beginning of all

things, time and space and cosmos and being, in the beginning of all

these was a little living creature. But I don't know even if it was

little. In the beginning was a living creature, its plasm quivering

and its life-pulse throbbing. This little creature died, as little

creatures always do. But not before it had had young ones. When the

daddy creature died, it fell to pieces. And that was the beginning of

the cosmos. Its little body fell down to a speck of dust, which the

young ones clung to because they must cling to something. Its little

breath flew asunder, the hotness and brightness of the little beast--I

beg your pardon, I mean the radiant energy from the corpse flew away

to the right hand, and seemed to shine warm in the air, while the

clammy energy from the body flew away to the left hand, and seemed

dark and cold. And so, the first little master was dead and done for,

and instead of his little living body there was a speck of dust in the

middle, which became the earth, and on the right hand was a brightness

which became the sun, rampaging with all the energy that had come out

of the dead little master, and on the left hand a darkness which felt

like an unrisen moon. And that was how the Lord created the world.

Except that I know nothing about the Lord, so I shouldn't mention it.

But I forgot the soul of the little master. It probably did a bit of

flying as well--and then came back to the young ones. It seems most

natural that way.

Which is my account of the Creation. And I mean by it, that Life is

not and never was anything but living creatures. That's what life is

and will be just living creatures, no matter how large you make the

capital L. Out of living creatures the material cosmos was made: out

of the death of living creatures, when their little living bodies fell

dead and fell asunder into all sorts of matter and forces and

energies, sun, moons, stars and worlds. So you got the universe. Where

you got the living creature from, that first one, don't ask me. He was

just there. But he was a little person with a soul of his own. He

wasn't Life with a capital L.

If you don't believe me, then don't. I'll even give you a little song

to sing.

"If it be not true to me

What care I how true it be . ."

That's the kind of man I really like, chirping his insouciance. And I

chirp back:

"Though it be not true to thee

It's gay and gospel truth to me. . ."

The living live, and then die. They pass away, as we know, to dust and

to oxygen and nitrogen and so on. But what we don't know, and what we

might perhaps know a little more, is how they pass away direct into

life itself--that is, direct into the living. That is, how many dead

souls fly over our untidiness like swallows and build under the eaves

of the living. How many dead souls, like swallows, twitter and breed

thoughts and instincts under the thatch of my hair and the eaves of my

forehead, I don't know. But I believe a good many. And I hope they

have a good time. And I hope not too many are bats.

I am sorry to say I believe in the souls of the dead. I am almost

ashamed to say, that I believe the souls of the dead in some way

reenter and pervade the souls of the living: so that life is always

the life of living creatures, and death is always our affair. This

bit, I admit, is bordering on mysticism. I'm sorry, because I don't

like mysticism. It has no trousers and no trousers seat: _n'a pas de

quoi_. And I should feel so uncomfortable if I put my hand behind me

and felt an absolute blank.

Meanwhile a long, thin, brown caterpillar keeps on pretending to be a

dead thin beech-twig, on a little bough at my feet. He had got his

hind feet and his fore feet on the twig, and his body looped up like

an arch in the air between, when a fly walked up the twig and began to

mount the arch of the imitator, not having the least idea that it was

on a gentleman's coat-tails. The caterpillar shook his stern, and the

fly made off as if it had seen a ghost. The dead twig and the live

twig now remain equally motionless, enjoying their different ways. And

when, with this very pencil, I push the head of the caterpillar off

from the twig, he remains on his tail, arched forward in air, and

oscillating unhappily, like some tiny pendulum ticking. Ticking,

ticking in mid-air, arched away from his planted tail. Till at last,

after a long minute and a half, he touches the twig again, and

subsides into twigginess. The only thing is, the dead beech-twig can't

pretend to be a wagging caterpillar. Yet how the two commune!

However--we have our exits and our entrances, and one man in his time

plays many parts. More than he dreams of, poor darling. And I am

entirely at a loss for a moral!

Well, then, we are born. I suppose that's a safe statement. And we

become at once conscious, if we weren't so before. _Nem con._ And our

little baby body is a little functioning organism, a little developing

machine or instrument or organ, and our little baby mind begins to

stir with all our wonderful psychical beginnings. And so we are in

bud.

But it won't do. It is too much of a Pisgah sight. We overlook too

much. _Descendez, cher Moise. Vous voyez trop loin._ You see too far

all at once, dear Moses. Too much of a bird's-eye view across the

Promised Land to the shore. Come down, and walk across, old fellow.

And you won't see all that milk and honey and grapes the size of

duck's eggs. All the dear little budding infant with its tender

virginal mind and various clouds of glory instead of a napkin. Not at

all, my dear chap. No such luck of a promised land.

Climb down, Pisgah, and go to Jericho. _Allons_, there is no road yet,

but we are all Aarons with rods of our own.