THE HOLY FAMILY
We are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein for knocking that eternal
axis out of the universe. The universe isn't a spinning wheel. It is a
cloud of bees flying and veering round. Thank goodness for that, for
we were getting drunk on the spinning wheel.
So that now the universe has escaped from the pin which was pushed
through it, like an impaled fly vainly buzzing: now that the multiple
universe flies its own complicated course quite free, and hasn't got
any hub, we can hope also to escape.
We won't be pinned down, either. We have no one law that governs us.
For me there is only one law: _I am I._ And that isn't a law, it's
just a remark. One is one, but one is not all alone. There are other
stars buzzing in the center of their own isolation. And there is no
straight path between them. There is no straight path between you and
me, dear reader, so don't blame me if my words fly like dust into
your eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of like music into your
ears. I am I, but also you are you, and we are in sad need of a theory
of human relativity. We need it much more than the universe does. The
stars know how to prowl round one another without much damage done.
But you and I, dear reader, in the first conviction that you are me
and that I am you, owing to the oneness of mankind, why, we are always
falling foul of one another, and chewing each other's fur.
You are _not_ me, dear reader, so make no pretentions to it. Don't get
alarmed if _I_ say things. It isn't your sacred mouth which is opening
and shutting. As for the profanation of your sacred ears, just apply a
little theory of relativity, and realize that what I say is not what
you hear, but something uttered in the midst of my isolation, and
arriving strangely changed and travel-worn down the long curve of your
own individual circumambient atmosphere. I may say Bob, but heaven
alone knows what the goose hears. And you may be sure that a red rag
is, to a bull, something far more mysterious and complicated than a
socialist's necktie.
So I hope now I have put you in your place, dear reader. Sit you like
Watts' Hope on your own little blue globe, and I'll sit on mine, and
we won't bump into one another if we can help it. You can twang your
old hopeful lyre. It may be music to you, so I don't blame you. It is
a terrible wowing in my ears. But that may be something in my
individual atmosphere; some strange deflection as your music crosses
the space between us. Certainly I never hear the concert of World
Regeneration and Hope Revived Again without getting a sort of
lock-jaw, my teeth go so keen on edge from the twanging harmony.
Still, the world-regenerators may _really_ be quite excellent
performers on their own jews'-harps. Blame the edginess of my teeth.
Now I am going to launch words into space so mind your cosmic eye.
As I said in my small but naturally immortal book, "Psychoanalysis and
the Unconscious," there's more in it than meets the eye. There's more
in you, dear reader, than meets the eye. What, don't you believe it?
Do you think you're as obvious as a poached egg on a piece of toast,
like the poor lunatic? Not a bit of it, dear reader. You've got a
solar plexus, and a lumbar ganglion not far from your liver, and I'm
going to tell everybody. Nothing brings a man home to himself like
telling everybody. And I _will_ drive you home to yourself, do you
hear? You've been poaching in my private atmospheric grounds long
enough, identifying yourself with me and me with everybody. A nice row
there'd be in heaven if Aldebaran caught Sirius by the tail and said,
"Look here, you're not to look so green, you damm dog-star! It's an
offense against star-regulations."
Which reminds me that the Arabs say the shooting stars, meteorites,
are starry stones which the angels fling at the poaching demons whom
they catch sight of prowling too near the palisades of heaven. I must
say I like Arab angels. My heaven would coruscate like a catherine
wheel, with white-hot star-stones. Away, you dog, you prowling
cur.--Got him under the left ear-hole, Gabriel--! See him, see him,
Michael? That hopeful blue devil! Land him one! Biff on your bottom,
you hoper.
But I wish the Arabs wouldn't entice me, or you, dear reader, provoke
me to this. I feel with you, dear reader, as I do with a deaf-man when
he pushes his vulcanite ear, his listening machine, towards my mouth.
I want to shout down the telephone ear-hole all kinds of improper
things, to see what effect they will have on the stupid dear face at
the end of the coil of wire. After all, words must be very different
after they've trickled round and round a long wire coil. Whatever
becomes of them! And I, who am a bit deaf myself, and may in the end
have a deaf-machine to poke at my friends, it ill becomes me to be so
unkind, yet that's how I feel. So there we are.
Help me to be serious, dear reader.
In that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious," I tried
rather wistfully to convince you, dear reader, that you had a solar
plexus and a lumbar ganglion and a few other things. I don't know why
I took the trouble. If a fellow doesn't believe he's got a nose, the
best way to convince him is gently to waft a little pepper into his
nostrils. And there was I painting my own nose purple, and wistfully
inviting you to look and believe. No more, though.
You've got first and foremost a solar plexus, dear reader; and the
solar plexus is a great nerve center which lies behind your stomach. I
can't be accused of impropriety or untruth, because any book of
science or medicine which deals with the nerve-system of the human
body will show it to you quite plainly. So don't wriggle or try to
look spiritual. Because, willy-nilly, you've got a solar plexus, dear
reader, among other things. I'm writing a good sound science book,
which there's no gainsaying.
Now, your solar plexus, most gentle of readers, is where you are you.
It is your first and greatest and deepest center of consciousness. If
you want to know _how_ conscious and _when_ conscious, I must refer
you to that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious."
At your solar plexus you are primarily conscious: there, behind you
stomach. There you have the profound and pristine conscious awareness
that you are you. Don't say you haven't. I know you have. You might as
well try to deny the nose on your face. There is your first and
deepest seat of awareness. There you are triumphantly aware of your
own individual existence in the universe. Absolutely there is the keep
and central stronghold of your triumphantly-conscious self. There you
_are_, and you know it. So stick out your tummy gaily, my dear, with a
_Me voila_. With a _Here I am!_ With an _Ecco mi!_ With a _Da bin
ich!_ There you are, dearie.
But not only a triumphant awareness that _There you are_. An exultant
awareness also that outside this quiet gate, this navel, lies a whole
universe on which you can lay tribute. Aha--at birth you closed the
central gate for ever. Too dangerous to leave it open. Too near the
quick. But there are other gates. There are eyes and mouths and ears
and nostrils, besides the two lower gates of the passionate body, and
the closed but not locked gates of the breasts. Many gates. And
besides the actual gates, the marvelous wireless communication between
the great center and the surrounding or contiguous world.
Authorized science tells you that this first great plexus, this
all-potent nerve-center of consciousness and dynamic life-activity is
a sympathetic center. From the solar plexus as from your castle-keep
you look around and see the fair lands smiling, the corn and fruit and
cattle of your increase, the cottages of your dependents and the halls
of your beloveds. From the solar plexus you know that all the world is
yours, and all is goodly.
This is the great center, where in the womb, your life first sparkled
in individuality. This is the center that drew the gestating maternal
blood-stream upon you, in the nine-months lurking, drew it on you for
your increase. This is the center whence the navel-string broke, but
where the invisible string of dynamic consciousness, like a dark
electric current connecting you with the rest of life, will never
break until you die and depart from corporate individuality.
They say, by the way, that doctors now perform a little operation on
the born baby, so that no more navel shows. No more belly-buttons,
dear reader! Lucky I caught you this generation, before the doctors
had saved your appearances. Yet, _caro mio_, whether it shows or not,
there you once had immediate connection with the maternal
blood-stream. And, because the male nucleus which derived from the
father still lies sparkling and potent within the solar plexus,
therefore that great nerve-center of you, still has immediate
knowledge of your father, a subtler but still vital connection. We
call it the tie of blood. So be it. It is a tie of blood. But much
more definite than we imagine. For true it is that the one bright male
germ which went to your begetting was drawn from the blood of the
father. And true it is that that same bright male germ lies unquenched
and unquenchable at the center of you, within the famous solar plexus.
And furthermore true is it that this unquenched father-spark within
you sends forth vibrations and dark currents of vital activity all the
time; connecting direct with your father. You will never be able to
get away from it while you live.
The connection with the mother may be more obvious. Is there not your
ostensible navel, where the rupture between you and her took place?
But because the mother-child relation is more plausible and flagrant,
is that any reason for supposing it deeper, more vital, more
intrinsic? Not a bit. Because if the large parent mother-germ still
lives and acts vividly and mysteriously in the great fused nucleus of
your solar plexus, does the smaller, brilliant male-spark that derived
from your father act any less vividly? By no means. It is
different--it is less ostensible. It may be even in magnitude smaller.
But it may be even more vivid, even more intrinsic. So beware how you
deny the father-quick of yourself. You may be denying the most
intrinsic quick of all.
In the same way it follows that, since brothers and sisters have the
same father and mother, therefore in every brother and sister there is
a direct communication such as can never happen between strangers. The
parent nuclei do not die within the new nucleus. They remain there,
marvelous naked sparkling dynamic life-centers, nodes, well-heads of
vivid life itself. Therefore in every individual the parent nuclei
live, and give direction connection, blood connection we call it, with
the rest of the family. It _is_ blood connection. For the fecundating
nuclei are the very spark-essence of the blood. And while life lives
the parent nuclei maintain their own centrality and dynamic
effectiveness within the solar plexus of the child. So that every
individual has mother and father both sparkling within himself.
But this is rather a preliminary truth than an intrinsic truth. The
intrinsic truth of every individual is the new unit of unique
individuality which emanates from the fusion of the parent nuclei.
This is the incalculable and intangible Holy Ghost each time--each
individual his own Holy Ghost. When, at the moment of conception, the
two parent nuclei fuse to form a new unit of life, then takes place
the great mystery of creation. A new individual appears--not the
result of the fusion merely. Something more. The quality of
individuality cannot be derived. The new individual, in his singleness
of self, is a perfectly new whole. He is not a permutation and
combination of old elements, transferred through the parents. No, he
is something underived and utterly unprecedented, unique, a new soul.
This quality of pure individuality is, however, only the one supreme
quality. It consummates all other qualities, but does not consume
them. All the others are there, all the time. And only at his maximum
does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become
purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure
individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly
unknown to them. "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" But this does
not alter the fact that within him lives the mother-quick and the
father-quick, and that though in his wholeness he is rapt away beyond
the old mother-father connections, they are still there within him,
consummated but not consumed. Nor does it alter the fact that very few
people surpass their parents nowadays, and attain any individuality
beyond them. Most men are half-born slaves: the little soul they are
born with just atrophies, and merely the organism emanates, the new
self, the new soul, the new swells into manhood, like big potatoes.
So there we are. But considering man at his best, he is at the start
faced with the great problem. At the very start he has to undertake
his tripartite being, the mother within him, the father within him,
and the Holy Ghost, the self which he is supposed to consummate, and
which mostly he doesn't.
And there it is, a hard physiological fact. At the moment of our
conception, the father nucleus fuses with the mother nucleus, and the
wonder emanates, the new self, the new soul, the new individual cell.
But in the new individual cell the father-germ and the mother-germ do
not relinquish their identity. There they remain still, incorporated
and never extinguished. And so, the blood-stream of race is one
stream, for ever. But the moment the mystery of pure individual
newness ceased to be enacted and fulfilled, the blood-stream would dry
up and be finished. Mankind would die out.
Let us go back then to the solar plexus. There sparkle the included
mother-germ and father-germ, giving us direct, immediate blood-bonds,
family connection. The connection is as direct and as subtle as
between the Marconi stations, two great wireless stations. A family,
if you like, is a group of wireless stations, all adjusted to the
same, or very much the same vibration. All the time they quiver with
the interchange, there is one long endless flow of vitalistic
communication between members of one family, a long, strange
_rapport_, a sort of life-unison. It is a ripple of life through many
bodies as through one body. But all the time there is the jolt, the
rupture of individualism, the individual asserting himself beyond all
ties or claims. The highest goal for every man is the goal of pure
individual being. But it is a goal you cannot reach by the mere
rupture of all ties. A child isn't born by being torn from the womb.
When it is born by natural process that is rupture enough. But even
then the ties are not broken. They are only subtilized.
From the solar plexus first of all pass the great vitalistic
communications between child and parents, the first interplay of
primal, pre-mental knowledge and sympathy. It is a great subtle
interplay, and from this interplay the child is built up, body and
psyche. Impelled from the primal conscious center in the abdomen, the
child seeks the mother, seeks the breast, opens a blind mouth and
gropes for the nipple. Not mentally directed and yet certainly
directed. Directed from the dark pre-mind center of the solar plexus.
From this center the child seeks, the mother knows. Hence the true
mindlessness of the pristine, healthy mother. She does not need to
think, mentally to know. She knows so profoundly and actively at the
great abdominal life-center.
But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it then know the mother
alone? To an infant the mother is the whole universe. Yet the child
needs more than the mother. It needs as well the presence of men, the
vibration from the present body of the man. There may not be any
actual, palpable connection. But from the great voluntary center in
the man pass unknowable communications and unreliable nourishment of
the stream of manly blood, rays which we cannot see, and which so far
we have refused to know, but none the less essential, quickening dark
rays which pass from the great dark abdominal life-center in the
father to the corresponding center in the child. And these rays, these
vibrations, are not like the mother-vibrations. Far, far from it. They
do not need the actual contact, the handling and the caressing. On the
contrary, the true male instinct is to avoid physical contact with a
baby. It may not need even actual presence. But present or absent,
there should be between the baby and the father that strange,
intangible communication, that strange pull and circuit such as the
magnetic pole exercises upon a needle, a vitalistic pull and flow
which lays all the life-plasm of the baby into the line of vital
quickening, strength, knowing. And any lack of this vital circuit,
this vital interchange between father and child, man and child, means
an inevitable impoverishment to the infant.
The child exists in the interplay of two great life-waves, the womanly
and the male. In appearance, the mother is everything. In truth, the
father has actively very little part. It does not matter much if he
hardly sees his child. Yet see it he should, sometimes, and touch it
sometimes, and renew with it the connection, the life-circuit, not
allow it to lapse, and so vitally starve his child.
But remember, dear reader, please, that there is not the slightest
need for you to believe me, or even read me. Remember, it's just your
own affair. Don't implicate me.