TREES AND BABIES AND PAPAS AND MAMAS
Oh, damn the miserable baby with its complicated ping-pong table of an
unconscious. I'm sure, dear reader, you'd rather have to listen to the
brat howling in its crib than to me expounding its plexuses. As for
"mixing those babies up," I'd mix him up like a shot if I'd anything
to mix him with. Unfortunately he's my own anatomical specimen of a
pickled rabbit, so there's nothing to be done with the bits.
But he gets on my nerves. I come out solemnly with a pencil and an
exercise book, and take my seat in all gravity at the foot of a large
fir-tree, and wait for thoughts to come, gnawing like a squirrel on a
nut. But the nut's hollow.
I think there are too many trees. They seem to crowd round and stare
at me, and I feel as if they nudged one another when I'm not looking.
I can _feel_ them standing there. And they won't let me get on about
the baby this morning. Just their cussedness. I felt they encouraged
me like a harem of wonderful silent wives, yesterday.
It is half rainy too--the wood so damp and still and so secret, in the
remote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest
subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the
roots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much
stronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem to feel them moving
and thinking and prowling, and they overwhelm me. Ah, well, the only
thing is to give way to them.
It is the edge of the Black Forest--sometimes the Rhine far off, on
its Rhine plain, like a bit of magnesium ribbon. But not to-day.
To-day only trees, and leaves, and vegetable presences. Huge straight
fir-trees, and big beech-trees sending rivers of roots into the
ground. And cuckoos, like noise falling in drops off the leaves. And
me, a fool, sitting by a grassy wood-road with a pencil and a book,
hoping to write more about that baby.
Never mind. I listen again for noises, and I smell the damp moss. The
looming trees, so straight. And I listen for their silence. Big,
tall-bodied trees, with a certain magnificent cruelty about them. Or
barbarity. I don't know why I should say cruelty. Their magnificent,
strong, round bodies! It almost seems I can hear the slow, powerful
sap drumming in their trunks. Great full-blooded trees, with strange
tree-blood in them, soundlessly drumming.
Trees that have no hands and faces, no eyes. Yet the powerful
sap-scented blood roaring up the great columns. A vast individual
life, and an overshadowing will. The will of a tree. Something that
frightens you.
Suppose you want to look a tree in the face? You can't. It hasn't got
a face. You look at the strong body of a trunk: you look above you
into the matted body-hair of twigs and boughs: you see the soft green
tips. But there are no eyes to look into, you can't meet its gaze. You
keep on looking at it in part and parcel.
It's no good looking at a tree, to know it. The only thing is to sit
among the roots and nestle against its strong trunk, and not bother.
That's how I write all about these planes and plexuses, between the
toes of a tree, forgetting myself against the great ankle of the
trunk. And then, as a rule, as a squirrel is stroked into its
wickedness by the faceless magic of a tree, so am I usually stroked
into forgetfulness, and into scribbling this book. My tree-book,
really.
I come so well to understand tree-worship. All the old Aryans
worshiped the tree. My ancestors. The tree of life. The tree of
knowledge. Well, one is bound to sprout out some time or other, chip
of the old Aryan block. I can so well understand tree-worship. And
fear the deepest motive.
Naturally. This marvelous vast individual without a face, without lips
or eyes or heart. This towering creature that never had a face. Here
am I between his toes like a pea-bug, and him noiselessly
over-reaching me. And I feel his great blood-jet surging. And he has
no eyes. But he turns two ways. He thrusts himself tremendously down
to the middle earth, where dead men sink in darkness, in the damp,
dense under-soil, and he turns himself about in high air. Whereas we
have eyes on one side of our head only, and only grow upwards.
Plunging himself down into the black humus, with a root's gushing
zest, where we can only rot dead; and his tips in high air, where we
can only look up to. So vast and powerful and exultant in his two
directions. And all the time, he has no face, no thought: only a huge,
savage, thoughtless soul. Where does he even keep his soul?--Where
does anybody?
A huge, plunging, tremendous soul. I would like to be a tree for a
while. The great lust of roots. Root-lust. And no mind at all. He
towers, and I sit and feel safe. I like to feel him towering round me.
I used to be afraid. I used to fear their lust, their rushing black
lust. But now I like it, I worship it. I always felt them huge
primeval enemies. But now they are my only shelter and strength. I
lose myself among the trees. I am so glad to be with them in their
silent, intent passion, and their great lust. They feed my soul. But I
can understand that Jesus was crucified on a tree.
And I can so well understand the Romans, their terror of the bristling
Hercynian wood. Yet when you look from a height down upon the rolling
of the forest--this Black Forest--it is as suave as a rolling, oily
sea. Inside only, it bristles horrific. And it terrified the Romans.
The Romans! They too seem very near. Nearer than Hindenburg or Foch or
even Napoleon. When I look across the Rhine plain, it is Rome, and the
legionaries of the Rhine that my soul notices. It must have been
wonderful to come from South Italy to the shores of this sea-like
forest: this dark, moist forest, with its enormously powerful
intensity of tree life. Now I know, coming myself from rock-dry
Sicily, open to the day.
The Romans and the Greeks found everything human. Everything had a
face, and a human voice. Men spoke, and their fountains piped an
answer.
But when the legions crossed the Rhine they found a vast impenetrable
life which had no voice. They met the faceless silence of the Black
Forest. This huge, huge wood did not answer when they called. Its
silence was too crude and massive. And the soldiers shrank: shrank
before the trees that had no faces, and no answer. A vast array of
non-human life, darkly self-sufficient, and bristling with indomitable
energy. The Hercynian wood, not to be fathomed. The enormous power of
these collective trees, stronger in their somber life even than Rome.
No wonder the soldiers were terrified. No wonder they thrilled with
horror when, deep in the woods, they found the skulls and trophies of
their dead comrades upon the trees. The trees had devoured them:
silently, in mouthfuls, and left the white bones. Bones of the mindful
Romans--and savage, preconscious trees, indomitable. The true German
has something of the sap of trees in his veins even now: and a sort of
pristine savageness, like trees, helpless, but most powerful, under
all his mentality. He is a tree-soul, and his gods are not human. His
instinct still is to nail skulls and trophies to the sacred tree, deep
in the forest. The tree of life and death, tree of good and evil, tree
of abstraction and of immense, mindless life; tree of everything
except the spirit, spirituality.
But after bone-dry Sicily, and after the gibbering of myriad people
all rattling their personalities, I am glad to be with the profound
indifference of faceless trees. Their rudimentariness cannot know why
we care for the things we care for. They have no faces, no minds and
bowels: only deep, lustful roots stretching in earth, and vast,
lissome life in air, and primeval individuality. You can sacrifice the
whole of your spirituality on their altar still. You can nail your
skull on their limbs. They have no skulls, no minds nor faces, they
can't make eyes of love at you. Their vast life dispenses with all
this. But they will live you down.
The normal life of one of these big trees is about a hundred years. So
the Herr Baron told me.
One of the few places that my soul will haunt, when I am dead, will be
this. Among the trees here near Ebersteinburg, where I have been
alone and written this book. I can't leave these trees. They have
taken some of my soul.
* * * * *
Excuse my digression, gentle reader. At first I left it out, thinking
we might not see wood for trees. But it doesn't much matter what we
see. It's nice just to look round, anywhere.
So there are two planes of being and consciousness and two modes of
relation and of function. We will call the lower plane the sensual,
the upper the spiritual. The terms may be unwise, but we can think of
no other.
Please read that again, dear reader; you'll be a bit dazzled, coming
out of the wood.
It is obvious that from the time a child is born, or conceived, it has
a permanent relation with the outer universe, relation in the two
modes, not one mode only. There are two ways of love, two ways of
activity and independence. And there needs some sort of equilibrium
between the two modes. In the same way, in physical function there is
eating and drinking, and excrementation, on the lower plane and
respiration and heartbeat on the upper plane.
Now the equilibrium to be established is fourfold. There must be a
true equilibrium between what we eat and what we reject again by
excretion: likewise between the systole and diastole of the heart,
the inspiration and expiration of our breathing. Suffice to say the
equilibrium is never quite perfect. Most people are either too fat or
too thin, too hot or too cold, too slow or too quick. There is no such
thing as an _actual_ norm, a living norm. A norm is merely an
abstraction, not a reality.
The same on the psychical plane. We either love too much, or impose
our will too much, are too spiritual or too sensual. There is not and
cannot be any actual norm of human conduct. All depends, first, on the
unknown inward need within the very nuclear centers of the individual
himself, and secondly on his circumstance. Some men _must_ be too
spiritual, some _must_ be too sensual. Some _must_ be too sympathetic,
and some _must_ be too proud. We have no desire to say what men
_ought_ to be. We only wish to say there are all kinds of ways of
being, and there is no such thing as human perfection. No man can be
anything more than just himself, in genuine living relation to all his
surroundings. But that which _I_ am, when I am myself, will certainly
be anathema to those who hate individual integrity, and want to swarm.
And that which I, being myself, am in myself, may make the hair
bristle with rage on a man who is also himself, but very different
from me. Then let it bristle. And if mine bristle back again, then let
us, if we must, fly at one another like two enraged men. It is how it
should be. We've got to learn to live from the center of our own
responsibility only, and let other people do the same.
To return to the child, however, and his development on his two planes
of consciousness. There is all the time a direct dynamic connection
between child and mother, child and father also, from the start. It is
a connection on two planes, the upper and lower. From the lower
sympathetic center the profound intake of love or vibration from the
living co-respondent outside. From the upper sympathetic center the
outgoing of devotion and the passionate vibration of _given_ love,
given attention. The two sympathetic centers are always, or should
always be, counterbalanced by their corresponding voluntary centers.
From the great voluntary ganglion of the lower plane, the child is
self-willed, independent, and masterful.
In the activity of this center a boy refuses to be kissed and pawed
about, maintaining his proud independence like a little wild animal.
From this center he likes to command and to receive obedience. From
this center likewise he may be destructive and defiant and reckless,
determined to have his own way at any cost.
From this center, too, he learns to use his legs. The motion of
walking, like the motion of breathing, is twofold. First, a
sympathetic cleaving to the earth with the foot: then the voluntary
rejection, the spurning, the kicking away, the exultance in power and
freedom.
From the upper voluntary center the child watches persistently,
wilfully, for the attention of the mother: to be taken notice of, to
be caressed, in short to exist in and through the mother's attention.
From this center, too, he coldly refuses to notice the mother, when
she insists on too much attention. This cold refusal is different from
the active rejection of the lower center. It is passive, but cold and
negative. It is the great force of our day. From the ganglion of the
shoulders, also, the child breathes and his heart beats. From the same
center he learns the first use of his arms. In the gesture of
sympathy, from the upper plane, he embraces his mother with his arms.
In the motion of curiosity, or interest, which derives from the
thoracic ganglion, he spreads his fingers, touches, feels, explores.
In the motion of rejection he drops an undesired object deliberately
out of sight.
And then, when the four centers of what we call the first _field_ of
consciousness are fully active, then it is that the eyes begin to
gather their sight, the mouth to speak, the ears to awake to their
intelligent hearings; all as a result of the great fourfold activity
of the first dynamic field of consciousness. And then also, as a
result, the mind wakens to its impressions and to its incipient
control. For at first the control is non-mental, even non-cerebral.
The brain acts only as a sort of switchboard.
The business of the father, in all this incipient child-development,
is to stand outside as a final authority and make the necessary
adjustments. Where there is too much sympathy, then the great
voluntary centers of the spine are weak, the child tends to be
delicate. Then the father by instinct supplies the roughness, the
sternness which stiffens in the child the centers of resistance and
independence, right from the very earliest days. Often, for a mere
infant, it is the father's fierce or stern presence, the vibration of
his voice, which starts the frictional and independent activity of the
great voluntary ganglion and gives the first impulse to the
independence which later on is life itself.
But on the other hand, the father, from his distance, supports,
protects, nourishes his child, and it is ultimately on the remote but
powerful father-love that the infant rests, in a rest which is beyond
mother-love. For in the male the dominant centers are naturally the
volitional centers, centers of responsibility, authority, and care.
It is the father's business, again, to maintain some sort of
equilibrium between the two modes of love in his infant. A mother may
wish to bring up her child from the lovely upper centers only, from
the centers of the breast, in the mode of what we call pure or
spiritual love. Then the child will be all gentle, all tender and
tender-radiant, always enfolded with gentleness and forbearance,
always shielded from grossness or pain or roughness. Now the father's
instinct is to be rough and crude, good-naturedly brutal with the
child, calling the deeper centers, the sensual centers, into play.
"What do you want? My watch? Well, you can't have it, do you see,
because it's mine." Not a lot of explanations of the "You see,
darling." No such nonsense.--Or if a child wails unnecessarily for its
mother, the father must be the check. "Stop your noise, you little
brat! What ails you, you whiner?" And if children be too sensitive,
too sympathetic, then it will do the child no harm if the father
occasionally throws the cat out of the window, or kicks the dog, or
raises a storm in the house. Storms there must be. And if the child is
old enough and robust enough, it can occasionally have its bottom
soundly spanked--by the father, if the mother refuses to perform that
most necessary duty. For a child's bottom is made occasionally to be
spanked. The vibration of the spanking acts direct upon the spinal
nerve-system, there is a direct reciprocity and reaction, the spanker
transfers his wrath to the great will-centers in the child, and these
will-centers react intensely, are vivified and educated.
On the other hand, given a mother who is too generally hard or
indifferent, then it rests with the father to provide the delicate
sympathy and the refined discipline. Then the father must show the
tender sensitiveness of the upper mode. The sad thing to-day is that
so few mothers have any deep bowels of love--or even the breast of
love. What they have is the benevolent spiritual will, the will of the
upper self. But the will is not love. And benevolence in a parent is
a poison. It is bullying. In these circumstances the father must give
delicate adjustment, and, above all, some warm, native love from the
richer sensual self.
The question of corporal punishment is important. It is no use roughly
smacking a shrinking, sensitive child. And yet, if a child is too
shrinking, too sensitive, it may do it a world of good cheerfully to
spank its posterior. Not brutally, not cruelly, but with real sound,
good-natured exasperation. And let the adult take the full
responsibility, half humorously, without apology or explanation. Let
us avoid self-justification at all costs. Real corporal punishments
apply to the sensual plane. The refined punishments of the spiritual
mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
The pained but resigned disapprobation of a mother is usually a very
bad thing, much worse than the father's shouts of rage. And sendings
to bed, and no dessert for a week, and so on, are crueller and meaner
than a bang on the head. When a parent gives his boy a beating, there
is a living passionate interchange. But in these refined punishments,
the parent suffers nothing and the child is deadened. The bullying of
the refined, benevolent spiritual will is simply vitriol to the soul.
Yet parents administer it with all the righteousness of virtue and
good intention, sparing themselves perfectly.
The point is here. If a child makes you so that you really want to
spank it soundly, then soundly spank the brat. But know all the time
_what_ you are doing, and always be responsible for your anger. Never
be ashamed of it, and never surpass it. The flashing interchange of
anger between parent and child is part of the responsible
relationship, necessary to growth. Again, if a child offends you
deeply, so that you really can't communicate with it any more, then,
while the hurt is deep, switch off your connection from the child, cut
off your correspondence, your vital communion, and be alone. But never
persist in such a state beyond the time when your deep hurt dies down.
The only rule is, do what you _really_, impulsively, wish to do. But
always act on your own responsibility sincerely. And have the courage
of your own strong emotion. They enrichen the child's soul.
For a child's primary education depends almost entirely on its
relation to its parents, brothers, and sisters. Between mother and
child, father and child, the law is this: I, the mother, am myself
alone: the child is itself alone. But there exists between us a vital
dynamic relation, for which I, being the conscious one, am basically
responsible. So, as far as possible, there must be in me no departure
from myself, lest I injure the preconscious dynamic relation. I must
absolutely act according to my own true spontaneous feeling. But,
moreover, I must also have wisdom for myself and for my child. Always,
always the deep wisdom of responsibility. And always a brave
responsibility for the soul's own spontaneity. Love--what is love?
We'd better get a new idea. Love is, in all, generous impulse--even a
good spanking. But wisdom is something else, a deep collectedness in
the soul, a deep abiding by my own integral being, which makes me
responsible, not for the child, but for my certain duties towards the
child, and for maintaining the dynamic flow between the child and
myself as genuine as possible: that is to say, not perverted by ideals
or by my _will_.
Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying. But what is
bullying? It is a desire to superimpose my own will upon another
person. Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is
more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally
good for them. I embrace for example an ideal, and I seek to enact
this ideal in the person of another. This is ideal bullying. A mother
says that life should be all love, all delicacy and forbearance and
gentleness. And she proceeds to spin a hateful sticky web of permanent
forbearance, gentleness, hushedness around her naturally passionate
and hasty child. This so foils the child as to make him half imbecile
or criminal. I may have ideals if I like--even of love and forbearance
and meekness. But I have no right to ask another to have these ideals.
And to impose _any ideals_ upon a child as it grows is almost
criminal. It results in impoverishment and distortion and subsequent
deficiency. In our day, most dangerous is the love and benevolence
ideal. It results in neurasthenia, which is largely a dislocation or
collapse of the great voluntary centers, a derangement of the will. It
is in us an insistence upon the one life-mode only, the spiritual
mode. It is a suppression of the great lower centers, and a living a
sort of half-life, almost entirely from the upper centers. Thence,
since we live terribly and exhaustively from the upper centers, there
is a tendency now towards pthisis and neurasthenia of the heart. The
great sympathetic center of the breast becomes exhausted, the lungs,
burnt by the over-insistence of one way of life, become diseased, the
heart, strained in one mode of dilation, retaliates. The powerful
lower centers are no longer fully active, particularly the great
lumbar ganglion, which is the clue to our sensual passionate pride and
independence, this ganglion is atrophied by suppression. And it is
this ganglion which holds the spine erect. So, weak-chested,
round-shouldered, we stoop hollowly forward on ourselves. It is the
result of the all-famous love and charity ideal, an ideal now quite
dead in its sympathetic activity, but still fixed and determined in
its voluntary action.
Let us beware and beware, and beware of having a high ideal for
ourselves. But particularly let us beware of having an ideal for our
children. So doing, we damn them. All we can have is wisdom. And
wisdom is not a theory, it is a state of soul. It is the state wherein
we know our wholeness and the complicate, manifold nature of our
being. It is the state wherein we know the great relations which exist
between us and our near ones. And it is the state which accepts full
responsibility, first for our own souls, and then for the living
dynamic relations wherein we have our being. It is no use expecting
the other person to know. Each must know for himself. But nowadays
men have even a stunt of pretending that children and idiots alone
know best. This is a pretty piece of sophistry, and criminal
cowardice, trying to dodge the life-responsibility which no man or
woman can dodge without disaster.
The only thing is to be direct. If a child has to swallow castor-oil,
then say: "Child, you've got to swallow this castor-oil. It is
necessary for your inside. I say so because it is true. So open your
mouth." Why try coaxing and logic and tricks with children? Children
are more sagacious than we are. They twig soon enough if there is a
flaw in our own intention and our own true spontaneity. And they play
up to our bit of falsity till there is hell to pay.
"You love mother, don't you, dear?"--Just a piece of indecent trickery
of the spiritual will. The great emotions like love are unspoken.
Speaking them is a sign of an indecent bullying will.
"Poor pussy! You must love poor pussy!"
What cant! What sickening cant! An appeal to love based on false pity.
That's the way to inculcate a filthy pharisaic conceit into a
child.--If the child ill-treats the cat, say:
"Stop mauling that cat. It's got its own life to live, so let it live
it." Then if the brat persists, give tit for tat.
"What, you pull the cat's tail! Then I'll pull your nose, to see how
you like it." And give his nose a proper hard pinch.
Children _must_ pull the cat's tail a little. Children _must_ steal
the sugar sometimes. They _must_ occasionally spoil just the things
one doesn't want them to spoil. And they _must_ occasionally tell
stories--tell a lie. Circumstances and life are such that we must all
sometimes tell a lie: just as we wear trousers, because we don't
choose that everybody shall see our nakedness. Morality is a delicate
act of adjustment on the soul's part, not a rule or a prescription.
Beyond a certain point the child _shall_ not pull the cat's tail, _or_
steal the sugar, _or_ spoil the furniture, _or_ tell lies. But I'm
afraid you can't fix this certain soul's humor. And so it must. If at
a sudden point you fly into a temper and thoroughly beat the boy for
hardly touching the cat--well, that's life. All you've got to say to
him is: "There, that'll serve you for all the times you _have_ pulled
her tail and hurt her." And he will feel outraged, and so will you.
But what does it matter? Children have an infinite understanding of
the soul's passionate variabilities, and forgive even a real
injustice, if it was _spontaneous_ and not intentional. They know we
aren't perfect. What they don't forgive us is if we pretend we are: or
if we _bully_.