THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
Here is a very vicious circle. And how to get out of it? In the first
place, we have to break the love-ideal, once and for all. Love, as we
see, is not the only dynamic. Taking love in its greatest sense, and
making it embrace every form of sympathy, every flow from the great
sympathetic centers of the human body, still it is not the whole of
the dynamic flow, it is only the one-half. There is always the other
voluntary flow to reckon with, the intense motion of independence and
singleness of self, the pride of isolation, and the profound
fulfillment through power.
The very first thing of all to be recognized is the danger of
idealism. It is the one besetting sin of the human race. It means the
fall into automatism, mechanism, and nullity.
We know that life issues spontaneously at the great nodes of the
psyche, the great nerve-centers. At first these are four only: then,
after puberty, they become eight: later there may still be an
extension of the dynamic consciousness, a further polarization. But
eight is enough at the moment.
First at four, and then at eight dynamic centers of the human body,
the human nervous system, life starts spontaneously into being. The
soul bursts day by day into fresh impulses, fresh desire, fresh
purpose, at these our polar centers. And from these dynamic generative
centers issue the vital currents which put us into connection with our
object. We have really no will and no choice, in the first place. It
is our soul which acts within us, day by day unfolding us according to
our own nature.
From the objective circuits and from the subjective circuits which
establish and fulfill themselves at the first four centers of
consciousness we derive our first being, our child-being, and also our
first mind, our child-mind. By the objective circuits we mean those
circuits which are established between the self and some external
object: mother, father, sister, cat, dog, bird, or even tree or plant,
or even further still, some particular place, some particular
inanimate object, a knife or a chair or a cap or a doll or a wooden
horse. For we must insist that every object which really enters
effectively into our lives does so by direct connection. If I love my
mother, it is because there is established between me and her a
direct, powerful circuit of vital magnetism, call it what you will,
but a direct flow of dynamic _vital_ interchange and intercourse. I
will not call this vital flow a _force_, because it depends on the
incomprehensible initiative and control of the individual soul or
self. Force is that which is directed only from some universal will or
law. Life is _always_ individual, and therefore never controlled by
one law, one God. And therefore, since the living really sway the
universe, even if unknowingly; therefore there is no one universal
law, even for the physical forces. Because we insist that even the sun
depends, for its heartbeat, its respiration, its pivotal motion, on
the beating hearts of men and beast, on the dynamic of the
soul-impulse in individual creatures. It is from the aggregate
heartbeat of living individuals, of we know not how many or what sort
of worlds, that the sun rests stable.
Which may be dismissed as metaphysics, although it is quite as valid
or even as demonstrable as Newton's Law of Gravitation, which law
still remains a law, even if not quite so absolute as heretofore.
But this is a digression. The argument is, that between an individual
and any external object with which he has an affective connection,
there exists a definite vital flow, as definite and concrete as the
electric current whose polarized circuit sets our tram-cars running
and our lamps shining, or our Marconi wires vibrating. Whether this
object be human, or animal, or plant, or quite inanimate, there is
still a circuit. My dog, my canary has a polarized connection with me.
Nay, the very cells in the ash-tree I loved as a child had a dynamic
vibratory connection with the nuclei in my own centers of primary
consciousness. And further still, the boots I have worn are so
saturated with my own magnetism, my own vital activity, that if anyone
else wear them I feel it is a trespass, almost as if another man used
my hand to knock away a fly. I doubt very much if a blood-hound, when
it takes a scent, _smells_, in our sense of the word. It receives at
the infinitely sensitive telegraphic center of the dog's nostrils the
vital vibration which remains in the inanimate object from the
individual with whom the object was associated. I should like to know
if a dog would trace a pair of quite new shoes which had merely been
dragged at the end of a string. That is, does he follow the smell of
the leather itself, or the vibration track of the individual whose
vitality is communicated to the leather?
So, there is a definite vibratory rapport between a man and his
surroundings, once he definitely gets into contact with these
surroundings. Any particular locality, any house which has been lived
in has a vibration, a transferred vitality of its own. This is either
sympathetic or antipathetic to the succeeding individual in varying
degree. But certain it is that the inhabitants who live at the foot of
Etna will always have a certain pitch of life-vibration, antagonistic
to the pitch of vibration even of a Palermitan, in some measure. And
old houses are saturated with human presence, at last to a degree of
indecency, unbearable. And tradition, in its most elemental sense,
means the continuing of the same peculiar pitch of vital vibration.
Such is the objective dynamic flow between the psychic poles of the
individual and the substance of the external object, animate or
inanimate. The subjective dynamic flow is established between the four
primary poles within the individual. Every dynamic connection begins
from one or the other of the sympathetic centers: is, or should be,
almost immediately polarized from the corresponding voluntary center.
Then a complete flow is set up, in one plane. But this always rouses
the activity on the other, corresponding plane, more or less intense.
There is a whole field of consciousness established, with positive
polarity of the first plane, negative polarity of the second. Which
being so, a whole fourfold field of dynamic consciousness now working
within the individual, direct cognition takes place. The mind begins
to know, and to strive to know.
The business of the mind is first and foremost the pure joy of knowing
and comprehending the pure joy of consciousness. The second business
is to act as medium, as interpreter, as agent between the individual
and his object. The mind should _not_ act as a director or controller
of the spontaneous centers. These the soul alone must control: the
soul being that forever unknowable reality which causes us to rise
into being. There is continual conflict between the soul, which is for
ever sending forth incalculable impulses, and the psyche, which is
conservative, and wishes to persist in its old motions, and the mind,
which wishes to have "freedom," that is spasmodic, idea-driven
control. Mind, and conservative psyche, and the incalculable soul,
these three are a trinity of powers in every human being. But there is
something even beyond these. It is the individual in his pure
singleness, in his totality of consciousness, in his oneness of being:
the Holy Ghost which is with us after our Pentecost, and which we may
not deny. When I say to myself: "I am wrong," knowing with sudden
insight that I _am_ wrong, then this is the whole self speaking, the
Holy Ghost. It is no piece of mental inference. It is not just the
soul sending forth a flash. It is my whole being speaking in one
voice, soul and mind and psyche transfigured into oneness. This voice
of my being I may _never_ deny. When at last, in all my storms, my
whole self speaks, then there is a pause. The soul collects itself
into pure silence and isolation--perhaps after much pain. The mind
suspends its knowledge, and waits. The psyche becomes strangely still.
And then, after the pause, there is fresh beginning, a new life
adjustment. Conscience is the being's consciousness, when the
individual is conscious _in toto_, when he knows in full. It is
something which includes and which far surpasses mental consciousness.
Every man must live as far as he can by his own soul's conscience.
But not according to any ideal. To submit the conscience to a creed,
or an idea, or a tradition, or even an impulse, is our ruin.
To make the mind the absolute ruler is as good as making a Cook's
tourist-interpreter a king and a god, because he can speak several
languages, and make an Arab understand that an Englishman wants fish
for supper. And to make an ideal a ruling principle is about as stupid
as if a bunch of travelers should never cease giving each other and
their dragoman sixpence, because the dragoman's main idea of virtue is
the virtue of sixpence-giving. In the same way, we _know_ we cannot
live purely by impulse. Neither can we live solely by tradition. We
must live by all three, ideal, impulse, and tradition, each in its
hour. But the real guide is the pure conscience, the voice of the self
in its wholeness, the Holy Ghost.
We have fallen now into the mistake of idealism. Man always falls into
one of the three mistakes. In China, it is tradition. And in the South
Seas, it seems to have been impulse. Ours is idealism. Each of the
three modes is a true life-mode. But any one, alone or dominant,
brings us to destruction. We must depend on the wholeness of our
being, ultimately only on that, which is our Holy Ghost within us.
Whereas, in an ideal of love and benevolence, we have tried to
automatize ourselves into little love-engines always stoked with the
sorrows or beauties of other people, so that we can get up steam of
charity or righteous wrath. A great trick is to pour on the fire the
oil of our indignation at somebody else's wickedness, and then, when
we've got up steam like hell, back the engine and run bish! smash!
against the belly of the offender. Because he said he didn't want to
love any more, we hate him for evermore, and try to run over him,
every bit of him, with our love-tanks. And all the time we yell at
him: "Will you deny love, you villain? Will you?" And by the time he
faintly squeaks, "I want to be loved! I want to be loved!" we have got
so used to running over him with our love-tanks that we don't feel in
a hurry to leave off.
"_Sois mon frere, ou je te tue._"
"_Sois mon frere, ou je me tue._"
There are the two parrot-threats of love, on which our loving
centuries have run as on a pair of railway-lines. Excuse me if I want
to get out of the train. Excuse me if I can't get up any love-steam
any more. My boilers are burst.
We have made a mistake, laying down love like the permanent way of a
great emotional transport system. There we are, however, running on
wheels on the lines of our love. And of course we have only two
directions, forwards and backwards. "Onward, Christian soldiers,
towards the great terminus where bottles of sterilized milk for the
babies are delivered at the bedroom windows by noiseless aeroplanes
each morn, where the science of dentistry is so perfect that teeth are
planted in a man's mouth without his knowing it, where twilight sleep
is so delicious that every woman longs for her next confinement, and
where nobody ever has to do anything except turn a handle now and then
in a spirit of universal love--" That is the forward direction of the
English-speaking race. The Germans unwisely backed their engine. "We
have a city of light. But instead of lying ahead it lies direct behind
us. So reverse engines. Reverse engines, and away, away to our city,
where the sterilized milk is delivered by noiseless aeroplanes, _at
the very precise minute when our great doctors of the Fatherland have
diagnosed that it is good for you_: where the teeth are not only so
painlessly planted that they grow like living rock, but where their
composition is such that the friction of eating stimulates the cells
of the jaw-bone and develops the _superman strength of will which
makes us gods_: and where not only is twilight sleep serene, but into
the sleeper are inculcated the most useful and instructive dreams,
calculated to perfect the character of the young citizen at this
crucial period, and to enlighten permanently the mind of the happy
mother, with regard to her new duties towards her child and towards
our great Fatherland--"
Here you see we are, on the railway, with New Jerusalem ahead, and New
Jerusalem away behind us. But of course it was very wrong of the
Germans to reverse their engines, and cause one long collision all
along the line. Why should we go _their_ way to the New Jerusalem,
when of course they might so easily have kept on going our way. And
now there's wreckage all along the line! But clear the way is our
motto--or make the Germans clear it. Because get on we will.
Meanwhile we sit rather in the cold, waiting for the train to get a
start. People keep on signaling with green lights and red lights. And
it's all very bewildering.
As for me, I'm off. I'm damned if I'll be shunted along any more. And
I'm thrice damned if I'll go another yard towards that sterilized New
Jerusalem, either forwards or backwards. New Jerusalem may rot, if it
waits for me. I'm not going.
So good-by! There we leave humanity, encamped in an appalling mess
beside the railway-smash of love, sitting down, however, and having
not a bad time, some of 'em, feeding themselves fat on the plunder:
others, further down the line, with mouths green from eating grass.
But all grossly, stupidly, automatically gabbling about getting the
love-service running again, the trains booked for the New Jerusalem
well on the way once more. And occasionally a good engine gives a
screech of love, and something seems to be about to happen. And
sometimes there is enough steam to set the indignation-whistles
whistling. But never any more will there be enough love-steam to get
the system properly running. It is done.
Good-by, then! You may have laid your line from one end to the other
of the infinite. But still there's plenty of hinterland. I'll go.
Good-by. Ach, it will be so nice to be alone: not to hear you, not to
see you, not to smell you, humanity. I wish you no ill, but wisdom.
Good-by!
To be alone with one's own soul. Not to be alone without my own soul,
mind you. But to be alone with one's own soul! This, and the joy of
it, is the real goal of love. My own soul, and myself. Not my ego, my
conceit of myself. But my very soul. To be at one in my own self. Not
to be questing any more. Not to be yearning, seeking, hoping,
desiring, aspiring. But to pause, and be alone.
And to have one's own "gentle spouse" by one's side, of course, to dig
one in the ribs occasionally. Because really, being alone in peace
means being two people together. Two people who can be silent
together, and not conscious of one another outwardly. Me in my
silence, she in hers, and the balance, the equilibrium, the pure
circuit between us. With occasional lapses of course: digs in the ribs
if one gets too vague or self-sufficient.
They say it is better to travel than to arrive. It's not been my
experience, at least. The journey of love has been rather a
lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey. But to come at last to a nice
place under the trees, with your "amiable spouse" who has at last
learned to hold her tongue and not to bother about rights and wrongs:
her own particularly. And then to pitch a camp, and cook your rabbit,
and eat him: and to possess your own soul in silence, and to feel all
the clamor lapse. That is the best I know.
I think it is terrible to be young. The ecstasies and agonies of love,
the agonies and ecstasies of fear and doubt and drop-by-drop
fulfillment, realization. The awful process of human relationships,
love and marital relationships especially. Because we all make a very,
very bad start to-day, with our idea of love in our head, and our sex
in our head as well. All the fight till one is bled of one's
self-consciousness and sex-in-the-head. All the bitterness of the
conflict with this devil of an amiable spouse, who has got herself so
stuck in her own head. It is terrible to be young.--But one fights
one's way through it, till one is cleaned: the self-consciousness and
sex-idea burned out of one, cauterized out bit by bit, and the self
whole again, and at last free.
The best thing I have known is the stillness of accomplished marriage,
when one possesses one's own soul in silence, side by side with the
amiable spouse, and has left off craving and raving and being only
half one's self. But I must say, I know a great deal more about the
craving and raving and sore ribs, than about the accomplishment. And I
must confess that I feel this self-same "accomplishment" of the
fulfilled being is only a preparation for new responsibilities ahead,
new unison in effort and conflict, the effort to make, with other men,
a little new way into the future, and to break through the hedge of
the many.
But--to your tents, my Israel. And to that precious baby you've left
slumbering there. What I meant to say was, in each phase of life you
have a great circuit of human relationship to establish and fulfill.
In childhood, it is the circuit of family love, established at the
first four consciousness centers, and gradually fulfilling itself,
completing itself. At adolescence, the first circuit of family love
should be completed, dynamically finished. And then, it falls into
quiescence. After puberty, family love should fall quiescent in a
child. The love never breaks. It continues static and basic, the basis
of the emotional psyche, the foundation of the self. It is like the
moon when the moon at last subsides into her eternal orbit, round the
earth. She travels in her orbit so inevitably that she forgets, and
becomes unaware. She only knits her brows over the earth's greater
aberrations in space.
The circuit of parental love, once fulfilled, is not done away with,
but only established into silence. The child is then free to establish
the new connections, in which he surpasses his parents. And let us
repeat, parents should never try to establish adult relations, of
sympathy or interest or anything else, between themselves and their
children. The attempt to do so only deranges the deep primary circuit
which is the dynamic basis of our living. It is a clambering upwards
only by means of a broken foundation. Parents should remain parents,
children children, for ever, and the great gulf preserved between the
two. Honor thy father and thy mother should always be a leading
commandment. But this can only take place when father and mother keep
their true parental distances, dignity, reserve, and limitation. As
soon as father and mother try to become the _friends_ and _companions_
of their children, they break the root of life, they rupture the
deepest dynamic circuit of living, they derange the whole flow of life
for themselves and their children.
For let us reiterate and reiterate: you cannot mingle and confuse the
various modes of dynamic love. If you try, you produce horrors. You
cannot plant the heart below the diaphragm or put an ocular eye in the
navel. No more can you transfer parent love into friend love or adult
love. Parent love is established at the great primary centers, where
man is father and child, playmate and brother, but where he _cannot_
be comrade or lover. Comrade and lover, this is the dynamic activity
of the further centers, the second four centers. And these second four
centers must be active in the parent, their intense circuit
established even if not fulfilled, long before the child is born. The
circuit of friendship, of personal companionship, of sexual love must
needs be established before the child is begotten, or at least before
it attains to adolescence. These circuits of the extended field are
already fully established in the parent before the centers of
correspondence in the child are even formed. When therefore the four
great centers of the extended consciousness arouses in a child, at
adolescence, they must needs seek a strange complement, a foreign
conjunction.
Not only is this the case, but the actual dynamic impulse of the new
life which rouses at puberty is _alien_ to the original dynamic flow.
The new wave-length by no means corresponds. The new vibration by no
means harmonizes. Force the two together, and you cause a terrible
frictional excitement and jarring. It is this instinctive recognition
of the different dynamic vibrations from different centers, in
different modes, and in different directions of positive and negative,
which lies at the base of savage taboo. After puberty, members of one
family should be taboo to one another. There should be the most
definite limits to the degree of contact. And mothers-in-law should be
taboo to their daughters' husbands, and fathers-in-law to their sons'
wives. We must again begin to learn the great laws of the first
dynamic life-circuits. These laws we now make havoc of, and
consequently we make havoc of our own soul, psyche, mind and health.
This book is written primarily concerning the child's consciousness.
It is not intended to enter the field of the post-puberty
consciousness. But yet, the dynamic relation of the child is
established so directly with the physical and psychical soul of the
parent, that to get any inkling of dynamic child-consciousness we must
understand something of parent-consciousness.
We assert that the parent-child love-mode excludes the possibility of
the man-and-woman, or friend-and-friend love mode. We assert that the
polarity of the first four poles is inconsistent with the polarity of
the second four poles. Nay, between the two great fields is a certain
dynamic opposition, resistance, even antipathy. So that in the natural
course of life there is no possibility of confusing parent love and
adult love.
But we are mental creatures, and with the explosive and mechanistic
aid of ideas we can pervert the whole psyche. Only, however, in a
destructive degree, not in a positive or constructive.
Let us return then. In the ordinary course of development, by the time
that the child is born and grown to puberty the whole dynamic soul of
the mother is engaged: first, with the children, and second, on the
further, higher plane, with the husband, and with her own friends. So
that when the child reaches adolescence it must inevitably cast abroad
for connection.
But now let us remember the actual state of affairs to-day, when the
poles are reversed between the sexes. The woman is now the responsible
party, the law-giver, the culture-bearer. She is the conscious guide
and director of the man. She bears his soul between her two hands. And
her sex is just a function or an instrument of power. This being so,
the man is really the servant and the fount of emotion, love and
otherwise.
Which is all very well, while the fun lasts. But like all perverted
processes, it is exhaustive, and like the fun wears out. Leaving an
exhaustion, and an irritation. Each looks on the other as a perverter
of life. Almost invariably a married woman, as she passes the age of
thirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt of her husband, or a pity
which is too near contempt. Particularly if he be a good husband, a
true modern. And he, for his part, though just as jarred inside
himself, resents only the fact that he is not loved as he ought to be.
Then starts a new game. The woman, even the most virtuous, looks
abroad for new sympathy. She will have a new man-friend, if nothing
more. But as a rule she has got something more. She has got her
children.
A relation between mother and child to-day is practically _never_
parental. It is personal--which means, it is critical and deliberate,
and adult in provocation. The mother, in her new role of idealist and
life-manager never, practically for one single moment, gives her child
the unthinking response from the deep dynamic centers. No, she gives
it what is good for it. She shoves milk in its mouth as the clock
strikes, she shoves it to sleep when the milk is swallowed, and she
shoves it ideally through baths and massage, promenades and practice,
till the little organism develops like a mushroom to stand on its own
feet. Then she continues her ideal shoving of it through all the
stages of an ideal up-bringing, she loves it as a chemist loves his
test-tubes in which he analyzes his salts. The poor little object is
his mother's ideal. But of her head she dictates his providential
days, and by the force of her deliberate mentally-directed love-will
she pushes him up into boyhood. The poor little devil never knows one
moment when he is not encompassed by the beautiful, benevolent,
idealistic, Botticelli-pure, and finally obscene love-will of the
mother. Never, never one mouthful does he drink of the milk of human
kindness: always the sterilized milk of human benevolence. There is no
mother's milk to-day, save in tigers' udders, and in the udders of
sea-whales. Our children drink a decoction of ideal love, at the
breast.
Never for one moment, poor baby, the deep warm stream of love from the
mother's bowels to his bowels. Never for one moment the dark proud
recoil into rest, the soul's separation into deep, rich independence.
Never this lovely rich forgetfulness, as a cat trots off and utterly
forgets her kittens, utterly, richly forgets them, till suddenly,
click, the dynamic circuit reverses itself in her, and she remembers,
and rages round in a frenzy, shouting for her young.
Our miserable infants never know this joy and richness and pang of real
maternal warmth. Our wonderful mothers never let us out of their minds
for one single moment. Not for a second do they allow us to escape from
their ideal benevolence. Not one single breath does a baby draw, free
from the imposition of the pure, unselfish, Botticelli-holy, detestable
_love-will_ of the mother. Always the _will_, the will, the love-will,
the ideal will, directed from the ideal mind. Always this stone, this
scorpion of maternal nourishment. Always this infernal self-conscious
Madonna starving our living guts and bullying us to death with her love.
We have made the idea supplant both impulse and tradition. We have no
spark of wholeness. And we live by an evil love-will. Alas, the great
spontaneous mode is abrogated. There is no lovely great flux of vital
sympathy, no rich rejoicing of pride into isolation and independence.
There is no reverence for great traditions of parenthood. No, there is
substitute for everything--life-substitute--just as we have
butter-substitute, and meat-substitute, and sugar-substitute, and
leather-substitute, and silk-substitute, so we have life-substitute.
We have beastly benevolence, and foul good-will, and stinking charity,
and poisonous ideals.
The poor modern brat, shoved horribly into life by an effort of will,
and shoved up towards manhood by every appliance that can be applied
to it, especially the appliance of the maternal will, it is really too
pathetic to contemplate. The only thing that prevents us wringing our
hands is the remembrance that the little devil will grow up and beget
other similar little devils of his own, to invent more aeroplanes and
hospitals and germ-killers and food-substitutes and poison gases. The
problem of the future is a question of the strongest poison-gas. Which
is certainly a very sure way out of our vicious circle.
There is no way out of a vicious circle, of course, except breaking
the circle. And since the mother-child relationship is to-day the
viciousest of circles, what are we to do? Just wait for the results of
the poison-gas competition presumably.
Oh, ideal humanity, how detestable and despicable you are! And how you
deserve your own poison-gases! How you deserve to perish in your own
stink.
It is no use contemplating the development of the modern child, born
out of the mental-conscious love-will, born to be another unit of
self-conscious love-will: an ideal-born beastly little entity with a
devil's own will of its own, benevolent, of course, and a Satan's own
seraphic self-consciousness, like a beastly Botticelli brat.
Once we really consider this modern process of life and the love-will,
we could throw the pen away, and spit, and say three cheers for the
inventors of poison-gas. Is there not an American who is supposed to
have invented a breath of heaven whereby, drop one pop-cornful in
Hampstead, one in Brixton, one in East Ham, and one in Islington, and
London is a Pompeii in five minutes! Or was the American only
bragging? Because anyhow, whom has he experimented on? I read it in
the newspaper, though. London a Pompeii in five minutes. Makes the
gods look silly!