THE LOWER SELF
So it comes about that the moon is the planet of our nights, as the
sun of our days. And this is not just accidental, or even mechanical.
The influence of the moon upon the tides and upon us is not just an
accident in phenomena. It is the result of the creation of the
universe by life itself. It was life itself which threw the moon apart
on the one hand, the sun on the other. And it is life itself which
keeps the dynamic-vital relation constant between the moon and the
living individuals of the globe. The moon is as dependent upon the
life of individuals, for her continued existence, as each single
individual is dependent upon the moon.
The same with the sun. The sun sets and has his perfect polarity in
the life-circuit established between him and all living individuals.
Break that circuit, and the sun breaks. Without man, beasts,
butterflies, trees, toads, the sun would gutter out like a spent lamp.
It is the life-emission from individuals which feeds his burning and
establishes his sun-heart in its powerful equilibrium.
The same with the moon. She lives from us, primarily, and we from her.
Everything is a question of relativity. Not only is every force
relative to other force or forces, but every existence is relative to
other existences. Not only does the life of man depend on man, beast,
and herb, but on the sun and moon, and the stars. And in another
manner, the existence of the moon depends absolutely on the life of
herb, beast, and man. The existence of the moon depends upon the life
of individuals, that which alone is original. Without the life of
individuals the moon would fall asunder. And the moon particularly,
because she is polarized dynamically to this, our own earth. We do not
know what far-off life breathes between the stars and the sun. But our
life alone supports the moon. Just as the moon is the pole of our
single terrestrial individuality.
Therefore we must know that between the moon and each individual being
exists a vital dynamic flow. The life of individuals depends directly
upon the moon, just as the moon depends directly upon the life of
individuals.
But in what way does the life of individuals depend directly upon the
moon?
The moon is the mother of darkness. She is the clue to the active
darkness. And we, below the waist, we have our being in darkness.
Below the waist we are sightless. When, in the daytime, our life is
polarized upwards, towards the open, sun-wakened eyes and the mind
which sees in vision, then the powerful dynamic centers of the lower
body act in subservience, in their negative polarity. And then we flow
upwards, we go forth seeking the universe, in vision, speech, and
thought--we go forth to see all things, to hear all things, to know
all things by acquaintance and by knowledge. One flood of dynamic flow
are we, upwards polarized, in our tallness and our wide-eyed spirit
seeking to bring all the universe into the range of our conscious
individuality, and eager always to make new worlds, out of this old
world, to bud new green tips on the tree of life. Just as a tree would
die if it were not making new green tips upon all its vast old world
of a body, so the whole universe would perish if man and beast and
herb were not always putting forth a newness: the toad taking a
vivider color, spreading his hands a little more gently, developing a
more ruse intelligence, the birds adding a new note to their speech
and song, a new sharp swerve to their flight, a new nicety to their
nests; and man, making new worlds, new civilizations. If it were not
for this striving into new creation on the part of living individuals,
the universe would go dead, gradually, gradually and fall asunder.
Like a tree that ceases to put forth new green tips, and to advance
out a little further.
But each new tip arises out of the apparent death of the old, the
preceding one. Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And if
men must at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must
the leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold.
And so dead men. Even dead men's souls.
So if death has to be the goal for a great number, then let it be so.
If America must invent this poison-gas, let her. When death is our
goal of goals we shall invent the means of death, let our professions
of benevolence be what they will.
But this time, it seems to me, we have consciously and responsibly to
carry ourselves through the winter-period, the period of death and
denudation: that is, some of us have, some _nation_ even must. For
there are not now, as in the Roman times, any great reservoirs of
energetic barbaric life. Goths, Gauls, Germans, Slavs, Tartars. The
world is very full of people, but all fixed in civilizations of their
own, and they all have all our vices, all our mechanisms, and all our
means of destruction. This time, the leading civilization cannot die
out as Greece, Rome, Persia died. It must suffer a great collapse,
maybe. But it must carry through all the collapse the living clue to
the next civilization. It's no good thinking we can leave it to China
or Japan or India or Africa--any of the great swarms.
And here we are, we don't look much like carrying through to a new
era. What have we got that will carry through? The latest craze is Mr.
Einstein's Relativity Theory. Curious that everybody catches fire at
the word Relativity. There must be something in the mere suggestion,
which we have been waiting for. But what? As far as I can see,
Relativity means, for the common amateur mind, that there is no one
absolute force in the physical universe, to which all other forces may
be referred. There is no one single absolute central principle
governing the world. The great cosmic forces or mechanical principles
can only be known in their relation to one another, and can only exist
in their relation to one another. But, says Einstein, this relation
between the mechanical forces is constant, and may be expressed by a
mathematical formula: which mathematical formula may be used to equate
all mechanical forces of the universe.
I hope that is not scientifically all wrong. It is what I understand
of the Einstein theory. What I doubt is the equation formula. It seems
to me, also, that the velocity of light through space is the _deus ex
machina_ in Einstein's physics. Somebody will some day put salt on the
tail of light as it travels through space, and then its simple
velocity will split up into something complex, and the Relativity
formula will fall to bits.--But I am a confirmed outsider, so I'll
hold my tongue.
All I know is that people have got the word Relativity into their
heads, and catch-words always refer to some latent idea or conception
in the popular mind. It has taken a Jew to knock the last center-pin
out of our ideally spinning universe. The Jewish intelligence for
centuries has been picking holes in our ideal system--scientific and
sociological. Very good thing for us. Now Mr. Einstein, we are glad to
say, has pulled out the very axle pin. At least that is how the vulgar
mind understands it. The equation formula doesn't count.--So now, the
universe, according to the popular mind, can wobble about without
being pinned down.--Really, an anarchical conclusion. But the Jewish
mind insidiously drives us to anarchical conclusions. We are glad to
be driven from false, automatic fixities, anyhow. And once we are
driven right on to nihilism we may find a way through.
So, there is nothing absolute left in the universe. Nothing. Lord
Haldane says pure knowledge is absolute. As far as it goes, no doubt.
But pure knowledge is only such a tiny bit of the universe, and always
relative to the thing known and to the knower.
I feel inclined to Relativity myself. I think there is no one absolute
principle in the universe. I think everything is relative. But I also
feel, most strongly, that in itself each individual living creature is
absolute: in its own being. And that all things in the universe are
just relative to the individual living creature. And that individual
living creatures are relative to each other.
And what about a goal? There is no final goal. But every step taken
has its own little relative goal. So what about the next step?
Well, first and foremost, that every individual creature shall come to
its own particular and individual fullness of being.--Very nice, very
pretty--but _how_? Well, through a living dynamic relation to other
creatures.--Very nice again, pretty little adjectives. But what _sort_
of a living dynamic relation?--Well, _not_ the relation of love,
that's one thing, nor of brotherhood, nor equality. The next relation
has got to be a relationship of men towards men in a spirit of
unfathomable trust and responsibility, service and leadership,
obedience and pure authority. Men have got to choose their leaders,
and obey them to the death. And it must be a system of culminating
aristocracy, society tapering like a pyramid to the supreme leader.
All of which sounds very distasteful at the moment. But upon all the
vital lessons we have learned during our era of love and spirit and
democracy we can found our new order.
We wanted to be all of a piece. And we couldn't bring it off. Because
we just _aren't_ all of a piece. We wanted first to have nothing but
nice daytime selves, awfully nice and kind and refined. But it didn't
work. Because whether we want it or not, we've got night-time selves.
And the most spiritual woman ever born or made has to perform her
natural functions just like anybody else. We must _always_ keep in
line with this fact.
Well, then, we have night-time selves. And the night-self is the very
basis of the dynamic self. The blood-consciousness and the
blood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can
_stay_ at the source. Nor even make a _goal_ of the source, as Freud
does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But
you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise
every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood.
When you go to sleep at night, you have to say: "Here dies the man I
am and know myself to be." And when you rise in the morning you have
to say: "Here rises an unknown quantity which is still myself."
The self which rises naked every morning out of the dark sleep of the
passionate, hoarsely-calling blood: this is the unit for the next
society. And the polarizing of the passionate blood in the individual
towards life, and towards leader, this must be the dynamic of the next
civilization. The intense, passionate yearning of the soul towards the
soul of a stronger, greater individual, and the passionate
blood-belief in the fulfillment of this yearning will give men the
next motive for life.
We have to sink back into the darkness and the elemental consciousness
of the blood. And from this rise again. But there is no rising until
the bath of darkness and extinction is accomplished.
As social units, as civilized men we have to do what we do as physical
organisms. Every day, the sun sets from the sky, and darkness falls,
and every day, when this happens, the tide of life turns in us.
Instead of flowing upwards and outwards towards mental consciousness
and activity, it turns back, to flow downwards. Downwards towards the
digestion processes, downwards further to the great sexual
conjunctions, downwards to sleep.
This is the soul now retreating, back from the outer life of day, back
to the origins. And so, it stays its hour at the first great sensual
stations, the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion. But the tide ebbs
on, down to the immense, almost inhuman passionate darkness of sex,
the strange and moon-like intensity of the hypogastric plexus and the
sacral ganglion, then deep, deeper, past the last great station of the
darkest psyche, down to the earth's center. Then we sleep.
And the moon is the tide-turner. The moon is the great cosmic pole
which calls us back, back out of our day-self, back through the
moonlit darknesses of the sensual planes, to sleep. It is the moon
that sways the blood, and sways us back into the extinction of the
blood.--And as the soul retreats back into the sea of its own
darkness, the mind, stage by stage, enjoys the mental consciousness
that belongs to this retreat back into the sensual deeps; and then it
goes extinguished. There is sleep.
And so we resolve back towards our elementals. We dissolve back, out
of the upper consciousness, out of mind and sight and speech, back,
down into the deep and massive, swaying consciousness of the dark,
living blood. At the last hour of sex I am no more than a powerful
wave of mounting blood. Which seeks to surge and join with the
answering sea in the other individual. When the sea of individual
blood which I am at that hour heaves and finds its pure contact with
the sea of individual blood which is the woman at that hour, then each
of us enters into the wholeness of our deeper infinitude, our profound
fullness of being, in the ocean of our oneness and our consciousness.
This is under the spell of the moon, of sea-born Aphrodite, mother and
bitter goddess. For I am carried away from my sunny day-self into
this other tremendous self, where knowledge will not save me, but
where I must obey as the sea obeys the tides. Yet however much I go, I
know that I am all the while myself, in my going.
This then is the duality of my day and my night being: a duality so
bitter to an adolescent. For the adolescent thinks with shame and
terror of his night. He would wish to have no night-self. But it is
Moloch, and he cannot escape it.
The tree is born of its roots and its leaves. And we of our days and
our nights. Without the night-consummation we are trees without roots.
And the night-consummation takes place under the spell of the moon. It
is one pure motion of meeting and oneing. But even so, it is a
circuit, not a straight line. One pure motion of meeting and oneing,
until the flash breaks forth, when the two are one. And this, this
flashing moment of the ignition of two seas of blood, this is the
moment of begetting. But the begetting of a child is less than the
begetting of the man and the woman. Woman is begotten of man at that
moment, into her greater self: and man is begotten of woman. This is
the main. And that which cannot be fulfilled, perfected in the two
individuals, that which cannot take fire into individual life, this
trickles down and is the seed of a new life, destined ultimately to
fulfill that which the parents could not fulfill. So it is for ever.
Sex then is a polarization of the individual blood in man towards the
individual blood in woman. It is more, also. But in its prime
functional reality it is this. And sex union means bringing into
connection the dynamic poles of sex in man and woman.
In sex we have our basic, most elemental being. Here we have our most
elemental contact. It is from the hypogastric plexus and the sacral
ganglion that the dark forces of manhood and womanhood sparkle. From
the dark plexus of sympathy run out the acute, intense sympathetic
vibrations direct to the corresponding pole. Or so it should be, in
genuine passionate love. There is no mental interference. There is
even no interference of the upper centers. Love is supposed to be
blind. Though modern love wears strong spectacles.
But love is really blind. Without sight or scent or hearing the
powerful magnetic current vibrates from the hypogastric plexus in the
female, vibrating on to the air like some intense wireless message.
And there is immediate response from the sacral ganglion in some
male. And then sight and day-consciousness begin to fade. In the lower
animals apparently any male can receive the vibration of any female:
and if need be, even across long distances of space. But the higher
the development the more individual the attunement. Every wireless
station can only receive those messages which are in its own vibration
key. So with sex in specialized individuals. From the powerful dynamic
center the female sends out her dark summons, the intense dark
vibration of sex. And according to her nature, she receives her
responses from the males. The male enters the magnetic field of the
female. He vibrates helplessly in response. There is established at
once a dynamic circuit, more or less powerful. It would seem as if,
while ever life remains free and wild and independent, the
sex-circuit, while it lasts, is omnipotent. There is one electric flow
which encompasses one male and one female, or one male and one
particular group of females all polarized in the same key of
vibration.
This circuit of vital sex magnetism, at first loose and wide,
gradually closes and becomes more powerful, contracts and grows more
intense, until the two individuals arrive into contact. And even then
the pulse and flow of attraction and recoil varies. In free wild life,
each touch brings about an intense recoil, and each recoil causes an
intense sympathetic attraction. So goes on the strange battle of
desire, until the consummation is reached.
It is the precise parallel of what happens in a thunder-storm, when
the dynamic forces of the moon and the sun come into collision. The
result is threefold: first, the electric flash, then the birth of pure
water, new water.
So it is in sex relation. There is a threefold result. First, the
flash of pure sensation and of real electricity. Then there is the
birth of an entirely new state of blood in each partner. And then
there is the liberation.
But the main thing, as in the thunder-storm, is the absolute renewal
of the atmosphere: in this case, the blood. It would no doubt be found
that the electro-dynamic condition of the white and red corpuscles of
the blood was quite different after sex union, and that the chemical
composition of the fluid of the blood was quite changed.
And in this renewal lies the great magic of sex. The life of an
individual goes on apparently the same from day to day. But as a
matter of fact there is an inevitable electric accumulation in the
nerves and the blood, an accumulation which weighs there and broods
there with intolerable pressure. And the only possible means of relief
and renewal is in pure passional interchange. There is and must be a
pure passional interchange from the upper self, as when men unite in
some great creative or religious or constructive activity, or as when
they fight each other to the death. The great goal of creative or
constructive activity, or of heroic victory in fight, _must_ always be
the goal of the daytime self. But the very possibility of such a goal
arises out of the vivid dynamism of the conscious blood. And the blood
in an individual finds its great renewal in a perfected sex circuit.
A perfected sex circuit and a successful sex union. And there can be
no successful sex union unless the greater hope of purposive,
constructive activity fires the soul of the man all the time: or the
hope of passionate, purposive _destructive_ activity: the two amount
religiously to the same thing, within the individual. Sex as an end in
itself is a disaster: a vice. But an ideal purpose which has no roots
in the deep sea of passionate sex is a greater disaster still. And now
we have only these two things: sex as a fatal goal, which is the
essential theme of modern tragedy: or ideal purpose as a deadly
parasite. Sex passion as a goal in itself always leads to tragedy.
There must be the great purposive inspiration always present. But the
automatic ideal-purpose is not even a tragedy, it is a slow
humiliation and sterility.
The great thing is to keep the sexes pure. And by pure we don't mean
an ideal sterile innocence and similarity between boy and girl. We
mean pure maleness in a man, pure femaleness in a woman. Woman is
really polarized downwards, towards the center of the earth. Her deep
positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull. And man is
polarized upwards, towards the sun and the day's activity. Women and
men are dynamically different, in everything. Even in the mind, where
we seem to meet, we are really utter strangers. We may speak the same
verbal language, men and women: as Turk and German might both speak
Latin. But _whatever_ a man says, his meaning is something quite
different and changed when it passes through a woman's ears. And
though you reverse the sexual polarity, the flow between the sexes,
still the difference is the same. The _apparent_ mutual understanding,
in companionship between a man and a woman, is always an illusion,
and always breaks down in the end.
Woman can polarize her consciousness upwards. She can obtain a hand
even over her sex receptivity. She can divert even the electric spasm
of coition into her upper consciousness: it was the trick which the
snake and the apple between them taught her. The snake, whose
consciousness is _only_ dynamic, and non-cerebral. The snake, who has
no mental life, but only an intensely vivid dynamic mind, he envied
the human race its mental consciousness. And he knew, this intensely
wise snake, that the one way to make humanity pay more than the price
of mental consciousness was to pervert woman into mentality: to
stimulate her into the upper flow of consciousness.
For the true polarity of consciousness in woman is downwards. Her
deepest consciousness is in the loins and belly. Even when perverted,
it is so. The great flow of female consciousness is downwards, down to
the weight of the loins and round the circuit of the feet. Pervert
this, and make a false flow upwards, to the breast and head, and you
get a race of "intelligent" women, delightful companions, tricky
courtesans, clever prostitutes, noble idealists, devoted friends,
interesting mistresses, efficient workers, brilliant managers, women
as good as men at all the manly tricks: and better, because they are
so very headlong once they go in for men's tricks. But then, after a
while, pop it all goes. The moment woman has got man's ideals and
tricks drilled into her, the moment she is competent in the manly
world--there's an end of it. She's had enough. She's had more than
enough. She hates the thing she has embraced. She becomes absolutely
perverse, and her one end is to prostitute herself and her ideals to
sex. Which is her business at the present moment.
We bruise the serpent's head: his flat and brainless head. But his
revenge of bruising our heel is a good one. The heels, through which
the powerful downward circuit flows: these are bruised in us, numbed
with a horrible neurotic numbness. The dark strong flow that polarizes
us to the earth's center is hampered, broken. We become flimsy fungoid
beings, with no roots and no hold in the earth, like mushrooms. The
serpent has bruised our heel till we limp. The lame gods, the enslaved
gods, the toiling limpers moaning for the woman. You don't find the
sun and moon playing at pals in the sky. Their beams cross the great
gulf which is between them.
So with man and woman. They must stand clear again. They must fight
their way out of their self-consciousness: there is nothing else. Or,
rather, each must fight the other out of self-consciousness. Instead
of this leprous forbearance which we are taught to practice in our
intimate relationships, there should be the most intense open
antagonism. If your wife flirts with other men, and you don't like it,
say so before them all, before wife and man and all, say you won't
have it. If she seems to you false, in any circumstance, tell her so,
angrily, furiously, and stop her. Never mind about being justified. If
you hate anything she does, turn on her in a fury. Harry her, and make
her life a hell, so long as the real hot rage is in you. Don't
silently hate her, or silently forbear. It is such a dirty trick, so
mean and ungenerous. If you feel a burning rage, turn on her and give
it to her, and _never_ repent. It'll probably hurt you much more than
it hurts her. But never repent for your real hot rages, whether
they're "justifiable" or not. If you care one sweet straw for the
woman, and if she makes you that you can't bear any more, give it to
her, and if your heart weeps tears of blood afterwards, tell her
you're thankful she's got it for once, and you wish she had it worse.
The same with wives and their husbands. If a woman's husband gets on
her nerves, she should fly at him. If she thinks him too sweet and
smarmy with other people, she should let him have it to his nose,
straight out. She should lead him a dog's life, and never swallow her
bile.
With wife or husband, you should never swallow your bile. It makes you
go all wrong inside. Always let fly, tooth and nail, and never repent,
no matter what sort of a figure you make.
We have a vice of love, of softness and sweetness and smarminess and
intimacy and promiscuous kindness and all that sort of thing. We think
it's so awfully nice of us to be like that, in ourselves. But in our
wives or our husbands it gets on our nerves horribly. Yet we think it
oughtn't to, so we swallow our spleen.
We shouldn't. When Jesus said "if thine eye offend thee, pluck it
out," he was beside the point. The eye doesn't really offend us. We
are rather fond of our own squint eye. It only offends the person who
cares for us. And it's up to this person to pluck it out.
This holds particularly good of the love and intimacy vice. It'll
never offend us in ourselves. While it will be gall and wormwood to
our wife or husband. And it is on this promiscuous love and intimacy
and kindness and sweetness, all a vice, that our self-consciousness
really rests. If we are battered out of this, we shall be battered out
of self-consciousness.
And so, men, drive your wives, beat them out of their
self-consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely idea of
themselves. Absolutely tear their lovely opinion of themselves to
tatters, and make them look a holy ridiculous sight in their own eyes.
Wives, do the same to your husbands.
But fight for your life, men. Fight your wife out of her own
self-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it till
she's stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice
superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her. Reduce
her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying.
Make her yield to her own real unconscious self, and absolutely stamp
on the self that she's got in her head. Drive her forcibly back, back
into her own true unconscious.
And then you've got a harder thing still to do. Stop her from looking
on you as her "lover." Cure her of that, if you haven't cured her
before. Put the fear of the Lord into her that way. And make her know
she's got to believe in you again, and in the deep purpose you stand
for. But before you can do that, you've got to _stand_ for some deep
purpose. It's no good faking one up. You won't take a woman in, not
really. Even when she _chooses_ to be taken in, for prettiness' sake,
it won't do you any good.
But combat her. Combat her in her sexual pertinacity, and in her
secret glory or arrogance in the sexual goal. Combat her in her
cock-sure belief that she "knows" and that she is "right." Take it all
out of her. Make her yield once more to the male leadership: if you've
got anywhere to lead to. If you haven't, best leave the woman alone;
she has _one_ goal of her own, anyhow, and it's better than your
nullity and emptiness.
You've got to take a new resolution into your soul, and break off from
the old way. You've got to know that you're a man, and being a man
means you must go on alone, ahead of the woman, to break a way through
the old world into the new. And you've got to be alone. And you've got
to start off ahead. And if you don't know which direction to take,
look round for the man your heart will point out to you. And
follow--and never look back. Because if Lot's wife, looking back, was
turned to a pillar of salt, these miserable men, for ever looking back
to their women for guidance, they are miserable pillars of half-rotten
tears.
You'll have to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, a
real pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer.
You'll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours:
her night goal to your day goal. The moon, the planet of women, sways
us back from our day-self, sways us back from our real social unison,
sways us back, like a retreating tide, in a friction of criticism and
separation and social disintegration. That is woman's inevitable mode,
let her words be what they will. Her goal is the deep, sensual
individualism of secrecy and night-exclusiveness, hostile, with
guarded doors. And you'll have to fight very hard to make a woman
yield her goal to yours, to make her, in her own soul, _believe_ in
your goal as the goal beyond, in her goal as the way by which you go.
She'll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profound
and absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, least
of all to her. She'll never believe until, in your soul, you are cut
off and gone ahead, into the dark.
She may of course already love you, and love you for yourself. But the
love will be a nest of scorpions unless it is overshadowed by a little
fear or awe of your further purpose, a living _belief_ in your going
beyond her, into futurity.
But when once a woman _does_ believe in her man, in the pioneer which
he is, the pioneer who goes on ahead beyond her, into the darkness in
front, and who may be lost to her for ever in this darkness; when once
she knows the pain and beauty of this belief, knows that the
loneliness of waiting and following is inevitable, that it must be so;
ah, then, how wonderful it is! How wonderful it is to come back to
her, at evening, as she sits half in fear and waits! How good it is to
come home to her! How good it is then when the night falls! How richly
the evening passes! And then, for her, at last, all that she has lost
during the day to have it again between her arms, all that she has
missed, to have it poured out for her, and a richness and a wonder she
had never expected. It is her hour, her goal. That's what it is to
have a wife.
Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she _believes_ in
you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her. Then, how
wonderful this nightfall is! How rich you feel, tired, with all the
burden of the day in your veins, turning home! Then you too turn to
your other goal: to the splendor of darkness between her arms. And you
know the goal is there for you: how rich that feeling is. And you feel
an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes in
your purpose and receives you into the magnificent dark gratification
of her embrace. That's what it is to have a wife.
But no man ever had a wife unless he served a great predominant
purpose. Otherwise, he has a lover, a mistress. No matter how much she
may be married to him, unless his days have a living purpose,
constructive or destructive, but a purpose beyond her and all she
stands for; unless his days have this purpose, and his soul is really
committed to his purpose, she will not be a wife, she will be only a
mistress and he will be her lover.
If the man has no purpose for his days, then to the woman alone
remains the goal of her nights: the great sex goal. And this goal is
no goal, but always cries for the something beyond: for the rising in
the morning and the going forth beyond, the man disappearing ahead
into the distance of futurity, that which his purpose stands for, the
future. The sex goal needs, absolutely needs, this further departure.
And if there _be_ no further departure, no great way of belief on
ahead: and if sex is the starting point and the goal as well: then sex
becomes like the bottomless pit, insatiable. It demands at last the
departure into death, the only available beyond. Like Carmen, or like
Anna Karenina. When sex is the starting point and the returning point
both, then the only issue is death. Which is plain as a pike-staff in
"Carmen" or "Anna Karenina," and is the theme of almost _all_ modern
tragedy. Our one hackneyed, hackneyed theme. Ecstasies and agonies of
love, and final passion of death. Death is the only pure, beautiful
conclusion of a great passion. Lovers, pure lovers should say "Let it
be so."
And one is always tempted to say "Let it be so." But no, let it be not
so. Only I say this, let it be a great passion and then death, rather
than a false or faked purpose. Tolstoi said "No" to the passion and
the death conclusion. And then drew into the dreary issue of a false
conclusion. His books were better than his life. Better the woman's
goal, sex and death, than some _false_ goal of man's.
Better Anna Karenina and Vronsky a thousand times than Natasha and
that porpoise of a Pierre. This pretty, slightly sordid couple tried
so hard to kid themselves that the porpoise Pierre was puffing with
great purpose. Better Vronsky than Tolstoi himself, in my mind. Better
Vronsky's final statement: "As a soldier I am still some good. As a
man I am a ruin"--better that than Tolstoi and Tolstoi-ism and that
beastly peasant blouse the old man wore.
Better passion and death than any more of these "isms." No more of the
old purpose done up in aspic. Better passion and death.
But still--we _might_ live, mightn't we?
For heaven's sake answer plainly "No," if you feel like it. No good
temporizing.
EPILOGUE
"_Tutti i salmi finiscono in gloria._"
All the psalms wind up with the Gloria.--"As it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be, World without end. Amen."
Well, then, Amen.
I hope you say Amen! along with me, dear little reader: if there be
any dear little reader who has got so far. If not, I say Amen! all by
myself.--But don't you think the show is all over. I've got another
volume up my sleeve, and after a year or two years, when I have shaken
it down my sleeve, I shall bring it and lay it at the foot of your
Liberty statue, oh Columbia, as I do this one.
I suppose Columbia means the States.--"Hail Columbia!"--I suppose,
etymologically, it is a nest of turtle-doves, Lat. _columba_, a dove.
Coo me softly, then, Columbia; don't roar me like the sucking doves of
the critics of my "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious."
And when I lay this little book at the foot of the Liberty statue,
that brawny lady is not to look down her nose and bawl: "Do you see
any green in my eye?" Of course I don't, dear lady. I only see the
reflection of that torch--or is it a carrot?--which you are holding up
to light the way into New York harbor. Well, many an ass has strayed
across the uneasy paddock of the Atlantic, to nibble your carrot, dear
lady. And I must say, you can keep on slicing off nice little
carrot-slices of guineas and doubloons for an extraordinarily
inexhaustible long time. And innumerable asses can collect themselves
nice little heaps of golden carrot-slices, and then lift up their
heads and brag over them with fairly pan-demoniac yells of
gratification. Of course I don't see any green in your eye, dear
Libertas, unless it is the smallest glint from the carrot-tips. The
gleam in your eye is golden, oh Columbia!
Nevertheless, and in spite of all this, up trots this here little ass
and makes you a nice present of this pretty book. You needn't sniff,
and glance at your carrot-sceptre, lady Liberty. You needn't throw
down the thinnest carrot-paring you can pare off, and then say: "Why
should I pay for this tripe, this wordy mass of rather revolting
nonsense!" You can't pay for it, darling. If I didn't make you a
present of it you could never buy it. So don't shake your
carrot-sceptre and feel supercilious. Here's a gift for you, Missis.
You can look in its mouth, too. Mind it doesn't bite you.--No, you
needn't bother to put your carrot behind your back, nobody wants to
snatch it.
How do you do, Columbia! Look, I brought you a posy: this nice little
posy of words and wisdom which I made for you in the woods of
Ebersteinburg, on the borders of the Black Forest, near Baden Baden,
in Germany, in this summer of scanty grace but nice weather. I made it
specially for you--Whitman, for whom I have an immense regard, says
"These States." I suppose I ought to say: "Those States." If the
publisher would let me, I'd dedicate this book to you, to "Those
States." Because I wrote this book entirely for you, Columbia. You may
not take it as a compliment. You may even smell a tiny bit of
Schwarzwald sap in it, and be finally disgusted. I admit that trees
ought to think twice before they flourish in such a disgraced place as
the Fatherland. "_Chi va coi zoppi, all' anno zoppica._" But you've
not only to gather ye rosebuds while ye may, but _where_ ye may. And
so, as I said before, the Black Forest, etc.
I know, Columbia, dear Libertas, you'll take my posy and put your
carrot aside for a minute, and smile, and say: "I'm sure, Mr.
Lawrence, it is a _long_ time since I had such a perfectly beautiful
bunch of ideas brought me." And I shall blush and look sheepish and
say: "So glad you think so. I believe you'll find they'll keep fresh
quite a long time, if you put them in water." Whereupon you, Columbia,
with real American gallantry: "Oh, they'll keep for _ever_, Mr.
Lawrence. They _couldn't_ be so cruel as to go and die, such perfectly
lovely-colored ideas. Lovely! Thank you ever, ever so much."
Just think of it, Columbia, how pleased we shall be with one another:
and how much nicer it will be than if you snorted "High-falutin'
Nonsense"--or "Wordy mass of repulsive rubbish."
When they were busy making Italy, and were just going to put it in
the oven to bake: that is, when Garibaldi and Vittorio Emmanuele had
won their victories at Caserta, Naples prepared to give them a
triumphant entry. So there sat the little king in his carriage: he had
short legs and huge swagger mustaches and a very big bump of
philoprogeniture. The town was all done up, in spite of the rain. And
down either side of the wide street were hasty statues of large,
well-fleshed ladies, each one holding up a fore-finger. We don't know
what the king thought. But the staff held their breath. The king's
appetite for strapping ladies was more than notorious, and naturally
it looked as if Naples had done it on purpose.
As a matter of fact, the fore-finger meant _Italia Una_! "Italy shall
be one." Ask Don Sturzo.
Now you see how risky statues are. How many nice little asses and
poets trot over the Atlantic and catch sight of Liberty holding up
this carrot of desire at arm's length, and fairly hear her say, as one
does to one's pug dog, with a lump of sugar: "Beg! Beg!"--and "Jump!
Jump, then!" And each little ass and poodle begins to beg and to jump,
and there's a rare game round about Liberty, zap, zap, zapperty-zap!
Do lower the carrot, gentle Liberty, and let us talk nicely and
sensibly. I don't like you as a _carotaia_, precious.
Talking about the moon, it is thrilling to read the announcements of
Professor Pickering of Harvard, that it's almost a dead cert that
there's life on our satellite. It is almost as certain that there's
life on the moon as it is certain there is life on Mars. The professor
bases his assertions on photographs--hundreds of photographs--of a
crater with a circumference of thirty-seven miles. I'm not satisfied.
I demand to know the yards, feet and inches. You don't come it over me
with the triteness of these round numbers.
"Hundreds of photographic reproductions have proved irrefutably the
springing up at dawn, with an unbelievable rapidity, of vast fields of
foliage which come into blossom just as rapidly (sic!) and which
disappear in a maximum period of eleven days."--Again I'm not
satisfied. I want to know if they're cabbages, cress, mustard, or
marigolds or dandelions or daisies. Fields of foliage, mark you. And
_blossom_! Come now, if you can get so far, Professor Pickering, you
might have a shrewd guess as to whether the blossoms are good to eat,
or if they're purely for ornament.
I am only waiting at last for an aeroplane to land on one of these
fields of foliage and find a donkey grazing peacefully. Hee-haw!
"The plates moreover show that great blizzards, snow-storms, and
volcanic eruptions are also frequent." So no doubt the blossoms are
edelweiss.
"We find," says the professor, "a living world at our very doors where
life in some respects resembles that of Mars." All I can say is:
"Pray come in, Mr. Moony. And how is your cousin Signor Martian?"
Now I'm sure Professor Pickering's photographs and observations are
really wonderful. But his _explanations_! Come now, Columbia, where is
your High-falutin' Nonsense trumpet? Vast fields of foliage which
spring up at dawn (!!!) and come into blossom just as quickly (!!!!)
are rather too flowery even for my flowery soul. But there, truth is
stranger than fiction.
I'll bet my moon against the Professor's, anyhow.
So long, Columbia. _A riverderci._