therefore have some bearing on the question. There was once a woman
whose mind was as active as her body. And there was once a man who was
constituted in the same way. And the combination of them produced a
child which was all mind and no body. And no one knew about it. She
was, naturally, a woman. Her parents gave her no name but referred
to her in a historical manner as ‘The Deliverer.’ Whenever anything
went wrong in any part of the world she put it right because she was
all mind. But no one knew about it and so it made no difference. When
they became quite hopeless her parents referred to her merely as ‘The
Angel.’ In the end she was plain ‘she’ to them. At her death she became
all body, and her parents, frenzied with disappointment, drove her out.
And no one knew about it. Her parents gave her no name but referred to
her in a historical manner as ‘The Destroyer.’ Whenever anything went
right in any part of the world she put it wrong again because she was
all body. But no one knew about it and so it made no difference. When
they became quite hopeless her parents referred to her merely as ‘The
Beast.’ In the end she was plain ‘she’ to them. At her death she became
all mind, and her parents, frenzied with disappointment, took her in
again. And no one knew about it.
This is the story which was in my mind and which may have some bearing
on the question. The point of it is, I think, that we are all in an
impossible position; which you handle by making less, myself more,
impossible. For example, it is unlikely that the story that I have
just told you would ever have occurred to you. Or if it had, you would
have broken down in the middle and called it the end. You stop half-way
round the circle in order to spare yourself the humiliation of missing
the true end, which is not perceptible in the ordinary way. Indeed if
it is not perceived, it makes no difference, the circle goes round and
round upon you. On the other hand, it makes no difference even if it
is perceived, except the difference of perceiving it, which makes the
position, as I have said, more rather than less impossible. So do as
you like.
But I shall abdicate if you do, and since you do, I abdicate. You are
all asleep, because being awake means being dreamless, and you can only
be awake by dreaming to be awake, by dreaming to be dreamless. You turn
your back on your own non-existence and are therefore non-existent.
When you love, you turn your back on what you love. When you sweep,
you turn your back on the dirt. When you think, you turn your back on
your mind. Well, keep looking the other way so that I can kick you
where you deserve to be kicked. And you will not turn on me but flatter
yourselves that you are having spasms of profundity.
Anyway, this is how it is, little wise-bottoms. There is Cleopatra,
Rome, Napoleon and so forth on one side, and there is the future on
the other side, and there you are in the middle alive. There is that
great churning, that continuous tossing up and making of a middle,
that bright ferment of centrality; and it is you. My o my o my o, what
a thing! But when it was Cleopatra, Rome, Napoleon or any of them of
then, or when it will be who it will be, my o my o my o, what a thing.
It was not, it will not be you. And what was you and what will you be?
You was and you will be dead. And why? Because you are alive now. But
come a little closer, darlings, that I may kick you a little harder.
Listen: if you was dead and if you will be dead, each of you, then you
must be dead now, each of you, you must be dead and alive. Now o now
o now o, pumpkins, don’t cry. For just think: there is that great big
live middle and it is nice and warm and it is you. But it may also be
it. And what would become of you then out in the cold if you didn’t
take yourselves in, if you weren’t also you, if you weren’t each of you
dead as well as alive? And what difference does it make? None whatever,
pets, except the difference of a difference that makes no difference.
I will argue further against what I am arguing for. The you which is
you is only you, and not only dead but invisible. And you can never be
this you unless you see the you which is it and every one hard round
the circle to the end, where you can no longer see, and are you alone.
And the result, if you do this? You will be so alive that you will be
deader than ever; you will have achieved the identity of opposites; you
will have brought two counter-processes to rub noses, the you which you
are not, which is you alone, and the you which you are, which is it,
every one, not you--and much good may it do you, except to make you
deader than ever. And the result, if you do not do this? You will save
that much life from death, and much good may it do you--enough to wipe
your nose on, when it runs with nervousness at the thought that you
will have to die anyway.
Yes, I once knew a woman who spent all her time washing her linen, in
order to be always fresh and sweet smelling. But as she was always
washing dirty linen and thus making the linen she wore dirtier than
it might have been if she had washed less, she smelled of nothing but
dirty linen. Any why? Because she was over-sincere and a hypocrite. She
got stranded in the fact of clean linen instead of moving on to the
effect of clean linen, which is the end of the circle. And you are all
like that.
And again. Believing it to be you alone and that you are only what you
are, think what a small, mean, cosy, curly, pink and puny figure you
cut when you set out to be it at a party of it’s, naked as in your own
bath. Whereas, ladies and gentlemen, if you understood the identity of
opposites, your nakedness would be an invisibility which you would
have to dress large, from the point of view of visibility. And to
this it-ish rather than you-ish exterior you would add an even larger
and looser-fitting social skin, a house in most it-ish order, a most
it-ish interior, in fact. But you do not understand. ‘Boo-hoo!’ you
cry. ‘What, hide our naked hearts, paralyse our heroic breasts, sit
upon our grave bottoms, swallow back our great acts?’ ‘Hush-a-bye,’ I
reply, ‘there is enough going on for you forrard without your great
acts: drinks free, if you will only drink, scenery on view, if you will
only look, music keeping step for you if you will only supply the feet.
Instead of spending money on what you can only get for nothing. Life,
lads, is a charity feed the fun of which is in everybody pretending
to be a swell and everybody treating everybody else like a swell and
everybody knowing everybody is a fraud and no matter. No matter because
of death, in which each may be rich and proud, and no fooling. And
your great acts? When you are bursting with fraud and charity and can
stand no more, sneak aft and do your great acts, like private retchings
and acts of death. If they will not come on, repeat to a point of
mechanical conviction some formula of dreary finality, such as, “The
fathers of our girl friends are lecherous,” or “Philosophy is teetotal
whisky.”’
But you are all sluts, your efforts are not biggish, and so your fine
points are only untidy and trivial. If you would neatly calculate, you
must calculate grossly the whole pattern of it, which is the making
of the middle; you must conceive first tremendously, then accurately;
you must grasp the general initiative which is it not you. From this,
if your application be fine enough, the fine points will resolve
themselves. But remember you are no fine small point yourself; you
are more and less than one; you are the littlishness of biggishness;
you are no fine small point but a fine small point of discrimination.
My o my o my o, what a thing, poor beastie, to be but dainty when
you would be statistical. The best of you are the worst of you: they
over-discriminate, put their hand to their chin, stand upon taste, pick
the highest and most delicately scorched plum, and then choke over the
stone, dying the death of an æsthete. For what is a single plum, too
fine for the eye and not fine enough for the throat?
I might advise you to think; but you are over-eager, all for gain. And
thought is just a power of potentiality; as you are of it; as death is
of life; without gain. You would make potentiality where there is none,
in order to have more thought than is possible; you would turn the
future into a bank, as you now do the past, from greed of time.
Or I might say: ‘Have shame.’ But you would only expose yourselves
a little more outrageously and hang your heads a little lower. You
would not understand that only truly abandoned boldness breeds truly
abandoned decorum. Your interpretations are ignoble and indecent.
You begin with contradictions instead of ending with them; efface
them instead of developing them. As, for example, with sex: you seize
upon it at the beginning, tease it, worry it, transform it, until you
think you have ironed it out thoroughly, whereas you have only ironed
yourselves out thoroughly. While if you had not seized upon it, you
would have found it at the end of the circle, had you reached the
end, an achieved confirmation of the impossibility that makes things
possible.
This is one of my favourite subjects; if I were not abdicating I might
discuss it elaborately, for your good. Since I am abdicating, I will
discuss it simply, for my own good; for it is one of my favourite
subjects. The balance of interest in man, I should say, is with the
making, with it, with life; in woman, with the breaking of the making
into the you which is you alone, into death. Woman is at the end of the
circle, she has only to rearrive at herself; man has first to learn
that there is an end, before he can set out for it. And the learning
he scorns as childish and the setting out as a deathbed rite. Woman
he counts passive because she is at the end, and inferior because,
being there, she turns round and starts all over again, to rearrive at
herself. He adores her when she remains passive, that is his inferior;
and despises her when she becomes his equal, that is, his superior.
Well, they are worthless, both orders, when they are no more than
they are. And when they are more than they are they are of no use to
anyone but themselves; which is right but sudden and perhaps too mean
for these mean times. For myself, I might confess to you, now that we
are parting, that my happiest hours have been spent in the brotherly
embrace of a humbug, not from want of womanliness in me or humbuggery
in him, but because I was queen and needed repose. Ah me ah me ah me,
what is this all about?
And such stickiness. How am I better than the rest of you? Because I
have converted stickiness into elasticity and made myself free without
wrenching myself free like a wayward pellet of paste. And what of
so-and-so, your popular idol and my late consort? He was a strong
man, powerfully sticky but not elastic; when he moved, he carried you
along with him, he could not have moved otherwise, freely. And so he
had great moments but not free moments. He was terribly alive but too
terribly, never more than alive. He was merely monstrous, without
the littlishness of biggishness. And what of so-and-so, my sometime
lover? He was indeed a darling but an insufferable fop, washing away
the stickiness till there was nothing left of him. And many others were
darlings, of a sticky gracefulness and rhythm. But send me no more
candidates, their embraces are either too heavy or too feeble; and I
am light, hollow with death, but strong, of a tough, lively, it-ish
exterior.
That is the trouble. You have no comprehension of appearance, what it
is. Appearance is everything, what you are, what you are not. But your
reach is sticky, not elastic; and so you get no further than reality, a
pathetic proportion. Appearance is where the circle meets itself, where
you live and do not live, where you are and are not dead. Appearance is
everything, and nothing; bright and uppermost in a woman, to be sunk
darkly inward; dumb, blind, darkly imbedded in a man, to be thrust
brutally outward.
No, I am not confused, my blinking intelligences, but understand too
clearly, and that is the trouble. I am unnecessary to you and therefore
abdicate. Nor do I deny that blinking is sufficient for your purposes,
which are sincere rather than statistical. Or that it would be for
mine, for that matter--if I had purposes instead of queenliness.
Which is my weakness, if you like--the tiresomeness of insisting upon
the necessity of what is not necessary. I admit all; I am not wise
but insistent, I am an unpaid hack of accuracy. I was queen from
tiresomeness, and I abdicate from tiresomeness. I am not enjoying
myself.
But perhaps you would like to know a little of my history, before I
retire finally. My mother imagined that she suffered from bad eyesight;
and to make it worse she wore a stocking round her eyes whenever
possible: at home, a white stocking; abroad, a black stocking; and
occasionally, to depress circumstances completely, a grey sock of my
father’s, fastened at the back of her head with a safety-pin. From
which, our house was full of small oval rugs made by my mother out of
the mates of the stockings which she wore round her eyes and which
she was always losing. And these rugs made by my mother were not well
made, because she imagined that she suffered from bad eyesight. From
which my mother, whose character was all dreariness, acquired in my
mind a hateful oddness. From which, I resolved to outdo her in oddness,
so that I not only imagined that I suffered from good eyesight: I did
actually suffer from it. And with this effect, that by the time I was
of age I had no more than one rug, and this was very large and square,
and it was well made, and not by me, though I suffered extremely from
good eyesight. I lived far away from my mother, having no connection
with her except to insist that she live far away from me; and my rug
was composed of many small squares; and the pattern of each square
was different; and yet the whole harmonious because the stuff was
provided by me--the finest silk and velvet rags that I could command
from others, and which I sorted and returned to them to be made into
squares, a square by each of them. And so each who made a square was
my subject. And so I became Queen. Perhaps now you will understand
me better. But I am determined to abdicate, however you dissuade me.
Before I was in reach of your praise, and liked neither your praise nor
lack of it. It would not improve my feelings to put myself in reach of
your pity. It was not for this that I told you my story. I told you my
story to make my abdication irrevocable.
Yes, even now, it is painful to leave you. Not because I love you but
because I am still untired; and after I leave you there will be no more
to do. I shall indeed be more untired than ever. For while I was with
you I worked hard (as you will not deny) and achieved a certain formal
queenly tiredness from being unable to tire myself out no matter how
hard I worked. But now concealment will be impossible: my insistence,
that before I tried to make pleasant to myself (and to others) by
trying to interest it in your affairs, will in the future be plainly
horrible, as everything is horrible if sufficiently disinterested, that
is, insistent. But the horror of my insistence will not be known to
you, because I am abdicating. Nor am I to be dissuaded. The stroke that
puts me in reach of your pity puts me out of reach of it as well.
I have said more than enough to satisfy my contempt of you. But I once
loved you; and I have not punished myself sufficiently for that. What
do I mean when I say that I once loved you? That I knew that being
alive for you and me meant being more than alive. But you were afraid
to admit it, though I was willing to take all the responsibility upon
myself. Then I tried pretending to be just alive, I became for a time
a partisan of timidity, in order to show you that being just alive
was just pretending to be just alive. But when, aside, I reached
for your hand, to press it, you dishonourably misunderstood me, you
put me in the loathsome position of flirting with you. Then I tried
extorting from you everything by means of which you lived, to show you
that when you did not live you still lived. But again you wilfully
misunderstood me and over-exerted yourself to supply me with what you
thought to be my needs and what you assumed to be yours; and stubbornly
refused to not live; and were disappointed when I did not applaud
your inexhaustibility. And then once more I tried. I loaded you with
favours in order to show you that nothing made any difference; that the
most as well as the least that you could endure by belonged to being
just alive; that you were more than alive, dead. But you repulsed me
with praise and gratitude; as you would now with pity and ingratitude
if I permitted.
Then I said: ‘I will leave them alone. I will content myself with being
queen. Perhaps if I play my part conscientiously, at no time abandoning
my royal manner, they will admit everything of their own accord,
like a good, kind, though stupid, timid people.’ But my grandeur you
interpreted meanly as the grandeur of being just alive, instead of
grandly, as the showy meanness of being just alive. You watched me act
and admired my performance, but credited me with sincerity rather than
talent; you refused to act yourself, paralysed by the emotions of an
audience. My challenge, my drastic insistence, made you if anything
more timid than you already were. You were hypnotized with admiration,
you were, from the vanity you took in watching me, less than just
alive. The men behaved more disgracefully than the women because to be
a woman requires a strong theatrical sense: requires of one who is more
than man to be less than man. For this reason I took many lovers, to
humble back as many as possible into activity. And this brought all of
us to where we were in the beginning. And so I abdicate, leaving you
once more to your heroism. With it you were intolerable to me; without
it you were not only intolerable to me, but you would have eventually
become intolerable to yourselves, especially after I had left you.
You know only how to be either heroes or cowards. But you do not know
how to outwit yourselves by being neither, though seeming to be both.
‘What,’ you say indignantly, ‘would you have us be nothing?’ Ah, my
dear people, if you could you would all shortly become Queens.
But perhaps it is best that you cannot. For if you became Queens you
would in time find it necessary to abdicate, as I have; and you would,
like me, be left extremely unhappy, of having succeeded in yourselves
but failed in others.
Yes, it is true that I concealed from you the colour of my eyes. But
the distance at which I kept you from myself was precisely the distance
between being just alive and being more than alive. I was giving you a
lesson in space, not a rebuff. Since we are at the end of things, you
may come close to me and look well into my eyes; but since you have not
learned your lesson, you will still remain ignorant of their colour.
Good-bye. I am going back to my mirror, where I came from.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Mr. Lewis takes a fierce, acquisitive joy in being right: as
if it were an honour to be right, and his unique honour. But many
people, alas, are right, only with more quietness and less joy than
Mr. Lewis. To be right (to see wrong) is properly a sad, not a joyous
mental condition. To be right in Mr. Lewis’s manner is to become a
self-appointed destroyer of wrong; and so to make oneself a candidate
for destruction, in turn. To be right in his manner--so righteously
right--is to be God; and so to chasten every one into wrong.
[2] The adultishness of the individual-real is an abhorrence (as Mr.
Lewis shows it to be) of intellectualism (organized fear) in the
up-to-date White mass, which to Mr. Lewis is sentimental Bolshevism,
Bohemianism. But such an abhorrence of intellectualism in the
up-to-date White mass, if one is not careful, becomes (as in Mr. Lewis)
an adultish championship of intellectualism (organized bravado) in a
privileged White few (as any _system_ of individualism must mean by
individualism the individualism of a few)--a sentimental Toryism, in
fact, Academianism. And in what few? The few, of course, swept aside
by the time-current; the few, indeed, who might be truly individual
were they not organized into a system of individualism. Mr. Lewis’s
Toryism would be perhaps apt if he were trying to be only politically,
not philosophically right as well. But in the circumstances his satire
is as irrelevant to his right, which is philosophical, as Swift’s
would have been, had it been philosophical, to his right, which was
political. The only satire relevant to a philosophical right is a
satire like Blake’s: Blake’s faith showed the people who were wrong
to be enemies, it was not a system organizing himself into an enemy.
Mr. Lewis does not like Blake because he said that the roads of genius
(right) were crooked: Mr. Lewis believes that the roads of right should
be systematic, that the person who is right should be an enemy, a
righteous, sentimental Tory rather than a sad though angry spirit.
[3] The symbolism of the individual-real in its scientific aspects is
best explained in C. K. Ogden’s and I. A. Richards’ _The Meaning of
Meaning_. In this confused mixture of philosophy, psychology, ethnology
and literature it is just possible to distinguish between what is meant
by ‘bad’ and ‘good’ symbolism. To begin with, the assumption must
be made for both varieties of symbolism that words mean nothing by
themselves. Bad symbolism is apparently the use of words for collective
propagandist purposes which distort the ‘referents’ (original objects
or events) of which the words are signs; good symbolism makes language
not an instrument of purposes but of the ‘real’ objects or events for
which it provides a sort of mathematic of signs. Words in this reformed
grammar are thus not vulgar stage-players of images; they are certified
scientific representatives of the natural objects, or constructions of
objects called events, which man’s mind, like a dust-cloud, is assumed
to obscure from himself. To Mr. Ogden and Mr. Richards language is
ideally a neutral region of literalness between reality and its human
perception. Signs (of which language is this precise mathematical
grammar), being the closest the perceiving mind can come to reality,
must for convenience be regarded as reality itself; the more faithfully
they are defined as signs, the more literally they represent
reality. There is no evidence anywhere in this book that perception
is properly anything other than a slave of reality. Disobedient
perception--language by itself--is an ‘Enchanted Wood of Words.’ There
is no hint that individual perception, instead of making a separate
approximation of the general sign conveying the object, does in fact
where originality is maintained experience a revulsion from the object
or event concerned. No hint that the very genesis or _utterance_ of a
sign is an assertion of the independence of the mind against what the
authors call the sign-situation. Or that the mind is a dust-cloud only
when perceptively organized to define reality. Or that language is only
an Enchanted Wood of Words when the dragon Reality is searched for in
it. Or that words are literal man, not ‘main topics of discussion,’ not
literal perception or the science of reality.
The conclusion of this study, if one has patience to extract a
conclusion from this science-proud collation of verbal niceties, is
that man has no right to meaning: meaning is the property of reality,
which is to be known scientifically only through symbols, which in
turn are to be regulated as to interpretation by limitations on the
use of symbols, called definitions. ‘But in most matters the possible
treachery of words can only be controlled through definitions, and the
greater the number of such alternative locutions available the less
is the risk of discrepancy, provided that we do not suppose symbols
to have “meaning” on their own account, and so people the world with
fictitious entities.’