The tiger blazed transcendent into immortal darkness. The unique phoenix
of the desert grew up to maturity and wisdom. Sitting upon her tree, she
was the only one of her kind in all creation, supreme, the zenith, the
perfect aristocrat. She attained to perfection, eagle-like she rose in
her nest and lifted her wings, surpassing the zenith of mortality; so
she was translated into the flame of eternity, she became one with the
fiery Origin.
It was not for her to sit tight, and assert her own tight ego. She was
gone as she came.
In the nest was a little ash, a little flocculent grey dust wavering
upon a blue-red, dying coal. The red coal stirred and gathered strength,
gradually it grew white with heat, it shot forth sharp gold flames. It
was the young phoenix within the nest, with curved beak growing hard and
crystal, like a scimitar, and talons hardening into pure jewels.
Wherein, however, is the immortality, in the constant occupation of the
nest, the widow’s cruse, or in the surpassing of the phoenix? She goes
gadding off into flame, into her consummation. In the flame she is
timeless. But the ash within the nest lies in the restless hollow of
time, shaken on the tall tree of the desert. It will rise to the same
consummation, become absolute in flame.
In a low, shady bush, far off, on the other side of the world, where the
rains are cold and the mists wrap the leaves in a chillness, the
ring-dove presses low on the bough, while her mate sends forth the last
ru-cuooo of peace. The mist darkens and ebbs-in in waves, the trees are
melted away, all things pass into a universal oneness, with the last
re-echoing dove, peace, all pure peace, ebbing in softer, softer waves
to a universal stillness.
The dark blue tranquillity is universal and infinite, the doves are
asleep in the sleeping boughs, all fruits are fallen and are silent and
cold, all the leaves melt away into pure mist of darkness.
It is strange, that away on the other side of the world, the tiger
gleams through the hot-purple darkness, and where the dawn comes
crimson, the phoenix lifts her wings in a yawn like an over-sumptuous
eagle, and passes into flame above the golden palpable fire of the
desert.
Here are the opposing hosts of angels, the ruddy choirs, the upright,
rushing flames, the lofty Cherubim that palpitate about the Presence,
the Source; and then the tall, still angels soft and pearly as mist, who
await round the Goal, the attendants that hover on the edge of the last
Assumption.
And from the seed two travellers set forth, in opposite directions, the
one concentrating towards the upper, ruddy, blazing sun, the zenith, the
creative fire; the other towards the blue, cold silence, dividing itself
and ever dividing itself till it is infinite in the universal darkness.
And at the summit, the zenith, there is a flash, a flame, as the
traveller enters into infinite, there is a red splash as the poppy leaps
into the upper, fiery eternity. And far below there is unthinkable
silence as the roots ramify and divide and pass into the oneness of
unutterable silence.
The flame is gone, the flower has leapt away, the fruit ripens and
falls. Then dark ebbs back to dark, and light to light, hot to hot, and
cold to cold. This is death and decay and corruption. And the worm, the
maggot, these are the ministers of separation, these are the tiny
clashing ripples that still ebb together, when the chief tide has set
back, to flow utterly apart.
This is the terror and wonder of dark returning to dark, and of light
returning to light, the two departing back to their Sources. This we
cannot bear to think of. It is the temporal flux of corruption, as the
flux together was the temporal flux of creation. The flux is temporal.
It is only the perfect meeting, the perfect interpenetration into
oneness, the kiss, the blow, the two-in-one, that is timeless and
absolute.
And dark is not willing to return to dark till it has known the light,
nor light to light till it has known the dark, till the two have been
consummated into oneness. But the act of death may itself be a
consummation, and life may be a state of negation.
It may be that our state of life is itself a denial of the consummation,
a prevention, a negation; that this life is our nullification, our
not-being.
It may be that the flower is held from the search of the light, and the
roots from the dark, like a plant that is pot-bound. It may be that, as
in the autumnal cabbage, the light and the dark are made prisoners in
us, their opposition is overcome, the ultimate moving has ceased. We
have forgotten our goal and our end. We have enclosed ourselves in our
exfoliation, there are many little channels that run out into the sand.
This is evil, when that which is temporal and relative asserts itself
eternal and absolute. This I, which I am, has no being save in
timelessness. In my consummation, when that which came from the
Beginning and that which came from the End are transfused into oneness,
then I come into being, I have existence. Till then I am only a part of
nature; I am not.
But as part of nature, as part of the flux, I have my instrumental
identity, my inferior I, my self-conscious ego.
If I say that _I am_, this is false and evil. I am not. Among us all,
how many have being?--too few. Our ready-made individuality, our
identity is no more than an accidental cohesion in the flux of time. The
cohesion will break down and utterly cease to be. The atoms will return
into the flux of the universe. And that unit of cohesion which I was
will vanish utterly. Matter is indestructible, spirit is indestructible.
This of us remains, in any case, general in the flux. But the soul that
has not come into being has no being for ever. The soul does not come
into being at birth. The soul comes into being in the midst of life,
just as the phoenix in her maturity becomes immortal in flame. That is
not her perishing: it is her becoming absolute: a blossom of fire. If
she did not pass into flame, _she_ would never really exist. It is by
her translation into fire that she is the phoenix. Otherwise she were
only a bird, a transitory cohesion in the flux.
It is absurd to talk about all men being immortal, all having souls.
Very few men have being at all. They perish utterly, as individuals.
Their endurance afterwards is the endurance of Matter within the flux,
non-individual: and spirit within the flux. Most men are just transitory
natural phenomena. Whether they live or die does not matter: except in
so far as every failure in the part is a failure in the whole. Their
death is of no more matter than the cutting of a cabbage in the garden,
an act utterly apart from grace.
They assert themselves as important, as absolute mortals. They are just
liars. When one cuts a fat autumnal cabbage, one cuts off a lie, to boil
it down in the pot.
They are all just fat lies, these people, these many people, these
mortals. They are innumerable cabbages in the regulated cabbage plot.
And our great men are no more than Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.
The cabbage is a nice fat lie. That is why we eat it. It is the business
of the truthful to eat up the lies. A fatted cow is a lie, and a fat pig
is a lie, and a fatted sheep is a lie, just the same: these sacrificial
beasts, these lambs and calves, become fat lies when they are merely
protected and fed full.
The cabbage is a lie because it asserts itself as a permanency, in the
state wherein it finds itself. In the swirl of the Beginning and the
End, stalk and leaves take place. But the stalk and leaves are only the
swirl of the waves. Yet they say, they are absolute, they have achieved
a permanent form. It is a lie. Their universal absolute is only the
far-off dawning of the truth, the false dawn which in itself is
nothing, nothing except in relation to that which comes after.
But they say, “We are the consummation and the reality, we are the
fulfilment.” This is pure amorphousness. Each one becomes a single,
separate entity, a single separate nullity. Having started along the way
to eternity, they say, “We are there, we have arrived,” and they enclose
themselves in the nullity of the falsehood.
And this is the state of man, when he falls into self-sufficiency, and
asserts that his self-conscious ego is It. He falls into the condition
of fine cabbages.
Then they are wealthy and fat. They go no further, so they become
wealthy. All that great force which would carry them naked over the edge
of time, into timelessness, into being, they convert into fatness, into
having. And they are full of self-satisfaction. Having no being, they
assert their artificial completeness, and the life within them becomes a
will-to-have; which is the expression of the will-to-persist, in the
temporary unit. Selfishness is the subjugating of all things to a false
entity, and riches is the great flux over the edge of the bottomless
pit, the falsity, the nullity. For where is the rich man who is not the
very bottomless pit? Travel nearer, nearer, nearer to him, and one comes
to the gap, the hole, the abyss where his soul should be. He is not. And
to stop up his hollowness, he drags all things unto himself.
And what are we all, all of us, collectively, even the poorest, now, in
this age? We are only potentially rich men. We are all alike. The
distinction between rich and poor is purely accidental. Rich and poor
alike are only, each one, a pit-head surrounding the bottomless pit. But
the rich man, by pouring vast quantities of matter down his void, gives
himself a more pleasant illusion of fulfilment than the poor man can
get: that is all. Yet we would give our lives, every one of us, for this
illusion.
There are no rich or poor, there are no masses and middle classes and
aristocrats. There are myriads of framed gaps, people, and a few
timeless fountains, men and women. That is all.
Myriads of framed gaps! Myriads of little egos, all wearing the crown of
life! Myriads of little Humpty-Dumpties, self-satisfied emptinesses, all
about to have a great fall.
The current ideal is to be a gap with a great heap of matter around it,
which can be sent clattering down. The most sacred thing is to give all
your having so that it can be put on the heaps that surround all the
other bottomless pits. If you give away all your having, even your life,
then, you are a bottomless pit with no sides to it. Which is infinite.
So that to become infinite, give away all your having, even to your
life. So that you will achieve immortality yourself. Like the heroes of
the war, you will become the bottomless pit itself; but more than this,
you will be contributing to the public good, you will be one of those
who make blessed history: which means, you will be heaping goods upon
the dwindling heaps of superfluity that surrounds these bottomless lives
of the myriad people. If we poor can each of us hire a servant, then the
servant will be like a stone tumbling always ahead of us down the
bottomless pit. Which creates an almost perfect illusion of having a
solid earth beneath us.
Long ago we agreed that we had fulfilled all purpose and that our only
business was to look after other people. We said; “It is marvellous, we
are really complete.” If the regulation cabbage, hide-bound and solid,
could walk about on his stalk, he would be very much as we are. He would
think of himself as we think of ourselves, he would talk, as we talk, of
the public good.
But inside him, proper and fine, the heart would be knocking and urgent,
the heart of the cabbage. Of course for a long time he would not hear
it. His good, enveloping green leaves outside, the heap round the hole,
would have closed upon him very early, like Wordsworth’s “Shades of the
prison house,” very close and complete and gratifying.
But the heart would beat within him, beat and beat, grow louder and
louder, till it was threshing the whole of his inside rotten, threshing
him hollow, till his inside began to devour his consciousness.
Then he would say: “I must do something.” Looking round he would see
little dwindly cabbages struggling in the patch, and would say: “So much
injustice, so much suffering and poverty in the world, it cannot be.”
Then he would set forth to make dwindly cabbages into proper, fine
cabbages. So he would be a reformer.
He would kick, kick, kick against the conditions which make some
cabbages poor and dwindly, most cabbages poorer and more dwindly than
himself. He would but be kicking against the pricks.
But it is very profitable to kick against the pricks. It gives one a
sensation, and saves one the necessity of bursting. If our reformers had
not had the prickly wrongs of the poor to kick, so that they hurt their
toe quite sorely, they might long ago have burst outwards from the
enclosed form in which we have kept secure.
Let no one suffer, they have said. No mouse shall be caught by a cat, no
mouse. It is a transgression. Every mouse shall become a pet, and every
cat shall lap milk in peace, from the saucer of utter benevolence.
This is the millennium, the golden age that is to be, when all shall be
domesticated, and the lion and the leopard and the hawk shall come to
our door to lap milk and to peck the crumbs, and no sound shall be heard
but the lowing of fat cows and the baa-ing of fat sheep.
This is the Green Age that is to be, the age of the perfect cabbage.
This was our hope and our fulfilment, for this, in this hope, we lived
and we died.
So the virtuous, public-spirited ones have suffered bitterly from the
aspect of their myriad more-or-less blighted neighbors, whom they love
as themselves. They have lived and died to right the wrong conditions of
social injustice.
Meanwhile the threshing has continued at the core of us, till
our entrails are threshed rotten. We are a wincing mass of
self-consciousness and corruption, within our plausible rind. The most
unselfish, the most humanitarian of us all, he is the hollowest and
fullest of rottenness. The more rotten we become, the more insistent and
insane becomes our desire to ameliorate the conditions of our poorer,
and maybe healthier neighbours.
Fools, vile fools! Why cannot we acknowledge and admit the
horrible pulse and thresh of corruption within us. What is this
self-consciousness that palpitates within us like a disease? What is it
that threshes and threshes within us, drives us mad if we see a cat
catch a sparrow?
We dare not know. Oh, we are convulsed with shame long before we come to
the point. It is indecent beyond endurance to think of it.
Yet here let it be told. It was the living desire for immortality, for
being, which urged us ceaselessly. It was the bud within the cabbage,
threshing, threshing, threshing. And now, oh our convulsion of shame,
when we must know this! We would rather die.
Yet it shall be made known. It was the struggling of the light and
darkness within us, towards consummation, towards absoluteness, towards
flowering. Oh, we shriek with anger of shame as the truth comes out:
that the cabbage is rotten within because it wanted to straddle up into
weakly fiery flower, wanted to straddle forth in a spire of ragged,
yellow, inconsequential blossom.
Oh God, it is unendurable, this revelation, this disclosure, it is not
to be borne. Our souls perish in an agony of self-conscious shame, we
will not have it.
Yet had we listened, the hide-bound cabbage might have burst, might have
opened apart, for a venturing forth of the tender, timid, ridiculous
cluster of aspirations, that issue in little yellow tips of flame, the
flowers naked in eternity, naked above the staring unborn crowd of
amorphous entities, the cabbages: the myriad egos.
But the crowd of assertive egos, of tough entities, they were too
strong, too many. Quickly they extinguished any shoot of tender
immortality from among them, violently they adhered to the null rind and
to the thresh of rottenness within.
Still the living desire beat and threshed at the heart of us,
relentlessly. And still the fixed will of the temporal form we have so
far attained, the static, mid-way form, triumphed in assertion.
Still the false I, the ego, held down the real, unborn I, which is a
blossom with all a blossom’s fragility.
Yet constantly the rising flower pushed and thrust at the belly and
heart of us, thrashed and beat relentlessly. If it could not beat its
way through into being, it must thrash us hollow. Let it do so then, we
said. This also we enjoy, this being threshed rotten inside. This is
sensationalism, reduction of the complex tissue back through rottenness
to its elements. And this sensationalism, this reduction back, has
become our very life, our only form of life at all. We enjoy it, it is
our lust.
It became at last a collective activity, a war, when, within the great
rind of virtue we thresh destruction further and further, till our whole
civilization is like a great rind full of corruption, of breaking down,
a mere shell threatened with collapse upon itself.
And the road of corruption leads back to one eternity. The activity of
utter going apart has, in eternity, a result equivalent to the result of
utter coming together. The tiger rises supreme, the last brindled flame
upon the darkness; the deer melts away, a blood-stained shadow received
into the utter pallor of light; each having leapt forward into eternity,
at opposite extremes. Within the closed shell of the Christian
conception, we lapse utterly back, through reduction, back to the
Beginning. It is the triumph of death, of decomposition.
And the process is that of the serpent lying prone in the cold, watery
fire of corruption, flickering with the flowing-apart of the two
streams. His belly is white with the light flowing forth from him, his
back is dark and brindled where the darkness returns to the Source. He
is the ridge where the two floods flow apart. So in the orange-speckled
belly of the newt, the light is taking leave of the darkness, and
returning to the light; the imperious, demon-like crest is the flowing
home of the darkness. He is the god within the flux of corruption, from
him proceeds the great retrogression back to the Beginning and back to
the End. These are our gods.
There are elsewhere the golden angels of the Kiss, the golden, fiery
angels of strife, those that have being when we come together, as
opposites, as complements coming to consummation. There is delight and
triumph elsewhere, these angels sound their loud trumpets. Then men are
like brands that have burst spontaneously into flame, the phoenix, the
tiger, the glistening dove, the white-burning unicorn.
But here are only the angels that cleave asunder, terrible and
invincible. With cold, irresistible hands they put us apart, they send
like unto like, darkness unto darkness. They thrust the seas backward
from embrace, backward from the locked strife. They set the cold
phosphorescent flame of light flowing back to the light, and cold heavy
darkness flowing back to the darkness. They are the absolute angels of
corruption, they are the snake, the newt, the water-lily, as reflected
from below.
I cease to be, my darkness lapses into utter, stone darkness, my light
into a light that is keen and cold as frost.
This goes on within the rind. But the rind remains permanent, falsely
absolute, my false absolute self, my self-conscious ego. Till the work
of corruption is finished; then the rind also, the public form, the
civilization, the established consciousness of mankind disappears as
well in the mouth of the worm, taken unutterably asunder by the hands of
the angels of separation. It ceases to be, all the civilization and all
the consciousness, it passes utterly away, a temporary cohesion in the
flux. It was this, this rind, this persistent temporary cohesion, that
was evil, this alone was evil. And it destroys us all before itself is
destroyed.