Within the womb of the established past, the light has entered the
darkness, the future is conceived. It is conceived, the beginning of the
end has taken place. Light is within the grip of darkness, darkness
within the embrace of light, the Beginning and the End are closed upon
one another.
They come nearer and nearer, till the oneness is full grown within the
womb of the past, within the belly of Time, it must move out, must be
brought forth, into timelessness.
But something withholds it. The pregnancy is accomplished, the hour of
labour has come. Yet the labour does not begin. The loins of the past
are withered, the young unborn is shut in.
All the time, within the womb, light has been travelling to the dark,
the interfusion of the two into a oneness has continued. Now that it is
fulfilled, it meets with some arrest. It is the dry walls of the womb
which cannot relax.
There is a struggle. Then the darkness, having overcome the light,
reaching the dead null wall of the womb, reacts into self-consciousness,
and recoils upon itself. At the same time the light has surpassed its
limit, become conscious, and starts in reflex to recoil upon itself.
Thus the false I comes into being: the I which thinks itself supreme and
infinite, and which is, in fact, a sick foetus shut up in the walls of
an unrelaxed womb.
Here, at this moment when the birth pangs should begin, when the great
opposition between the old and the young should take place, when the
young should beat back the old body that surrounds it, and the old womb
and loins should expel the young body, there is a deadlock. The two
cannot fight apart. The walls of the old body are inflexible and
insensible, the unborn does not know that there can be any travelling
forth. It conceives itself as the whole universe, surrounded by dark
nullity. It does not know that it is in prison. It believes itself to
have filled up the whole of the universe, right to the extremes where is
nothing but blank nullity.
It is tremendously conceited. It can only react upon itself. And the
reaction can only take the form of self-consciousness. For the self is
everything, universal, the surrounding womb is just the outer darkness
in which that which _is_, exists. Therefore there remains either to die,
to pass into the outer darkness, or to enter into self-knowledge.
So the unborn recoils upon itself, dark upon dark, light upon light.
This is the horror of corruption begun already within the unborn,
already dissolution and corruption set in before birth. And this is the
triumph of the ego.
Mortality has usurped the Crown. The unborn, reacting upon the null
walls of the womb, assumes that it has reached the limit of all space
and all being. It concludes that its self is fulfilled, that all
consummation is achieved. It takes for certain that itself has filled
the whole of space and the whole of time.
And this is the glory of the ego.
There is no more fight to be fought, there is no more to be sought and
embraced. All is fought and overcome, all is embraced and contained. It
is all concluded, there is nothing remaining but the outer nothingness,
the only activity is the reaction against the outer nothingness, into
the achieved being of the self, all else is fulfilled and concluded. To
die is merely to assume nothingness. The limit of all life is reached.
And this is the apotheosis of the ego.
So there is the great turning round upon the self, dark upon dark, light
upon light, the flux of separation, corruption within the unborn. The
tides which are set towards each other swirl back as from a promontory
which intervenes. There has been no consummation. There can be no
consummation. The only thing is to return, to go back--that which came
from the Beginning to go back to the Beginning, that which came from the
End to return to the End. In the return lies the fulfilment.
And this is the unconscious undoing of the ego.
That which we _are_ is absolute. There is no adding to it, no
superseding this accomplished self. It is final and universal. All that
remains is thoroughly to explore it.
That is, to analyse it. Analysis presupposes a corpse.
It is at this crisis in the human history that tragic art appears again,
that art becomes the only absolute, the only watchword among the people.
This achieved self, which we are, is absolute and universal. There is
nothing beyond. All that remains is to state this self, and the
reactions upon this self, perfectly. And the perfect statement presumes
to be art. It is aestheticism.
At this crisis there is a great cry of loneliness. Every man conceives
himself as a complete unit surrounded by nullity. And he cannot bear it.
Yet his pride is in this also. The greatest conceit of all is the cry of
loneliness.
At this crisis, emotion turns into sentiment, and sentimentalism takes
the place of feeling. The ego has no feeling, it has only sentiments.
And the myriad egos sway in tides of sentimentalism.
But the _tacit_ utterance of every man, when this state is reached, is
“_Après moi le Déluge_.” And when the deluge begins to set in, there is
profound secret satisfaction on every hand. For the ego in a man
secretly hates every other ego. In a democracy where every little ego is
crowned with the false crown of its own supremacy, every other ego is a
false usurper, and nothing more. We can only tolerate those whose crowns
are not yet manufactured, because they can’t _afford_ it.
And again, the supreme little ego in man hates an unconquered universe.
We shall never rest till we have heaped tin cans on the North Pole and
the South Pole, and put up barb-wire fences on the moon. Barb-wire
fences are our sign of conquest. We have wreathed the world with them.
The back of creation is broken. We have killed the mysteries and
devoured the secrets. It all lies now within our skin, within the ego of
humanity.
So circumscribed within the outer nullity, we give ourselves up to the
flux of death, to analysis, to introspection, to mechanical war and
destruction, to humanitarian absorption in the body politic, the poor,
the birth-rate, the mortality of infants, like a man absorbed in his own
flesh and members, looking for ever at himself. It is the continued
activity of disintegration--disintegration, separating, setting apart,
investigation, research, the resolution back to the original void.
All this goes on within the glassy, insentient, insensible envelope of
nullity. And within this envelope, like the glassy insects within their
rind, we imagine we fill the whole cosmos, that we contain within
ourselves the whole of time, which shall tick forth from us as from a
clock, now everlastingly.
We are capable of nothing but reduction within the envelope. Our every
activity is the activity of disintegration, of corruption, of
dissolution, whether it be our scientific research, our social
activity--(the social activity is largely concerned with reducing all
the parts contained within the envelope to an equality, so that there
shall be no unequal pressure, tending to rupture the envelope, which is
divine)--our art, or our anti-social activity, sensuality,
sensationalism, crime, war. Everything alike contributes to the flux of
death, to corruption, and liberates the static data of the
consciousness.
Whatever single act is performed by any man now, in this condition, it
is an act of reduction, disintegration. The scientist in his laboratory,
the artist in his study, the statesman, the artisan, the sensualist
obtaining keen gratification, every one of these is reducing down that
which is himself to its simpler elements, reducing the compound back to
its parts. It is the pure process of corruption in all of us. The
activity of death is the only activity. It is like the decay of our
flesh, and every new step in decay liberates a sensation, keen,
momentarily gratifying, or a conscious knowledge of the parts that made
a whole; knowledge equally gratifying.
It is like Dmitri Karamazov, who seeks and experiences sensation after
sensation, reduction after reduction, till finally he is stripped
utterly naked before the police, and the quick of him perishes. There
_is_ no more any physical or integral Dmitri Karamazov. That which is in
the hospital, afterwards, is a conglomeration of qualities, strictly an
idiot, a nullity.
And Dostoevsky has shown us perfectly the utter subjection of all human
life to the flux of corruption. That is his theme, the theme of
reduction through sensation after sensation, consciousness after
consciousness, until nullity is reached, all complexity is broken down,
an individual becomes an amorphous heap of elements, qualities.
There are the two types, the dark Dmitri Karamazov, or Rogozhin; and the
Myshkin on the other hand. Dmitri Karamazov and Rogozhin will each of
them plunge the flesh within the reducing agent, the woman, obtain the
sensation and the reduction within the flesh, add to the sensual
experience, and progress towards utter dark disintegration, to nullity.
Myshkin on the other hand will react upon the achieved consciousness or
personality or ego of every one he meets, disintegrate this
consciousness, this ego, and his own as well, obtaining the knowledge of
the factors that made up the complexity of the consciousness, the ego,
in the woman and in himself, reduce further and further back, till
himself is a babbling idiot, a vessel full of disintegrated parts, and
the woman is reduced to a nullity.
This is real death. The actual physical fact of death is part of the
life-stream. It is an incidental point when the flux of light and dark
has flowed sufficiently apart for the conjunction, which we call life,
to disappear.
We live with the pure flux of death, it is part of us all the time. But
our blossoming is transcendent, beyond death and life.
Only when we fall into egoism do we lose all chance of blossoming, and
then the flux of corruption is the breath of our existence. From top to
bottom, in the whole nation, we are engaged, fundamentally engaged in
the process of reduction and dissolution. Our reward is sensational
gratification in the flesh, or sensational gratification within the
mind, the utter gratification we experience when we can pull apart the
whole into its factors. This is the reward in scientific and
introspective knowledge, this is the reward in the pleasure of cheap
sensuality.
In each case, the experience remains as it were absolute. It is the
statement of what is, or what was. And a statement of what _is_, is the
absolute footstep in the progress backward towards the starting place,
it is the _undoing_ of a complete unit into the factors which previously
went to making its oneness. It is the reduction of the iris back into
its component waves.
There was the bliss when the iris came into being. There is now the
bliss when the iris passes out of being, and the whole is torn apart.
The secret of the whole is never captured. Certain data are captured.
The secret escapes down the sensual, or the sensational, or
intellectual, thrill of pleasure.
So there goes on reduction after reduction within the shell. And we, who
find our utmost gratification in this process of reduction, this flux of
corruption, this retrogression of death, we will preserve with might and
main the glassy envelope, the insect rind, the tight-shut shell of the
cabbage, the withered, null walls of the womb. For by virtue of this
null envelope alone do we proceed uninterrupted in this process of
gratifying reduction.
And this is utter evil, this secret, silent worship of the null envelope
that preserves us intact for our gratification with the flux of
corruption.
Intact within the null envelope, which we have come to worship as the
preserver of this our life-activity of reduction, we re-act back upon
what we are. We do not seek any more the consummation of union. We seek
the consummation of reduction.
When a man seeks a woman in love, or in positive desire, he seeks a
union, he seeks a consummation of himself with that which is not
himself, light with dark, dark with light.
But within the glassy, null envelope of the enclosure, no union is
sought, no union is possible; after a certain point, only reduction. Ego
reacts upon ego only in friction. There are small egos, many small
people, who have not reached the limit of the confines which we worship.
They may still have small consummation in union. But all those who are
strong and have travelled far have met and reacted from the nullity.
And then, when a man seeks a woman, he seeks not a consummation in
union, but a frictional reduction. He seeks to plunge his compound flesh
into the cold acid that will reduce him, in supreme sensual experience,
down to his parts. This is Rogozhin seeking Nastasia Filippovna, Dmitri
his Grushenka, or D’Annunzio in Fuoco seeking his Foscarina. This is
more or less what happens when a soldier, maddened with lust of pure
destructiveness, violently rapes the woman of his captivity. It is that
he may destroy another being by the very act which is called the act of
creation, or procreation. In the brute soldier it is cruelty-lust: as it
was in the Red Indian. But when we come to civilized man, it is not so
simple. His cruelty-lust is directed almost as much against himself as
against his victim. He is destroying, reducing, breaking down that of
himself which is within the envelope. He is immersing himself within a
keen, fierce, terrible reducing agent. This is true of the hero in Edgar
Allan Poe’s tales, _Ligeia_, or the _Fall of the House of Usher_. The
man seeks his own sensational reduction, but he disintegrates the woman
even more, in the name of love. In the name of love, what horrors men
perpetrate, and are applauded!
It is only in supreme crises that man reaches the supreme pitch of
annihilation. The difference, however, is only a difference in degree,
not in kind. The bank-clerk performs in a mild degree what Poe performed
intensely and deathlily.
These are the men in whom the development is rather low, whose souls are
coarsely compounded, so that the reduction is coarse, a sort of activity
of coarse hate.
But the men of finer sensibility and finer development, sensuous or
conscious, they must proceed more gradually and subtly and finely in the
process of reduction. It is necessary for a finely compounded nature to
reduce itself more finely, to know the subtle gratification of its own
reduction.
A subtle nature like Myshkin’s would find no pleasure of reduction in
connection with Grushenka, scarcely any with Nastasia. He must proceed
more delicately. He must give up his soul to the reduction. It is his
mind, his conscious self he wants to reduce. He wants to dissolve it
back. He wants to become infantile, like a child, to reduce and resolve
back all the complexity of his consciousness, to the rudimentary
condition of childhood. That is his ideal.
So he seeks mental contacts, mental re-actions. It is in his mental or
conscious contacts that he seeks to obtain the gratification of
self-reduction. He reaches his crisis in his monologue of self-analysis,
self-dissolution, in the drawing-room scene where he falls in a fit.
And of course, all this reducing activity is draped in alluring
sentimentalism. The most evil things in the world, today, are to be
found under the chiffon folds of sentimentalism. Sentimentality is the
garment of our vice. It covers viciousness as inevitably as greenness
covers a bog.
With all our talk of advance, progress, we are all the time working
backwards. Our heroines become younger and younger. In the movies, the
heroine is becoming more and more childish, and touched with infantile
idiocy. We cannot bear honest maturity. We want to reduce ourselves
back, back to the _corruptive_ state of childishness.
Now it is all very well for a child to be a child. But for a grown
person to be slimily, pornigraphically reaching out for
child-gratifications, is disgusting. The same with the prevalent love of
boys. It is the desire to be reduced back, reduced back, in our
accomplished ego: always within the unshattered rind of our completeness
and complacency, to go backwards, in sentimentalised disintegration, to
the states of childhood.
And no matter _what_ happens to us, now, we sentimentalise it and use it
as a means of sensational reduction. Even the great war does not alter
our civilization one iota, in its total nature. The form, the whole
form, remains intact. Only inside the complete envelope we writhe with
sensational experiences of death, hurt, horror, reduction.
The goodness of anything depends on the direction in which it is moving.
Childhood, like a bud, striving and growing and struggling towards
blossoming full maturity, is surely beautiful. But childhood as a
_goal_, for which grown people aim: childishness futile and sentimental,
for which men and women lust, and which always retreats when grasped,
like the _ignis fatuus_ of a poisonous marsh of corruption: this is
disgusting.
While we live, we are balanced between the flux of life and the flux of
death. All the while our bodies are being composed and decomposed. But
while every man fully lives, all the time the two streams keep fusing
into the third reality, of real creation. Every new gesture, every
fresh smile of a child is a new emergence into creative being: a glimpse
of the Holy Ghost.
But when grown people start grimacing with childishness, or lusting
after child-gratifications, it is corruption pure and simple.
And the still clear look on an old face, and the stillness of old,
withered hands, which have gathered the long repose of autumn, this is
the purity of the two streams consummated, and the bloom, like autumn
crocuses, of age.
But the painted, silly child-face that old women make nowadays: or the
harpy’s face that many have, lusting for the sensations of youth: the
hard, voracious, selfish faces of old men, seeking their own ends,
devouring the shoots of young life: this is vile.
While we live, we are balanced between the flux of life and the flux of
death. But the real clue is the Holy Ghost, that moves us on into the
state of blossoming. And each year the blossoming is different: from the
delicate blue speedwells of childhood to the equally delicate, frail
farewell flowers of old age: through all the poppies and sunflowers:
year after year of difference.
While we live, we change, and our flowering is a constant change.
But once we fall into the state of egoism, we cannot change. The ego,
the self-conscious ego remains fixed, a final envelope around us. And
we are then safe inside the mundane egg of our own self-consciousness
and self-esteem.
Safe we are! Safe as houses! Shut up like unborn chickens that cannot
break the shell of the egg. That’s how safe we are! And as we can’t be
born, we can only rot. That’s how safe we are!
Safe within the everlasting walls of the egg-shell we have not the
courage, nor the energy, to crack, we fall, like the shut-up chicken,
into a pure flux of corruption, and the worms are our angels.
And mankind falls into the state of innumerable little worms bred within
the unbroken shell: all clamoring for food, food, food, all feeding on
the dead body of creation, all crying peace! peace! universal peace!
brotherhood of man! Everything must be “universal”, to the conquering
worm. It is only _life_ which is different.
V