To those who are in prison, whose being is prisoner within the walls of
unliving fact, there are only two forms of triumph: the triumph of
inertia, or the triumph of the Will. There is no flowering possible.
And the experience _en route_ to either triumph, is the experience of
sensationalism.
Stone walls need not a prison make: that is, not an _absolute_ prison.
If the great sun has shone into a man’s soul, even prison-walls cannot
blot it out. Yet prison-walls, unless they be a temporary shelter are
deadly things.
So, if we are imprisoned within walls of accomplished fact, experience,
or knowledge, we are prisoned indeed. The living sun is shut out
finally. A false sun, like a lamp, shines.
All absolutes are prison-walls. These “laws” which science has invented,
like conservation of energy, indestructibility of matter, gravitation,
the will-to-live, survival of the fittest: and even these absolute
facts, like--the earth goes round the sun, or the doubtful atoms,
electrons, or ether--they are all prison-walls, unless we realise that
we don’t know what they mean. We don’t know what we mean, ultimately, by
_conservation_, or _indestructibility_. Our atoms, electrons, ether, are
caps that fit exceeding badly. And our will-to-live contains a germ of
suicide, and our survival-of-the-fittest the germ of degeneracy. As for
the earth going round the sun: it goes round as the blood goes round my
body, absolutely mysteriously, with the rapidity and hesitation of life.
But the human ego, in its pettifogging arrogance, sets up these things
for you as absolutes, and unless you kick hard and kick in time, they
are your prison walls forever. Your spirit will be like a dead bee in a
cell.
Once you are in prison, you have no experience left, save the experience
of reduction, destruction going on inwardly. Your sentimentalism is only
the smell of your own rottenness.
This reduction within the self is sensationalism. And sensationalism, of
course, is progressive. You can’t have your cake and eat it. To get a
sensation, you eat your cake. That is, to get a sensation, you reduce
down some part of your complex psyche, physical and psychic. You get a
flash, as when you strike a match. But a match once struck can never be
struck again. It is finished--sensationalism is an exhaustive process.
The resolving down is progressive. It can apparently go on _ad
infinitum_. But in infinity it means what we call utter death, utter
nothingness, opposites released from opposition, and from conjunction,
till there _is_ nothing left at all, only nullity itself.
Sensationalism progresses in the individual. This is the doom of it.
This is the doom of egoistic sex. Egoistic sex-excitement means the
reacting of the sexes against one another in a purely reducing activity.
The reduction progresses. When I have finally reduced one complexity,
one unit, I must proceed to the next, the lower. It is the progressive
activity of dissolution within the soul.
And the climax of this progression is in perversity, degradation and
death. But only the very powerful and energetic ego can go through all
the phases of its own violent reduction. The ordinary crude soul, after
having enjoyed the brief reduction in the sex, is finished there, blasé,
empty. And alcohol is slow and crude, and opium is only for the
imaginative, the somewhat spiritual nature. Then remain the opium-drugs,
for a finisher, a last reducer.
There remains only the reduction of the contact with death. So that as
the sex is exhausted, gradually, a keener desire, the desire for the
touch of death follows on, in an intense nature. Then come the fatal
drugs. Or else those equally fatal wars and revolutions which really
create nothing at all, but destroy, and leave emptiness.
When a man is cleaving like a fly with spread arms upon the face of a
rock, with infinite space beneath him, and he feels his foothold going,
and he cries out to the men on the rope, and falls away, dangling into
endless space, jerked back by the thin rope, then he perishes, he is
fused in the reducing flame of death. He knows another keen anguish of
reduction. What matters to that man, afterwards? Does any of the complex
life of the world below matter? None. All that is left is the triumph of
his will in having gone so far and recovered. And all that lies ahead is
another risk, another slip, another agony of the fall, or a demonish
triumph of the will. And the _final_ consummation of such a man is the
last fall of all, the few horrible seconds whilst he drops, like a
meteorite, to extinction. This is his final and utter satisfaction, the
smash of extinction at the bottom.
But even this man is not a pure egoist. This man still has his soul open
to the mystery of the mountains, he still feels the passion of the
_contact_ with death.
If he wins, however, in the contest: if his will triumphs in the test:
then there is danger of his falling into final egoism, the more-or-less
inert complacency of a self-satisfied old man.
The soul is still alive, while it has passion: any sort of passion, even
for the brush with death, or for the final and utter reduction. And in
the brush with death it may be released again into positive life. A man
may be sufficiently released by a fall on the rope and the dangling for
a few minutes of agony, in space. That may finally reduce his soul to
its elements, set it free and child-like, and break-down that egoistic
entity which has developed upon it from the past. The near touch of
death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic
will, and release that other flow.
But if a man, having fallen very near to death, gets up at length and
says: “I did it! It’s my triumph! I beat the mountains that
time!”--then, of course, his ego has only pulled itself in triumph out
of the menace, and the individual will go on more egoistic and barrenly
complacent.
If a man says: “I fell! But the unseen goodness helped me, when I
struggled for life, and so I was saved”--then this man will go on in
life unimprisoned, the channels of his heart open, and passion still
flowing through him.
But if the brush with death only gave the brilliant sensational thrill
of fear, followed immediately, by the _gamin_ exultance: “Yah! I got
myself out all right!”--then the ego continues intact, having enjoyed
the sensation, and remaining vulgarly triumphant in the power of the
Will. And it will continue inert and complacent till the next thrill.
So it is with war. Whoever goes to war in his own might alone, will even
if he come out victorious, come out barren: a barren triumpher, whose
strength is in inertia. A man must do his own utmost: but even then, the
final stroke will be delivered, or the final strength will be given from
the unseen, and the man must feel it. If he doesn’t feel it, he will be
an inert victor, or equally inert vanquished, complacent and sterile in
either case.
There must be a certain faith. And that means, an ultimate reliance on
that which is beyond our will, and not contained in our ego.
We have gone to war. For a hundred years we have been piling up safety
upon safety, we have grown enormously within the shell of our
civilization, we have rounded off our own ego and grown almost
complacent about our own triumphs of will. Till we come to a point where
sex seems exhausted, and passion falls flat. When even criticism and
analysis now only fatigue the mind and weary the soul.
Then we gradually, gradually formulate the desire: Oh, give us the brush
with death, and let us see if we can win out all right!
We go into a war like this in order to get once more the final reduction
under the touch of death. That the death is so inhuman, cold,
mechanical, sordid, the giving of the body to the grip of cold,
stagnant mud and stagnant water, whilst one awaits for some falling
death, the knowledge of the gas clouds that may lacerate and reduce the
lungs to a heaving mass, this, this sort of self-inflicted Sadism,
brings almost a final satisfaction to our civilized and still passionate
men.
Almost! And when it is over, and we have won out, shall we be released
into a new lease of life? Or shall we only extend our dreary lease of
egoism and complacency? Shall we know the barren triumph of the
will?--or the equally barren triumph inertia, helplessness, barren
irresponsibility.
And still, as far as there is any passion in the war, it is a passion
for the embrace with death. The desire to deal death and to take death.
The enemy is the bride, whose body we will reduce with rapture of agony
and wounds. We are the bridegroom, engaged with him in the long,
voluptuous embrace, the giving of agony, the rising and rising of the
slow unwilling transport of misery, the soaking-in of day after day of
wet mud, in penetration of the heavy, sordid, unendurable cold, on and
on to the climax, the laceration of the blade, like a frost through the
tissue, blasting it.
This is the desire and the consummation, this is the war. But at length,
we shall be satisfied, at length we shall have consummation. Then the
war will end. And what then?
It is not really a question of victories or defeats. It is a question of
fulfilment, and release from the old prison-house of a dead form. The
war is one bout in the terrific, horrible labour, our civilization
laboring in child-birth, and unable to bring forth.
How will it end? Will there be a release, a relaxation of the horrible
walls, and a real issuing, a birth?
Or will it end in nothing, all the agony going to stiffen the old form
deader, to enclose the unborn more helplessly and drearily.
It may easily be. For behind us all, in the war, stand the old and the
elderly, complacent with egoism, bent on maintaining the old form. Oh,
they are the monkey grinning with anxiety and anticipation, behind us,
waiting for the burnt young cat to pull the chestnut out of the fire.
And in the end, they will thrill with the triumph of their egoistic
will, and harden harder still with vulture-like enertia, rapacious
inertia.
In sex, we have plunged the quick of creation deep into the cold flux of
reduction, corruption, till the quick is extinguished. In war we have
plunged the whole quick of the living, sentient body into a cold, cold
flux. Much has died and much will die. But if the whole quick dies, and
there remain only the material, mechanical unquickened tissue, acting at
the bidding of the mechanical will, and the sterile ego triumphant, then
it is a poor tale, a barrenly poor tale.
I have seen a soldier at the seaside who was maimed. One leg was only a
small stump, with the trouser folded back on it. He was a handsome man
of about thirty, finely built. His face was sun-browned, and
extraordinarily beautiful, still, with a strange placidity, something
like perfection, abstract, complete. He had known his consummation. It
seemed he could never desire corruption or reduction again, he had had
his satisfaction of death. He was become almost impersonal, a simple
abstraction, all his personality loosed and undone. He was now like a
babe just born, new to begin life. Yet in a sense, still-born. The
newness and candour, like a flower just unloosed, was something strange
and rare in him. Yet unloosed, curiously, into the light of death.
So he came forward down the pier, in the sunshine, slowly on his
crutches. Behind, the sea was milk-white and vague, as if full of
ghosts, and silent, except when a long white wave plunged to silence out
of the smooth, milky silence of the sea, coming from very far out of the
ghostly stillness.
The maimed soldier, strong and handsome, with some of the frail candour
of a newly-wakened child in his face, came slowly down the pier on his
crutches, looking at everybody who looked at him. He was naïve like a
child, wondering. The people stared at him with a sort of fascination.
So he was rather vain, rather proud, like a vain child.
He did not know he was maimed, it had not entered his consciousness. His
soul, so clean and new and fine, could not conceive of such a thing. He
was rather vain and slightly ostentatious, not as a man with a wound, a
trophy, more as a child who is conspicuous among envious elders.
The women particularly were fascinated. They could not look away from
him. The strange abstraction of horror and death was so perfect in his
face, like the horror of birth on a new-born infant, that they were
almost hysterical. They gravitated towards him, helplessly, they could
not move away from him.
They wanted him, they wanted him so badly, that they were almost beside
themselves. They wanted his consummation, his perfect completeness in
horror and death. They too wanted the consummation. They followed him,
they made excuses to talk to him. And he, strange, abstract, glowing
still from the consummation of destruction and pain and horror, like a
bridegroom just come from the bride, seemed to glow before the women, to
give off a strange, unearthly radiance, which was like an embrace, a
most poignant embrace to their souls.
But still his eyes were looking, looking, looking for someone who was
not eager for him, to know him, to devour him, like women round a
perfect child. He had not realized yet what all the attention meant,
which he received. He was so strong in his new birth. And he was
looking for his own kind, for the living, the new-born, round about. But
he was surrounded by greedy, voracious people, like birds seeking the
death in him, pecking at the death in him.
It was horrible, rather sinister, the women round the man, there on the
pier stretched from the still, sunny land over the white sea, noiseless
and inhuman.
The spirit of destruction is divine, when it breaks the ego and opens
the soul to the wide heavens. In corruption there is divinity. Aphrodite
is, on one side, the great goddess of destruction in sex, Dionysus in
the spirit. Moloch and some gods of Egypt are gods also of the knowledge
of death. In the soft and shiny voluptuousness of decay, in the marshy
chill heat of reptiles, there is the sign of the Godhead. It is the
activity of departure. And departure is the opposite equivalent of
coming together; decay, corruption, destruction, breaking down is the
opposite equivalent of creation. In infinite going-apart there is
revealed again the pure absolute, the absolute relation: this time truly
as a Ghost: the ghost of what was.
We who live, we can only live or die. And when, like the maimed soldier
on the pier with the white sea behind, when we have come right back into
life, and the wonder of death fades off our faces again, what then?
Shall we go on with wide, careless eyes and the faint astonished smile
waiting all our lives for the accomplished death? Waiting for death
finally? And continuing the sensational reduction process? Or shall we
fade into a dry empty egoism? Which will the maimed soldier do? He
cannot remain as he is, clear and peaceful.
Are we really doomed, and smiling with the wonder of doom?
Even if we are, we need not say: “It is finished.” It is never finished.
That is one time when Jesus spoke a fatal half-truth, in his
_Consummatum Est!_ Death consummates nothing. It can but abruptly close
the individual life. But Life itself, and even the forms men have given
it, will persist and persist. There is no consummation into death. Death
leaves still further deaths.
Leonardo knew this: he knew the strange endlessness of the flux of
corruption. It is Mona Lisa’s ironic smile. Even Michael Angelo knew it.
It is in his _Leda and the Swan_. For the swan is one of the symbols of
divine corruption with its reptile feet buried in the ooze and mud, its
voluptuous form yielding and embracing the ooze of water, its beauty
white and cold and terrifying, like the dead beauty of the moon, like
the water-lily, the sacred lotus, its neck and head like the snake, it
is for us a flame of the cold white fire of flux, the phosphorescence of
corruption, the salt, cold burning of the sea which corrodes all it
touches, coldly reduces every sun-built form to ash, to the original
elements. This is the beauty of the swan, the lotus, the snake, this
cold white salty fire of infinite reduction. And there was some
suggestion of this in the Christ of the early Christians, the Christ who
was the Fish.
So that, when Leonardo and Michael Angelo represent Leda in the embrace
of the swan, they are painting mankind in the clasp of the divine flux
of corruption, the singing death. Mankind _turned back_, to cold, bygone
consummations.
When the swan first rose out of the marshes, it was a glory of creation.
But when we turn back, to seek its consummation again, it is a fearful
flower of corruption.
And corruption, like growth, is only divine when it is pure, when all is
given up to it. If it be experienced as a controlled activity within an
intact whole, this is vile. When the cabbage flourishes round a hollow
rottenness, this is vile. When corruption goes on within the living
womb, this is unthinkable. The chicken dead in the egg is an
abomination. We cannot subject a divine process to a static will, not
without blasphemy and loathsomeness. The static will must be subject to
the process of reduction, also. For the pure absolute, the Holy Ghost,
lies also in the relationship which is made manifest by the departure,
the departure _ad infinitum_, of the opposing elements.
Corruption will at last break down for us the deadened forms, and
release us into the infinity. But the static ego, with its
will-to-persist, neutralises both life and death, and utterly defies the
Holy Ghost. The unpardonable sin!
It is possible for this static will, this vile rind of nothingness, to
triumph for a long while over the divine relation in the flux, to assert
an absolute nullity of static form.
This we do who preserve intact our complete null concept of life, as an
envelope around this flux of destruction, the war. The whole concept and
form of life remains absolute and static, around the gigantic but
contained seething of the fight. It is the rottenness seething within
the cabbage, corruption within the old, fixed body. The cabbage does not
relax, the body is not broken open. The reduction is sealed and
contained.
That is our attitude now. It is the attitude of the women who flutter
round and peck at death in us. This is the carrion process set in, the
process of obscenity, the baboon, the vulture in us.
In so far as we fight to remain ideally intact, in so far as we seek to
give and to have the experience of death, so that we may remain
unchanged in our whole conscious form, may preserve the static entity of
our conception, around the fight, we are obscene. We are like vultures
and obscene insects.
We may give ourselves utterly to destruction. Then our conscious forms
are destroyed along with us, and something new must arise. But we may
not have corruption within ourselves as sensationalism, our skin and
outer form intact. To destroy life for the preserving of a static, rigid
form, a shell, a glassy envelope, this is the lugubrious activity of the
men who fight to save democracy and to end all fighting. The fight
itself is divine, the relation betrayed in the fight is absolute. But
the glassy envelope of the established concept is only a foul nullity.
Destruction and Creation are the two relative absolutes between the
opposing infinites. Life is in both. Life may even, for a while be
almost entirely in one, or almost entirely in the other. The end of
either oneness is death. For life is really in the two, the absolute is
the pure relation, which is both.
If we have our fill of destruction, then we shall turn again to
creation. We shall need to live again, and live hard, for once our great
civilized form is broken, and we are at last born into the open sky, we
shall have a whole new universe to grow up into, and to find relations
with. The future will open its delicate, dawning icons in front of us,
unfathomable.
But let us watch that we do not preserve an enveloping falsity around
our destructive activity, some nullity of virtue and self-righteousness,
some conceit of the “general good” and the salvation of the world by
bringing it all within our own conceived whole form. This is the utter
lie and obscenity. The ego, like Humpty Dumpty, sitting for ever on the
wall.
The vulture was once, perhaps, an eagle. It became a supreme strong
bird, almost like the phoenix. But at a certain point, it said: “I am
It.” And then it proceeded to preserve its own static form crystal about
the flux of corruption, fixed, absolute as a crystal, about the horrible
seethe of corruption. Then the eagle became a vulture.
And the dog, through cowardice, arrested itself at a certain point and
became domestic, or a hyæna, preserving a glassy, fixed form about a
voracious seethe of corruption.
And the baboon, almost a man, or almost a high beast, arrested himself
and became obscene, a grey, hoary rind closed upon an activity of strong
corruption.
And the louse, in its little glassy envelope, brings everything into the
corrupting pot of its little belly.
And these are all perfectly-arrested egoists, asserting themselves
static and foul, triumphant in inertia and in will.
Let us watch that we do not turn either into carrion or into carrion
eaters. Let us watch that we do not become, in the vulgar triumph of our
will, and the obscene inertia of our ego, vultures who feed on
putrescence. The lust for death, for pain, for torture, is even then
better than this fatal triumph of inertia and the egoistic will.
Anything is better than that. The Red Indians, full of Sadism and
self-torture and death, destroyed themselves. But the eagle, when it
gets stuck and can know no more blossoming turns into a vulture with a
naked head, and becomes carrion-foul.
There must always be some balance between the passion for destruction
and the passion for creation, in every living activity; for in the race
to destruction we can utterly destroy the vital quick of our being,
leave us amorphous, undistinguished, vegetable; and in the race for
creation we can lose ourselves in mere production, and pile ourselves
over with dead null monstrosities of obsolete form. All birth comes with
the reduction of old tissue. But the reduction is not the birth. That is
the fallacy of all of us, who represent the old tissue now. In this
fallacy we go careering down the slope in our voluptuousness of death
and horror, careering into oblivion, like Hippolytus trammelled up and
borne away in the traces of his maddened horses.
Who says that the spirit of destruction will outrun itself? Not till the
driver be annihilated. Then the destructive career will run itself out.
And then what?
But neither destruction nor production is, in itself, evil. The danger
lies in the fall into egoism, which neutralises both. When destruction
and production alike are mechanical, meaningless.
The race of destruction may outrun itself. But still the form may remain
intact, the old imprisoning laws. Only those who have not travelled to
the confines will be left, the mean, the average, the laborers, the
slaves: all of them little crowned egos.
Still the ancient mummy will have the people within its belly. There
they will be slaves: not to the enemy, but to themselves, the concept
established about them: being slaves, they will be happy enclosed within
the tomb-like belly of a concept, like goldfish in a bowl, which think
themselves the centre of the universe.
This is like the vultures of the mountains. They have kept the form and
height of eagles. But their souls have turned into the souls of slaves
and carrion eaters. Their size, their strength, their supremacy of the
mountains, remains intact. But they have become carrion eaters.
This is the tomb, the whited sepulchre, this very form, this liberty,
this ideal for which we are fighting. The Germans are fighting for
another sepulchre. Theirs is the sepulchre of the Eagle become vulture,
ours is the sepulchre of the lion become dog: soon to become hyæna.
But we would have our own sepulchre, in which we shall dwell secure
when the rage of destruction is over. Let it be the sepulchre of the dog
or the vulture, the sepulchre of democracy or aristocracy, what does it
matter! Inside it, the worms will jig the same jazzy dances, and heave
and struggle to get hold of vast and vaster stores of carrion, or its
equivalent, gold.
The carrion birds, aristocrats, sit up high and remote, on the sterile
rocks of the old absolute, their obscene heads gripped hard and small,
like knots of stone clenched upon themselves forever. The carrion dogs
and hyænas of the old, arid, democratic absolute, prowl among the bare
stones of the common earth, in numbers, their loins cringing, their
heads sharpened to stone.
Those who will hold power, afterwards, they will sit on their rocks and
heights of unutterable morality, which have become foul through the
course of ages, like vultures upon the unchangeable mountain-tops. The
fixed, existing form will persist forever beneath them, about them, they
will have become the spirit incarnate of the fixed form of life. They
will eat carrion, having become a static hunger for keen putrescence.
This alone will support the incarnation of hoary fixity which they are.
And beside the carrion they will fight the multitudes of hoary, obscene
dogs, which also persist. It is the mortal form become null and fixed
and enduring, glassy, horrible, beyond life and death, beyond
consummation, the awful, stony nullity. It is timeless, almost as the
rainbow.
But it is not utterly timeless. It is only unthinkably slow, static in
its passing away, perpetuated.
Its very aspect of timelessness is a fraud.
What is evil?--not death, nor the blood-devouring Moloch, but this
spirit of perpetuation and apparent timelessness, this obscenity which
holds the great carrion birds, and the carrion dogs. The tiger, the
hawk, the weasel, are beautiful things to me; and as they strike the
dove and the hare, that is the will of God, it is a consummation, a
bringing together of two extremes, a making perfect one from the
duality.
But the baboon, and the hyæna, the vulture, the condor, and the carrion
crow, these fill me with fear and horror. These are the highly developed
life-forms, now arrested, petrified, frozen, falsely, timeless. The
baboon was almost as man, the hyæna as the lion: the vulture and the
condor are greater than the eagle, the carrion crow is stronger than the
hawk. And these obscene beasts are not ashamed. They are stark and
static, they are not mixed. Their will is hoary, ageless. Before us, the
Egyptians have known them and worshipped them.
The baboon, with his intelligence and his unthinkable loins, the cunning
hyæna with his cringing, stricken loins, these are the static form of
one achieved ego, the egoistic Christian, the democratic, the
unselfish. The vulture, with her naked neck and naked, small stony
head, this is the static form of the other achieved ego, the eagle, the
Self, aristocratic, lordly, pagan.
It is unthinkable and unendurable. Yet we are drawn more and more in
this direction. After the supreme intelligence, the baboon, after the
supreme pride, the vulture. The millionaire: the international
financier: the bankers of this world. The baboons, the hyænas, the
vultures.
The snake is the spirit of the great corruptive principle, the festering
cold of the marsh. This is how he seems, as we look back. We revolt from
him, but we share the same life and tide of life as he. He struggles as
we struggle, he enjoys the sun, he comes to the water to drink, he curls
up, hides himself to sleep. And under the low skies of the far past
æons, he emerged a king out of chaos, a long beam of new life. But the
vulture looms out in sleep like a rock, invincible within the hoary,
static form, invincible against the flux of both eternities.
One day there was a loud, terrible scream from the garden, tearing the
soul. Oh, and it was a snake lying on the warm garden bed, and in his
teeth the leg of a frog, a frog spread out, screaming with horror. We
ran near. The snake glanced at us sharply, holding fast to the frog,
trying to get further hold. In so trying, it let the frog escape, which
leaped convulsed, away. Then the snake slid noiselessly under cover,
sullenly, never looking at us again.
We were all white with fear. But why? In the world of twilight as in the
world of light, one beast shall devour another. The world of corruption
has its stages, where the lower shall devour the higher, _ad infinitum_.
So a snake, also, devours the fascinated bird, the little, static bird
with its tiny skull. Yet is there no great reptile that shall swallow
the vulture?
As yet, the vulture is beyond life or change. It stands hard, immune
within the principle of corruption, and the principle of creation,
unbreakable. It is kept static by the fire of putrescence, which makes
the void within balance the void without. It is a changeless tomb
wherein the latter stages of corruption take place, counteracting
perfectly the action of life. Life devours death to keep the static
nullity of the form.
So the ragged, grey-and-black vulture sits hulked, motionless, like a
hoary, foul piece of living rock, its naked head and neck sunk in, only
the curved beak protruding, the naked eyelids lowered. Motionless,
beyond life, it sits on the sterile heights.
It does not sleep, it stays utterly static. When it spreads its great
wings and floats down the air, still it is static, still this is the
sleep, a dream-floating. When it rips up carrion and swallows it, it is
still the same dream-motion, static, beyond the inglutination. The
naked, obscene head is always fast locked, like stone.
It is this naked, obscene head of a bird, sleep-locked, a petrified knot
of sleep, that I cannot bear to think of. When I think of it, I neither
live nor die, I am petrified into foulness. The knot of volition, the
will knotted upon a perpetuated moment, will not now be unloosed for
ever. It will remain hoary, unchanging, timeless. Till it disappears,
suddenly. Amid all the flux of time, of the two eternities, this head
remains unbroken in a cold, rivetted sleep. But one day it will be
broken.
I am set utterly against this small, naked, stone-clinched head, it is a
foul vision I want to wipe away. But I am set utterly also against the
loathsome, cringing, imprisoned loins of the hyæna, that cringe down the
hind legs of the beast with their static weight. Again the static will
has knotted into rivetted, endless nullity, but here upon the loins. In
the vulture, the head is turned to stone, the fire is in the talons and
the beak. In the hoary, glassy hyæna, the loins are turned to stone,
heavy, sinking down to earth, almost dragged along, the fire is in the
white eyes, and in the fangs. The hyæna can scarcely see and hear the
living world; it draws back on to the stony fixity of its own loins,
draws back upon its own nullity, sightless save for carrion. The
vulture can neither see nor hear the living world, it is one supreme
glance, the glance in search of carrion, its own absolute quenching,
beyond which is nothing.
This is the end, and beyond the end. This is beyond the beginning and
the end. Here the beginning and the end are revoked. The vulture,
revoking the end, the end petrified upon the beginning, is a nullity.
The hyæna, the beginning petrified beneath the end, is a nullity. This
is beyond the beginning and the end, this is aristocracy gone beyond
aristocracy, the I gone beyond the I; the other is democracy gone beyond
democracy, the not-me surpassed upon itself.
This is the changelessness of the kingdoms of the earth, null,
unthinkable.
This is the last state into which man may fall, in the triumph of will
and the triumph of inertia, the state of the animated sepulchre.