Yet while I live, I want to live. Death, no doubt, solves its own
problems. Let Life solve the problem of living.
“Teach me to live that so I may
Rise glorious at the Judgment Day.”
I have no desire to rise glorious at any Judgment Day, when the serpent
finally chokes himself with his own tail.
“Teach me to live that I may
Go gaily on from day to day.”
Nay, in all the world, I feel the life-urge weakening. It may be, there
are too many people alive. I feel it is, because there is too much
automatic consciousness and self-consciousness in the world.
We can’t live by loving life, alone. Life is like a capricious mistress:
the more you woo her the more she despises you. You have to get up and
go to something more interesting. Then she’ll pelt after you.
Life is the river, darkly sparkling, that enters into us from behind,
when we set our faces towards the unknown. Towards some goal!!!
But there is no eternal goal. Every attempt to find an eternal goal puts
the tail of the serpent into his mouth again, whereby he chokes himself
in one more last gasp.
What is there then, if there is no eternal goal?
By itself, the river of life just gets nowhere. It sinks into the sand.
The river of life follows the living. If the living don’t get anywhere,
the river of life doesn’t. The old serpent lays him down and goes into a
torpor, instead of dancing at our heels and sending the life-sparks up
our legs and spine, as we travel.
So we’ve got to get somewhere.
Is there no goal?
“Oh man! on your four legs, your two, and your three, where are you
going?”--says the Sphinx.
“I’m just going to say _How-do-you-do?_ to Susan,” replies the man. And
he passes without a scratch.
When the cock crows, he says “_How-do-you-do?_”
“_How-do-you-do Peter? How-do-you-do? old liar!_”
“_How-do-you-do, Oh Sun!_”
A challenge and a greeting.
We live in a multiple universe. I am a chick that absolutely refuses to
chirp inside the monistic egg. See me walk forth, with a bit of
egg-shell sticking to my tail!
When the cuckoo, the cow, and the coffee-plant chipped the Mundane Egg,
at various points, they stepped out, and immediately set off in
different directions. Not different directions of space and time, but
different directions in creation: within the fourth dimension. The
cuckoo went cuckoo-wards, the cow went cow-wise, and the coffee-plant
started coffing. Three very distinct roads across the fourth dimension.
The cow was dumb, and the cuckoo too.
They went their ways, as creatures do,
Till they chanced to meet, in the Lord’s green Zoo.
The bird gave a cluck, the cow gave a coo,
At the sight of each other the pair of them flew
Into tantrums, and started their hullabaloo.
They startled creation; and when they were through
Each said to the other: till I came across you
I wasn’t aware of the things I could do!
Cuckoo!
Moo!
Cuckoo!
And this, I hold, is the true history of evolution.
The Greeks made equilibrium their goal. Equilibrium is hardly a goal to
travel towards. Yet it’s something to attain. You travel in the fourth
dimension, not in yards and miles, like the eternal serpent.
Equilibrium argues either a dualistic or a pluralistic universe. The
Greeks, being sane, were pantheists and pluralists, and so am I.
Creation is a fourth dimension, and in it there are all sorts of things,
gods and what-not. That brown hen, scratching with her hind leg in such
common fashion, is a sort of goddess in the creative dimension. Of
course, if you stay outside the fourth dimension, and try to measure
creation in length, breadth and height, you’ve set yourself the
difficult task of measuring up the Monad, the Mundane Egg. Which is a
game, like any other. The solution is, of course (let me whisper): _put
his tail in his mouth!_
Once you realise that, willy nilly, you’re _inside_ the Monad, you give
it up. You’re inside it and you always will be. Therefore, Jonah, sit
still in the whale’s belly, and have a look round. For you’ll never
measure the whale, since you’re inside him.
And then you see it’s a fourth dimension, with all sorts of gods and
goddesses in it. That brown hen, who, being a Rhode Island Red, is big
and stuffy like plush-upholstery, is of course, a goddess in her own
rights. If I myself had to make a poem to her, I should begin:
Oh my flat-footed plush armchair
So commonly scratching in the yard--!
But this poem would only reveal my own limitations.
Because Flat-foot is the favourite of the white leghorn cock, and he
shakes the tid-bit for her with a most wooing noise, and when she lays
an egg, he bristles like a double white poppy, and rushes to meet her,
as she flounders down from the chicken-house, and his echo of her
_I’ve-laid-an-egg_ cackle is rich and resonant. Every pine-tree on the
mountains hears him:
She’s} _laid an egg_!
I’ve}
She’s} _laid an egg_!
I’ve}
And his poem would be:
“Oh you who make me feel so good, when you sit next me on the perch
At night! (temporarily, of course!)
Oh you who make my feathers bristle with the vanity of life!
Oh you whose cackle makes my throat go off like a rocket!
Oh you who walk so slowly, and make me feel swifter
Than my boss!
Oh you who bend your head down, and move in the under
Circle, while I prance in the upper!
Oh you, come! come! come! for here is a bit of fat from
The roast veal; I am shaking it for you.”
In the fourth dimension, in the creative world, we live in a pluralistic
universe, full of gods and strange gods and unknown gods; a universe
where that Rhode Island Red hen is a goddess in her own right and the
white cock is a god indisputable, with a little red ring on his leg:
which the boss put there.
Why? Why, I mean, is he a god?
Because he is something that nothing else is. Certainly he is something
that I am not.
And she is something that neither he is nor I am.
When she scratches and finds a bug in the earth, she seems fairly to
gobble down the monad of all monads; and when she lays, she certainly
thinks she’s put the Mundane Egg in the nest.
Just part of her naive nature!
As for the goal, which doesn’t exist, but which we are always coming
back to: well, it doesn’t spatially, or temporally, or eternally exist:
but in the fourth dimension, it does.
What the Greeks called equilibrium: what I call relationship.
Equilibrium is just a bit mechanical. It became very mechanical with the
Greeks: an intellectual nail put through it.
I don’t _want_ to be “good” or “righteous”--and I won’t even be
“virtuous”, unless “vir” means a man, and “vis” means the life-river.
But I _do_ want to be alive. And to be alive, I must have a goal in the
_creative_, not the _spatial_ universe.
I want, in the Greek sense, an equilibrium between me and the rest of
the universe. That is, I want a relationship between me and the brown
hen.
The Greek equilibrium took too much for granted. The Greek never asked
the brown hen, nor the horse, nor the swan, if it would kindly be
equilibrated with him. He took it for granted that hen and horse would
be only too delighted.
You can’t take it for granted. That brown hen is extraordinarily callous
to my god-like presence. She doesn’t even choose to know me to nod to.
If I’ve got to strike a balance between us, I’ve got to work at it.
But that is what I want: that she shall nod to me, with a
“_Howdy!_”--and I shall nod to her, more politely: “_How-do-you-do,
Flat-foot?_” And between us there shall exist the third thing, the
_connaissance_. That is the goal.
I shall not betray myself nor my own life-passion for her. When she
walks into my bedroom and makes droppings in my shoes, I shall chase her
with disgust, and she will flutter and squawk. And I shall not ask her
to be human for my sake.
That is the mistake the Greeks made. They talked about equilibrium, and
then, when they wanted to equilibrate themselves with a horse, or an ox,
or an acanthus, then horse, ox, and acanthus had to become nine-tenths
human, to accommodate them. Call that equilibrium?
As a matter of fact, we don’t call it equilibrium, we call it
anthropomorphism. And anthropomorphism is a bore. Too much anthropos
makes the world a dull hole.
So Greek sculpture tends to become a bore. If it’s a horse, it’s an
anthropomorphised horse. If it’s a Praxiteles _Hermes_, it’s a Hermes so
Praxitelised, that it begins sugarily to bore us.
Equilibrium, in its very best sense--in the sense the Greeks
_originally_ meant it--stands for the strange spark that flies between
two creatures, two things that are equilibrated, or in living
relationship. It is a goal: to come to that state when the spark will
fly from me to Flat-foot, the brown hen, and from her to me.
I shall leave off addressing her: “_Oh my flat-footed plush arm-chair!_”
I realise that is only impertinent anthropomorphism on my part. She
might as well address me: “_Oh my skin-flappy split pole!_” Which would
be like her impudence. Skin-flappy, of course, would refer to my blue
shirt and baggy cord trousers. How would _she_ know I don’t grow them
like a loose skin!
In the early Greeks, the spark between man and man, stranger and
stranger, man and woman, stranger and strangeress, was alive and vivid.
Even those Doric Apollos.
In the Egyptians, the spark between man and the living universe remains
alight for ever in those early, silent, motionless statues of Pharaohs.
They say, it is the statue of the soul of the man. But what is the soul
of a man, except _that_ in him which is himself alone, suspended in
immediate relationship to the sum of things? Not isolated or cut off.
The Greeks began the cutting apart business. And Rodin’s remerging was
only an intellectual tacking on again.
The serpent hasn’t got his tail in his mouth. He is on the alert, with
lifted head like a listening, sparky flower. The Egyptians knew.
But when the oldest Egyptians carve a hawk or a Sekhet-cat, or paint
birds or oxen or people: and when the Assyrians carve a she-lion: and
when the cave-men drew the charging bison, or the reindeer, in the caves
of Altamira: or when the Hindoo paints geese or elephants or lotus in
the great caves of India whose name I forget--Ajanta!--then how
marvellous it is! How marvellous is the living relationship between man
and his object! be it man or woman, bird, beast, flower or rock or rain:
the exquisite frail moment of pure conjunction, which, in the fourth
dimension, is timeless. An Egyptian hawk, a Chinese painting of a camel,
an Assyrian sculpture of a lion, an African fetish idol of a woman
pregnant, an Aztec rattlesnake, an early Greek Apollo, a cave-man’s
paintings of a Pre-historic mammoth, on and on, how perfect the timeless
moments between man and the other Pan-creatures of this earth of ours!
And by the way, speaking of cave-men, how did those prognathous
semi-apes of Altamira come to depict so delicately, so beautifully, a
female bison charging, with swinging udder, or deer stooping feeding, or
an antediluvian mammoth deep in contemplation. It is art on a pure, high
level, beautiful as Plato, far, far more “civilized” than Burne Jones.
Hadn’t somebody better write Mr. Wells’ History backwards, to prove how
we’ve degenerated, in our stupid visionlessness, since the cave-men?
The pictures in the cave represent moments of purity which are the quick
of civilization. The pure relation between the cave-man and the deer:
fifty per-cent. man, and fifty per-cent. bison, or mammoth, or deer. It
is not ninety-nine per-cent. man, and one per-cent. horse: as in a
Raphael horse. Or hundred per-cent. fool, as when F. G. Watts sculpts a
bronze horse and calls it Physical Energy.
If it is to be life, then it is fifty per-cent. me, fifty per-cent.
thee: and the third thing, the spark, which springs from out of the
balance, is timeless. Jesus, who saw it a bit vaguely, called it the
Holy Ghost.
Between man and woman, fifty per-cent. man and fifty per-cent. woman:
then the pure spark. Either this, or less than nothing.
As for ideal relationships, and pure love, you might as well start to
water tin pansies with carbolic acid (which is pure enough, in the
antiseptic sense) in order to get the Garden of Paradise.