Their two egos are absolutely separate. He’s a cock, she’s a hen. He
never thinks of her for a moment, as if she were a cock like himself;
and she never thinks for a moment that he is a hen like herself. I never
hear anything in her squawk which would seem to say: “_Aren’t I a fowl
as much as you are, you brute!_” Whereas I always hear women shrieking
at their men: “Aren’t I a human being as much as you are?”
It seems beside the point.
I always answer my spouse, with sweet reasonableness: “My dear, we are
both British Subjects. What can I say more, on the score of equality?
You are a British Subject as much as I am.”
Curiously, she hates to have it put that way. She wants to be a human
being as much as I am. But absolutely and honestly, I don’t know what a
human-being is. Whereas I do know what a British Subject is. It can be
defined.
And I can see how a _Civis Romanum_, or a British Subject can be free,
whether it’s he or she. The he-ness or the she-ness doesn’t matter. But
how a _man_ can consider himself free, I don’t know. Any more than a
cock-robin or a dandelion.
Imagine a dandelion suddenly hissing: “_I am free and I will be free!_”
Then wriggling on his root like a snake with his tail pegged down!
What a horrifying sight!
So it is when a man, with two legs and a penis, a belly and a mouth
begins to shout about being free. One wants to ask: which bit do you
refer to?
There’s a cock and there’s the hen, and their two egos or
individualities seem to stay apart without friction. They never coo at
one another, nor hold each other’s hand. I never see her sitting on his
lap and being petted. True, sometimes he calls for her to come and eat a
titbit. And sometimes he dashes at her and walks over her for a moment.
She doesn’t seem to mind. I never hear her squawking: “_Don’t you think
you can walk over me!_”
Yet she’s by no means downtrodden. She’s just herself, and seems to have
a good time: and she doesn’t like it if he is missing.
So there is this peculiar togetherness about them. You can’t call it
love. It would be too ridiculous.
What then?
As far as I can see, it is desire. And the desire has a fluctuating
intensity, but it is always there. His desire is always towards her,
even when he has absolutely forgotten her. And by the way she puts her
feet down, I can see she always walks in her plumes of desirableness,
even when she’s going broody.
The mystery about her, is her strange undying desirableness. You can see
it in every step she takes. She is desirable. And this is the breath of
her life.
It is the same with Susan. The queer cowy mystery of her is her
changeless cowy desirableness. She is far, alas, from any bull. She
never even remotely dreams of a bull, save at rare and brief periods.
Yet her whole being and motion is that of being desirable: or else
fractious. It seems to unite her with the very air, and the plants and
trees. Even to the sky and the trees and the grass and the running
stream, she is subtly, delicately and _purely_ desirable, in cowy
desirability. It is her cowy mystery. Then her fractiousness is the
fireworks of her desirableness.
To me she is fractious, tiresome, and a faggot. Yet the subtle
desirableness is in her, for me. As it is in a brown hen, or even a sow.
It is like a peculiar charm: the creature’s femaleness, her
desirableness. It is her sex, no doubt: but so subtle as to have nothing
to do with function. It is a mystery, like a delicate flame. It would be
false to call it love, because love complicates the ego. The ego is
always concerned in love. But in the frail, subtle desirousness of the
true male, towards everything female, and the equally frail,
indescribable desirability of every female for every male, lies the real
clue to the equating, or the _relating_, of things which otherwise are
incommensurable.
And this, this desire, is the reality which is inside love. The ego
itself plays a false part in it. The individual is like a deep pool, or
tarn, in the mountains, fed from beneath by unseen springs, and having
no obvious inlet or outlet. The springs which feed the individual at the
depths are sources of power, power from the unknown. But it is not until
the stream of desire overflows and goes running downhill into the open
world, that the individual has his further, secondary existence.
Now we have imagined love to be something absolute and personal. It is
neither. In its essence, love is no more than the stream of clear and
unmuddied, subtle desire which flows from person to person, creature to
creature, thing to thing. The moment this stream of delicate but potent
desire dries up, the love has dried up, and the joy of life has dried
up. It’s no good trying to turn on the tap. Desire is either flowing, or
gone, and the love with it, and the life too.
This subtle streaming of desire is beyond the control of the ego. The
ego says: “This is _my_ love, to do as I like with! This is _my_ desire,
given me for my own pleasure.”
But the ego deceives itself. The individual cannot possess the love
which he himself feels. Neither should he be entirely possessed by it.
Neither man nor woman should sacrifice individuality to love, nor love
to individuality.
If we lose desire out of our life, we become empty vessels. But if we
breakout own integrity, we become a squalid mess, like a jar of honey
dropped and smashed.
The individual has nothing, really, to do with love. That is, his
individuality hasn’t. Out of the deep silence of his individuality runs
the stream of desire, into the open squash-blossom of the world. And the
stream of desire may meet and mingle with the stream from a woman. But
it is never _himself_ that meets and mingles with _herself_: any more
than two lakes, whose waters meet to make one river, in the distance,
meet in themselves.
The two individuals stay apart, for ever and ever. But the two streams
of desire, like the Blue Nile and the White Nile, from the mountains one
and from the low hot lake the other, meet and at length mix their
strange and alien waters, to make a Nilus Flux.
See then the childish mistake we have made, about love. We have
_insisted_ that the two individualities should “fit”. We have insisted
that the “love” between man and woman must be “perfect”. What on earth
that means, is a mystery. What would a perfect Nilus Flux be?--one that
never overflowed its banks? or one that always overflowed its banks? or
one that had exactly the same overflow every year, to a hair’s-breadth?
My dear, it is absurd. Perfect love is an absurdity. As for casting out
fear, you’d better be careful. For fear, like curses and chickens, will
also come home to roost.
Perfect love, I suppose, means that a married man and woman never
contradict one another, and that they both of them always feel the same
thing at the same moment, and kiss one another on the strength of it.
What blarney! It means, I suppose, that they are absolutely intimate:
this precious intimacy that lovers insist on. They tell each other
_everything_: and if she puts on chiffon knickers, he ties the strings
for her: and if he blows his nose, she holds the hanky.
Pfui! Is anything so loathsome as intimacy, especially the married sort,
or the sort that “lovers” indulge in!
It’s a mistake and ends in disaster. Why? Because the individualities
of men and women are incommensurable, and they will no more meet than
the mountains of Abyssinia will meet with Lake Victoria Nyanza. It is
far more important to keep them distinct, than to join them. If they are
to join, they will join in the third land where the two streams of
desire meet.
Of course, as citizen and citizeness, as two persons, even as two
spirits, man and woman can be equal and intimate. But this is their
outer, more general or common selves. The individual man himself, and
the individual woman herself, this is another pair of shoes.
It is a pity that we have insisted on putting all our eggs in one
basket: calling love the basket, and ourselves the eggs. It is a pity we
have insisted on being individuals only in the communistic,
semi-abstract or generalised sense: as voters, money-owners, “free” men
and women: free in so far as we are all alike, and individuals in so far
as we are commensurable integers.
By turning ourselves into integers: every man to himself and every woman
to herself a Number One; an infinite number of Number Ones; we have
destroyed ourselves as desirous or desirable individuals, and broken the
inward sources of our power, and flooded all mankind into one dreary
marsh where the rivers of desire lie dead with everything else, except a
stagnant unity.
It is a pity of pities women have learned to think like men. Any husband
will say, “_they haven’t_.” But they have: they’ve all learned to think
like some other beastly man, who is not their husband. Our education
goes on and on, on and on, making the sexes alike, destroying the
original individuality of the blood, to substitute for it this dreary
individuality of the ego, the Number One. Out of the ego streams neither
Blue Nile nor White Nile. The infinite number of little human egos makes
a mosquito marsh, where nothing happens except buzzing and biting, ooze
and degeneration.
And they call this marsh, with its poisonous will-o-the-wisps, and its
clouds of mosquitos, _democracy_, and the reign of love!!
You can have it.
I am a man, and the Mountains of Abyssinia, and my Blue Nile flows
towards the desert. There should be a woman somewhere far South, like a
great lake, sending forth her White Nile towards the desert, too: and
the rivers will meet among the Slopes of the World, somewhere.
But alas, every woman I’ve ever met spends her time saying she’s as good
as any man, if not better, and she can beat him at his own game. So Lake
Victoria Nyanza gets up on end, and declares it’s the Mountains of
Abyssinia, and the Mountains of Abyssinia fall flat and cry: “_You’re
all that, and more, my dear!_”--and between them, you’re bogged.