But at any rate it’s nice to know _what’s_ wrong, since wrong it is.
If we were men, if we were women, our individualities would be lone and
a bit mysterious, like tarns, and fed with power, male power, female
power, from underneath, invisibly. And from us the streams of desire
would flow out in the eternal glimmering adventure, to meet in some
unknown desert.
_Mais nous avons changé tout cela._
I’ll bet the yokel, even then, was more himself, and the stream of his
desire was stronger and more gurgling, than William Wordsworth’s. For a
long time the yokel retains his own integrity, and his own real stream
of desire flows from him. Once you break this, and turn him, who was a
yokel, into still another Number One, an assertive newspaper-parcel of
an ego, you’ve done it!
But don’t, dear, darling reader, when I say “desire”, immediately
conclude that I mean a jungleful of rampaging Don Juans and raping buck
niggers. When I say that a woman should be eternally desirable, _don’t_
say that I mean every man should want to sleep with her, the instant he
sets eyes on her.
On the contrary. Don Juan was only Don Juan because he _had_ no real
desire. He had broken his own integrity, and was a mess to start with.
No stream of desire, with a course of its own, flowed from him. He was
a marsh in himself. He mashed and trampled everything up, and desired no
woman, so he ran after every one of them, with an itch instead of a
steady flame. And tortured by his own itch, he inflamed his itch more
and more. That’s Don Juan, the man who _couldn’t_ desire a woman. He
shouldn’t have tried. He should have gone into a monastery at fifteen.
As for the yokel, his little stream may have flowed out of commonplace
little hills, and been ready to mingle with the streams of any easy,
puddly little yokeless. But what does it matter! And men are far less
promiscuous, even then, than we like to pretend. It’s Don Juanery,
sex-in-the-head, no real desire, which leads to profligacy or squalid
promiscuity. The yokel usually met desire with desire: which is all
right: and sufficiently rare to ensure the moral balance.
Desire is a living stream. If we gave free rein, or a free course, to
our living flow of desire, we shouldn’t go far wrong. It’s quite
different from giving a free rein to an itching, prurient imagination.
That is our vileness.
The living stream of sexual desire itself does not often, in any man,
find its object, its confluent, the stream of desire in a woman into
which it can flow. The two streams flow together, spontaneously, not
often, in the life of any man or woman. Mostly, men and women alike rush
into a sort of prostitution, because our idiotic civilisation has never
learned to hold in reverence the true desire-stream. We force our desire
from our ego: and this is deadly.
Desire itself is a pure thing, like sunshine, or fire, or rain. It is
desire that makes the whole world living to me, keeps me in the flow
connected. It is my flow of desire that makes me move as the birds and
animals move through the sunshine and the night, in a kind of
accomplished innocence, not shut outside of the natural paradise. For
life is a kind of Paradise, even to my horse Azul, though he doesn’t get
his own way in it, by any means, and is sometimes in a real temper about
it. Sometimes he even gets a bellyache, with wet alfalfa. But even the
bellyache is part of the natural paradise. Not like human _ennui_.
So a man can go forth in desire, even to the primroses. But let him
refrain from falling all over the poor blossom, as William did. Or
trying to incorporate it in his own ego, which is a sort of lust. Nasty
anthropomorphic lust.
Everything that exists, even a stone, has two sides to its nature. It
fiercely maintains its own individuality, its own solidity. And it
reaches forth from itself in the subtlest flow of desire.
It fiercely resists all inroads. At the same time it sinks down in the
curious weight, or flow, of that desire which we call gravitation. And
imperceptibly, through the course of ages, it flows into delicate
combination with the air and sun and rain.
At one time, men worshipped stones: symbolically, no doubt, because of
their mysterious durability, their power of hardness, resistance, their
strength of remaining unchanged. Yet even then, worshipping man did not
rest till he had erected the stone into a pillar, a menhir, symbol of
the eternal desire, as the phallus itself is but a symbol.
And we, men and women, are the same as stones: the powerful resistance
and cohesiveness of our individuality is countered by the mysterious
flow of desire, from us and towards us.
It is the same with the worlds, the stars, the suns. All is alive, in
its own degree. And the centripetal force of spinning earth is the force
of earth’s individuality: and the centrifugal force is the force of
desire. Earth’s immense centripetal energy, almost passion, balanced
against her furious centrifugal force, holds her suspended between her
moon and her sun, in a dynamic equilibrium.
So instead of the Greek: _Know thyself!_ we shall have to say to every
man: “_Be Thyself! Be Desirous!_”--and to every woman: “_Be Thyself! Be
Desirable!_”
_Be Thyself!_ does not mean: _Assert thy ego!_ It means, be true to your
own integrity, as man, as woman: let your heart stay open, to receive
the mysterious inflow of power from the unknown: know that the power
comes to you from beyond, it is not generated by your own will:
therefore all the time, be watchful, and reverential towards the
mysterious coming of power into you.
_Be Thyself!_ is the grand cry of individualism. But individualism makes
the mistake of considering an individual as a fixed entity: a little
windmill that spins without shifting ground or changing its own nature.
And this is nonsense. When power enters us, it does not just move us
mechanically. It changes us. When the unseen wind blows, it blows upon
us, and through us. It carries us like a ship on a sea. And it roars to
flame in us, like a draught in a fierce fire. Or like a dandelion in
flower.
What is the difference between a dandelion and a windmill?
Heap on more wood!
Even the Nirvanists consider man as a fixed entity, a changeless ego,
which is capable of nothing, ultimately, but remerging into the
infinite. A little windmill that can turn faster and faster, till it
becomes actually invisible, and nothing remains in nothingness, except a
blur and a faint hum.