by John Fowles
36 Even those who try to find their pleasures in the ‘good’ poles will just as much need, even if they do not actively seek experience in, the ‘bad’ poles.
37 Now it may seem at first sight that this alternating mechanism reaches so deep into our innermost beings, and into the innermost being of our societies, that we can do nothing about it. But this is to say that reason and science can do nothing against the pleasure principle and our addiction to the virgin experience; that we can never control the violent effects that these tensions at present exert on each of us and the societies we live in. I reject totally this pessimistic and fatalistic view of human destiny, and I want to suggest the model and method we should examine for a solution.
THE MANIPULATION OF THE TENSIONS
38 The model is marriage; the method is transposition; and what we hope to achieve is not of course the abolition of all tension, but the avoidance of wasted energy, pointless battle and unnecessary suffering. It is necessary to drink water; but it should not be necessary to drink polluted water.
39 Joining is a first principle; the proton joins the electron, the atoms by joining grow in complicacy, make molecules by joining, amoeba joins amoeba, male joins female, mind mind, country country: existence is being joined. Being is joining, and the higher the being the more the joining.
40 Marriage is the best general analogy of existing. It is the most familiar polar situation, with the most familiar tension; and the very fact that reproduction requires a polar situation is an important biological explanation of why we think polarly.
41 As with all tensional states, marriage is harassed by a myth and a reality. The objective myth is that of the Perfect Marriage, a supposedly achievable state of absolute harmony between the partners. The reality is whatever is the case, every actual marriage.
42 Married couples normally try to give the public, their friends, and even their children, a Perfect Marriage version of their own marriage; if they do not, then they still express and judge the extent of their failure by the standards of the Perfect Marriage.
43 The gauges of the supposedly Perfect Marriage are passion and harmony. But passion and harmony are antipathetic. A marriage may begin in passion and end in harmony, but it cannot be passionate and harmonious at the same time.
44 Passion is a pole, an extreme joining; it can only be achieved as height is on a swing – by going from coital pole to sundered counterpole; from two to two ones. The price of passion is no passion.
45 During the White Terror, the police caught two suspects, a man and a woman, who were passionately in love. The chief of police invented a new torture. He simply had them bound as one, face to face. To begin with, the lovers consoled themselves that at least they were together, even though it was with the inseparability of Siamese twins. But slowly each became irksome to the other; they became filthy, they could not sleep; and then hateful; and finally so intolerably loathsome that when they were released they never spoke to each other again.
46 A few rare marriages may be without mutual hatred or quarrels from their very beginning. One could also write music in which every interval was of a perfect fourth. But it would not be perfect music. Most marriages recognize this paradox: that passion destroys passion, as the Midas touch destroys possession.
47 An intelligent married couple might therefore come to this conclusion: they wish to retain passion in their marriage, and so they should deliberately quarrel, and hate, in order to swing back together with more force. Women do indeed initiate marital quarrels more frequently than men; they know more about human nature, more about mystery, and more about keeping passion alive. There may be biological reasons for menstruation, but it is also the most effective recreator of passion; and the women who resist emancipation also know what they are about.
48 But there comes a time when passion costs too much in quarrels. To survive familiarity, dailiness, it needs more and more violent separations, and so either the two poles quarrel more and more violently inside marriage, or they look for new passion, a new pole, outside it.
49 Passion can be controlled in only one way; by sacrificing its pleasures.
50 But this sacrifice is made almost impossibly difficult, at least in capitalist Western society, by our attitude to growing old. With the decline of a belief in an afterlife and the corresponding growth of the demand for equality, the whole tendency of man is to shrink away from death and the age at which it arrives. In every aspect of our societies, from their art to their advertising, we see the cult and desirability of eternal youth maintained… and therefore of passion, which joined with our craving for the virgin experience, explains the enormous change that has taken place in our concepts and standards of marital fidelity.
51 Man is more guilty than woman here, since men have always required public and social – rather than emotional and domestic – reward in life. In spite of the male myth about female vanity, it is the men who are in the more greedy pursuit of this chimera of eternal youth. The Western male has, in our century, become increasingly Moslem in his attitude towards marriage and women. We do not yet practice legal polygamy, but the common contemporary desire of men in their forties and fifties to jettison their similarly-aged wives for an affaire or a new marriage with a girl young enough to be a daughter (or even a grand-daughter) is already a de facto polygamous institution among the rich and successful in the less convention-bound professions (especially those that permit mobility and thus escape the ethical pressures of the close community). This may be a normal, even finally a healthy, innovation in society. But it could be just only if middle-aged women were allowed to follow suit. In fact, they stay at home and suffer, left in a slavery more subtle but no less iron than the one they are generally supposed to have been freed from during these last fifty years.
52 This retrogressive step in the relationship between the sexes is certainly partly explicable as a last resentment of overthrown Adam against victorious Eve; and it may in itself seem to have little to do with my general theme. But it is in fact very symptomatic of our craving for a more sharply-opposed tonality of life – a greater tension. No one will deny that passion is necessary in its season, and we possess nothing until we possess it first with passion. But this passion, and the passionate stage of marriage, is animal; it is the harmonius marriage that is human. In passion it is said, we feel near the heart of things – and so we are: nearer things than humanity.
53 Plenty of books instruct sexual technique; but none teach the equally vital technique of transposing from the passionate relationship to the harmonious one.
TRANSPOSITION
54 The first step is to eliminate passion as a source of tension. The second is to accept the oneness of the marriage. In passion everything is between thee and me; in harmony it is between them and us. I-thou is passion, we-they is harmony. We have the word egocentric; it is time we invented noscentric.
55 Now of course no marriage can be wholly harmonious. But if it becomes noscentric it is immediately equipped to find different counterpoles, outside itself, which can in their turn help to determine the nature of, and establish and cement, the nos, the ‘we’ pole; just as the T pole is determined by its counterpoles. Certain counterpoles, such as the problems of aging, and the approach of death, will be common to all marriages.
56 But there is a second aid to the establishment of the harmonious marriage. We think ordinarily of the opposite of harmony as discord. But as I said earlier there is another and very fundamental counterpole of every existent object, and that is its non-existence-nothingness, the state of ‘God’. In a piece of music we think of the discords as the counterpoles of the harmonies; but there are also the pauses and silences.
And it is this state, not of discord but of ‘silent’ not-harmony, that we need to utilize to establish the harmonious marriage. In practical terms, this means the establishment of private interests not shared by the other partner, a disconnection in the relationship, an acceptance that togetherness becomes as intolera
ble as that of the pair in the White Terror torture if it is not based on periods of at least psychological separation. Now clearly the ability to form such outside interests, to maintain such a controlled separateness from which the basic harmony will spring, requires both education and economic freedom of a standard we have nowhere in our world today except among the fortunate few; and that is yet one more argument for a greater human equality.
57 All I say about marriage is stale news: every middle-aged and still happily married couple knows it. But my purpose is to point out that in our metaphorical marriage to pleasure, and in particular to the pleasures of being secure, doing good, and experiencing beauty, we develop the same kind of passionate relationship as we do in marriage. We feel passionately about them, but in order to continue to feel so, we have increasingly to resort to their counterpoles.
58 The equivalent in marriage is the malaise known as the seven-year-itch: boredom with fidelity. This metaphorical itch, this boredom with the stable and the socially recommended and the good, comes as a rule between the ages of thirty and forty – in the fourth decade of the marriage to existence. It is aggravated – and always will be – by the group in society who are at the age when the passionate experience is their right, their desire, and almost their duty: that is, the young. And if we idolize (as we do today) the young, then passionate atmospheres (and passionate politics, passionate art, and all the rest) must infest our societies.
INTERNATIONAL TENSION
59 All this conflict between harmony and passion becomes of greatest pertinence in the relationship between different countries and blocs of countries. The suffering we cause by private stupidity is at least confined to a small area; but the penalties now lurking in the underground bunkers and germ-warfare laboratories, lurking and waiting to pounce on any national or governmental selfishness and stupidity, are so gigantic that we cannot afford any personal isolationism in these matters.
60 Countries and blocs also live in relationships like marriage. To have the passion of love (to five in peace, which in the world as it is means in a state where the over-privileged are left in safe possession of their privileges) they have to have war. So ages of prosperity and security breed the counterpoles. An age of self is always mother to an age of war.
61 It is customary to talk of ‘international tension’ and ‘nuclear annihilation’ as if these things were terrible. But we love the terror. It is like salt to us. We live under the threat of an annihilatory war; and on it.
62 The two world wars were wars among societies dominated by the emotions of the adolescent. East and West, unhappily and passionately married in the house of the world, both derive vigour and energy from their mutual love-hatred. They erect and exercise and thrill each other. They stimulate each other in many ways besides the economic.
63 There are enough hostile factors (overpopulation, poverty, disease, ignorance) in the human situation to provide endless extramarital counterpoles. There is no inescapable need for man to be his own worst enemy. Many other things are queueing close to have that role.
THE ULTIMATE TENSION
64 The power of a tension is proportionate to its mystery. To be aware of and to understand a tension produces two results. Like lightning on a dark night it reveals what is, and it reveals the way ahead. It thus allows the transposition to a personally or socially less harmful tension to be made. It permits the tension to be controlled, rather than to control.
65 Knowledge of a tension therefore inaugurates two situations: a seeing through the old, and a craving for a new. Because we love and need mystery, we are often reluctant to analyze situations in which mystery seems to inhere. The chief such situation is in ourselves, in the tensions we exist in. We despise primitive cultures for the taboos with which they surround sacred groves and caves and the like; but we still encourage exactly similar taboos in the antique landscapes of the mind.
66 Yet even here we must distinguish between the selfish attachment to mystery that is really a lazy refusal to think or act and our essential need of a residual mystery in life as a whole. This mystery, between what we know and what we know we will never know, is the ultimate tension.
67 The more knowledge we have the more intense this mystery becomes. It may diminish from our point of view, but it condenses.
68 We tend to think that evolution must be a vast attack on mystery. We suppose our highest goal must be to know all. We consequently try to ignore, or destroy, or vitiate, what genuine mysteries life contains.
69 We are intended to solve much of the mystery; it is harmful to us. We have to invent protections against the sun, in many situations; but to wish to destroy the sun? The easier mysteries, how at a superficial level things work mechanically, how things are ‘caused’, have been largely solved. Many take these mysteries for the whole mystery. The price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.
70 The task of education is to show the mysteries solved; but also to show where mystery has not been, and will not be, solved – and in the most familiar objects and events. There is mystery enough at noon; no need to multiply the midnight rites.
71 The counterpole of all that is existent and known or knowable, that is ‘God’, must be infinite mystery, since only so can a tension remain to keep mankind from collapsing into total knowledge, or a ‘perfect’ world that would be a perfect hell. From this knowledge-mystery tension there is no transposing; and it is the source of human being.
72 All predictions are wagers. All predictions about the future are about what is not scientifically certain, but only scientifically probable. This fundamental uncertainty is essential to life. Every look forward is a potential illusion. This satisfies our need for insecurity; since in an eternally insecure situation we must externally seek knowledge and security, and never completely find them.
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OTHER PHILOSOPHIES
1 We may reject some of these as we might reject certain houses to live in; we cannot reject them as houses for anyone else to live in, we cannot deny them utility in part, beauty in part, meaningfulness in part; and therefore truth in part.
2 Ernst Mach: A piece of knowledge is never false or true – but only more or less biologically and evolutionally useful. All dogmatic creeds are approximations: these approximations form a humus from which better approximations grow.*
CHRISTIANITY
3 In a hundred years ecclesiastical Christianity will be dead. It is already a badly-flawed utility. The current ecumenical mania, the ‘glorious new brotherhood’ of churches, is a futile scrabbling behind the wainscots of reality.
4 This is not to deny what Christianity has done for humanity. It was instituted by a man of such active philosophical and evolutionary genius that it is little wonder that he was immediately called (as it was a necessary part of his historical efficacy that he should be) divine.
5 Christianity has protected the most precarious, because most evolved, section of the human race from itself. But in order to sell its often sound evolutionary principles it was obliged to ‘lie’; and these ‘lies’ made it temporarily more, but now finally less, effective.
6 In no foreseeable future will many of the general social laws and attitudes stated or implied in Christianity be archaic; this is because they are based on compassion and common sense. But there is in every great religion a process akin to the launching of space vehicles; an element that gives the initial boost, the getting off the ground, and an element that stays aloft. Those who cling to Christian metaphysical dogma are trying to keep launcher and launched together.
7 Furthermore, the essential appeal of a religion will always be racial, and always more accessible to the originating race or racial group than to others. A religion is a specific reaction to an environment, a historical predicament; and therefore always in some sense inadequate to those who live in different environments and predicaments.
8 First the buttress of dogmatic faith strengthens, then it petrifies; just as the heavy armo
ur of some prehistoric reptiles first enabled them to survive and then caused them to disappear. A dogma is a form of reaction to a special situation; it is never an adequate reaction to all situations.
9 The Bet Situation: however much evidence of historical probability the theologians produce for the incredible (in terms of modern scientific credibility) events of the life of Jesus, they can never show that these events took place verifiably in the way they claim they took place. The same is finally true, of course, of any remote historical event. We are always reduced, in the bitter logical end, to the taking of some such decision as the Kierkegaardian step in the dark of the Pascalian pari; and if I refuse to believe these incredible events took place, then it can be said that I am doing no more than taking my own blind step in the opposite direction. A certain kind of blind believer, not confined to Christianity but common in it since the days of Tertullian, uses the apparent absurdity, and the consequent despair, of our never being able to establish any certainty of belief as both a source of energy for the step in the dark and an indication of the direction in which it should be taken. Because (it is said) by any empirical human definition of what constitutes knowing I cannot know anything finally, I must leap to some state that does permit me to know finally – a state of certainty ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ attainment by empirical or rational means. But this is as if, finding myself in doubt and in darkness, I should decide, instead of cautiously feeling my way forward, to leap; not only to leap, to leap desperately; and not only to leap desperately, but into the darkest part of the surrounding darkness. There is an obvious emotional heroic-defiant appeal about this violent plunge from the battlements of reason; and an equally obvious lack of spiritual glamour in the cautious inching forward by the dim light of probability and the intermittent flicker (in this remote region) of scientific method. But I believe, and my reason tells me I am right to believe, that the step in the dark constitutes an existential betrayal and blasphemy, which is the maintaining that scientific probability should play no part in matters of faith. On the contrary I believe that probability must play a major part. I believe in the situation and cosmos described in the first group of notes here because it seems to me the most probable. No one but Jesus has been born of a virgin or has risen on the third day, and these, like the other incredible facts about him, are running at very long odds indeed. It is countless thousands of millions to one that I am right in refusing to believe in certain aspects of the Biblical accounts of his life, and countless thousands of millions to one that you, if you do believe them, are wrong.*
