If it is greater self-definition that lies before women, and greater concrete achievement that lies before the less organised races, much may be gained, but easy definition has its own sterility, while the undefined can be the very quick of life. Many will always live it, remaining close to their source for the increase of life they gain. It will be at our peril if we put all our faith in the measurable, and dishonour that which lies beyond statement.
Perhaps the less differentiated people are still natural enough to evolve a good that we lost a long way back, so Western races almost owe other races a warning. We might say, “We are bad guides for you to follow. Our way could be your undoing. We have become factual, mechanical, theoretical and over active. We try to be as efficient, untiring and reliable as machines. This cannot be a good time for Western man to be imitated as he is too near a recoil from himself.” And small wonder our sense of awe has almost gone, little is sacred to us, we have lost the grace of innate well-being, and how often can we admire and revere? “Follow your own way,” we should say, “but don’t follow us”.
I often want to say to people, “You have neat, tight expectations of what life ought to give you, but you won’t get it. That isn’t what life does. Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you: It is meant to, and it couldn’t do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.”
But some wouldn’t hear, and some would shatter themselves on principle.
A note book might be the very thing for all the old who wave away crossword puzzles, painting, petit point, and knitting. It is more restful than conversation, and for me it has become a companion, more a confessional. It cannot shrive me, but knowing myself better comes near to that: Only this morning—this mild, sunny morning that charmed me into happiness—I realized my cheer was partly because I was alone. I thought for an awful moment that perhaps I was essentially unloving, perhaps had never loved; but years of absorption, and of joy, yes, I have loved, but enough? Is there any stab as deep as wondering where and how much you failed those you loved? Disliking is my great sin, which I cannot overcome. It has taken me my entire life to learn not to withdraw.
I wonder why love is so often equated with joy when it is everything else as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excessive value, and losing it again. It is recognition, often of what you are not but might be. It sears and it heals. It is beyond pity and above law. It can seem like truth. But what is truth? Oh this mysterious world in which we know nothing, nothing. At times love seems clarity, beyond judgement. But this is a place that can also be reached alone, an impersonal place, found and lost again.
Love is asked to carry intolerable burdens, not seen from outside. Love can be hard service, giving your all, and it may be finding your all. It is sometimes a discipline enabling you to do the impossible. It may be your glimpse of transcendence. It is even agreement. But it is all the pains as well, the small pains as well as the great. It is baffling to be loved by someone incapable of seeing you. It is pain to have your love claimed as a cloak that another may hide from himself. Love tested by its indulgence to weakness, or its blindness to unworthiness can turn to scorn. Love may have blind facets in its all-seeing eyes, but it is we who are blind to what we ask it to bear. Of course it is the heights and the depths, the follies and the glories, but being loving is not always love, and hate can be more cleansing. Why are love and hate near each other, opposite, and alike, and quickly interchangeable?
Love is honoured and hate condemned, but love can do harm. It can soften, distort, maintain the unreal, and cover hate. Hate can be nature’s way of forcing honesty on us, and finding the strength to follow a truer way. But as hate is a burning poison that dehumanises us, how can I be anything but appalled by it? I am appalled. I have hated, and I know its evil. But hate is part of truth. It is not safe to forget that the Orphic World Egg had on one side the face of Eros, and on the other that of Phobus, and no one who has seen either ever forgets.
When I was young I knew inside me what I could and could not accept, but I could not express opposition. I had to bear the unacceptable a long time until I hated it. Then I could protest, but with the scalding accompaniment of hate. I know well that hate is a consuming fire poisoning every part of us, yet—yet there are times when it has to be met, for some degree of it is as cleansing as fire. Heat brings change, and so anger can be the right weapon if one is clean enough to use it.
Apparently hate and definition belong together. What differs from you, you may hate; perhaps too quickly, perhaps too slowly. It may be from fear, fear for your identity, fear of your inability to guard your weak identity. Could it be that at our archaic level we are so undifferentiated, so in a state of primal oneness that anything different feels a threat, and hate flames to protect us, is needed, as our dissolution is very possible. So the deep point in us is a dark, hot oneness, making difference a thing to dread and combat. Differing is never a cool thing, and it is the differing, not the issue that makes human beings boil, so no wonder believing what the crowd believes is a comfort and a power. Yet love, too, is a oneness, a warmth and a power, but utterly different, since it is personal, willing to face difference, and even capable of relinquishing its need.
Before the First World War I was travelling in France and when the train stopped a middle-aged woman entered the compartment accompanied by a distraught-looking girl of perhaps seventeen who held a handkerchief to her eyes. The woman announced quietly but gravely and dramatically, “C’est l’amour”. At once the five or six other passengers rearranged themselves, leaving one side of the compartment vacant. The young girl laid herself down at full length, her head in her mother’s lap, a cloak over her, and softly sobbed herself to sleep. The other passengers sat crowded in silent respect. A god had struck, and it was best to be wary.
Differing and belonging is only one of our problems, but so important that without those two strong threads binding each other there would be no living cloth, usable and durable. How much containment is necessary, of how much daring and originality are we capable? Man’s pugnacity and his evasions must be made up of this question. We, our pattern, what makes us ourselves to ourselves, can be destroyed by alien influences, yet without the new we may be stultified. It takes great courage to open our minds and hearts, yet it is required of us to our last breath.
I don’t always moan over humanity. I marvel at the artistry and toughness there often is in small hidden tribes, isolated peoples, small nations who put all their energy into creating their own patterns. What but being different brings the conviction of having found the best way? With endurance revered, rewards certain, behaviour settled, then energy flows in patterns of satisfaction. The satisfaction of creating your unique way could account for every totem, custom, and superstition; with all doubt gone as to right and wrong, each member knowing his place in the group, and knowing his group to be like no other, what more was needed to survive? Only placating the forces of nature, in reality as well as in symbol. The pattern that necessity had formed made each individual live creatively to keep it in being. This makes the highly stylized group the prototype of the individual, so only where the group is comparatively small is the individual and the group at one.
Any small tribe spending their energies in their pattern of yearly renewal would seem to be more satisfied than modern man, no matter what their material difficulties, or just because of their material difficulties. They are fully occupied in the vital elaboration of their own identity, as well as their survival. This is their safety and their religion. This is the precious secret their wise men harbour. From this comes their self-decoration, their art, their culture.
An intense sense of their own identity may entail avoidance of other groups, also fear and hostility. If they should mix or intermarry, uncertainty could follow, blurring of beliefs, doubt, and perhaps despair. It could be suicidal not to hate the alien way. If this is at all true must we say that our present belief in oneness, integrat
ion, organisation which we follow blindly, could result in the individual becoming nobody, nothing? Are numbers our true enemy, our undoing … if I could stop worrying about what is beyond me.
But I can’t. Was sameness inevitable from the time of easy communication; going to places that differ from ours making them differ less, a too easy exchange of goods making them less worthy of exchange? Then do comfort, safety, order, fraternity, all the values that our intelligence and compassion create, endanger us? Is it the terrible truth that our abilities, our open minds, and generous hearts are self-destructive? Do we have to assume that man is incapable of knowing what is for his own good? Is he to be forever blind to the fact that it is his own quality of being that alone matters? Man can do almost everything but assess himself. “Know thyself” is still the unbearable command. But it is tried. Oh it is tried.
Then I should know that good is sure to bring some bad, as bad some good. The bad that results from the good done brings the next problem in the great chain of life, each requiring deeper understanding. It does take the heart of a hero to even glance at what one hopes is the wavering line of growth.
It is puzzling that many seem relieved to have got rid of God; no sense of impoverishment at all. It is almost as though they had been personally irked by that unknowable, inescapable power. Some even seem a little vain and preen themselves, as though it had been partly they who had destroyed their creator, and that of the world as well. They feel no loss, apparently. They are not surprised that the world still exists.
To destroy a god used to require a hero, one who was fit to be a god, and dared assume the burden. Now it takes no hero. Secularity is voiced with relief until one wonders—will poverty again be the birthplace of a new-born god? An inner poverty this time. Love is said to be the child of need, and that we have, and will have more.
My only fear about death is that it will not come soon enough. Life still interests and occupies me. Happily I am not in such discomfort that I wish for death, I love and am loved, but please God I die before I lose my independence. I do not know what I believe about life after death; if it exists then I burn with interest, if not—well, I am tired. I have endured the flame of living and that should be enough. I have made others suffer, and if there are more lives to be lived I believe I ought to do penance for the suffering I have caused. I should experience what I have made others experience. It belongs to me, and I should learn it.
If I suffer from my lacks, and I do daily, I also feel elation at what I have become. At times I feel a sort of intoxication because of some small degree of gain; as though the life that is in me has been my charge, the trust birth brought me, and my blunders, sins, the blanks in me as well as the gifts, have in some long painful transmutation made the life that is in me clearer.
The most important thing in my life was the rich experience of the unconscious. This was a gift life gave me and I only had the sense to honour and serve it. It taught me that we are fed by great forces, and I know that I am in the hands of what seemed immortal. It hardly matters whether I am mortal or not since I have experienced the immortal. This makes me at rest in much of my being, but not in all. It is almost as if the order in me is barely me, and I still have to deal with the chaos that is mine.
It has taken me all the time I’ve had to become myself, yet now that I am old there are times when I feel I am barely here, no room for me at all. I remember that in the last months of my pregnancies the child seemed to claim almost all my body, my strength, my breath, and I held on wondering if my burden was my enemy, uncertain as to whether my life was at all mine. Is life a pregnancy? That would make death a birth.
When I recall those nights when I tried to understand, letting the thrust of truth teach me a deeper truth, how sexual that was. This has never occurred to me before. Then understanding can resemble impregnation. My understanding was not thought, so I wonder what it was. Could it have been feminine thought, right for us, not dry and arid as man’s thought so often is when it is used by women; or could it have been assessing by true feeling? It was a highly disciplined acceptance of the value of truth, no evasion allowed, so it may have been a feeling judgement.
The enchantment of the sky, ever changing beauty almost ignored. Beyond words, without fixed form, not to be understood, or stated. It ravishes away dullness, worry, even pain. It graces life when nothing else does. It is the first marvel of the day. Even when leaden grey it is still a friend, withdrawn for a time.
Evolution is necessarily slow since we resent it so. A large proportion of our energy is used in holding it back, wanting to stop it if possible. The new good is refused countless times before it is accepted. The rare, the beautiful, the admirable are taken as rebukes, making us feel inferior, suggesting our improvement. Anything but that, so we mock at the new, recoil from the rare, be-little the great, until finally grown accustomed … to ignore is easy.
I am ashamed to admit to myself that I am disappointed in humanity. Nothing less. That is the ache that lies behind other aches. Not disappointed in this beautiful world, owing much of its beauty to man, but somehow broken-hearted at the incorrigibility of man. The animals know how to live and be beautiful and themselves; primitive peoples evolve religions that give meaning to their lives. But as soon as consciousness arrives man begins his blunders. His genius is for creating insoluble problems, every cure creating new difficulties. How could it be otherwise since consciousness is the intolerable registering of pain and pleasure, opinion and belief. Consciousness seems to be both what life strives to evolve and its greatest danger.
Mercy seems an undoubted good, yet it can bring ill results. Everyone wants it as I would want it; one side of me would plead for mercy for all my blind acts, for all I haven’t been. I think, I cannot be sure, but I think I would rather be cleansed than granted mercy. No, no, I am quite sure, I want both, and because I need mercy I pray that I may feel it for others; that I may make life a little less hard, still seeing clearly that we have to give pain, cannot avoid it, that we are unceasingly burdens one to another. We are indeed each beholden to each. Oh love is truly the child of need, but realism, just realism, admitting what we are and what we do, is the smiting of the rock that makes tenderness and pity flow.
I have to go on with my thoughts, knowing they are not thoughts, but more like sobs or counter-blows, perhaps just worries of an old heart. I could not see more clearly than I do that impersonal judgements are beyond me, beyond all but the very wise, the well-informed who relinquish judgement and observe. Yet if some kindly priest remonstrated with me saying, “These are not matters for your concern”, I would say—“If my heart aches for humanity, let it be so”
It feels right to take humanity into my heart, or out of my heart and examine it and be eased of it. Poor, poor mankind what a marvel it is, what marvels man has done. His buildings alone would make one assume him an archangel. His music, his order, the richness of his acts—it is because of marvels accomplished that we have high hopes—and when man refuses much of the time to live up to the range of the mighty creature he sometimes is, then hopeful people like me make a to-do. When we see what mankind can do, and be—and we have no idea why it is so much easier to do than to be—and when with equal clarity we see what he usually is, then childishly, shamefully we cry, “Won’t more people be strong, and wise and lovable, because I try and I can’t”. Yet even in my despair I see man rise to such noble heights in his fateful struggle, that more often than we guess the gods may regard him with brotherly awe.
Of course one is forced to deplore and revere humanity. Its variety, disparity, and complexity make it the great cross on which we are stretched. We are crucified in experiencing ourselves. The cross is our cross because it is we who are the nobilities and beauties and delicious happiness, and the horrors and the indifference and the blindness. How could we react to suffering and joy with anything but the full range of our possibilities? With my thoughts stabbing like spears it might be supposed that I have waited for my eig
hty-third year before I noticed mankind. This is not so. I never found it possible to ignore man’s plight even when I was busy living it, and now in my idleness it has me by the scruff of the neck. I have to endure it as though there was a final bite that would yield a last drop of understanding blood. Can this be true? What must I see?
One thing I see clearly. These notes are not thoughts. They are the creaks and cries of a heart opening slowly. So love has nothing to do with liking. I see. Concern lay in the depths when on the surface I felt recoil. I do see.
Do we then begin to see that all evil is ours? Not belittling evil in the hopes of remaining little ourselves. Do we prepare for a wholeness never yet attempted with open eyes; wholeness large enough to contain what—who dares define how much?
Are we about to say—at least within centuries of saying—“With the help of the God within me I accept responsibility for my own acts—all, all, especially for those I did not know were mine”? If that great task is beginning, then we live in an age of promise, and who would not be reckless enough to hope?
There is youth in me, in most of us, who would be carefree and happy, “bird happy”, and would find it natural and enough. Knowing that destruction and creation are twin brothers, that the gods destroy and create—why else are they called gods?—I hear without surprise someone in me saying: “But life is delicious, what beauty, what interest, I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. Look at the day, feel the air, you see for yourself, all is well.”
Measure of My Days Page 4
