Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence

by D. H. Lawrence

  It’s the oldest Pan-mystery. God is the flame-life in all the universe; multifarious, multifarious flames, all colours and beauties and pains and sombrenesses. Whichever flame flames in your manhood, that is you, for the time being. It is your manhood, don’t make water on it, says the novel. A man’s manhood is to honour the flames in him, and to know that none of them is absolute: even a flame is only relative.

  But see old Leo Tolstoi wetting on the flame. As if even his wet were absolute!

  Sex is flame, too, the novel announces. Flame burning against every absolute, even against the phallic. For sex is so much more than phallic, and so much deeper than functional desire. The flame of sex singes your absolute, and cruelly scorches your ego. What, will you assert your ego in the universe? Wait till the flames of sex leap at you like striped tigers.

  “They returned from the ride With the lady inside, And a smile on the face of the tiger.”

  You will play with sex, will you! You will tickle yourself with sex as with an ice-cold drink from a soda-fountain! You will pet your best girl, will you, and spoon with her, and titillate yourself and her, and do as you like with your sex?

  Wait! Only wait till the flame you have dribbled on flies back at you, later! Only wait!

  Sex is a life-flame, a dark one, reserved and mostly invisible. It is a deep reserve in a man, one of the core-flames of his manhood.

  What, would you play with it? Would you make it cheap and nasty!

  Buy a king-cobra, and try playing with that. Sex is even a majestic reserve in the sun. Oh, give me the novel! Let me hear what the novel says.

  As for the novelist, he is usually a dribbling liar.

  HIM WITH HIS TAIL IN HIS MOUTH

  ANSWER a fool according to his folly, philosophy ditto. Solemnity is a sign of fraud. Religion and philosophy both; have the same dual purpose: to get at the beginning of things, and at the goal of things. They have both decided that the serpent has got his tail in his mouth, and that the end is one with the beginning.

  It seems to me time someone gave that serpent of eternity another dummy to suck.

  They’ ve all decided that the beginning of all things is the life-stream itself, energy, ether, libido, not to mention the Sanskrit joys of Purusha, Pradhana, Kala.

  Having postulated the serpent of the beginning, now see all the heroes from Moses and Plato to Bergson, wrestling with him might and main, to push his tail into his mouth.

  Jehovah creates man in his Own Image, according to His Own Will. If man behaves according to the ready-made Will of God, formulated in a bunch of somewhat unsavoury commandments, then lucky man will be received into the bosom of Jehovah.

  Man isn’t very keen. And that is Sin, original and perpetual.

  Then Plato discovers how lovely the intellectual idea is: in fact, the only perfection is ideal.

  But the old dragon of creation, who fathered us all, didn’t have an idea in his head.

  Plato was prepared. He popped the Logos into the mouth of the dragon, and the serpent of eternity was rounded off. The old dragon, ugly and venomous, wore yet the precious jewel of the Platonic idea in his head. Unable to find the dragon wholesale, modern philosophy sets up a retail shop. You can’t lay salt on the old scoundrel’s tail, because, of course, he’s got it in his mouth, according to postulate. He doesn’t seem to be sprawling in his old lair, across the heavens. In fact, he appears to have vamoosed. Perhaps, instead of being one big old boy, he is really an infinite number of little tiny boys: atoms, electrons, units of force or energy, tiny little birds all spinning with their tails in their beaks. Just the same in detail as in the gross. Nothing will come out of the egg that isn’t in it. Evolution sings away at the same old song. Out of the amoeba, or some such old- fashioned entity, the dragon of evolved life stretches himself enormous and more enormous, only, at last, to return each time, and put his tail into his own mouth, and be an amoeba once more. The amoeba, or the electron, or whatever it may lately be — the rose would be just as scentless — is the constant, from which all manifest living creation starts out, and to which it all returns.

  There was a time when man was not, nor monkey, nor cow, not catfish. But the amoeba (or the electron, or the atom, or whatever it is) always was and always will be.

  Boom! tiddy-ra-ta! Boom!

  Boom! tiddy-ra-ta! Boom!

  How do you know? How does anyone know, what always was or wasn’t? Bunk of geology, and strata, and all that, biology or evolution.

  “One, two, three four five, Catch a little fish alive.

  Six, seven, eight nine ten, I have let him go again.

  Bunk of beginnings and of ends, and heads and tails. Why does man always want to know so damned much? Or rather, so damned little? If he can’t draw a ring round creation, and fasten the serpent’s tail into its mouth with the padlock of one final clinching idea, then creation can go to hell, as far as man is concerned.

  There is such a thing as life, or life energy. We know, becausc we’ve got it, or had it It isn’t a constant. It comes and it goes. But we want it.

  This I think is incontestable.

  More than anything else in the world, we want to have life, and life-energy abundant in us. We think if we eat yeast, vitamines and proteids, we’re sure of it. We’re had. We diddle ourselves for the million millionth time.

  What we want is life, and life-energy inside us. Where it comes from, or what it is, we don’t know, and never shall. It is the capital X of all our knowledge.

  But we want it, we must have it. It is the all in all.

  This we know, now, for good and all: that which is good, and moral, is that which brings into us a stronger, deeper flow of life and life-energy: evil is that which impairs the life-flow.

  But man’s difficulty is, that he can’t have life for the asking. “He asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest it him: even length of days for ever and ever.” There’s a pretty motto for the tomb!

  It isn’t length of days for ever and ever that a man wants. It is strong life within himself, while he lives.

  But how to get it? You may be as healthy as a cow, and yet have fear inside you, because your life is not enough.

  We know, really, that we can’t have life for the asking, nor find it by seeking, nor get it by striving. The river flows into us from behind and below. We must turn our backs to it, and go ahead. The faster we go ahead, the stronger the river rushes into us. The moment we turn round to embrace the river of life, it ebbs away, and we see nothing but a stony fiumara.

  We must go ahead.

  But which way is ahead?

  We don’t know.

  We only know that, continuing in the way we are going, the river of life flows feebler and feebler in us, and we lose all sense of vital direction. We begin to talk about vitamines. We become idiotic. We cunningly prepare our own suicide.

  This is the philosophic problem: to find the way ahead.

  Allons! — there is no road before us.

  Plato said that ahead, ahead was the perfect Idea, gleaming in the brow of the dragon.

  We have pretty well caught up with the perfect Idea, and we find it a sort of vast, white, polished tomb-stone.

  If the mouth of the serpent is the open grave, into which the tail disappears, then three cheers for the Logos, and down she goes.

  We children of a later Pa, know that Life is real, Life is earnest, and the Grave is not its Goal.

  Let us side-step.

  All goals become graves.

  Every goal is a grave, when you get there.

  Well, I came out of an egg-cell, like an amoeba, and I go into the grave. I can’t help it. It’s not my fault, and it’s not my business.

  I don’t want eternal life, nor length of days for ever and ever. Nothing so long drawn out.

  I give up all that sort of stuff.

  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 Peter1 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:

  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 Gree
k 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 Flatfoot, the brown hen, and from her to me.

  I shall leave off addressing her: “Oh my flatfooted 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 re- merging 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 cavemen 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!