Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

by D. H. Lawrence

  We are now in the last stages of idealism. And psychoanalysis alone has the courage necessary to conduct us through these last stages. The identity of love with sex, the single necessity for fulfilment through love, these are our fixed ideals. We must fulfil these ideals in their extremity. And this brings us finally to incest, even incest-worship. We have no option, whilst our ideals stand.

  Why? Because incest is the logical conclusion of our ideals, when these ideals have to be carried into passional effect. And idealism has no escape from logic. And once he has built himself in the shape of any ideal,

  man will go to any logical length rather than abandon his ideal corpus. Nay, some great cataclysm has to throw him down and destroy the whole fabric of his life before the motor- principle of his dominant ideal is destroyed. Hence psychoanalysis as the advance-guard of science, the evangel of the last ideal liberty. For of course there is a great fascination in a completely effected idealism. Man is then undisputed master of his own fate, and captain of his own soul. But better say engine-driver, for in truth he is no more than the little god in the machine, this master of fate. He has invented his own automatic principles, and he works himself according to them, like any little mechanic inside the works.

  But ideal or not, we are all of us between the pit and the pendulum, or the walls of red- hot metal, as may be. If we refuse the Freudian pis-aller as a means of escape, we have still to find some way out. For there we are, all of us, trapped in a corner where we cannot, and simply do not know how to fulfil our own natures, passionally. We don’t know in which way fulfilment lies. If psychoanalysis discovers incest, small blame to it.

  Yet we do know this much: that the pushing of the ideal to any further lengths will not avail us anything. We have actually to go back to our own unconscious. But not to the unconscious which is the inverted reflection of our ideal consciousness. We must discover, if we can, the true unconscious, where our life bubbles up in us, prior to any mentality. The first bubbling life in us, which is innocent of any mental alteration, this is the unconscious. It is pristine, not in any way ideal. It is the spontaneous origin from which it behooves us to live.

  What then is the true unconscious? It is not a shadow cast from the mind. It is the spontaneous life-motive in every organism. Where does it begin? It begins where life begins. But that is too vague. It is no use talking about life and the unconscious in bulk. You can talk about electricity, because electricity is a homogeneous force, conceivable apart from any incorporation. But life is inconceivable as a general thing. It exists only in living creatures. So that life begins, now as always, in an individual living creature. In the beginning of the individual living creature is the beginning of life, every time and always, and life has no beginning apart from this. Any attempt at a further generalization takes us merely beyond the consideration of life into the region of mechanical homogeneous force. This is shown in the cosmologies of eastern religions.

  The beginning of life is in the beginning of the first individual creature. You may call the naked, unicellular bit of plasm the first individual, if you like. Mentally, as far as thinkable simplicity goes, it is the first. So that we may say that life begins in the first naked unicellular organism. And where life begins the unconscious also begins. But mark, the first naked unicellular organism is an individual. It is a specific individual, not a mathematical unit, like a unit of force.

  Where the individual begins, life begins. The two are inseparable, life and individuality. And also, where the individual begins, the unconscious, which is the specific life-motive, also begins. We are trying to trace the unconscious to its source. And we find that this source, in all the higher organisms, is the first ovule cell from which an individual organism arises. At the moment of conception, when a procreative male nucleus fuses with the nucleus of the female germ, at that moment does a new unit of life, of consciousness, arise in the universe. Is it not obvious? The unconscious has no other source than this, this first fused nucleus of the ovule.

  Useless to talk about the unconscious as if it were a homogeneous force like electricity. You can only deal with the unconscious when you realize that in every individual organism an individual nature, an individual consciousness, is spontaneously created at the moment of conception. We say created. And by created we mean spontaneously appearing in the universe, out of nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit. It is true that an individual is also generated. By the fusion of two nuclei, male and female, we understand the process of generation. And from the process of generation we may justly look for a new unit, according to the law of cause and effect. As a natural or automatic result of the process of generation we may look for a new unit of existence. But the nature of this new unit must derive from the natures of the parents, also by law. And this we deny. We deny that the nature of any new creature derives from the natures of its parents. The nature of the infant does not follow from the natures of its parents. The nature of the infant is not just a new permuta- tion-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents, something which could never be derived from the natures of all the existent individuals or previous individuals. There is in the nature of the infant something entirely new, underived, underiv- able, something which is, and which will forever remain, causeless. And this something is the unanalyzable, indefinable reality of in dividuality. Every time at the moment of conception of every higher organism an individual nature incomprehensibly arises in the universe, out of nowhere. Granted the whole cause-and-effect process of generation and evolution, still the individual is not explained. The individual unit of consciousness and being which arises at the conception of every higher organism arises by pure creation, by a process not susceptible to understanding, a process which takes place outside the field of mental comprehension, where mentality, which is definitely limited, cannot and does not exist.

  This causeless created nature of the individual being is the same as the old mystery of the divine nature of the soul. Religion was right and science is wrong. Every individual creature has a soul, a specific individual nature the origin of which cannot be found in any cause-and-effect process whatever. Cause-and-effect will not explain even the individuality of a single dandelion. There is no assignable cause, and no logical reason, for individuality. On the contrary, individuality appears in defiance of all scientific law, in defiance even of reason.

  Having established so much, we can really approach the unconscious. By the unconscious we wish to indicate that essential unique nature of every individual creature, which is, by its very nature, unanalyzable, undefinable, inconceivable. It cannot be conceived, it can only be experienced, in every single instance. And being inconceivable, we will call it the unconscious. As a matter of fact, soul would be a better word. By the unconscious we do mean the soul. But the word soul has been vitiated by the idealistic use, until nowadays it means only that which a man conceives him self to be. And that which a man conceives himself to be is something far different from his true unconscious. So we must relinquish the ideal word soul.

  If, however, the unconscious is inconceivable, how do we know it at all? We know it by direct experience. All the best part of knowledge is inconceivable. We know the sun. But we cannot conceive the sun, unless we are willing to accept some theory of burn- inggases, some cause-and-effect nonsense. And even if we do have a mental conception of the sun as a sphere of blazing gas — which it certainly isn’t — we are just as far from knowing what blaze is. Knowledge is always a matter of whole experience, what St. Paul calls knowing in full, and never a matter of mental conception merely. This is indeed the point of all full knowledge: that it is contained mainly within the unconscious, its mental or conscious reference being only a sort of extract or shadow.

  It is necessary for us to know the unconscious, or we cannot live, just as it is necessary for us to know the sun. But we need not explain the unconscious, any more than we need ex
plain the sun. We can’t do either, anyway. We know the sun by beholding him and watching his motions and feeling his changing power. The same with the unconscious. We watch it in all its manifestations, its unfolding incarnations. We watch it in all its processes and its unaccountable evolutions, and these we register.

  For though the unconscious is the creative element, and though, like the soul, it is beyond all law of cause and effect in its totality, yet in its processes of self-realization it follows the laws of cause and effect. The processes of cause and effect are indeed part of the work ing out of this incomprehensible self-realization of the individual unconscious. The great laws of the universe are no more than the fixed habits of the living unconscious.

  What we must needs do is to try to trace still further the habits of the true unconscious, and by mental recognition of these habits break the limits which we have imposed on the movement of the unconscious. For the whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious. We have to try to recognize the true nature and then leave the unconscious itself to prompt new movement and new being — the creative progress.

  What we are suffering from now is the restriction of the unconscious within certain ideal limits. The more we force the ideal the more we rupture the true movement. Once we can admit the known, but incomprehensible, presence of the integral unconscious; once we can trace it home in ourselves and follow its first revealed movements; once we know how it habitually unfolds itself; once we can scientifically determine its laws and processes in ourselves: then at last we can begin to live from the spontaneous initial prompting, instead of from the dead machine-principles of ideas and ideals. There is a whole science of the creative unconscious, the unconscious in its law-abiding activities. And of this science we do not even know the first term. Yes, when we know that the unconscious appears by creation, as a new individual reality in every newly-fertilized germ-cell, then we know the very first item of the new science. But it needs a super-scientific grace before we can admit this first new item of knowledge. It means that science abandons its intellectualist position and embraces the old religious faculty. But it does not thereby become less scientific, it only becomes at last complete in knowledge.

  CHAPTER III

  THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  It is useless to try to determine what is consciousness or what is knowledge. Who cares anyhow, since we know without definitions. But what we fail to know, yet what we must know, is the nature of the pristine consciousness which lies integral and progressive within every functioning organism. The brain is the seat of the ideal consciousness. And ideal consciousness is only the dead end of consciousness, the spun silk. The vast bulk of consciousness is non-cerebral. It is the sap of our life, of all life.

  We are forced to attribute to a star-fish, or to a nettle, its own peculiar and integral con-

  sciousness. This throws us at once out of the ideal castle of the brain into the flux of sap- consciousness. But let us not jump too far in one bound. Let us refrain from taking a sheer leap down the abyss of consciousness, down to the invertebrates and the protococci. Let us cautiously scramble down the human declivities. Or rather let us try to start somewhere near the foot of the calvary of human consciousness. Let us consider the child in the womb. Is the foetus conscious? It must be, since it carries on an independent and progressive self-development. This consciousness obviously cannot be ideal, cannot be cerebral, since it precedes any vestige of cerebration. And yet it is an integral, individual consciousness, having its own single purpose and progression. Where can it be centered, how can it operate, before even nerves are formed? For it does steadily and persistently operate,

  even spinning the nerves and brain as a web for its own motion, like some subtle spider.

  What is the spinning spider of the first human consciousness — or rather, where is the center at which this consciousness lies and spins? Since there must be a center of consciousness in the tiny foetus, it must have been there from the very beginning. There it must have been, in the first fused nucleus of the ovule. And if we could but watch this prime nucleus, we should no doubt realize that throughout all the long and incalculable history of the individual it still remains central and prime, the source and clue of the living unconscious, the origin. As in the first moment of conception, so to the end of life in the individual, the first nucleus remains the creative-productive center, the quick, both of consciousness and of organic development.

  And where in the developed foetus shall we look for this creative-productive quick? Shall we expect it in the brain or in the heart? Surely our own subjective wisdom tells us, what science can verify, that it lies beneath the navel of the folded foetus. Surely that prime center, which is the very first nucleus of the fertilized ovule, lies situated beneath the navel of all womb-born creatures. There, from the beginning, it lay in its mysterious relation to the outer, active universe. There it lay, perfectly associated with the parent body. There it acted on its own peculiar independence, drawing the whole stream of creative blood upon itself, and, spinning within the parental blood-stream, slowly creating or bodying forth its own incarnate amplification. All the time between the quick of life in the foetus and the great outer universe there exists a perfect correspondence, upon which correspondence the astrologers based their sci ence in the days before mental consciousness had arrogated all knowledge unto itself.

  The foetus is not personally conscious. But then what is personality if not ideal in its origin? The foetus is, however, radically, individually conscious. From the active quick, the nuclear center, it remains single and integral in its activity. At this center it distinguishes itself utterly from the surrounding universe, whereby both are modified. From this center the whole individual arises, and upon this center the whole universe, by implication, impinges. For the fixed and stable universe of law and matter, even the whole cosmos, would wear out and disintegrate if it did not rest and find renewal in the quick center of creative life in individual creatures.

  And since this center has absolute location in the first fertilized nucleus, it must have location still in the developed foetus, and in the mature man. And where is this location in the unborn infant? Beneath the burning influx of the navel. Where is it in the adult man? Still beneath the navel. As primal affective center it lies within the solar plexus of the nervous system.

  We do not pretend to use technical language. But surely our meaning is plain even to correct scientists, when we assert that in all mammals the center of primal, constructive consciousness and activity lies in the middle front of the abdomen, beneath the navel, in the great nerve center called the solar plexus. How do we know? We feel it, as we feel hunger or love or hate. Once we know what we are, science can proceed to analyze our knowledge, demonstrate its truth or its untruth.

  We all of us know what it is to handle a new born, or at least a quite young infant. We know what it is to lay the hand on the round little abdomen, the round, pulpy little head. We know where is life, where is pulp. We have seen blind puppies, blind kittens crawling. They give strange little cries. Whence these cries? Are they mental exclamations? As in a ventriloquist, they come from the stomach. There lies the wakeful center. There speaks the first consciousness, the audible unconscious’, in the squeak of these infantile things, which is so curiously and indescribably moving, reacting direct upon the great abdominal center, the preconscious mind in man.

  There at the navel, the first rupture has taken place, the first break in continuity. There is the scar of dehiscence, scar at once of our pain and splendor of individuality. Here is the mark of our isolation in the uni verse, stigma and seal of our free, perfect singleness. Hence the lotus of the navel. Hence the mystic contemplation of the navel. It is the upper mind losing itself in the lower first-mind, that which is last in consciousness reverting to that which is first.

  A mother w
ill realize better than a philosopher. She knows the rupture which has finally separated her child into its own single, free existence. She knows the strange, sensitive rose of the navel: how it quivers conscious; all its pain, its want for the old connection; all its joy and chuckling exultation in sheer organic singleness and individual liberty.

  The powerful, active psychic center in a new child is the great solar plexus of the sympathetic system. From this center the child is drawn to the mother again, crying, to heal the new wound, to re-establish the old oneness.

  This center directs the little mouth which, blind and anticipatory, seeks the breast. How could it find the breast, blind and mindless little mouth? But it needs no eyes nor mind. From the great first-mind of the abdomen it moves direct, with an anterior knowledge almost like magnetic propulsion, as if the little mouth were drawn or propelled to the maternal breast by vital magnetism, whose center of directive control lies in the solar plexus.

  In a measure, this taking of the breast reinstates the old connection with the parent body. It is a strange sinking back to the old unison, the old organic continuum — a recovery of the pre-natal state. But at the same time it is a deep, avid gratification in drinking- in the sustenance of a new individuality. It is a deep gratification in the exertion of a new, voluntary power. The child acts now separately from its own individual center and ex erts still a control over the adjacent universe, the parent body.

  So the warm life-stream passes again from the parent into the aching abdomen of the severed child. Life cannot progress without these ruptures, severances, cataclysms; pain is a living reality, not merely a deathly. Why haven’t we the courage for life-pains? If we could depart from our old tenets of the mind, if we could fathom our own unconscious sapience, we should find we have courage and to spare. We are too mentally domesticated.