Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

by D. H. Lawrence

  The great magnetic or dynamic center of first-consciousness acts powerfully at the solar plexus. Here the child knows beyond all knowledge. It does not see with the eyes, it cannot perceive, much less conceive. Nothing can it apprehend; the eyes are a strange plas- mic, nascent darkness. Yet from the belly it knows, with a directness of knowledge that frightens us and may even seem abhorrent. The mother, also, from the bowels knows her child — as she can never, never know it from the head. There is no thought nor speech, only direct, ventral gurglings and cooings. From the passional nerve-center of the solar plexus in the mother passes direct, unspeakable effluence and intercommunication, sheer effluent contact with the palpitating nerve- center in the belly of the child. Knowledge, unspeakable knowledge interchanged, which must be diluted by eternities of materialization before they can come to expression.

  It is like a lovely, suave, fluid, creative electricity that flows in a circuit between the great nerve-centers in mother and child. The electricity of the universe is a sundering force. But this lovely polarized vitalism is creative. It passes in a circuit between the two poles of the passional unconscious in the two now sepa rated beings. It establishes in each that first primal consciousness which is the sacred, all- containing head-stream of all our consciousness.

  But this is not all. The flux between mother and child is not all sweet unison. There is as well the continually widening gap. A wonderful rich communion, and at the same time a continually increasing cleavage. If only we could realize that all through life these are the two synchronizing activities of love, of creativity. For the end, the goal, is the perfecting of each single individuality, unique in itself — which cannot take place without a perfected harmony between the beloved, a harmony which depends on the at-last-clarified singleness of each being, a singleness equilibrized, polarized in one by the counter-posing singleness of the other.

  So the child. In its wonderful unison with the mother it is at the same time extricating itself into single, separate, independent existence. The one process, of unison, cannot go on without the other process, of purified severance. At first the child cleaves back to the old source. It clings and adheres. The sympathetic center of unification, or at least unison, alone seems awake. The child wails with the strange desolation of severance, wails for the old connection. With joy and peace it returns to the breast, almost as to the womb.

  But not quite. Even in sucking it discovers its new identity and power. Its own new, separate power. It draws itself back suddenly; it waits. It has heard something? No. But another center has flashed awake. The child stiffens itself and holds back. What is it, wind? Stomach-ache? Not at all. Listen to some of the screams. The ears can hear deeper than eyes can see. The first scream of the ego. The scream of asserted isolation. The scream of revolt from connection, the revolt from union. There is a violent anti- maternal motion, anti-everything. There is a refractory, bad-tempered negation of everything, a hurricane of temper. What then? After such tremendous unison as the womb implies, no wonder there are storms of rage and separation. The child is screaming itself rid of the old womb, kicking itself in a blind paroxysm into freedom, into separate, negative independence.

  So be it, there must be paroxysms, since there must be independence. Then the mother gets angry too. It affects her, though perhaps not as badly as it affects outsiders. Nothing acts more direct on the great primal nerve- centers than the screaming of an infant, this blind screaming negation of connections. It is the friction of irritation itself. Everybody is implicated, just as they would be if the air were surcharged with electricity. The mother is perhaps less affected because she understands primarily, or because she is polarized directly with the child. Yet she, too, must be angry, in her measure, inevitably.

  It is a blind, almost mechanistic effort on the part of the new organism to extricate itself from cohesion with the circumambient universe. It applies direct to the mother. But it affects everybody. The great centers of response vibrate with a maddening, sometimes unbearable friction. What centers? Not the great sympathetic plexus this time, but its corresponding voluntary ganglion. The’ great ganglion of the spinal system, the lumbar ganglion, negatively polarizes the solar plexus in the primal psychic activity of a human individual. When a child screams with temper, it sends out from the lumbar ganglion violent waves of frictional repudiation, extraordinary. The little back has an amazing power once it stiffens itself. In the lumbar ganglion the unconscious now vibrates tremendously in the activity of sundering, separation. Mother and child, polarized, are primarily affected. Often the mother is so sure of her possession of the child that she is almost unmoved. But the child continues, till the frictional response is roused in the mother, her anger rises, there is a flash, an outburst like lightning. And then the storm subsides. The pure act of sundering is effected. Each being is clarified further into its own single, individual self, further perfected, separated.

  Hence a duality, now, in primal consciousness in the infant. The warm rosy abdomen, tender with chuckling unison, and the little back strengthening itself. The child kicks away, into independence. It stiffens its spine in the strength of its own private and separate, inviolable existence. It will admit now of no trespass. It is awake now in a new pride, a new self-assertion. The sense of antagonistic freedom is aroused. Clumsy old adhesions must be ruthlessly fused. And so, from the lumbar ganglion the fiery-tempered infant asserts its new, blind will.

  And as the child fights the mother fights. Sometimes she fights to keep her refractory child, and sometimes she fights to kick him off, as a mare kicks off her too-babyish foal. It is the great voluntary center of the unconscious flashing into action. Flashing from the deep lumbar ganglion in the mother to the newly- awakened, corresponding center in the child goes the swift negative current, setting each of them asunder in clean individuality. So long as the force meets its polarized response all is well. When a force flashes and has no response, there is devastation. How weary in the back is the nursing mother whose great center of repudiation is suppressed or weak; how a child droops if only the sympathetic unison is established.

  So, the polarity of the dynamic consciousness, from the very start of life! Direct flowing and flashing of two consciousness-streams, active in the bringing forth of an individual being. The sweet commingling, the sharp clash of opposition. And no possibility of creative development without this polarity, this dual circuit of direct, spontaneous, honest interchange. No hope of life apart from this. The primal unconscious pulsing in its circuits between two beings: love and wrath, cleaving and repulsion, inglutination and excrementa- tion. What is the good of inventing “ideal” behavior? How order the path of the unconscious? For let us now realize that we cannot,

  even with the best intentions, proceed to order the path of our own unconscious without vitally deranging the life-flow of those connected with us. If you disturb the current at one pole, it must be disturbed at the other. Here is a new moral aspect to life.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER

  IN asserting that the seat of consciousness in a young infant is in the abdomen, we do not pretend to suggest that all the other conscious-centers are utterly dormant. Once a child is born, the whole nervous and cerebral system comes awake, even the brain’s memories begin to glimmer, recognition and cognition soon begin to take place. But the spontaneous control and all the prime developing activity derive from the great affective centers of the abdomen. In the solar plexus is the first great fountain and issue of infantile consciousness. There, beneath the navel, lies the active human first-mind, the prime unconscious. From the moment of conception, when the first nucleus is formed, to the moment of death, when this same nucleus breaks again, the first great active center of human consciousness lies in the solar plexus.

  The movement of development in any creature is, however, towards a florescent individuality. The ample, mature, unfolded individual stands perfect, perfect in himself, but also perfect in his harmonious relation to t
hose nearest him and to all the universe. Whilst only the one great center of consciousness is awake, in the abdomen, the infant has no separate existence, his whole nature is contained in the conjunction with the parent. As soon as the complementary negative pole arouses the voluntary center of the lumbar ganglion, there is at once a retraction into independence and an assertion of singleness. The back strengthens itself.

  But still the circuit of polarity, dual as it is, positive and negative from the positive- sympathetic and the negative-voluntary poles, still depends on the duality of two beings — it is still extra-individual. Each individual is vitally dependent on the other, for the life circuit.

  Let us consider for a moment the kind of consciousness manifested at the two great primary centers. At the solar plexus the new psyche acts in a mode of attractive vitalism, drawing its objective unto itself as by vital magnetism. Here it drinks in, as it were, the contiguous universe, as during the womb- period it drank from the living continuum of the mother. It is darkly self-centered, exultant and positive in its own existence. It is all-in-all to itself, its own great subject. It knows no objective. It only knows its own vital potency, which potency draws the external object unto itself, subjectively, as the blood-stream was drawn into the foetus, by subjective attraction. Here the psyche is to itself the All. Blindly self-positive.

  This is the first mode of consciousness for every living thing — fascinating in all young things. The second half of the same mode commences as soon as direct activity sets up in the lumbar ganglion. Then the psyche recoils upon itself, in its first reaction against continuity with the outer universe. It recoils even against its own mode of assimilatory unison. Even it must break off, interrupt the great psychic-assimilation process which goes on at the sympathic center. It must recoil clean upon itself, break loose from.any attachment whatsoever. And then it must try its power, often playfully.

  This reaction is still subjective. When a child stiffens and draws away, when it screams with pure temper, it takes no note of that from which it recoils. It has no objective consciousness of that from which it reacts, the mother principally. It is like a swimmer endlessly kicking the water away behind him, with strong legs vividly active from the spinal ganglia. Like a man in a boat pushing off from the shore, it merely thrusts away, in order to ride free, ever more free. It is a purely subjective motion, in the negative direction.

  After our long training in objectivation, and our epoch of worship of the objective mode, it is perhaps difficult for us to realize the strong, blind power of the unconscious on its first plane of activity. It is something quite different from what we call egoism — which is really mentally derived — for the ego is merely the sum-total of what we conceive ourselves to be. The powerful pristine subjectivity of the unconscious on its first plane is, on the other hand, the root of all our consciousness and being, darkly tenacious. Here we are grounded, say what we may. And if we break the spell of this first subjective mode, we break our own main root and live rootless, shiftless, groundless.

  So that the powerful subjectivity of the unconscious, where the self is all-in-all unto itself, active in strong desirous psychic assimilation or in direct repudiation of the contiguous universe; this first plane of psychic activity, polarized in the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion of each individual but established in a circuit with the corresponding poles of another individual: this is the first scope of life and being for every human individual, and is beyond question. But we must again remark that the whole circuit is established between two individuals — that neither is a free thing- unto-itself — and that the very fact of estab lished polarity between the two maintains that correspondence between the individual entity and the external universe which is the clue to all growth and development. The pure subjectivity of the first plane of consciousness is no more selfish than the pure objectivity of any other plane. How can it be? How can any form of pure, balanced polarity between two vital individuals be in any sense selfish on the part of one individual? We have got our moral values all wrong.

  Save for healthy instinct, the moralistic human race would have exterminated itself long ago. And yet man must be moral, at the very root moral. The essence of morality is the basic desire to preserve the perfect correspondence between the self and the object, to have no trespass and no breach of integrity, nor yet any refaulture in the vitalistic interchange.

  As yet we see the unconscious active on one plane only and entirely dependent on two individuals. But immediately following the establishment of the circuit of the powerful, subjective, abdominal plane comes the quivering of the whole system into a new degree of consciousness. And two great upper centers are awake.

  The diaphragm really divides the human body, psychically as well as organically. The two centers beneath the diaphragm are centers of dark subjectivity, centripetal, assimilative. Once these are established, in the thorax the two first centers of objective consciousness become active, with ever-increasing intensity. The great thoracic sympathetic plexus rouses like a sun in the breast, the thoracic ganglion fills the shoulders with strength. There are now two planes of primary consciousness — the first, the lower, the subjective unconscious, active beneath the diaphragm, and the second upper, objective plane, active above the diaphragm, in the breast.

  Let us realize that the subjective ana objective of the unconscious are not the same as the subjective and the objective of the mind. Here we have no concepts to deal with, no static objects in the shape of ideas. We have none of that tiresome business of establishing the relation between the mind and its own ideal object, or the discriminating between the ideal thing-in-itself and the mind of which it is the content. We are spared that hateful thing-in-itself, the idea, which is at once so all-important and so nothing. We are on straightforward solid ground; there is no abstraction.

  The unconscious subjectivity is, in its positive manifestation, a great imbibing, and in its negative, a definite blind rejection. What we call an unconscious rejection. This subjec tivity embraces alike creative emotion and physical function. It includes alike the sweet and untellable communion of love between the mother and child, the irrational reaction into separation between the two, and also the physical functioning of sucking and urination. Psychic and physical development run parallel, though they are forever distinct. The child sucking, the child urinating, this is the child acting from the great subjective centers, positive and negative. When the child sucks, there is a sympathetic circuit between it and the mother, in which the sympathetic plexus in the mother acts as negative or submissive pole to the corresponding plexus in the child. In urination there is a corresponding circuit in the voluntary centers, so that a mother seems gratified, and is gratified, inevitably, by the excremental functioning of her child. She experiences a true polar reaction.

  Child and mother have, in the first place, no objective consciousness of each other, and certainly no idea of each other. Each is a blind desideratum to the other. The strong love between them is effectual in the great abdominal centers, where all love, real love, is primarily based. Of that reflected or moon- love, derived from the head, that spurious form of love which predominates to-day, we do not speak here. It has its root in the idea: the beloved is a mental objective, endlessly appreciated, criticized, scrutinized, exhausted. This has nothing to do with the active unconscious.

  Having realized that the unconscious sparkles, vibrates, travels in a strong subjective stream from the abdominal centers, connecting the child directly with the mother at corresponding poles of vitalism, we realize that the unconscious contains nothing ideal,

  nothing in the least conceptual, and hence nothing in the least personal, since personality, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective self. So the first analyses are, or should be, so impersonal that the so-called human relations are not involved. The first relationship is neither personal nor biological — a fact which psychoanalysis has not succeeded in grasping.

  For example. A child screams
with terror at the touch of fur; another child loves the touch of fur, and purrs with pleasure. How now? Is it a complex? Did the father have a beard?

  It is possible. But all-too-human. The physical result of rubbing fur is to set up a certain amount of frictional electricity. Frictional electricity is one of the sundering forces. It corresponds to the voluntary forces exerted at the lower spinal ganglia, the forces of anger and retraction into independence and power. An over-sympathetic child will scream with fear at the touch of fur; a refractory child will purr with pleasure. It is a reaction which involves even deeper things than sex — the primal constitution of the elementary psyche. A sympathetically overbalanced child has a horror of the electric-fric- tional force such as is emitted from the fur of a black cat, creature of rapacity. The same delights a fierce-willed child.

  But we must admit at the same time that from earliest days a child is subject to the definite conscious psychic influences of its surroundings and will react almost automatically to a conscious-passional suggestion from the mother. In this way personal sex is prematurely evoked, and real complexes are set up. But these derive not from the spontaneous unconscious. They are in a way dictated from the deliberate, mental consciousness, even if involuntarily. Again they are a result of mental subjectivity, self-consciousness — so different from the primal subjectivity of the unconscious.

  To return, however, to the pure unconscious. When the upper centers flash awake, a whole new field of consciousness and spontaneous activity is opened out. The great sympathetic plexus of the breast is the heart’s mind. This thoracic plexus corresponds directly in the upper man to the solar plexus in the lower. But it is a correspondence in creative opposition. From the sympathetic center of the breast as from a window the unconscious goes forth seeking its object, to dwell upon it. When a child leans its breast against its mother it becomes filled with a primal awareness of her — not of itself desiring her or partaking of her — but of her as she is in her self. This is the first great acquisition of primal objective knowledge, the objective content of the unconscious. Such knowledge we call the treasure of the heart. When the ancients located the first seat of consciousness in the heart, they were neither misguided nor playing with metaphor. For by consciousness they meant, as usual, objective consciousness only. And from the cardiac plexus goes forth that strange effluence of the self which seeks and dwells upon the beloved, lovingly roving like the fingers of an infant or a blind man over the face of the treasured object, gathering her mould into itself and transferring her mould forever into its own deep unconscious psyche. This is the first acquiring of objective knowledge, sightless, unspeakably direct. It is a dwelling of the child’s unconscious within the form of the mother, the gathering of a pure, eternal impression. So the soul stores itself with dynamic treasures; it verily builds its own tissue of such treasure, the tissue of the developing body, each cell stored with creative dynamic content. ^