Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

by D. H. Lawrence

  The breasts themselves are as two eyes. We do not know how much the nipples of the breast, both in man and woman, serve primarily as poles of vital conscious effluence and connection. We do not know how the nipples of the breast are as fountains leaping into the universe, or as little lamps irradiating the contiguous world, to the soul in quest.

  But certainly from the passional conscious- center of the breast goes forth the first joyous discovery of the beloved, the first objective discovery of the contiguous universe, the first ministration of the self to that which is beyond the self. So, functionally, the mother ministers with the milk of her breast. But this is a yielding to the great lower plexus, the basic solar plexus. It is the breast as part also of the alimentary system — a special thing.

  In sucking the hands also come awake. It is strange to notice the pictures by the old masters of the Madonna and Child. Sometimes the strange round belly of the Infant seems the predominant mystery-center, and sometimes from the tiny breast it is as if a delicate light glowed, the light of love. As if the breast should illumine the outer world in its seeking administering love. As if the breast of the Infant glimmered its light of discovery on the adoring Mother, and she bowed, submissive to the revelation.

  The little hands and arms wave, circulate, trying to touch, to grasp, to know. To grasp in caress, not to reive. To grasp in order to identify themselves with the cherished discovery, to realize the beloved. To cherish, to realize the beloved. To administer the out ward-seeking self to the beloved. We give this the exclusive name of love. But it is indeed only the one direction of love, the outgoing from the lovely center of the breast — the nipple0 seeking, the hands delicately, caressively exploring, the eyes at last waking to perception. The eyes, the hands, these wake and are alert from the center of the breast. But the ears and feet move from the deep lower centers — the recipient ears, imbibing vibrations, the feet which press the resistant earth, controlled from the powerful lower ganglia of the spine. And thus great scope of activity opens, in the hands that wave and explore, the eyes that try to perceive, the legs, the little knees that thrust, thrust away, the small feet that curl and twinkle upon themselves, ready for the obstinate earth.

  And so, also a wholeness is established within the individual. The two fields of conscious ness, the first upper and the first lower, are based upon a correspondence of polarity. The first great complex circuit is now set up within the individual, between the upper and lower centers. The individual consciousness has now its own integral independent existence and activity, apart from external connection. It has its right to be alone.

  CHAPTER V

  THE LOVER AND THE BELOVED

  Consciousness develops on successive planes. On each plane there is the dual polarity, positive and negative, of the sympathetic and voluntary nerve centers. The first plane is established between the poles of the sympathetic solar plexus and the voluntary lumbar ganglion. This is the active first plane of the subjective unconscious, from which the whole of consciousness arises.

  Immediately, succeeding the first plane of subjective dynamic consciousness arises the corresponding first plane of objective consciousness, the objective unconscious, polarized in the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion, in the breast. There is a perfect cor-

  respondence in difference between the first abdominal and the first thoracic planes. These two planes polarize each other in a fourfold polarity, which makes the first great field of individual, self-dependent consciousness.

  Each pole of the active unconscious manifests a specific activity and gives rise to a specific kind of dynamic or creative consciousness. On each plane, the negative voluntary pole complements the positive sympathetic pole, and yet the consciousness originating from the complementary poles is not merely negative versus positive, it is categorically different, opposite. Each is pure and perfect in itself.

  But the moment we enter the two planes of corresponding consciousness, lower and upper, we find a whole new range of complements. The upper, dynamic-objective plane is complementary to the lower, dynamic-subjective.

  The mystery of creative opposition exists all the time between the two planes, and this unison in opposition between the two planes forms the first whole field of consciousness. Within the individual the polarity is fourfold. In a relation between two individuals the polarity is already eightfold.

  Now before we can have any sort of scientific, comprehensive psychology we shall have to establish the nature of the consciousness at each of the dynamic poles — the nature of the consciousness, the direction of the dynamic- vital flow, the resultant physical-organic development and activity. This we must do before we can even begin to consider a genuine system of education. Education now is widely at sea. Having ceased to steer by the pole-star of the mind, having ceased to aim at the cramming of the intellect, it veers hither and thither hopelessly and absurdly. Education can never become a serious science until the human psyche is properly understood. And the human psyche cannot begin to be understood until we enter the dark continent of the unconscious. Having begun to explore the unconscious, we find we must go from center to center, chakra to chakra, to use an old esoteric word. We must patiently determine the psychic manifestation at each center, and moreover, as we go, we must discover the psychic results of the interaction, the polarized interaction between the dynamic centers both within and without the individual.

  Here is a real job for the scientist, a job which eternity will never see finished though even to-morrow may see it well begun. It is a job which will at last free us from the most hateful of all shackles, the shackles of ideas and ideals. It is a great task of the liberators, those who work forever for the liberation of the free spontaneous psyche, the effective soul.

  In these few chapters we hope to hint at the establishment of the first field of the unconscious — at the nature of the consciousness manifested at each pole — and at the already complex range of dynamic polarity between the various poles. So far we have given the merest suggestion of the nature of the first plane of the unconscious and have attempted the opening of the second or upper plane. We profess no scientific exactitude, particularly in terminology. We merely wish intelligibly to open a way.

  To balance the solar plexus wakes the great plexus of the breast. In our era this plexus is the great planet of our psychic universe. In the previous sympathetic era the flower of the universal blossomed in the navel. But since Egypt the sun of creative activity beams from the breast, the heart of the supreme Man. This is to us the source of light — the loving heart, the Sacred Heart. Against this we contrast the devouring darkness of the lower man, the devouring whirlpool beneath the navel. Even theosophists don’t realize that the universal lotus really blossoms in the abdomen — that our lower man, our dark, devouring whirlpool, was once the creative source, in human estimation.

  But in calling the heart the sun, the source of light, we are biologically correct even. For the roots of vision are in the cardiac plexus. But if we were to consider the heart itself, not its great nerve plexus, we should have to go further than the nervous system. If we had to consider the whole lambent blood-stream, we should have to descend too deep for our unpractised minds. Suffice it here to hint that the solar plexus is the first and main clue to the great alimentary-sexual activity in man, an activity at once functional and creatively emotional, whilst the cardiac plexus is first and main clue to the respiratory system and the active-productive manifestations. The mouth and nostrils are gates to each great center, upper and lower — even the breasts have this duality. Yet the clue to respiration and hand activity and vision is in the breast, while the clue to alimentation and passion and sex is in the lower centers. The duality goes so far and is so profound. And the polarity! The great organs, as well as the lymphatic glands, depend each on its own specific center of the unconscious; each is derived from a specific dynamic conscious-clue, what we might almost call a soul-cell. The inherent unconscious, or soul, is the first nucleus subdivide
d, and from its own subdivisions produced, from its own still-creative constellated nuclei, the organs, glands, nerve-

  centers of the human organism. This is our answer to materialism and idealism alike. The nuclear unconscious brought forth organs and consciousness alike. And the great nuclei of the unconscious still lie active in the great living nerve-centers, which nerve centers, from the original solar-plexus to the conclusive brain, form one great chain of dual polarity and amplified consciousness.

  All this is a mere incoherent stammering, broken first-words. To return to the direct path of our progress. It is not merely a metaphor, to call the cardiac plexus the sun, the Light. It is metaphor in the first place, because the conscious effluence which proceeds from this first upper center in the breast goes forth and plays upon its external object, as phosphorescent waves might break upon a ship and reveal its form. The transferring of the objective knowledge to the psyche is al most the same as vision. It is root-vision. It happens before the eyes open. It is the first tremendous mode of apprehension, still dark, but moving towards light. It is the eye in the breast. Psychically, it is basic objective apprehension. Dynamically, it is love, devotional, administering love.

  Now we make already a discrimination between the two natures, even of this first upper consciousness. First from the breast flows the devotional, self-outpouring of love, love which gives its all to the beloved. And back again returns to the ingathered objective consciousness, the first objective content of the psyche.

  This argues the dual polarity. From the positive pole of the cardiac plexus flows out that effluence which we call selfless love. It is really self-devoting love, not self-less. This is the one form of love we recognize. But from the strong ganglion of the shoulders pro ceeds the negative circuit, which searches and explores the beloved, bringing back pure objective apprehension, not critical, in the mental sense, and yet passionally discriminative.

  Let us discriminate between the two upper poles. From the sympathetic heart goes forth pure administering, like sunbeams. But from the strong thoracic center of the shoulders is exerted a strong rejective force, a force which, pressing upon the object of attention, in the mode of separation, succeeds in transferring to itself the impression of the object to which it has attended. This is the other half of devotional love — perfect knowledge of the beloved.

  Now this knowledge in itself argues a contradistinction between the lover and the beloved. It is the very mould of the contradistinction. It is the impress upon the lover of that which was separate from him, resistant to him, in the beloved. Objective knowledge is always of this kind — a knowledge based on unchangeable difference, a knowledge truly of the gulf that lies between the two beings nearest to each other.

  In two kinds, then, consists the activity of the unconscious on the first upper plane. Primal is the blissful sense of ineffable transfusion with the beloved, which we call love, and of which our era has perhaps enjoyed the full. It is a mode of creative consciousness essentially objective, but yet it preserves no object in the memory, even the dynamic memory. It is a great objective flux, a streaming forth of the self in blissful departure, like sunbeams streaming.

  If this activity alone worked, then the self would utterly depart from its own integrity; it would pass out and merge with the beloved — which passing out and merging is the goal of enthusiasts. But living beings are kept integral by the activity of the great negative pole. From the thoracic ganglion also the unconscious goes forth in its quest of the beloved. But what does it go to seek? Real objective knowledge. It goes to find out the wonders which itself does not contain and to transfer these wonders, as by impress, into itself. It goes out to determine the limits of its own existence also.

  This is the second half of the activity of upper or self-less or spiritual love. There is a tremendous great joy in exploring and discovering the beloved. For what is the beloved? She is that which I myself am not Knowing the breach between us, the unclose- able gulf, I in the same breath realize her features. In the first mode of the upper consciousness there is perfect surpassing of all sense of division between the self and the be loved. In the second mode the very discovery of the features of the beloved contains the full realization of the irreparable, or unsurpassable, gulf. This is objective knowledge, as distinct from objective emotion. It contains always the element of self-amplification, as if the self were amplified by knowledge in the beloved. It should also contain the knowledge of the limits of the self.

  So it is with the Infant. Curious indeed is the look on the face of the Holy Child, in Leonardo’s pictures, in Botticelli’s, even in the beautiful Filippo Lippi. It is the Mother who crosses her hands on her breast, in supreme acquiescence, recipient; it is the Child who gazes, with a kind of objective, strangely discerning, deep apprehension of her, startling to northern eyes. It is a gaze by no means of innocence, but of profound, pre-visual discerning. So plainly is the child looking across the gulf and fixing the gulf by very intentness of pre-visual apprehension, that instinctively the ordinary northerner finds Him antipathetic. It seems almost a cruel objectivity.

  Perhaps between lovers, in the objective way of love, either the voluntary separative mode predominates, or the sympathetic mode of communion — one or the other. In the north we have worshipped the latter mode. But in the south it is different; the objective sapient manner of love seems more natural. Moreover in the face of the Infant lingers nearly always the dark look of the pristine mode of consciousness, the powerful self-centering subjective mode, established in the lower body — the so-called sensual mode.

  But take our own children. A small infant, as soon as it really begins to direct its attention. How often it seems to be gazing across a strange distance at the mother; what a curious look is on its face, as if the mother were an object set across a far gulf, distinct however, discernible, even obtrusive in her need to be apprehended. A mother will chase away this look with kisses. But she cannot chase away the inevitable effluence of separatist, objective* apprehension. She herself sometimes will fall into a half-trance, and the child on her lap will resolve itself into a strange and separate object. She does not criticize or analyze him. She does not even perceive him. But as if rapt, she apprehends him lying there, an unfathomable and inscrutable objective, outside herself, never to be grasped or included in herself. She seizes as it were a sudden and final, objective impression of him. And the conclusive sensation is one of finality. Something final has happened to her. She has the strange sensation of unalterable certainty, a sensation at once profoundly gratifying and rather ap palling. She possesses something, a certain entity of primal, pre-conscious knowledge. Let the child be what he may, her knowledge of him is her own, forever and final. It gives her a sense of wealth in possession, and of power. It gives her a sense also of fatality. From the very satisfaction of the objective finality derives the sense of fatality. It is a knowledge of the other being, but a knowledge which contains at the same time a final assurance of the eternal and insuperable gulf which lies between beings — the isolation of the self first.

  Thus the first plane of the upper consciousness — the outgoing, the sheer and unspeakable bliss of the sense of union, communion, at-one- ness with the beloved — and then the complementary objective realization of the beloved, the realization of that which is apart, different. This realization is like riches to the ob jective consciousness. It is, as it were, the adding of another self to the own self, through the mode of apprehension. Through the mode of dynamic objective apprehension, which in our day we have gradually come to call imagination, a man may in his time add on to himself the whole of the universe, by increasing pristine realization of the universal. This in mysticism is called the progress to infinity — that is, in the modern, truly male mysticism. The older female mysticism means something different by the infinite.

  But anyhow there it is. The attaining to the Infinite, about which the mystics have rhapsodized, is a definite process in the developing unconscious, but a proces
s in the development only of the objective-apprehensive centers — an exclusive process, naturally.

  A soul cannot come into its own through that love alone which is unison. If it stress the one mode, the sympathetic mode, beyond a certain point, it breaks its own integrity, and corruption sets in in the living organism. On both planes of love, upper and lowTer, the two modes must act complementary to one another, the sympathetic and the separatist. It is the absolute failure to see this, that has torn the modern world into two halves, the one half warring for the voluntary, objective, separatist control, the other for the pure sympathetic. The individual psyche divided against itself divides the world against itself, and an unthinkable progress of calamity ensues unless there be a reconciliation.