Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

by D. H. Lawrence

  What kind of consciousness is it? We must look to the great affective centres, emotional and volitional. And we shall find that in the tiny infant there are two emotional centres primal and intensely active, with two corresponding volitional centres. We need go through no tortures of scientific psychology to get at the truth. We need only take direct heed of the infant.

  And then we shall realize that the busy business of consciousness is not taking place beneath the soft little skull, but beneath the little navel, and in the midst of the little breast. Here are the two great affective centres of the so-called emotional consciousness. Which emotional consciousness, according to our idealistic psychology, is only some sort of force, like imagination, heat, or electric current. This force which arises and acts from the primal emotional-affective centres is supposed to be impersonal, general, truly a mechanical universal force, like electricity or heat or any kinetic force.

  Impersonal, and having nothing to do with the individual. The personal and the individual element does not enter until we reach mental consciousness. Personality, individuality, depends on mentality. So our psychology assumes. In the mind, a child is personal and individual, it is itself. Outside the mind, it is an instrument, a dynamo, if you like, a unit of difficult kinetic force betraying a sort of automatic consciousness, the same in every child, undifferentiated. In the same way, according to our psychology, animals have no personality and no individuality, because they have no mental cognition. They have a certain psyche which they hold in common. What is true of one rabbit is true of another. All we can speak of is “the psychology of the rabbit,” one rabbit having just the same psyche as another. Why? Because it has no recognizable cognition: it has only instinct.

  We know this is all wrong, because, having met a rabbit or two, we have seen quite clearly that each separate rabbit was a separate, distinct rabbit — individual, with a specific nature of his own. We should be sorry to attribute a mind to him. But he has consciousness, and quite an individual consciousness too. It is notorious that human beings see foreigners all alike. To an English sailor the faces of a crowd of Chinese are all alike. But that is because the English sailor doesn’t see the difference, not because the difference doesn’t exist. Why, each fat domestic sheep, mere clod as it seems, has a distinct individual nature of its own, known to a shepherd after a very brief acquaintance.

  So here we are with the great affective centres, volitional and emotional. The two chief emotional centres in the baby are the solar plexus of the abdomen and the cardiac plexus of the breast. The corresponding ganglia of the volitional system are the lumbar ganglion and the thoracic ganglion.

  And we may as well leave off at once regarding these great affective centres as merely instrumental, like little dynamos and accumulators and so on. Nonsense. They are primary, integral mind- centres, each of a specific nature. There is a specific form of knowing takes place at each of these centres, without any mental reference at all. And the specific form of knowing at each of the great affective centres in the infant is of an individual and personal nature, peculiar to the very soul and being of that infant.

  That is, at the great solar plexus an infant knows, in primary, mindless knowledge; and from this centre he acts and reacts directly, individually, and self-responsibly. The same from the cardiac plexus, and the two corresponding ganglia, lumbar and thoracic. The brain at first acts only as a switchboard which keeps these great active centres in circuit of communication. The process of idealization, mental consciousness, is a subsidiary process. It is a second form of conscious activity. Mental activity, final cognition, ideation, is only set up secondarily from the perfect interaction and inter-communication of the primary affective centres, which remain all the time our dynamic first-minds.

  VI

  How to begin to educate a child. First rule, leave him alone. Second rule, leave him alone. Third rule, leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.

  Which doesn’t mean we are to let him starve, or put his fingers in the fire, or chew broken glass. That is mere neglect. As a little organism, he must have his proper environment. As a little individual he has his place and his limits: we also are individuals, and as such cannot allow him to make an unlimited nuisance of himself. But as a little person and a little mind, if you please, he does not exist. Personality and mind, like moustaches, belong to a certain age. They are a deformity in a child.

  It is in this respect that we repeat, leave him alone. Leave his sensibilities, his emotions, his spirit, and his mind severely alone. There is the devil in mothers, that they must try to provoke personal recognition and personal response from their infants. They might as well start rubbing Tatcho on the tiny chin, to provoke a beard. Except that the Tatcho provocation will have no effect, unless perhaps a blister: whereas the emotional or psychic provocation has, alas, only too much effect.

  For this reason babies should invariably be taken away from their modern mothers and given, not to yearning and maternal old maids, but to rather stupid fat women who can’t be bothered with them. There should be a league for the prevention of maternal love, as there is a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. The stupid fat woman may not guard so zealously against germs. But all the germs in the list of bacteriology are not so dangerous for a child as mother-love.

  And why? Not for any thrilling Freudian motive, but because our now deadly idealism insists on idealizing every human relationship, but particularly that of mother and child. Heaven, how we all prostrate ourselves before the mother-child relationship, in all the grovelling degeneracy of Mariolatry! Highest, purest, most ideal of relationships, mother and child!

  What nasty drivel! The mother-child relationship is certainly deep and important, but to make it high, or pure, or ideal is to make a nauseous perversion of it. A healthy, natural child has no high nature, no purity, and no ideal being. To stimulate these qualities in the infant is to produce psychic deformity, just as ugly as if we stimulated the growth of a beard on the baby face.

  As far as all these high and personal matters go, leave the child alone. Personality and spiritual being mean with us our mental consciousness of our own self. A mother is to a high degree, alas, mentally conscious of her own self, her own exaltedness, her own mission, in these miserable days. And she wants her own mental consciousness reciprocated in the child. The child must recognize and respond. Alas, that the child cannot give her the greatest smack in the eye, every time she smirks and yearns for recognition and response. If we are to save the ultimate sanity of our children, it is down with mothers! A has les meres’.

  Down to the right level. Pull them down from their exalted perches. No more of this Madonna smirking and yearning. No more soul. A mother should have ten strokes with the birch every time she “comes over” with soul or yearning love or aching responsibility. Ten hard, keen, stinging strokes on her bare back, each time. Be- or even, as in the legend, in a she-wolf. Suffice it that the two great dynamic centres, the solar plexus in the infant and the solar plexus in some external being, are seized into correspondence, and a vital circuit set up.

  The vital circuit, we remark, is set up between two extraneous and individual beings, each separately existing. Yet the circuit embraces the two in a perfectly balanced unison. The mother and child are on the same plane. The mother is one in vital correspondence with the child. That is, in all her direct intercourse with the child she is as rudimentary as the child itself, her dynamic consciousness is as undeveloped and non-mental as the child’s.

  Herein we have the true mother: she who corresponds with her child on the deep, rudimentary plane of the first dynamic consciousness. This correspondence is a sightless, mindless correspondence of touch and sound. The two dark poles of vital being must be kept constant in mother and infant, so that the flow is uninterrupted. This constancy is preserved by intimacy of contact, physical immediacy. But this physical immediacy does not make the two beings any less distinct and separate. It makes them more so. The child develops i
ts own single, incipient self at its own primary centre; the mother develops her own separate, matured female self. The circuit of dynamic polarity which keeps the two equilibrized also produces each of them, produces the infant’s developing body and psyche, produces the perfected womanhood of the mother.

  All this, so long as the circuit is not broken, the flow perverted. The circuit, the flow is kept as the child lies against the bosom of its mother, just as the circle of magnetic force is kept constant in a magnet, by the “keeper” which unites the two poles. The child which sleeps in its mother’s arms, the child which sucks its mother’s breast, the child which screams and kicks on its mother’s knee is established in a vital circuit with its parent, out of which circuit its being arises and develops. From pole to pole, direct, the current flows: from the solar plexus in the abdomen of the child to the solar plexus in the abdomen of the mother, from the cardiac plexus in the breast of the child to the cardiac plexus in the breast of the mother. The mouth which sucks, the little voice which calls and cries, both issue from the deep centres of the breast and bowels, giving expression from these centres, and not from the brain. The baby is not mentally vocal. It utters itself from the great affective centres. And this is why it has such power to charm or to madden us. The mother in her response utters herself from the same affective centres; her coos and callings also are unintelligible. Not the mind speaks, but the deep, happy bowels, the lively breast.

  Introduce one grain of self-consciousness into the mother, as she chuckles and coos to her baby, and what then? The good life-flow instantly breaks. The sounds change. She begins to produce them deliberately,-under mental control. And what then? The deep affective centre in the baby is suddenly robbed, as when the mouth still sucking is suddenly snatched from the full breast. The vital flow is suddenly interrupted, and a new stimulus is applied to the child. There is a new provocation, a provocation for mental response from the infantile self-consciousness. And what then? The child either howls, or turns pale and makes this convulsed effort at mental- conscious, or self-conscious response. After which it is probably sick.

  The same with the baby’s eyes. They do not see, mentally. Mentally, they are sightless and dark. But they have the remote, deep vision of the deep affective centres. And so a mother, laughing and clapping to her baby, has the same half-sightless, glaucous look in her eyes, vision non-mental and non-critical, the primary affective centres corresponding through the eyes, void of idea or mental cognition.

  But rouse the devil of a woman’s self-conscious will, and she, clapping and cooing and laughing apparently just as before, will try to force a personal, conscious recognition into the eyes of the baby. She will try and try and try, fiendishly. And the child will blindly, instinctively resist. But with the cunning of seven legions of devils and the persistency of hell’s most hellish fiend, the cooing, clapping, devilish modern mother traduces the child into the personal mode of consciousness. She succeeds, and starts this hateful “personal” love between herself and her excited child, and the unspoken but unfathomable hatred between the violated infant and her own assaulting soul, which together make the bane of human life, and give rise to all the neurosis and neuritis and nervous troubles we are all afflicted with.

  With children we must absolutely leave out the self-conscious and personal note. Communication must be remote and impersonal, a correspondence direct between the deep affective centres. And this is the reason why we must kick out all the personal fritter from the elementary schools. Stories must be tales, fables. They may have a flat moral if you like. But they must never have a personal, self- conscious note, the little-Mary-who-dies-and-goes-to-heaven touch, or the little-Alice-who-saw-a-fairy. This is the most vicious element in our canting infantile education today. “And you will all see fairies, dears, if you know how to look for them.”

  It is perversion of the infant mind at the start. This continual introduction of a little child-heroine or -hero, with whom the little girl or the little boy can self-consciously identify herself or himself, stultifies all development at the true centres. Fairies are not a personal, mental reality. Alice Jenkinson, who lives in “The Laburnums,” Leslie Road, Brixton, knows quite well that fairies are all “my-eye.” But she is quite content to smirk self-consciously and say, “Yes, miss,” when teacher asks her if she’d like to see a fairy. It’s all very well playing games of pretence, so long as you enter right into the game, robustly, and forget your own pretensive self. But when, like the little Alices of today, you keep a constant self-conscious smirk on your nose all the time you’re “playing fairies,” then to hell with you and your fairies. And ten times to hell with the smirking, self-conscious “teacher” who encourages you. A hateful, self-tickling, self-abusive affair, the whole business.

  And this is what is wrong, first and foremost, with our education: this attempt deliberately to provoke reactions in the great affective centres and to dictate these reactions from the mind. Fairies are true embryological realities of the human psyche. They are true and real for the great affective centres, which see as through a glass, darkly, and which have direct correspondence with living and naturalistic influences in the surrounding universe, correspondence which cannot have mental, rational utterance, but must express itself, if it be expressed, in preternatural forms. Thus fairies are true, and Little Red Riding Hood is most true.

  But they are not true for Alice Jenkinson, smirking little minx. Because Alice Jenkinson is an incurably self-conscious little piece of goods, and she cannot act direct from the great affective centres, she can only act perversely, by reflection, from her personal consciousness. And therefore, for her, all fairies and princesses and Peters and Wendys should be put on the fire, and she should be spanked and transported to Newcastle, to have some of her self- consciousness taken out of her.

  An inspector should be sent round at once to burn all pernicious Little Alice and Little Mary literature in the elementary schools, and empowered to cut down to one-half the salary of any teacher found smirking or smuggling or indulging in any other form of pretty self-consciousness and personal grace. Abolish all the bunkum, go back to the three R’s. Don’t cultivate any more imagination at all in children: it only means pernicious self-consciousness. Let us, for heaven’s sake, have children without imagination and without “nerves,” for the two are damnably inseparable.

  Down with imagination in school, down with self-expression. Let us have a little severe hard work, good, clean, well-written exercises, well-pronounced words, well-set-down sums: and as far as head- work goes, no more. No more self-conscious dabblings and smirkings and lispings of “The silver birch is a dainty lady” (so is little Alice, of course). The silver birch must be finely downcast to see itself transmogrified into a smirky little Alice. The owl and the pussy-cat may have gone to sea in the pea-green boat, and the little girl may well have said: “What long teeth you’ve got, Grandmother!” This is well within the bounds of natural pristine experience. But that dainty-lady business is only self-conscious smirking.

  It will be a long time before we know how to act or speak again from the deep affective centres, without self-conscious perversion. And therefore, in the interim, whilst we learn, let us abolish all pretence at naivete and childish self-expression. Let us have a bit of solid, hard, tidy work. And for the rest, leave the children alone. Pitch them out into the street or the playgrounds, and take no notice of them. Drive them savagely away from their posturings.

  There must be an end to the self-conscious attitudinizing of our children. The self-consciousness and all the damned high-flownness must be taken out of them, and their little personalities must be nipped in the bud. Children shall be regarded as young creatures, not as young affected persons. Creatures, not persons.

  VII

  As a matter of fact, our private hope is that by a sane system of education we may release the coming generation from our own nasty disease of self-consciousness: a disease quite as rampant among the working-classes as among the
well-to-do classes; and perhaps even more malignant there, because, having fewer forms of expression, it tends to pivot in certain ideas, which fix themselves in the psyche and become little less than manias. The wage is the mania of the moment: the working-man consciousness of himself as a working- man, which has now become an idee fixe, excluding any possibility of his remaining a lively human being.

  What do we mean by self-consciousness? If we will realize that all spontaneous life, desire, impulse, and first-hand individual consciousness arises and is effective at the great nerve-centres of the body, and not in the brain, we shall begin to understand. The great nerve-centres are in pairs, sympathetic and volitional. Again, they are polarized in upper and lower duality, above and below the diaphragm. Thus the solar plexus of the abdomen is the first great affective centre, sympathetic, and the lumbar ganglion, volitional, is its partner. At these two great centres arises our first consciousness, our primary impulses, desires, motives. These are our primal minds, here located in the dual great affective centres below the diaphragm. But immediately above the diaphragm we have the cardiac plexus and the thoracic ganglion, another great pair of conjugal affective centres, acting in immediate correspondence with the two lower centres. And these four great nerve-centres establish the first field of our consciousness, the first plane of our vital being. They are the four corner-stones of our psyche, the four powerful vital poles which, flashing darkly in polarized interaction one with another, form the fourfold issue of our individual life. At these great centres, primarily, we live and move and have our being. Thought and idea do not enter in. The motion arises spontaneous, we know not how, and is emitted in dark vibrations. The vibration goes forth, seeks its object, returns, establishing a life-circuit. And this life-circuit, established internally between the four first poles, and established also externally between the primal affective centres in two different beings or creatures, this complex life-circuit or system of circuits constitutes in itself our profound primal consciousness, and contains all our radical knowledge, knowledge non-ideal, non-mental, yet still knowledge, primary cognition, individual and potent.