The mental cognition or consciousness is, as it were, distilled or telegraphed from the primal consciousness into a sort of written, final script, in the brain. If we imagine the infinite currents and meaningful vibrations in the world’s atmosphere, and if we realize how some of these, at the great wireless stations, are ticked off and written down in fixed script, we shall form some sort of inkling of how the primary consciousness centralized in the great affective centres, and circulating in vital circuits of primary cognition, is captured by the supremely delicate registering apparatus in the brain and registered there like some strange code, the newly rising mental consciousness. The brain itself, no doubt, is a very tissue of memory, every smallest cell is a vast material memory which only needs to be roused, quickened by the vibration coming from the primary centres, only needs the new fertilization of a new quiver of experience, to blossom out as a mental conception, an idea. This power for the transfer of the pure affective experience, the primary consciousness, into final mental experience, ideal consciousness, varies extremely according to individuals. It would seem as if, in Negroes for example, the primary affective experience, the affective consciousness is profound and intense, but the transfer into mental consciousness is comparatively small. In ourselves, in modern educated Europeans, on the other hand, the primal experience, the vital consciousness grows weaker and weaker, the mind fixes the control and limits the life-activity. For, let us realize once and for all that the whole mental consciousness and the whole sum of the mental content of mankind is never, and can never be more than a mere tithe of all the vast surging primal consciousness, the affective consciousness of mankind.
Yet we presume to limit the potent spontaneous consciousness to the poor limits of the mental consciousness. In us, instead of our life issuing spontaneously at the great affective centres, the mind, the mental consciousness, grown unwieldy, turns round upon the primary affective centres, seizes control, and proceeds to evoke our primal motions and emotions, didactically. The mind subtly, without knowing, provokes and dictates our own feelings and impulses. That is to say, a man helplessly and unconsciously causes from his mind every one of his own important reactions at the great affective centres. He can’t help himself. It isn’t his own fault. The old polarity has broken down. The primal centres have collapsed from their original spontaneity, they have become subordinate, neuter, negative, waiting for the mind’s provocation, waiting to be worked according to some secondary idea. Thus arises our pseudo-spontaneous modern living.
We are in the toils of helpless self-consciousness. We can’t help ourselves. It is like being in a boat with no oars. What can we do but drift? We know we are drifting, but we don’t know how or where. Because there is no primary resistance in us, nothing that resists the helpless but fatal flux of ideas which streams us away. The resistant spontaneous centres have broken down in us.
Why does this happen? Because we have become too conscious? Not at all. Merely because we have become too fixedly conscious. We have limited our consciousness, tethered it to a few great ideas, like a goat to a post. We insist over and over again on what we know from one mere centre of ourselves, the mental centre. We insist that we are essentially spirit, that we are ideal beings, conscious personalities, mental creatures. As far as ever possible we have resisted the independence of the great affective centres. We have struggled for some thousands of years, not only to get our passions under control, but absolutely to eliminate certain passions, and to give all passions an ideal nature.
And so, at last, we succeed. We do actually give all our passions an ideal nature. Our passions at last are nothing more or less than ideas auto-suggested into practice. We try to persuade ourselves that it is all fine and grand and flowing. And for quite a long time we manage to take ourselves in. But we can’t continue, ad infinitum, this life of self-satisfied auto-suggestion.
Because, if you think of it, everything which is provoked or originated by an idea works automatically or mechanically. It works by principle. So that even our wickedness today, being ideal in its origin, a sort of deliberate reaction to the accepted ideal, amounts to the same mechanism. It is an ideal working of the affective centres in the opposite direction from the accepted direction: opposite and opposite and opposite, till murder itself becomes an ideal at last. But it is all auto-affective. No matter which way you work the affective centres, once you work them from the mental consciousness you automatize them. And the human being craves for change in his automatism. Sometimes it seems to him horrible that he must, in a fixed routine, get up in the morning and put his clothes on, day in, day out. He can’t bear his automatism. He is beside himself in his self-consciousness. But he is a damned little Oliver Twist: nothing but twist, and always wanting “more.” He doesn’t want to drop his self-consciousness. He wants more, always more. The damned little ideal being, he wants to work his own little psyche till the end of time, like a clever little god-in-the-machine that he is. And he despises any real spontaneity with all the street-arab insolence of depraved idealism. Man would rather be the ideal god inside his own automaton than anything else on earth. And woman is ten times worse. Woman as the goddess in the machine of the human psyche is a heroine who will drive us, like a female chauffeur, through all the avenues of hell, till she pitches us eventually down the bottomless pit. And even then she’ll save herself, she’ll kilt her skirts and look round for new passengers. She has a million more dodges for automatic self-stimulation than man has. When man has finished, woman can still cadge a million more sensational reactions out of herself and her co-respondent.
Man is accursed once he falls into the trick of ideal self- automatism. But he is infinitely conceited about it. He really works his own psyche! He really is the god of his own creation! Isn’t this enough to puff him out? Here he is, tricky god and creator of himself at last! And he’s not going to be ousted from his at-last-acquired godhead. Not he! The triumphant little god sits in the machine of his own psyche and turns on the petrol. It is like a story by H. G. Wells — too true to life, alas. There sits every man ensconced upon the engine of his own psyche, turning on the ideal taps and opening the ideal valves of his own nature, and so proud of himself, it’s a wonder he hasn’t set off to fly to the sun in one of his aeroplanes, like a new Icarus. But he lacks the fine boldness for such a flight. He wants to sit tight in his little hobby machine, near enough to his little hearth and home, this tubby, domestic little mechanical godhead.
A curse on idealism! A million curses on self-conscious automatic humanity, men and women both. Curses on their auto-suggestive self-reactions, from which they derive such inordinate self-gratifi- cation. Most curses of all upon the women, the self-conscious provokers of infinite sensations, of which man is the instrument. Let there be a fierce new Athanasian creed, to damn and blast all idealists. But let spiritual, ideal self-conscious woman be the most damned of all. Men, after all, don’t get much more than aeroplane thrills and political thrills out of their god-in-the-machine reactions. But women get soul-thrills and sexual thrills, they float and squirm on clouds of self-glorification, with a lot of knock-kneed would-be saints and apostles of the male sort goggling sanctified eyes upwards at them, as in some sickening Raphael picture.
It is enough to send a sane person mad, to see this goggling, squirming, self-glorifying idealized humanity carrying on its self- conscious little games. And how it loves its little games. Just heaven, how it wallows in them, ideally!
What is to be done? We talk about new systems of education, and here we have a civilized mankind sucking its fingers avidly, as if its own fingers were so many sticks of juicy barley-sugar. It loves itself so much, this ideal self-conscious humanity, that it could verily eat itself-And so it nibbles gluttishly at itself.
Is it the slightest good doing anything but joining in with the sucking and self-nibbling? Probably not. We’ll throw stones at them none the less, even if every stone boomerangs back in our own teeth. Perhaps once we shall catch humanity one in
the eye.
The question is, don’t our children get this self-conscious, self- nibbling habit, in the very womb of their travesty mothers, before they are even born? We are afraid it is so. Our miserable offspring, churned in the abdomen of insatiable self-conscious woman, woman self-consciously every moment seeking and watching her own reactions, her own pregnancy and her own everything, grinding all her sensations from her head and reflecting them all back into her head, all her physical churnings ground exceeding small in the hateful self-conscious mills of her female mind, ideal and unremitting; do not our miserable offspring issue from the ovens of such a womb writhing and crisping with self-conscious morbid hunger of self? Alas and alack, to all appearance they do. The self-conscious devil is in them, either smirking and smarming, or preening and prancing, or irritably self-nibbling and sentimentalizing, or stolidly sufficient, or hostile. But there it is, the hateful devil of self-conscious self-importance born with them, simmered into them in the acid- seething, irritable womb.
What’s to be done? Why, of course, keep the game up. Tickle the poor little wretches into ecstasies of self-consciousness. Gather round them and stare at them and mouth over them and sentimentalize and rhapsodize over them. Get the doctor to paw them, the nurse to expose them naked to a horde of ideal prurient females, get the parson to preach over them and roll his eyes to heaven over their sanctity. Then send them to school to “express themselves,” in the hopes that they’ll turn out infant prodigies. For, oh, dear me! what a feather in the cap of a mortal mother is an infant prodigy!
If one healthily sensitive mother in these days bore one healthy- souled, simple child she’d pick him up and bolt for her life from the mobs of our ghoulish “charming” women, and the mobs of goggling adoring men. She’d run, poor Hagar, to some desert with her Ishmael. And there she’d give him to a she-wolf, or a she-bear, or a she-lion to suckle. She’d never trust herself. Verily, she’d have more faith in a rattlesnake, as far as motherhood is concerned.
Would God a she-wolf had suckled me, and stood over me with her paps, and kicked me back into a rocky corner when she’d had enough of me. It might have made a man of me.
But it’s no use sighing. Romulus and Remus had all the luck. We see now why they bred a great, great race: because they had no mother: a race of men. Christians have no fathers: only these ogling woman-worshipping saints, and the self-conscious friction of exalted mothers.
Let us rail — why shouldn’t we? It is subject enough for railing.
But what about these infants? Alas, there isn’t a wild she-wolf in the length and breadth of Britain. There isn’t a crevice in the British Isles where you could suckle a brat undisturbed by the village constable. And therefore, no hope with us of heroic twins.
What are we going to do? Presumably, nothing: except carry on the pretty process of smirking and goggling which we call education. The sense of futility overwhelms us. The thought of all the exalted mothers of England, and of all the knock-kneed smug God- besprinkled fathers is too much for us: all the hosts of the sentimental, self-conscious ones, the sensational self-conscious ones, the free-and-easy self-conscious ones, the downright no-nonsense-about- me self-conscious ones, the elegant self-conscious ones, the would-be dissolute self-conscious ones, the very-very-naughty self-conscious ones, the chic self-conscious ones, and spiritual self-conscious ones, and the nuancy self-conscious ones (those full of nuances), and the self-sacrificial self-conscious ones, and the do-all-you-can-for-others self-conscious ones, the do-your-bit self-conscious ones, the yearning, the aspiring, the sighing, the leering, the tip-the-winking self- conscious ones, females and so-called men: all the lot of them: ad nauseam and ad nauseissimam: they are too much for me. All of them like so many little barrel-organs grinding their own sensations, nay, their own very natures, out of their own little heads: and become so automatic at it they don’t even know they’re doing it. They think they are fine spontaneous angels, these little automata. And they are automata, self-turning little barrel-organs, all of them, from the millionaire down to the dustmari. The dustman grinds himself off according to his own dustman-ideal prescription.
VIII
We’ve got to get on to a different tack: snap! off the old tack and veer on to a new one. No more seeing ourselves as others see us. No more seeing ourselves at all. A fig for such sights.
The primary conscious centres, the very first and deepest, are in the lower body. A button for your brain, whoever you are. If you are not darkly potent below the belt, you are nothing.
Let go the upper consciousness. Switch it off for a time. Release the cramped and tortured lower consciousness. Drop this loving and merging business. Fall back into your own isolation and the insuperable pride thereof. Break off the old polarity, the merging into oneness with others, with evervthing. Snap the old connexions.
Break clean away from the old yearning navel-string of love, which unites us to the body of everything. Break it, and be born. Fall apart into your own isolation; set apart single and potent in-singularity for ever. One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so. Exult in it. Exult in the fact that you are yourself, and alone for ever. Exult in your own dark being. Across the gulf are strangers, myriad- faced dancing strangers like midges and like Pleiades. One draws near; there is a thrill and a fiery contact. But never a merging. A withdrawal, a bond of knowledge, but no identification. Recognition across space: across a dark and bottomless space: two beings who recognize each other across the chasm, who occasionally cross and meet in a fiery contact, but who find themselves invariably withdrawn afterwards, with dark, dusky-glowing faces glancing across the insuperable chasm which intervenes between two beings.
Have done; let go the old connexions. Fall apart, fall asunder, each into his own unfathomable dark bath of isolation. Break up the old incorporation. Finish for ever the old unison with homogeneity. Let every man fall apart into a fathomless, single isolation of being, exultant at his own core, and apart. Then, dancing magnificent in our own space, as the spheres dance in space, we can set up the extra-individual communication. Across the space comes the thrill of communication. There is an approach, a flash and blaze of contact, and then the sheer fiery purity of a purer isolation, a more exultant singleness. Not a mass of homogeneity, like sunlight, but a fathomless multiplicity, like the stars at night, each one isolate in the darkly singing space. This symbol of Light, the homogeneous and universal Day, the daylight, symbolizes our universal mental consciousness, which we have in common. But our being we have in integral separateness, as the stars at night. To think of lumping the stars together into one mass is hideous. Each one separate, each one his own peculiar ray. So the universe is made up.
And the sun only hides all this. Imagine, if the sun shone all the time, we should never know there was anything but ourselves in the universe. Everything would be limited to the plane superficies of ourself and our own mundane nature. Everything would be as we see it and as we think it.
Which is what ails us. Living as we do entirely in the light of the mental consciousness, we think everything is as we see it and as we think it. Which is a vast illusion. Imagine a man who all his life has been shut up in a hermetically dark room, between sundown and sunrise, and let out only when light was full in the heavens.
He would imagine that everything, all the time, was light, that the firmament was a vast blue space screened from us sometimes by our own vapours, but otherwise a blue, unblemished void occupied by ourselves and the sun, one blue unchanging blaze of eternal light, with ourselves for the only inhabitants, under the sun.
Which, in spite of Galileo, that star-master, is what we actually do think. If we proceed to imagine other worlds, we cook up a few distortions of our own world and scatter them into space. A Martian may have long ears and horns on his forehead, but he is only ourselves dressed up, busy making super-zeppelins. We are convinced, as a matter of fact, that the stars and ourselves are all seed of one sort.
And what holds true cosmologica
lly holds much more true psychologically. The man sealed up during twilight and night-time would have a rare shock the first time he was taken out under the stars. To see all the blue heavens crumpled and shrivelled away! To see the pulsation of myriad orbs proudly moving in the endless darkness, insouciant, sunless, taking a stately path we know not whither or how. Ha, the day-time man would feel his heart and brain burst to a thousand shivers, he would feel himself falling like a seed into space. All that he counted himself would be suddenly dispelled. All that he counted eternal, infinite, Everything, suddenly shrivelled like a vast, burnt roof of paper, or a vast paper lantern: the eternal light gone out: and behold, multiplicity, twinkling, proud multiplicity, utterly indifferent of oneness, proud far-off orbs taking their lonely way beyond the bounds of knowledge, emitting their own unique and untransmutable rays, pulsing with their own isolate pulsation.
This is what must happen to us. We have kept up a false daylight all through our nights. Our sophistry has intervened like a lamp between us and the slow-stepping stars, we have turned our cheap lanterns on the dark and wizard face of Galileo, till lo and behold, his words are as harmless as butterflies. Of course the orbs are manifold: we admit it easily. But light is one and universal and infinite.
Put it in human terms: men are manifold, but Wisdom and Understanding are one and universal. Men are manifold, but the Spirit, the consciousness, is one, as sunlight is one. And therefore, because the consciousness of mankind is really one and universal, mankind is one and universal. Therefore each individual is a term of the Infinite.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 1053