Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

by D. H. Lawrence

  This is the condition of freedom: that in the understanding, I fear nothing. In the body I fear pain, in love I fear hate, in death I fear life. But in the understanding I fear neither love nor hate nor death nor pain nor abhorrence. I am brave even against abhorrence; even the abhorrent I will understand and be at peace with. Not by exclusion, but by incorporation and unison. There is no hope in exclusion. For whatsoever limbo we cast our devils into will receive us ourselves at last. We shall fall into the cesspool of our own abhorrence.

  If there is a serpent of secret and shameful desire in my soul, let me not beat it out of my consciousness with sticks. It will lie beyond, in the marsh of the so-called subconsciousness, where I cannot follow it with my sticks. Let me bring it to the fire to see what it is. For a serpent is a thing created. It has its’ own raison d’etre. In its own being it has beauty and reality. Even my horror is a tribute to its reality. And I must admit the genuineness of my horror, accept it, and not exclude it from my understanding.

  There is nothing on earth to be ashamed of, nor under the earth, except only the craven veils we hang up to save our appearances. Pull down the veils and understand everything, each man in his own self-responsible soul. Then we are free.

  Who made us a judge of the things that be? Who says that the water-lily shall rock on the still pool, but the snake shall not hiss in the festering marshy border? I must humble myself before the abhorred serpent and give him his dues as he lifts his flattened head from the secret grass of my soul. Can I exterminate what is created? Not while the condition of its creation lasts. There is no killing the serpent so long as his principle endures. And his principle moves slowly in my belly; I must disembowel myself to get rid of him. “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” But the offence is not in the eye, but in the principle it perceives. And howsoever I may pluck out my eyes, I cannot pluck the principle from the created universe. To this I must submit. And I must adjust myself to that which offends me, I must make my peace with it, and cease, in my delicate understanding, to be offended. Maybe the serpent of my abhorrence nests in my very heart. If so, I can but in honour say- to him, “Serpent, serpent, thou art at home.” Then I shall know that my heart is a marsh. But maybe my understanding will drain the swampy place, and the serpent will evaporate as his condition evaporates. That is as it is. While there is a marsh, the serpent has his holy ground.

  I must make my peace with the serpent of abhorrence that is within me. I must own my most secret shame and my most secret shameful desire. I must say, “Shame, thou art me, I am thee. Let us understand each other and be at peace.” Who am I that I should hold myself above my last or worst desire? My desires are me, they are the beginning of me; my stem and branch and root. To assume a better angel is an impertinence. Did I create myself? According to the maximum of my desire is my flower and my blossoming. This is beyond my will for ever. I can only learn to acquiesce.

  And there is in me the great desire of creation and the great desire of dissolution. Perhaps these two are pure equivalents. Perhaps the decay of autumn purely balances the putting forth of spring. Certainly the two are necessary each to the other; they are the systole-diastole of the physical universe. But the initial force is the force of spring, as is evident. The undoing of autumn can only follow the putting forth of spring. So that creation is primal and original, corruption is only a consequence. Nevertheless, it is the inevitable consequence, as inevitable as that water flows downhill.

  There is in me the desire of creation and the desire of dissolution. Shall I deny either? Then neither is fulfilled. If there is no autumn and winter of corruption, there is no spring and summer. All the time I must be dissolved from my old being. The wheat is put together by the pure activity of creation. It is the bread of pure creation I eat in the body. The fire of creation from out of the wheat passes into my blood, and what was put together in the pure grain now comes asunder, the fire mounts up into my blood, the watery mould washes back down my belly to the underearth. These are the two motions wherein we have our life. Is either a shame to me? Is it a pride to me that in my blood the fire flickers out of the wheaten bread I have partaken of, flickers up to further and higher creation? Then how shall it be a shame that from my blood exudes the bitter sweat of corruption on the journey back to dissolution; how shall it be a shame that in my consciousness appear the heavy marsh-flowers of the flux of putrescence, which have their natural roots in the slow stream of decomposition that flows for ever down my bowels?

  There is a natural marsh in my belly, and there the snake is naturally at home. Shall he not crawl into my consciousness? Shall I kill him with sticks the moment he lifts his flattened head on my sight? Shall I kill him or pluck out the eye which sees him? None the less, he will swarm within the marsh.

  Then let the serpent of living corruption take his place among us honourably. Come then, brindled abhorrent one, you have your own being and your own righteousness, yes, and your own desirable beauty. Come then, lie down delicately in the sun of my mind, sleep on the bosom of my understanding; I shall know your living weight and be gratified.

  But keep to your own ways and your own being. Come in just proportion, there in the grass beneath the bushes where the birds are. For the Lord is the lord of all things, not of some only. And everything shall in its proportion drink its own draught of life. But I, who have the gift of understanding, I must keep most delicately and transcendingly the balance of creation within myself, because now I am taken over into the peace of creation. Most delicately and justly I must bring forth the blossom of my spring and provide for the serpent of my living corruption. But each in its proportion. If I am taken over into the stream of death, I must fling myself into the business of dissolution, and the serpent must writhe at my right hand, my good familiar. But since it is spring with me, the snake must wreathe his way secretly along the paths that belong to him, and when I see him asleep in the sunshine I shall admire him in his place.

  I shall accept all my desires and repudiate none. It will be a sign of bliss in me when I am reconciled with the serpent of my own horror, when I am free both from the fascination and the revulsion. For secret fascination is a fearful tyranny. And then my desire of life will encompass my desire of death, and I shall be quite whole, have fulfilment in both. Death will take its place in me, subordinate but not subjected. I shall be fulfilled of corruption within the strength of creation. The serpent will have his own pure place in me and I shall be free.

  For there are ultimately only two desires, the desire of life and the desire of death. Beyond these is pure being, where I am absolved from desire and made perfect. This is when I am like a rose, when I balance for a space in pure adjustment and pure understanding. The timeless quality of being is understanding; when I understand fully, flesh and blood and bone, and mind and soul and spirit one rose of unison, then I am. Then I am unrelated and perfect. In true understanding I am always perfect and timeless. In my utterance of that which I have understood I am timeless as a jewel.

  The rose as it bursts into blossom reveals the absolute world before us. The brindled, slim adder, as she lifts her delicate head attentively in the spring sunshine — for they say she is deaf — suddenly throws open the world of unchanging, pure perfection to our startled breast. In our whole understanding, when sense and spirit and mind are consummated into pure unison, then we are free in a world of the absolute. The lark sings in a heaven of pure understanding, she drops back into a world of duality and change.

  And it does not matter whether we understand according to death or according to life; the understanding is a consummating of the two in one, and a transcending into absolution. This is true of tragedy and of psalms of praise and of the Sermon on the Mount. It is true of the serpent and of the dove, of the tiger and the fragile, dappled doe. For all things that emerge pure in being from the matrix of chaos are roses of pure understanding; in them death and life are adjusted, darkness is in perfect equilibrium with light. This is the meaning of understa
nding. This is why the leopard gleams to my eye a blossom of pure significance, whilst a hyena seems only a clod thrown at me in contumely. The leopard is a piece of understanding uttered in terms of fire, the dove is expressed in gurgling watery sound. But in them both there is that perfect conjunction of sun and dew which makes for absolution and the world beyond worlds. Only the leopard starts from the sun and must for ever quench himself with the living soft fire of the fawn; the dove must fly up to the sun like mist drawn up.

  We, we are all desire and understanding, only these two. And desire is twofold, desire of life and desire of death. All the time we are active in these two great powers, which are for ever contrary and complementary. Except in understanding, and there we are immune and perfect, there the two are one. Yet even understanding is twofold in its appearance. It comes forth as understanding of life or as understanding of death, in strong, glad words like Paul and David, or in pain like Shakespeare.

  All active life is either desire of life or desire of death, desire of putting together or desire of putting asunder. We come forth uttering ourselves in terms of fire, like the rose, or in terms of water, like the lily. We wish to say that we are single in our desire for life and creation and putting together. But it is a lie, since we must eat life to live. We must, like the leopard, drink up the lesser life to bring forth our greater. We wish to conquer death. But it is absurd, since only by death do we live, like the leopard. We wish not to die; we wish for life everlasting. But this is mistaken interpretation. What we mean by immortality is this fulfilment of death with life and life with death in us where we are consummated and absolved into heaven, the heaven on earth.

  We can never conquer death; that is folly. Death and the great dark flux of undoing, this is the inevitable half. Life feeds death, death feeds life. If life is just one point the stronger in the long run, it is only because death is inevitably the stronger in the short run of each separate existence. They are like the hare and the tortoise.

  It is only in understanding that we pass beyond the scope of this duality into perfection, in actual living equipoise of blood and bone and spirit. But our understanding must be dual, it must be death understood and life understood.

  We understand death, and in this there is no death. Life has put together all that is put together. Death is the consequent putting asunder. We have been torn to shreds in the hands of death, like Osiris in the myth. But still within us life lay intact like seeds in winter.

  That is how we know death, having suffered it and lived. It is now no mystery, finally. Death is understood in us, and thus we transcend it. Henceforward actual death is a fulfilling of our own knowledge.

  Nevertheless, we only transcend death by understanding down to the last ebb the great process of death in us. We can never destroy death. We can only transcend it in pure understanding. We can envelop it and contain it. And then we are free.

  By standing in the light we see in terms of shadow. We cannot see the light we stand in. So our understanding of death in life is an act of living.

  If we live in the mind, we must die in the mind, and in the mind we must understand death. Understanding is not necessarily mental. It is of the senses and the spirit.

  But we live also in the mind. And the first great act of living is to encompass death in the understanding. Therefore the first great activity of the living mind is to understand death in the mind. Without this there is no freedom of the mind, there is no life of the mind, since creative life is the attaining a perfect consummation with death. When in my mind there rises the idea of life, then this idea must encompass the idea of death, and this encompassing is the germination of a new epoch of the mind.

  III

  We long most of all to belong to life. This primal desire, the desire to come into being, the desire to achieve a transcendent state of existence, is all we shall ever know of a primum mobile. But it is enough.

  And corresponding with this desire for absolute life, immediately consequent is the desire for death. This we will never admit. We cannot admit the desire of death in ourselves even when it is single and dominant. We must still deceive ourselves with the name of life.

  This is the root of all confusion, this inability for man to admit, “Now I am single in my desire for destructive death.” When it is autumn in the world, the autumn of a human epoch, then the desire for death becomes single and dominant. I want to kill, I want violent sensationalism, I want to break down, I want to put asunder, I want anarchic revolution — it is all the same, the single desire for death.

  We long most of all for life and creation. That is the final truth. But not all life belongs to life. Not all life is progressing to a state of transcendent being. For many who are born and live year after year there is no such thing as coming to blossom. Many are saprophyte, living on the dead body of the past. Many are parasite, living on the old and enfeebled body politic; and many, many more are mere impurities. Many, in these days, most human beings, having come into the world on the impulse of death, find that the impulse is not strong enough to carry them into absolution. They reach a maturity of physical life, and then the advance ends. They have not the strength for the further passage into darkness. They are born short, they wash on a slack tide; they will never be flung into the transcendence of the second death. They are spent before they arrive; their life is a slow lapsing out, a slow inward corruption. Their flood is the flood of decomposition and decay; in this they have their being. They are like the large green cabbages that cannot move on into flower. They attain a fatness and magnificence of leaves, then they rot inside. There is not sufficient creative impulse, they lapse into great corpulence. So with the sheep and the pigs of our domestic life. They frisk into life as if they would pass on to pure being. But the tide fails them. They grow fat; their only raison d’etre is to provide food for a really living organism. They have only the moment of first youth, then they lapse gradually into nullity. It is given us to devour them.

  So with very many human lives, especially in what is called the periods of decadence. They have mouths and stomachs, and an obscene will of their own. Yes, they have also prolific procreative wombs whence they bring forth increasing insufficiency. But of the germ of intrinsic creation they have none, neither have they the courage of true death. They never live. They are like the sheep in the fields, that have their noses to the ground, and anticipate only the thrill of increase.

  These will never understand, neither life nor death. But they will bleat mechanically about life and righteousness, since this is how they can save their appearances. And in their eyes is the furtive tyranny of nullity. They will understand no word of living death, since death encompasses them. If a man understands the living death, he is a man in the quick of creation.

  The quick can encompass death, but the living dead are encompassed. Let the dead bury their dead. Let the living dead attend to the dead dead. What has creation to do with them?

  The righteousness of the living dead is an abominable nullity. They, the sheep of the meadow, they eat and eat to swell out their living nullity. They are so many, their power is immense, and the negative power of their nullity bleeds us of life as if they were vampires. Thank God for the tigers and the butchers that will free us from the abominable tyranny of these greedy, negative sheep.

  It is very natural that every word about death they will decry as evil. For if death be understood, they are found out. They are multitudes of slow, greedy-mouthed decay.

  There are the isolated heroes of passionate and beautiful death: Tristan, Achilles, Napoleon. These are the royal lions and tigers of our life. There are many wonderful initiators into the death for re-birth, like Christ and St. Paul and St. Francis. But there is a ghastly multitude of obscene nullity, flocks of hideous sheep with blind mouths and still blinder crying, and hideous coward’s eye of tyranny for the sake of their own bloated nothingness.

  These are the enemy and the abomination. And they are so many we shall with difficulty save ourselves fr
om them. Indeed, the word humanity has come to mean only this obscene flock of blind mouths and blinder bleating and most hideous coward’s tyranny of negation. Save us, oh, holy death; carry us beyond them, oh, holy life of creation; for how shall we save ourselves against such ubiquitous multitudes of living dead? It needs a faith in that which has created all citation, and will therefore never fall before the blind mouth of nullity.

  The sheep, the hideous myrmidons of sheep, all will and belly and prolific womb, they have their own absolution. They have the base absolution of the I. A vile entity detaches itself and shuts itself off immune from the flame of creation and from the stream of death likewise. They assert a free will. And this free will is a horny, glassy, insentient covering into which they creep, like some tough bugs, and therein remain active and secure from life and death. So they swarm in insulated completeness, obscene like bugs.

  We are quite insulated from life. And we think ourselves quite immune from death. But death, beautiful death searches us out, even in our armour of insulated will. Death is within us, while we tighten our will to keep him out. Death, beautiful, clean death, washes slowly within us and carries us away. We have never known life, save, perhaps, for a few moments during childhood. Well may heaven lie about us in our infancy, if our maturity is but the buglike security of a vast and impervious envelope of insentience, the insentience of the human mass. Heaven lies about us in our consummation of manhood, if we are men. If we are men, we attain to heaven in .our achieved manhood, our flowering maturity. But if we are like bugs, our first sight of this good earth may well seem heavenly. For we soon learn not to see. A bug, and a sheep, sees only with its fear and its belly. Its eyes look out in a coward’s will not to see, a self-righteous vision.