SEARCH FOR TRUTH
SEARCH for nothing any more, nothing
except truth.
Be very still, and try and get at the truth.
And the first question to ask yourself is:
How great a liar am I?
LIES ABOUT LOVE
WE are all liars, because
the truth of yesterday becomes a lie to-morrow,
whereas letters are fixed,
and we live by the letter of truth.
The love I feel for my friend, this year,
is different from the love I felt last year.
If it were not so, it would be a lie.
Yet we re-iterate love! love!
as if it were coin with a fixed value
instead of a flower that dies, and opens a different bud.
TRAVEL IS OVER
I HAVE travelled, and looked at the world, and loved it.
Now I don’t want to look at the world any more,
there seems nothing there.
In not-looking, and in not-seeing
comes a new strength
and undeniable new gods share their life with us, when we
cease to see.
OLD MEN
WHOM the gods love, die young.
How the gods must hate most of the old, old men to-day,
the rancid old men that don’t die
because the gods don’t want them
won’t have them
leave them to stale on earth.
Old people fixed in a rancid resistance
to life, fixed to the letter of the law.
The gods, who are life, and the fluidity of living change
leave the old ones fixed to their ugly, cogged self-will
which turns on and on, the same, and is hell on earth.
DEATH
DEATH is no escape, ah no! only a doorway to the inevitable.
That’s why the dogged, resistant old ones dare not die
dare not die! — they daren’t go through the door.
They dare not die, because they know
in death they cannot anymore escape
the retribution for their obstinacy.
Old men, old obstinate men and women
dare not die, because in death
their hardened souls are washed with fire, and washed and seared
till they are softened back to life-stuff again, against which
they hardened themselves.
BOURGEOIS AND BOLSHEVIST
THE bourgeois produces the bolshevist, inevitably
as every half-truth at length produces the contradiction of itself
in the opposite half-truth.
PROPERTY AND NO-PROPERTY
THE bourgeois asserts that he owns his property by divine right,
and the bolshevist asserts that by human right no man shall
own property
and between the two blades of this pair of shears, property
and no-property
we shall all be cut to bits.
COWARDICE AND IMPUDENCE
BOURGEOIS cowardice produces bolshevist impudence
in direct ratio.
As the bourgeois gets secretly more cowardly, knowing he is in
the wrong
the bolshevist gets openly more impudent, also knowing he
is in the wrong.
And between the cowardice and impudence of this pair who
are in the wrong,
this pair of property mongrels
the world will be torn in two.
LORD TENNYSON AND LORD MELCHETT
“ DOST tha hear my horse’s feet, as he canters away?
Property! Property! Property! tha’s what they seems to
say! “
Do you hear my Rolls Royce purr, as it glides away?
— I lick the cream off property! that’s what it seems to say!
CHOICE OF EVILS
IF I have to choose between the bourgeois and the bolshevist
I choose the bourgeois
he will interfere with me less.
But in choosing the bourgeois, one brings to pass
only more inevitably, the bolshevist
Since the bourgeois is the direct cause of the bolshevist,
as a half-lie causes the immediate contradiction of the half-lie.
HARD-BOILED CONSERVATIVES
O YOU hard-boiled conservatives, and you soft-boiled liberals
don’t you see how you make bolshevism inevitable?
SOLOMON’S BABY
PROPERTY is now Solomon’s baby
and whoever gets it, it’ll be a dead baby
a corpse, even of property.
THE PROPERTY QUESTION
IN settling the property question between them,
bourgeois and bolshevist,
they’ll merely destroy all property and a great many people
like the two lions who devoured one another, and left the tail —
tufts wagging.
Let’s hope there’ll be more sense in the tail-tufts
than there was in the lions.
THE WAY OUT
THE only way to settle the property question
is to cease to be interested in it; to be so interested in some —
thing else
that the property problem solves itself by the way.
ST GEORGE AND THE DRAGON
THE more you tackle the property dragon
the more deadly and dangerous it becomes.
Whereas if you ride away and become deeply concerned in
something else
the old dragon will dwindle down to the size of a stray cat, neglected,
whom some recalcitrant old maid will adopt, as a hobby.
It is all a question of being profoundly interested in property,
or not.
And quite a lot of people are not.
But they let themselves be overwhelmed by those that are.
THE HALF-BIJND
THE bourgeois and the bolshevist are both blind
hence the ridiculous way they rush in where angels fear to tread.
They can’t see it.
But among the bourgeois and the bolshevist bounders
one notices men here and there, going hesitatingly, faltering
with the pathos of those who can see, but whose sight is dim.
And these, the minority of men who can still see the light of life
give way all the time before the mechanical rushing of the
ugly stone-blind ones.
MINORITIES IN DANGER
Now above all is the time for the minorities of men,
those who are neither bourgeois nor bolshevist, but true life,
to gather and fortify themselves, in every class, in every
country, in every race.
Instead of which, the minorities that still see the gleams of life
submit abjectly to the blind mechanical traffic-streams of those horrors
the stone-blind bourgeois, and the stone-blind bolshevist,
and pander to them.
IF YOU ARE A MAN
IF you are a man, and believe in the destiny of mankind
then say to yourself: we will cease to care
about property and money and mechanical devices,
and open our consciousness to the deep, mysterious life
that we are now cut off from.
The machine shall be abolished from the earth again;
it is a mistake that mankind has made;
money shall cease to be, and property shall cease to perplex
and we will find the way to immediate contact with life
and with one another.
To know the moon as we have never known
yet she is knowable.
To know a man as we have never known
a man, as never yet a man was knowable, yet still shall be.
TERRA INCOGNITA
THERE are vast realms of con
sciousness still undreamed of
vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,
we know nothing of, within us.
Oh when man escaped from the barbed-wire entanglement
of his own ideas and his own mechanical devices
there is a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty
and fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life
and me, and you, and other men and women
and grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight
and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo
of the unknown air, and eyes so soft
softer than the space between the stars,
and all things, and nothing, and being and not-being
alternately palpitant,
when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosure
of Know Thyself, knowing we can never know,
we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effort
and dangle in a last fastidious fine delight
as the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless drop
of purple after so much putting forth
and slow mounting marvel of a little tree.
CLIMBING DOWN
THEY are afraid of climbing down from this idiotic tin-pot
heaven of ours
because they don’t know what they’ll find when they do get down.
They needn’t bother, most of them will never get down at all,
they’ve got to stay up.
And those that do descend have got to suffer a sense-change
into something new and strange.
Become aware as leaves are aware
and fine as flowers are fine
and fierce as fire is fierce
and subtle, silvery, tinkling and rippling
as rain-water
and still a man,
but a man re-born from the rigidity of fixed ideas
resurrected from the death of mechanical motion and emotion.
ONLY THE BEST MATTERS
ONLY the best matters, in man especially.
True, you can’t produce the best without attending to the whole
but that which is secondary is only important
in so far as it goes to the bringing forth of the best.
TO PINO
O PINO
What a bean-o!
when we printed Lady C.!
Little Giuntina
couldn’t have been a
better little bee!
When you told him
perhaps they’d scold him
for printing those naughty words
All he could say:
“ But we do it every day!
like the pigeons and the other little birds! “
And dear old lady Jean
“ I don’t know what you mean
by publishing such a book.”
We’re all in it, all my family
me and Ekkerhart and Somers and Pamelie —
you’re no better than a crook — ! “
“Wait, dear Lady Jean, wait a minute!
What makes you think that you’re all in it?
Did you ever open the book?
Is Ekke Sir Clifford? it’s really funny!
And you, dear Lady Jean, are you Connie?
Do open the book and look! — “
But off she went, being really rattled
and there’s a battle that’s still to be battled
along with the others! what luck!
BROADCASTING TO THE G. B. P.
“ HUSHABY baby, on a tree top
when the wind blows, the cradle shall rock,
when the bough breaks “
Stop that at once!
You’ll give the Great British Public a nervous shock!
“Goosey goosey gander
whither do you wander
upstairs, downstairs
in my lady’s “
Stop! where’s your education?
Don’t you know that’s obscene?
Remember the British Public!
“ Baa-baa black sheep
have you any wool?
yes sir! yes sir!
three bags full!
One for the master, and one for the dame,
and one for the little boy that lives down the “
No!
You’d better omit that, too communistic!
Remember the state of mind of the British Public.
“Pussy-cat pussy-cat where have you been?
I’ve been up to London to see the fine queen!
Pussy-cat pussy-cat what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse — — “
Thank you! thank you
There are no mice in our Royal Palaces. Omit it!
WE CANT BE TOO CAREFUL
WE can’t be too careful
about the British Public.
It gets bigger and bigger
and its perambulator has to get bigger and bigger
and its dummy-teat has to be made bigger and bigger and bigger
and the job of changing its diapers gets bigger and bigger and
bigger and bigger
and the sound of its howling gets bigger and bigger and bigger
and bigger and bigger
and the feed of pap that we nurses and guardian angels of
the press have to deal out to it
gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger
yet its belly-ache seems to get bigger too
and soon even god won’t be big enough to handle that infant.
GLIMPSES
WHAT’S the good of a man
unless there’s the glimpse of a god in him?
And what’s the good of a woman
unless she’s a glimpse of a goddess of some sort?
ALL SORTS OF GODS
THERE’S all sorts of gods, all sorts and every sort,
and every god that humanity has ever known is still a god to-day
the African queer ones and Scandinavians’ queer ones,
the Greek beautiful ones, the Phoenician ugly ones, the Aztec
hideous ones
goddesses of love, goddesses of dirt, excrement-eaters or lily virgins
Jesus, Buddha, Jehovah and Ra, Egypt and Babylon
all the gods, and you see them all if you look, alive and moving to-day,
and alive and moving to-morrow, many to-morrows, as yesterdays.
Where do you see them, you say?
You see them in glimpses, in the faces and forms of people,
in glimpses.
When men and women, when lads and girls are not thinking,
when they are pure, which means when they are quite clean
from self-consciousness
either in anger or tenderness, or desire or sadness or wonder
or mere stillness
you may see glimpses of the gods in them.
FOR A MOMENT
FOR a moment, at evening, tired, as he stepped off the tram- car,
— the young tram-conductor in a blue uniform, to himself
forgotten, —
and lifted his face up, with blue eyes looking at the electric
rod which he was going to turn round,
for a moment, pure in the yellow evening light, he was
Hyacinthus.
In the green garden darkened the shadow of coming rain
and a girl ran swiftly, laughing breathless, taking in her white washing
in rapid armfuls from the line, tossing in the basket,
and so rapidly, and so flashing, fleeing before the rain
for a moment she was Io, Io, who fled from Zeus, or the Danae.
When I was waiting and not thinking, sitting at a table on the
hotel terrace
I saw suddenly coming towards me, lit up and uplifted with pleasure
advancing with the slow-swiftness of a ship backing her whi
te
sails into port
the woman who looks for me in the world
and for the moment she was Isis, gleaming, having found her
Osiris.
For a moment, as he looked at me through his spectacles
pondering, yet eager, the broad and thick-set Italian who
works in with me,
for a moment he was the Centaur, the wise yet horse-hoofed
Centaur
in whom I can trust.
GOETHE AND POSE
WHEN Goethe becomes an Apollo, he becomes a plaster cast.
When people pose as gods, they are Crystal Palace statues,
Made of cement poured into a mould, around iron sticks.
MEN LIKE GODS
WHEN men think they are like gods
they are usually much less than men
being conceited fools.
THOUGHT
THOUGHT, I love thought.
But not the jaggling and twisting of already existent ideas
I despise that self-important game.
Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness
Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of the conscience
Thought is gazing on to the face of life, and reading what can
be read,
Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to con- clusion.
Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges
Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.
BE IT SO
O, IF a flame is in you, be it so!
When your flame flickers up, and flickers forth in sheer purity
for a moment free from all conceit of yourself, and all after- thought
you are for that moment one of the gods, Jesus or Fafnir or
Priapus or Siva.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 871