Who can choose beforehand what the world shall be? All law, all knowledge holds good for that which already exists in the created world. But there is no law, no knowledge of the unknown which is to take place. We cannot know, we cannot declare beforehand. We can only come at length to that perfect state of understanding, of acquiescence, when we sleep upon the living drift of the unknown, when we are given to the direction of creation, when we fly like a shuttle that flies from hand to hand in a line across the loom. The pattern is woven of us without our foreknowing, but not without our perfect unison of acquiescence.
What is will, divorced from the impulse of the unknown? What can we achieve by this insulated self-will? Who can take his way into the unknown by will? We are driven. Subtly and beautifully, we are impelled. It is our peace and bliss to follow the rarest prompting. We sleep upon the impulse; we lapse on the strange incoming tide, which rises now where no tide ever rose; we are conveyed to the new ends. And this is peace when we sleep upon the perfect impulse in the spirit. This is peace even whilst we run the gauntlet of destruction. Still we sleep in peace upon the pure impulse.
When we have become very still, when there is an inner silence as complete as death, then, as in the grave, we hear the rare, superfine whispering of the new direction; the intelligence comes. After the pain of being destroyed in all our old securities that we used to call peace, after the pain and death of our destruction in the old life comes the inward suggestion of fulfilment in the new.
This is peace like a river. This is peace like a river to flow upon the tide of the creative direction, towards an end we know nothing of, but which only fills us with bliss of confidence. Our will is a rudder that steers us and keeps us faithfully adjusted to the current. Our will is the strength that throws itself upon the tiller when we are caught by a wrong current. We steer by the delicacy of adjusted understanding, and our will is the strength that serves us in this. Our will is never tired of adjusting the helm according to our pure understanding. Our will is prompt and ready to shove off from any obstruction, to overcome any impediment. We steer with the subtlety of understanding and the strength of our will sees us through.
But all the while our greatest effort and our supreme aim is to adjust ourselves to the river that carries us, so that we may be carried safely to the end, neither wrecked nor stranded nor clogged in weeds. All the while we are but given to the stream, we are borne upon the surpassing impulse which has our end in view beyond us. None of us knows the way. The way is given on the way.
There is a sacrifice demanded — only one, an old sacrifice that was demanded of the first man, and will be demanded of the last. It is demanded of all created life. I must submit my will and my understanding — all I must submit, not to any other will, not to any other understanding, not to anything that is, but to the exquisitest suggestion from the unknown that comes upon me. This I must attend to and submit to. It is not me, it is upon me.
There is no visible security; pure faith is the only security. There is no given way; there will never be any given way. We have no foreknowledge, no security of chart and regulation; there is no pole- star save only pure faith.
We must give up our assurance, our conceit of final knowledge, our vanity of charted right and wrong. We must give these up for ever. We cannot map out the way. We shall never be able to map out the way to the new. All our maps, all our charts, all our right and wrong are only record from the past. But for the new there is a new and for ever incalculable element.
We must give ourselves and be given, not to anything that has been, but to the river of peace that bears us. We must abide by the incalculable impulse of creation; we must sleep in faith. It will seem to us we are nowhere. We shall be afraid of anarchy and confusion. But, in fact, there is no anarchy so horrid as the anarchy of fixed law, which is mechanism.
We must be given in faith, like sleep. We must lapse upon a current that carries us like repose, and extinguishes in repose our self-insistence and self-will. It will seem to us we are nothing when we are no longer actuated by the stress of self-will. It will seem we have no progression, nothing progressive happens. Yet if we look, we shall see the banks of the old slipping noiselessly by; we shall see a new world unfolding round us. It is pure adventure, most beautiful.
But first it needs the act of courage: that we yield up our will to the unknown, that we deliver our course to the current of the invisible. With what rigid, cruel insistence we clutch the control of our lives; with what a morbid frenzy we try to force our conclusions; with what madness of ghastly persistence we break ourselves under our own will! We think to work everything out mathematically and mechanically, forgetting that peace far transcends mathematics and mechanics.
There is a far sublimer courage than the courage of the indomitable will. It is not the courage of the man smiling contemptuously in the face of death that will save us all from death. It is the courage which yields itself to the perfectest suggestion from within. When a man yields himself implicitly to the suggestion which transcends him, when he accepts gently and honourably his own creative fate, he is beautiful and beyond aspersion.
In self-assertive courage a man may smile serenely amid the most acute pains of death, like a Red Indian of America. He may perform acts of stupendous heroism. But this is the courage of death. The strength to die bravely is not enough.
Where has there been on earth a finer courage of death and endurance than in the Red Indian of America? And where has there been more complete absence of the courage of life? Has not this super-brave savage maintained himself in the conceit and strength of his own will since time began, as it seems? He has held himself aloof from all pure change; he has kept his will intact and insulated from life till he is an automaton — mad, living only in the acute inward agony of a negated impulse of creation. His living spirit is crushed down from him, confined within bonds of an unbreakable will, as the feet of a Chinese woman are bound up and clinched in torment. He only knows that he lives by the piercing of anguish and the thrill of peril. He needs the sharp sensation of peril; he needs the progression through danger and the interchange of mortal hate; he needs the outward torture to correspond with the inward torment of the restricted spirit. For that which happens at the quick of a man’s life will finally have its full expression in his body. And the Red Indian finds relief in the final tortures of death, for these correspond at last with the inward agony of the cramped spirit; he is released at last to the pure and sacred readjustment of death.
He has all the fearful courage of death. He has all the repulsive dignity of a static, indomitable will. He has all the noble, sensational beauty of arrestedness, the splendour of insulated changeless- ness, the pride of static resistance to every impulse of mobile, delicate life. And what is the end? He is benumbed against all life, therefore he needs torture to penetrate him with vital sensation. He is cut off from growth, therefore he finds his fulfilment in the slow and mortal anguish of destruction. He knows no consummation of peace, but falls at last in the great conclusion of death.
Having all the resultant courage of negation, he has failed in the great crisis of life. He had not the courage to yield himself to the unknown that should make him new and vivid, to yield himself, deliberately, in faith. Does any story of martyrdom affect us like the story of the conversion of Paul? In an age of barrenness, where people glibly talk of epilepsy on the road to Damascus, we shy off from the history, we hold back from realizing what is told. We dare not know. We dare to gloat on the crucifixion, but we dare not face the mortal fact of the conversion from the accepted world, to the new world which was not yet conceived, that took place in the soul of St. Paul on the road to Damascus.
It is a passage through a crisis greater than death or martyrdom. It is the passage from the old way of death to the new way of creation. It is a transition out of assurance into peace. It is a change of state from comprehension to faith. It is a submission and allegiance given to the new which approaches us, in place of defiance
and self-insistence, insistence on the known, that which lies static and external.
Sappho leaped off into the sea of death. But this is easy. Who dares leap off from the old world into the inception of the new? Who dares give himself to the tide of living peace? Many have gone in the tide of death. Who dares leap into the tide of new life? Who dares to perish from the old static entity, lend himself to the unresolved wonder? Who dares have done with his old self? Who dares have done with himself, and with all the rest of the old-established world; who dares have done with his own righteousness; who dares have done with humanity? It is time to have done with all these, and be given to the unknown which will come to pass.
It is the only way. There is this supreme act of courage demanded from every man who would move in a world of life. Empedocles ostentatiously leaps into the crater of the volcano. But a living man must leap away from himself into the much more awful fires of creation. Empedocles knew well enough where he was going when he leaped into Etna. He was only leaping hastily into death, where he would have to go, whether or not. He merely forestalled himself a little. For we must all die. But we need not all live. We have always the door of death in front of us, and, howsoever our track winds and travels, it comes to that door at last. We must die within an allotted term; there is not the least atom of choice allowed us in this.
But we are not compelled to live. We are only compelled to die. We may refuse to live; we may refuse to pass into the unknown of life; we may deny ourselves to life altogether. So much choice we have. There is so much free will that we are perfectly free to forestall our date of death, and perfectly free to postpone our date of life, as long as we like.
We must choose life, for life will never compel us. Sometimes we have even no choice; we have no alternative to death. Then, again, life is with us; there is the soft impulse of peace. But this we may deny emphatically and to the end, and it is denied to us. We may reject life completely and finally from ourselves. Unless we submit our will to the flooding of life, there is no life in us.
If a man have no alternative but death, death is his honour and his fulfilment. If he is wintry in discontent and resistance, then winter is his portion and his truth. Why should he be cajoled or bullied into a declaration for life? Let him declare for death with a whole heart. Let every man search in his own soul to find there the quick suggestion, whether his soul be quick for life or quick for death. Then let him act as he finds it. For the greatest of all misery is a lie; and if a man belong to the line of obstinate death, he has at least the satisfaction of pursuing this line simply. But we will not call this peace. There is all the world of difference between the sharp, drug-delicious satisfaction or resignation and self-gratifying humility and the true freedom of peace. Peace is when I accept life; when I accept death I have the hopeless equivalent of peace, which is quiescence and resignation.
Life does not break the self-insistent will. But death does. Death compels us and leaves us without choice. And all comparison whatsoever is death, and nothing but death.
To life we must cede our will, acquiesce and be at one with it, or we stand alone, we are excluded, we are exempt from living. The service of life is voluntary.
This fact of conversion, which has seemed, in its connexion with religion, to smack of unreality, to be, like the miracles, not quite credible, even if demonstrable, is a matter of fact essentially natural and our highest credit. We know what it is to prosecute death with all our strength of soul and body. We know what it is to be fulfilled with the activity of death. We have given ourselves body and soul, altogether, to the making of all the engines and contrivances and inventions of death. We have wanted to compel every man whatsoever to the activity of death. We have wanted to envelop the world in a vast unison of death, to let nothing escape. We have been filled with a frenzy of compulsion; our insistent will has co-ordinated into a monstrous engine of compulsion and death.
So now our fundamental being has come out. True, our banner is ostensible peace. But let us not degrade ourselves with lying. We were filled with the might of death. And this has been gathering in us for a hundred years. Our strength of death-passion has accumulated from our fathers; it has grown stronger and stronger from generation to generation. And in us it is confessed.
Therefore, we are in a position to understand the “phenomenon” of conversion. It is very simple. Let every man look into his own heart and see what is fundamental there. Is there a gnawing and unappeasable discontent? Is there a secret desire that there shall be new strife? Is there a prophecy that the worst is yet to come, is there a subtle thrill in the anticipation of a fearful tearing of the body of life at home, here, between the classes of men in England; a great darkness coming over England; the sound of a great rending of destruction? Is there a desire to partake in this rending, either on one side or the other? Is there a longing to see the masses rise up and make an end of the wrong old order? Is there a will to circumvent these masses and subject them to superior wisdom? Shall we govern them for their own good, strongly?
It does not matter on which side the desire stands, it is the desire of death. If we prophesy a triumph of the people over their degenerate rulers, still we prophesy from the inspiration of death. If we cry out in the name of the subjected herds of mankind against iniquitous tyranny, still we are purely deathly. If we talk of the wise controlling the unwise, this is the same death.
For all strife between things old is pure death. The very division of mankind into two halves, the humble and the proud, is death. Unless we pull off the old badges and become ourselves, single and new, we are divided unto death. It helps nothing whether we are on the side of the proud or the humble.
But if, in our heart of hearts, we can find one spark of happiness that is absolved from strife, then we are converted to the new life the moment we accept this spark as the treasure of our being. This is conversion. If there is a quick, new desire to have new heaven and earth, and if we are given triumphantly to this desire, if we know that it will be fulfilled of us, finally and without fail, we are converted. If we will have a new creation on earth, if our souls are chafing to make a beginning, if our fingers are itching to start the new work of building up a new world, a whole new world with a new open sky above us, then we are transported across the unthinkable chasm, from the old dead way to the beginning of all that is to be.
II
The beginning of spring lies in the awakening from winter. For us, to understand is to overcome. We have a winter of death, of destruction, vivid sensationalism of going asunder, the wintry glory of tragical experience to surmount and surpass. Thrusting through these things with the understanding, we come forth in first flowers of our spring with pale and icy blossoms, like bulb-flowers, the pure understanding of death. When we know the death is in ourselves, we are emerging into the new epoch. For whilst we are in the full flux of death, we can find no bottom of resistance from which to understand. When at last life stands under us, we can know what the flood is, in which we are immersed.
That which is understood by man is surpassed by man. When we understand our extreme being in death, we have surpassed into a new being. Many bitter and fearsome things there are for us to know, that we may go beyond them; they have no power over us any more.
Understanding, however, does not belong to every man, is not incumbent on every man. But it is vital that some men understand, that some few go through this final pain and relief of knowledge. For the rest, they have only to know peace when it is given them. But for the few there is the bitter necessity to understand the death that has been, so that we may pass quite clear of it.
The anguish of this knowledge, the knowledge of what we ourselves, we righteous ones, have been and are within the flux of death, is a death in itself. It is the death of our established belief in ourselves, it is the end of our current self-esteem. Those who live in the mind must also perish in the mind. The mindless are spared this.
We are not only creatures of light and virtue. We are al
so alive in corruption and death. It is necessary to balance the dark against the light if we are ever going to be free. We must know that we, ourselves, are the living stream of seething corruption, this also, all the while, as well as the bright river of life. We must recover our balance to be free. From our bodies comes the issue of corruption as well as the issue of creation. We must have our being in both, our knowledge must consist in both. The veils of the old temple must be rent, for they are but screens to hide from us our own being in corruption.
It is our self-knowledge that must be torn across before we are whole. The man I know myself to be must be destroyed before the true man I am can exist. The old man in me must die and be put away.
Either we can and will understand the other thing that we are, the flux of darkness and lively decomposition, and so become free and whole, or we fight shy of this half of ourselves, as man has always fought shy of it, and gone under the burden of secret shame and self- abhorrence. For the tide of our corruption is rising higher, and unless we adjust ourselves, unless we come out of our veiled temples, and see and know, and take the tide as it comes, ride upon it and so escape it, we are lost.
Within our bowels flows the slow stream of corruption, to the issue of corruption. This is one direction. Within our veins flows the stream of life, towards the issue of pure creation. This is the other direction. We are of both. We are the watershed from which flow the dark rivers of hell on the one hand, and the shimmering rivers of heaven on the other.
If we are ashamed, instead of covering the shame with a veil, let us accept that thing which makes us ashamed, understand it and be at one with it. If we shrink from some sickening issue of ourselves, instead of recoiling and rising above ourselves, let us go down into ourselves, enter Che hell of corruption and putrescence, and rise again, not fouled, but fulfilled and free. If there is a loathsome thought or suggestion, let us not dispatch it instantly with impertinent righteousness; let us admit it with simplicity, let us accept it, be responsible for it. It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them. For they are of us. We are angels and we are devils, both, in our own proper person. But we are more even than this. We are whole beings, gifted with understanding. A full, undiminished being is complete beyond the angels and the devils.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1058