Now we have to sow wild seed again. We have to cultivate our feelings. It is no good trying to be popular, to let a whole rank tangle of liberated, degenerate feelings spring up. It will give us no satisfaction.
And it is no use doing as the psychoanalysts have done. The psychoanalysts show the greatest fear of all, of the innermost primeval place in man, where God is, if He is anywhere. The old Jewish horror of the true Adam, the mysterious “natural man,” rises to a shriek in psychoanalysis. Like the idiot who foams and bites his wrists till they bleed. So great is the Freudian hatred of the oldest, old Adam, from whom God is not yet separated off, that the psychoanalyst sees this Adam as nothing but a monster of perversity, a bunch of engendering adders, horribly clotted.
This vision is the perverted vision of the degenerate tame: tamed through thousands of shameful years. The old Adam is the for ever untamed: he who is of the tame hated, with a horror of fearful hate: but who is held in innermost respect by the fearless.
In the oldest of the old Adam, was God: behind the dark wall of his breast, under the seal of the navel. Then man had a revulsion against himself, and God was separated off, lodged in the outermost space.
Now we have to return. Now again the old Adam must lift up his face and his breast, and un-tame himself. Not in viciousness nor in wantonness, but having God within the walls of himself. In the very darkest continent of the body there is God. And from Him issue the first dark rays of our feeling, wordless, and utterly previous to words: the innermost rays, the first messengers, the primeval, honourable beasts of our being, whose voice echoes wordless and for ever wordless down the darkest avenues of the soul, but full of potent speech. Our own inner meaning.
Now we have to educate ourselves, not by laying down laws and inscribing tables of stone, but by listening. Not listening-in to noises from Chicago or Timbuktu. But listening-in to the voices of the honourable beasts that call in the dark paths of the veins of our body, from the God in the heart. Listening inwards, inwards, not for words nor for inspiration, but to the lowing of the innermost beasts, the feelings, that roam in the forest of the blood, from the feet of God within the red, dark heart.
And how? How? How shall we even begin to educate ourselves in the feelings?
Not by laying down laws, or commandments, or axioms and postulates. Not even by making assertions that such and such is blessed. Not by words at all.
If we can’t hear the cries far down in our own forests of dark veins, we can look in the real novels, and there listen-in. Not listen to the didactic statements of the author, but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny.
THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS V. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
The more one reads of modern novels, the more one realizes that, in this individualistic age, there are no individuals left. People, men, women, and children, are not thinking their own thoughts, they are not feeling their own feelings, they are not living their own lives.
The moment the human being becomes conscious of himself, he ceases to be himself. The reason is obvious. The moment any individual creature becomes aware of its own individual isolation, it becomes instantaneously aware of that which is outside itself, and forms its limitation. That is, the psyche splits in two, into subjective and objective reality. The moment this happens, the primal integral I, which is for the most part a living continuum of all the rest of living things, collapses, and we get the I which is staring out of the window at the reality which is not itself. And this is the condition of the modern consciousness, from early childhood.
In the past, children were supposed to be “innocent.” Which means that they were like the animals, not split into subjective and objective consciousness. They were one living continuum with all the universe. This is the essential state of innocence, of naivete, and it is the persistence of this state all through life, as the basic state of consciousness, which preserves the human being all his life fresh and alive, a true individual. Paradoxical as it may sound, the individual is only truly himself when he is unconscious of his own individuality, when he is unaware of his own isolation, when he is not split into subjective and objective, when there is no me or you, no me or it in his consciousness, but the me and you, the me and it is a living continuum, as if all were connected by a living membrane.
As soon as the conception me or you, me or it enters the human consciousness, then the individual consciousness is supplanted by the social consciousness. The social consciousness means the cleaving of the true individual consciousness into two halves, subjective and objective, “me” on the one hand, “you” or “it” on the other. The awareness of “you” or of “it” as something definitely limiting “me,” this is the social consciousness. The awareness of “you” or of “it” is a continuum of “me” — different, but not separate: different as the eye is different from the nose — this is the primal or pristine or basic consciousness of the individual, the state of “innocence” or of naivety.”
This consciousness collapses, and the real individual lapses out, leaving only the social individual, a creature of subjective and objective consciousness, but of no innocent or genuinely individual consciousness. The innocent or radical individual consciousness alone is unanalysable and mysterious; it is the queer nuclear spark in the protoplasm, which is life itself, in its individual manifestation. The moment you split into subjective and objective consciousness, then the whole thing becomes analysable, and, in the last issue, dead.
Of course, it takes a long time to destroy the naive individual, the old Adam, entirely, and to produce creatures which are completely social in consciousness, that is, always aware of the “you” set over against the “me,” always conscious of the “it” which the “I” is up against. But it has happened now in even tiny children. A child nowadays can say: Mummy’. — and his fatal consciousness of the cleft between him and Mummy is already obvious. The cleavage has happened to him. He is no longer one with things: worse, he is no longer at one with his mother even. He is a tiny, forlorn little social individual, a subjective-objective little Consciousness.
The subjective-objective consciousness is never truly individual. It is a product. The social individual, the me-or-you, me-or-it individual, is denied all na’fve or innocent or really individual feelings. He is capable only of the feelings, which are really sensations, produced by the reaction between the “me” and the “you,” the “I” and the “it.” Innocent or individual feeling is only capable when there is a continuum, when the me and the you and the it are a continuum.
Man lapses from true innocence, from the at-oneness, in two ways. The first is the old way of greed or selfishness, when the “me” wants to swallow the “you” and put an end to the continuum that way. The other is the way of negation, when the “I” wants to lapse out into the “you” or the “it,” and so end all responsibility of keeping up one’s own bright nuclear cell alive in the tissue of the universe. In either way, there is a lapse from innocence and a fall into the state of vanity, ugly vanity. It is a vanity of positive tyranny, or a vanity of negative tyranny. The old villains-in-the-piece fell into the vanity of positive tyranny, the new villains-in-the-peace, who are still called saints and holy persons, or at worst, God’s fools, are squirming in the vanity of negative tyranny. They won’t leave the continuum alone. They insist on passing out into it. Which is as bad as if the eye should insist on merging itself into a oneness with the nose. For we are none of us more than a cell in the eye- tissue, or a cell in the nose-tissue or the heart-tissue of the macrocosm, the universe.
And, of course, the moment you cause a break-down in living tissue, you get inert Matter. So the moment you break the continuum, the naivete, the innocence, the at-oneness, you get materialism and nothing but materialism.
Of course, inert Matter exists, as distinct from living tissue: dead protoplasm as distinct from living, nuclear protoplasm. But the living tissue is able to deal with the dead tissue. Whereas the
reverse is not true. Dead tissue cannot do anything to living tissue, except try to corrupt it and make it dead too. Which is the main point concerning Materialism, whether it be the spiritual or the carnal Materialism.
The continuum which is alive can handle the dead tissue. That is, the individual who still retains his individuality, his basic at- oneness or innocence or naivete, can deal with the material world successfully. He can be analytical and critical upon necessity. But at the core, he is always naive or innocent or at one.
The contrary is not true. The social consciousness can only be analytical, critical, constructive but not creative, sensational but not passionate, emotional but without true feeling. It can know, but it cannot be. It is always made up of a duality, to which there is no clue. And the one half of the duality neutralizes, in the long run, the other half. So that, whether it is Nebuchadnezzar or Francis of Assisi, you arrive at the same thing, nothingness.
You can’t make art out of nothingness. Ex nihilo nihil fit! But you can make art out of the collapse towards nothingness: the collapse of the true individual into the social individual.
Which brings us to John Galsworthy with a bump. Because, in all his books, I have not been able to discover one real individual — nothing but social individuals. Ex nihilo nihil fit! You can’t make art, which is the revelation of the continuum itself, the very nuclear glimmer of the naive individual, when there is no continuum and no naive individual. As far as I have gone, I have found in Galsworthy nothing but social individuals.
Thinking you are naive doesn’t make you naive, and thinking you are passionate doesn’t make you passionate. Again, being stupid or limited is not a mark of naivety, and being doggedly amorous is not a sign of passion. In each case, the very reverse. Again, a peasant is by no means necessarily more naive, or innocent, or individual than a stockbroker, nor a sailor than an educationalist. The reverse may be the case. Peasants are often as greedy as cancer, and sailors as soft and corrupt as a rotten apple.
INTRODUCTION TO PICTURES
Man is anything from a forked radish to an immortal spirit. He is pretty well everything that ever was or will be, absolutely human and absolutely inhuman. If we did but know it, we have every imaginable and unimaginable feeling streaking somewhere through us. Even the most pot-headed American judge, who feels that his daughter will be lost for ever if she hears the word cunt, has all the feelings of a satyr careering somewhere inside him, very much suppressed and distorted. And the reason that Puritans are so frightened of life is that they happen, unfortunately, to be alive in spite of themselves.
The trouble with poor, pig-headed man is that he makes a selection out of the vast welter of his feelings, and says: I only feel these excellent selected feelings, and you, moreover, are allowed only to feel these excellent select feelings too. Which is all very well, till the pot boils over, or blows up.
When man fixes on a few select feelings and says that these feelings must be felt exclusively, the said feelings rapidly become repellent. Because we’ve got to love our wives, we make a point of loving somebody else. The moment the mind fixes a feeling, that feeling is repulsive. Take a greedy person, who falls right into his food. Why is he so distasteful? Is it because his stomach is asserting itself? Not at all! It is because his mind, having decided that food is good, or good for him, drives on his body to eat and eat and eat. The poor stomach is overloaded in spite of itself. The appetites are violated. The natural appetite says: I’ve had enough! But the fixed mind, fixed on feeding, forces the jaws, the gullet to go on working, the stomach to go on receiving. And this is greed. And no wonder it is repulsive.
The same is precisely true of drinking, smoking, drug-taking, or any of the vices. When did the body of a man ever like getting drunk? Never! Think how it reacts, how it vomits, how it tries to repudiate the excess of drink, how utterly wretched it feels when its sane balance is overthrown. But the mind or spirit of a man finds in intoxication some relief, some escape, some sense of licence, so the drunkenness is forced upon the unhappy stomach and bowels, which gradually get used to it. But which are slowly destroyed.
If only we would realize that, until perverted by the mind, the human body preserves itself continually in a delicate balance of sanityl That is what it is always striving to do, and always it is shoved over by the pernicious mental consciousness called the spirit. As soon as even a baby finds something good, it howls for more, till it is sick. That is the nauseating side of the human consciousness. But it is not the body. It is the mind, the self-aware-of-itself, which says: This is good. I will go on and on and on eating it! The human spirit is the self-aware-of-itself. This self-awareness may make us noble. More often it makes us worse than pigs. We need above all things a curb upon this spirit of ours, this self-aware-of-itself, which is our spirituality and our vice.
As a matter of fact, we need to be a little more radically aware of ourselves. When a man starts drinking, and his stomach simply doesn’t want any more, it is time he put a check on his impudent spirit and obeyed his stomach. When a man’s body has reached one of its periods of loneliness, and with a sure voice cries that it wants to be alone and intact, it is then, inevitably, that the accursed perversity of the spirit, the self-aware-of-itself, is bound to whip the unhappy senses into excitement and to force them into fornication. It is then, when a man’s body cries to be left alone and intact, that man forces himself to be a Don Juan. The same with women. It is the price we have to pay for our precious spirit, our self-aware- of-itself, which we don’t yet know how to handle.
And when a man has forced himself to be a Don Juan, you may bet his children will force themselves to be Puritans, with a nasty, greedy abstinence, as greedy as the previous gluttony. Oh bitter inheritance, the human spirit, the self-aware-of-itself! The self-aware- of-itself, that says: I like it, so I will have it all the time! — and then, in revulsion, says: I don’t like it, I will have none of it, and no man shall have any of it. Either way, it is sordid, and makes one sick. Oh lofty human spirit, how sordid you have made us! What a viper Plato was, with his distinction between body and spirit, and the exaltation of the spirit, the self-aware-of-itself. The human spirit, the self-aware-of-itself, is only tolerable when controlled by the divine, or demonish sanity which is greater than itself.
It is difficult to know what name to give to that most central and vital clue to the human being, which clinches him into integrity. The best is to call it his vital sanity. We thus escape the rather nauseating emotional suggestions of words like soul and spirit and holy ghost.
We can escape from the trap of the human spirit, the self-aware- of-itself, in which we are entrapped, by going quite, quite still and letting our whole sanity assert itself inside us, and set us into rhythm.
But first of all we must know we are entrapped. We most certainly are. You may call it intellectualism, self-consciousness, the self aware of itself, or what you will: you can even call it just human consciousness, if you like: but there it is. Perhaps it is simpler to stick to a common word like self-consciousness. In modern civilization we are all self-conscious. All our emotions are mental, self-conscious. Our passions are self-conscious. We are an intensely elaborate and intricate clockwork of nerves and brain. Nerves and brain, but still a clockwork. A mechanism, and hence incapable of experience.
The nerves and brain are the apparatus by which we signal and register consciousness. Consciousness, however, does not take rise in the nerves and brain. It takes rise elsewhere: in the blood, in the corpuscles, somewhere very primitive and pre-nerve and pre-brain. Just as energy generates in the electron. Every speck of protoplasm, every living cell is conscious. All the cells of our body are conscious. And all the time, they give off a stream of consciousness which flows along the nerves and keeps us spontaneously alive. While the flow streams through us, from the blood to the heart, the bowls, the viscera, then along the sympathetic system of nerves into our spontaneous minds, making us breathe, and see, and move, and be aware, and do thin
gs spontaneously, while this flow streams as a flame streams ceaselessly, we are lit up, we glow, we live.
But there is another process. There is that strange switchboard of consciousness, the brain, with its power of transferring spontaneous energy into voluntary energy: or consciousness, as you please: the two are very closely connected. The brain can transfer spontaneous consciousness, which we are unaware of, into voluntary consciousness, which we are aware of, and which we call consciousness exclusively.
Now it is nonsense to say there cannot be a consciousness in us of which we are always unaware. We are never aware of sleep except when we awake. If we didn’t sleep, we should never know we were awake. But we are very much aware of our “consciousness.” We are aware that it is a state only. And we are aware that it displaces another state. The other state we may negatively call the unconscious. But it is a poor way of putting it. To say that a skylark sings unconsciously is feeble. The skylark of course sings consciously. But with the other, spontaneous or sympathetic consciousness, which flows up like a flame from the corpuscles of all the body to the gates of the body, through the muscles and nerves of the sympathetic system to the hands and eyes and all the organs of utterance. The skylark does not sing like the lady in the concert- hall, consciously, mentally, deliberately, with the voluntary consciousness.
Some very strange process takes place in the brain, the process of cognition. This process of cognition consists in the forming of ideas, which are units of transmuted consciousness. These ideas can then be stored in the memory, or wherever it is that the brain stores its ideas. And these ideas are alive: they are little batteries in which so much energy of consciousness is stored.
It is here that our secondary consciousness comes in, our mind, our mental consciousness, our cerebral consciousness. Our mind is made up of a vast number of live ideas, and a good number of dead ones. Ideas are like the little electric batteries of a flashlight, in which a certain amount of energy is stored, which expends itself and it not renewed. Then you throw the dead battery away.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1069