But when the mind has a sufficient number of these little batteries of ideas in store, a new process of life starts in. The moment an idea forms in the mind, at that moment does the old integrity of the consciousness break. In the old myths, at that moment we lose our “innocence,” we partake of the tree of knowledge, and we become “aware of our nakedness”: in short, self-conscious. The self becomes aware of itself, and then the fun begins, and then the trouble starts.
The first thing the self-aware-of-itself realizes is that it is a derivative, not a primary entity. The second thing it realizes is that the spontaneous self with its sympathetic consciousness and non- ideal reaction is the original reality, the old Adam, over which the self-aware-of-itself has no originative power. That is, the self-aware- of-itself knows it can frustrate the consciousness of the old Adam, divert it, but it cannot stop it: it knows, moreover, that as the moon is a luminary because the sun shines, so it, the self-aware-of-itself, the mental consciousness, the spirit, is only a sort of reflection of the great primary consciousness of the old Adam.
Now the self-aware-of-itself has always the quality of egoism. The spirit is always egoistic. The greatest spiritual commands are all forms of egoism, usually inverted egoism, for deliberate humility, we are all well aware, is a rabid form of egoism. The Sermon on the Mount is a long string of utterances from the self-aware-of-itself, the spirit, and all of them are rabid aphorisms of egoism, backhanded egoism.
The moment the self-aware-of-itself comes into being, it begins egoistically to assert itself. It cuts immediately at the wholeness of the pristine consciousness, the old Adam, and wounds it. And it goes on with the battle. The greatest enemy man has or ever can have is his own spirit, his own self-aware-of-itself.
This self-aware ego knows it is a derivative, a satellite. So it must assert itself. It knows it has no power over the original body, the old Adam, save the secondary power of the idea. So it begins to store up ideas, those little batteries which always have a moral, or good-and-bad implication.
For four thousand years man has been accumulating these little batteries of ideas, and using them on himself against his pristine consciousness, his old Adam. The queen bee of all human ideas since 2000 B.C. has been the idea that the body, the pristine consciousness, the great sympathetic life-flow, the steady flame of the old Adam is bad, and must be conquered. Every religion taught the conquest: science took up the battle, tooth and nail: culture fights in the same cause: and only art sometimes — or always — exhibits an internecine conflict and betrays its own battle-cry.
I believe that there was a great age, a great epoch when man did not make war: previous to 2000 B.C. Then the self had not really become aware of itself, it had not separated itself off, the spirit was not yet born, so there was no internal conflict, and hence no permanent external conflict. The external conflict of war, or of industrial competition, is only a reflection of the war that goes on inside each human being, the war of the self-conscious ego against the spontaneous old Adam.
If the self-conscious ego once wins, you get immediate insanity, because our primary self is the old Adam, in which rests our sanity. And when man starts living from his self-conscious energy, women at once begin to go to pieces, all the “freedom” business sets in. Because women are only kept in equilibrium by the old Adam. Nothing else can avail.
But the means which the spirit, the self-conscious ego, the personality, the self-aware-of-itself takes to conquer the vital self or old Adam are curious. First it has an idea, a semi-truth in which some of the energy of the vital consciousness is transmuted and stored. This idea it projects down again onto the spontaneous affective body. The verv first idea is the idea of shame. The spirit, the self-conscious ego looks at the body and says: You are shameful. The body, for some mysterious reason (really, because it is so vulnerable), immediately feels ashamed. A-ha! Now the spirit has got a hold. It discovers a second idea. The second idea is work. The spirit says: Base body! you need all the time to eat food. Who is going to give you food? You must sweat for it, sweat for it, or you will starve.
Now before the spirit emerged white and tyrannous in the human consciousness, man had not concerned himself deeply about starving. Occasionally, no doubt, he starved; but no oftener than the birds do, and they don’t often starve. Anyhow, he cared no more about it than the birds do. But now he feared it, and fell to work.
And here we see the mysterious power of ideas, the power of rousing emotion, primitive emotions of shame, fear, anger, and sometimes joy; but usually the specious joy over another defeat of the pristine self.
So the spirit, the self-aware-of-itself organized a grand battery of dynamic ideas, the pivotal idea being almost always the idea of self-sacrifice and the triumph of the self-aware-of-itself, that pale Galilean simulacrum of a man.
But wait! Wait! There is a nemesis. It is great fun overcoming the Old Adam while the Old Adam is still lusty and kicking: like breaking in a bronco. But nemesis, strange nemesis. The old Adam isn’t an animal that you can permanently domesticate. Domesticated, he goes deranged.
We are the sad results of a four-thousand-year effort to break the Old Adam, to domesticate him utterly. He is to a large extent broken and domesticated.
But then what? Then, as the flow of pristine or spontaneous consciousness gets weaker and weaker, the grand dynamic ideas go deader and deader. We have got a vast magazine of ideas, all of us. But they are practically all dead batteries, played out. They can’t provoke any emotion or feeling or reaction in the spontaneous body, the old Adam. Love is a dead shell of an idea — we don’t react — for love is only one of the great dynamic ideas, now played out. Self- sacrifice is another dead shell. Conquest is another. Success is another. Making good is another.
In fact, I don’t know of one great idea or ideal — they are the same — which is still alive today. They are all dead. You can turn them on, but you get no kick. You turn on love, you fornicate till you are black in the face — you get no real thing out of it. The old Adam plays his last revenge on you, and refuses to respond at all to any of your ideal pokings. You have gone dead. You can’t feel anything, and you may as well know it.
The mob, of course, will always deceive themselves that they are feeling things, even when they are not. To them, when they say 1 love you! there will be a huge imaginary feeling, and they will act up according to schedule. All the love on the film, the close-up kisses and the rest, and all the responses in buzzing emotion in the audience, is all acting up, all according to schedule. It is all just cerebral, and the body is just forced to go through the antics.
And this deranges the natural body-mind harmony on which our sanity rests. Our masses are rapidly going insane.
And in the horror of nullity — for the human being comes to have his own nullity in horror, he is terrified by his own incapacity to feel anything at all, he has a mad fear, at last, of his own self- consciousness — the modern man sets up the reverse process of katab- olism, destructive sensation. He can no longer have any living productive feelings. Very well, he will have destructive sensations, produced by katabolism on his most intimate tissues.
Drink, drugs, jazz, speed, “petting,” all modern forms of thrill, are just the production of sensation by the katabolism of the finest conscious cells of our living body. We explode our own cells and release a certain energy and accompanying sensation. It is, naturally, a process of suicide. And it is just the same process as ever: the self-conscious ego, the spirit, attacking the pristine body, the old Adam. But now the attack is direct. All the wildest Bohemians and profligates are only doing directly what their puritanical grandfathers did indirectly: killing the body of the old Adam. But now the lust is direct self-murder. It only needs a few more strides, and it is promiscuous murder, like the war.
But we see this activity rampant today: the process of the sensational katabolism of the conscious body. It is perhaps even more pernicious than the old conservative attack on the old Adam, certainly it is
swifter. But it is the same thing. There is no volte-face. There is no new spirit. It may be a Life of Christ or it may be a book on Relativity or a slim volume of lyrics or a novel like the telephone directory: it is still the same old attack on the living body. The body is still made disgusting. Only the moderns drag in all the excrements and the horrors and put them under your nose and say: Enjoy that horror! Or they write about love as if it were a process of endless pissing — except that they write kissing instead of pissing — and they say: Isn’t it lovely!
PERSONALIA AND FRAGMENTS
THE MINER AT HOME
Like most colliers, Bower had his dinner before he washed himself. It did not surprise his wife that he said little. He seemed quite amiable, but evidently did not feel confidential. Gertie was busy with the three children, the youngest of whom lay kicking on the sofa, preparing to squeal; therefore she did not concern herself overmuch with her husband, once having ascertained by a few shrewd glances at his heavy brows and his blue eyes, which moved conspicuously in his black face, that he was only pondering.
He smoked a solemn pipe until six o’clock. Although he was really a good husband, he did not notice that Gertie was tired. She was getting irritable at the end of the long day.
“Don’t you want to wash yourself?” she asked, grudgingly, at six o’clock. It was sickening to have a man sitting there in his pit-dirt, never saying a word, smoking like a Red Indian.
“I’m ready, when you are,” he replied.
She lay the baby on the sofa, barricaded it with pillows, and brought from the scullery a great panchion, a bowl of heavy earthenware like brick, glazed inside to a dark mahogany color. Tall and thin and very pale, she stood before the fire holding the great bowl, her grey eyes flashing.
“Get up, our Jack, this minute, or I’ll squash thee under the blessed panchion.”
The fat boy of six, who was rolling on the rug in the firelight, said broadly:
“Squash me, then.”
“Get up,” she cried, giving him a push with her foot.
“Gi’e ower,” he said, rolling jollily.
“I’ll smack you,” she said grimly, preparing to put down the panchion.
“Get up, theer,” shouted the father.
Gertie ladled water from the boiler with a tin ladling can. Drops fell from her ladle hissing into the red fire, splashing on to the white hearth, blazing like drops of flame on the flat-topped fender. The father gazed at it all, unmoved.
“I’ve told you,” he said, “to put cold water in the panchion first. If one o’ th’ children goes an’ falls in . . .”
“You can see as ‘e doesn’t then,” snapped she. She tempered the bowl with cold water, dropped in a flannel and a lump of soap, and spread the towel over the fender to warm.
Then, and only then, Bower rose. He wore no coat, and his arms were freckled black. He stripped to the waist, hitched his trousers into the strap, and kneeled on the rug to wash himself. There was a great splashing and sputtering. The red firelight shone on his cap of white soap, and on the muscles of his back, on the strange working of his red and white muscular arms, that flashed up and down like individual creatures.
Gertie sat with the baby clawing at her ears and hair and nose. Continually she drew back her face and head from the cruel little baby-clasp. Jack was hanging on to the kitchen door.
“Come away from that door,” cried the mother.
Jack did not come away, but neither did he open the door and run the risk of incurring his father’s wrath. The room was very hot, but the thought of a draught is abhorrent to a miner.
With the baby on one arm, Gertie washed her husband’s back. She sponged it carefully with the flannel, and then, still with one hand, began to dry it on the rough towel.
“Canna ter put th’ childt down an’ use both hands?” said her husband.
“Yes; an’ then if th’Yhildt screets, there’s a bigger to-do than iver. There’s no suitin’ some folk.”
“The childt ‘ud non screet.”
Gertie plumped it down. The baby began to cry. The wife rubbed her husband’s back till it grew pink, whilst Bower quivered with pleasure. As soon as she threw the towel down:
“Shut that childt up,” he said.
He wrestled his way into his shirt. His head emerged, with black hair standing roughly on end. He was rather an ugly man, just above medium height, and stiffly built. He had a thin black moustache over a full mouth, and a very full chin that was marred by a blue seam, where a horse had kicked him when he was a lad in the pit.
With both hands on the mantelpiece above his head, he stood looking in the fire, his whitish shirt hanging like a smock over his pit trousers.
Presently, still? looking absently in the fire, he said: “Bill Andrews was standin’ at th’ pit top, an’ give ivery man as ‘e come up one o’ these.”
He handed to his wife a small whity-blue paper, on which was printed simply:
February 14, 191s.
To the Manager —
I hereby give notice to leave your employment fourteen days from above date.
Signed —
Gertie read the paper, blindly dodging her head from the baby’s grasp.
“An’ what d’you reckon that’s for?” she asked.
“I suppose it means as we come out.”
“I’m sure!” she cried in indignation. “Well, tha’rt not goin’ to sign it.”
“It’ll ma’e no diff’rence whether I do or dunna — t’others will.”
“Then let ‘em!” She made a small clicking sound in her mouth. “This ‘ill ma’e th’ third strike as we’ve had sin’ we’ve been married; an’ a fat lot th’ better for it you are, arena you?”
He squirmed uneasily.
“No, but we mean to be,” he said.
“I’ll tell you what, colliers is a discontented lot, as doesn’t know what they do want. That’s what they are.”
“Tha’d better not let some o’ th’ colliers as there is hear thee say so.”
“I don’t care who hears me. An’ there isn’t a man in Eastwood but what’ll say as th’ last two strikes has ruined the place. There’s that much bad blood now atween th’ mesters an’ th’ men as there isn’t a thing but what’s askew. An’ what will it be, I should like to know!”
“It’s not on’y here; it’s all ower th’ country alike,” he gloated.
“Yes; it’s them blessed Yorkshire an’ Welsh colliers as does it. They’re that bug nowadays, what wi’ talkin’ an’ spoutin’, they hardly know which side their back-side hangs. Here, take this childt!”
She thrust the baby into his arms, carried out the heavy bowlful of black suds, mended the fire, cleared round, and returned for the child.
“Ben Haseldine said, an’ he’s a union man — he told me when he come for th’ union money yesterday, as th’ men doesn’t want to come out — not our men. It’s th’ union.”
“Tha knows nowt about it, woman. It’s a’ woman’s jabber, from beginnin’ to end.” “You don’t intend us to know. Who wants th’ Minimum Wage? Butties doesn’t. There th’ butties’ll be, havin’ to pay seven shillin’ a day to men as ‘appen isn’t worth a penny more than five.”
“But the butties is goin’ to have eight shillin’ accordin’ to scale.”
“An’ then th’ men as can’t work tip-top, an’ is worth, ‘appen, five shillin’ a day, they get th’ sack: an’ th’ old men, an’ so on.”
“Nowt o’ th’ sort, woman, nowt o’ th’ sort. Tha’s got it off ‘am-pat. There’s goin’ to be inspectors for all that, an’ th’ men’ll get what they’re worth, accordin’ to age, an’ so on.”
“An’ accordin’ to idleness an’ — what somebody says about ‘em. I’ll back! There’ll be a lot o’ fairness!”
“Tha talks like a woman as knows nowt. What does thee know about it?”
“I know what you did at th’ last strike. And I know this much, when Shipley men had their strike tickets, not one in thre
e signed ‘em — so there. An’ tha’rt not goin’ to!”
“We want a livin’ wage,” he declared.
“Hanna you got one?” she cried.
“Han we?” he shouted. “Han we? Who does more chaunterin’ than thee when it’s a short wik, an’ tha gets ‘appen a scroddy twenty-two shillin’? Tha goes at me ‘ard enough.”
“Yi; but what better shall you be? What better are you for th’ last two strikes — tell me that?”
“I’ll tell thee this much, th’ mesters doesna’ mean us to ha’e owt. They promise, but they dunna keep it, not they. Up comes Friday night, an’ nowt to draw, an’ a woman fit to ha’e yer guts out for it.”
“It’s nowt but th’ day-men as wants the blessed Minimum Wage — it’s not butties.”
“It’s time as th’ butties did ha’e ter let their men make a fair day’s wage. Four an’ sixpence a day is about as ‘e’s allowed to addle, whoiver he may be.”
“I wonder what you’ll say next. You say owt as is put in your mouth, that’s a fac’. What are thee, dost reckon? — are ter a butty, or day-man, or ostler, or are ter a mester? — for tha might be, ter hear thee talk.”
“I nedna neither. It ought to be fair a’ round.”
“It ought, hang my rags, it ought! Tha’rt very fair to me, for instance.”
“An’ arena I?”
“Tha thinks ‘cause tha gi’es me a lousy thirty shillin’ reg’lar tha’rt th’ best man i’ th’ Almighty world. Tha mun be “waited on han’ an’ foot, an’ sided wi’ whativer tha says. But I’m not! No, an’ I’m not, not when it comes to strikes. I’ve seen enough on ‘em.”
“Then niver open thy mouth again if it’s a short wik, an’ we’re pinched.”
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1070