Chapter VI: To Be, and to Be Different (2)

By itself, the river of life just gets nowhere. It sinks into the sand.

The river of life follows the living. If the living don’t get anywhere, the river of life doesn’t. The old serpent lays him down and goes into a torpor, instead of dancing at our heels and sending the life-sparks up our legs and spine, as we travel.

So we’ve got to get somewhere.

Is there no goal?

“Oh man! on your four legs, your two, and your three, where are you going?”--says the Sphinx.

“I’m just going to say _How-do-you-do?_ to Susan,” replies the man. And he passes without a scratch.

When the cock crows, he says “_How-do-you-do?_”

“_How-do-you-do Peter? How-do-you-do? old liar!_”

“_How-do-you-do, Oh Sun!_”

A challenge and a greeting.

We live in a multiple universe. I am a chick that absolutely refuses to chirp inside the monistic egg. See me walk forth, with a bit of egg-shell sticking to my tail!

When the cuckoo, the cow, and the coffee-plant chipped the Mundane Egg, at various points, they stepped out, and immediately set off in different directions. Not different directions of space and time, but different directions in creation: within the fourth dimension. The cuckoo went cuckoo-wards, the cow went cow-wise, and the coffee-plant started coffing. Three very distinct roads across the fourth dimension.

The cow was dumb, and the cuckoo too.
They went their ways, as creatures do,
Till they chanced to meet, in the Lord’s green Zoo.

The bird gave a cluck, the cow gave a coo,
At the sight of each other the pair of them flew
Into tantrums, and started their hullabaloo.

They startled creation; and when they were through
Each said to the other: till I came across you
I wasn’t aware of the things I could do!

Cuckoo!
Moo!
Cuckoo!

And this, I hold, is the true history of evolution.

The Greeks made equilibrium their goal. Equilibrium is hardly a goal to travel towards. Yet it’s something to attain. You travel in the fourth dimension, not in yards and miles, like the eternal serpent.

Equilibrium argues either a dualistic or a pluralistic universe. The Greeks, being sane, were pantheists and pluralists, and so am I.

Creation is a fourth dimension, and in it there are all sorts of things, gods and what-not. That brown hen, scratching with her hind leg in such common fashion, is a sort of goddess in the creative dimension. Of course, if you stay outside the fourth dimension, and try to measure creation in length, breadth and height, you’ve set yourself the difficult task of measuring up the Monad, the Mundane Egg. Which is a game, like any other. The solution is, of course (let me whisper): _put his tail in his mouth!_

Once you realise that, willy nilly, you’re _inside_ the Monad, you give it up. You’re inside it and you always will be. Therefore, Jonah, sit still in the whale’s belly, and have a look round. For you’ll never measure the whale, since you’re inside him.

And then you see it’s a fourth dimension, with all sorts of gods and goddesses in it. That brown hen, who, being a Rhode Island Red, is big and stuffy like plush-upholstery, is of course, a goddess in her own rights. If I myself had to make a poem to her, I should begin:

Oh my flat-footed plush armchair
So commonly scratching in the yard--!

But this poem would only reveal my own limitations.

Because Flat-foot is the favourite of the white leghorn cock, and he shakes the tid-bit for her with a most wooing noise, and when she lays an egg, he bristles like a double white poppy, and rushes to meet her, as she flounders down from the chicken-house, and his echo of her _I’ve-laid-an-egg_ cackle is rich and resonant. Every pine-tree on the mountains hears him:

She’s} _laid an egg_!
I’ve}

She’s} _laid an egg_!
I’ve}

And his poem would be:

“Oh you who make me feel so good, when you sit next me on the perch
At night! (temporarily, of course!)
Oh you who make my feathers bristle with the vanity of life!
Oh you whose cackle makes my throat go off like a rocket!
Oh you who walk so slowly, and make me feel swifter
Than my boss!
Oh you who bend your head down, and move in the under
Circle, while I prance in the upper!
Oh you, come! come! come! for here is a bit of fat from
The roast veal; I am shaking it for you.”

In the fourth dimension, in the creative world, we live in a pluralistic universe, full of gods and strange gods and unknown gods; a universe where that Rhode Island Red hen is a goddess in her own right and the white cock is a god indisputable, with a little red ring on his leg: which the boss put there.

Why? Why, I mean, is he a god?

Because he is something that nothing else is. Certainly he is something that I am not.

And she is something that neither he is nor I am.

When she scratches and finds a bug in the earth, she seems fairly to gobble down the monad of all monads; and when she lays, she certainly thinks she’s put the Mundane Egg in the nest.

Just part of her naive nature!

As for the goal, which doesn’t exist, but which we are always coming back to: well, it doesn’t spatially, or temporally, or eternally exist: but in the fourth dimension, it does.

What the Greeks called equilibrium: what I call relationship. Equilibrium is just a bit mechanical. It became very mechanical with the Greeks: an intellectual nail put through it.

I don’t _want_ to be “good” or “righteous”--and I won’t even be “virtuous”, unless “vir” means a man, and “vis” means the life-river.

But I _do_ want to be alive. And to be alive, I must have a goal in the _creative_, not the _spatial_ universe.

I want, in the Greek sense, an equilibrium between me and the rest of the universe. That is, I want a relationship between me and the brown hen.

The Greek equilibrium took too much for granted. The Greek never asked the brown hen, nor the horse, nor the swan, if it would kindly be equilibrated with him. He took it for granted that hen and horse would be only too delighted.

You can’t take it for granted. That brown hen is extraordinarily callous to my god-like presence. She doesn’t even choose to know me to nod to. If I’ve got to strike a balance between us, I’ve got to work at it.

But that is what I want: that she shall nod to me, with a “_Howdy!_”--and I shall nod to her, more politely: “_How-do-you-do, Flat-foot?_” And between us there shall exist the third thing, the _connaissance_. That is the goal.

I shall not betray myself nor my own life-passion for her. When she walks into my bedroom and makes droppings in my shoes, I shall chase her with disgust, and she will flutter and squawk. And I shall not ask her to be human for my sake.

That is the mistake the Greeks made. They talked about equilibrium, and then, when they wanted to equilibrate themselves with a horse, or an ox, or an acanthus, then horse, ox, and acanthus had to become nine-tenths human, to accommodate them. Call that equilibrium?

As a matter of fact, we don’t call it equilibrium, we call it anthropomorphism. And anthropomorphism is a bore. Too much anthropos makes the world a dull hole.

So Greek sculpture tends to become a bore. If it’s a horse, it’s an anthropomorphised horse. If it’s a Praxiteles _Hermes_, it’s a Hermes so Praxitelised, that it begins sugarily to bore us.

Equilibrium, in its very best sense--in the sense the Greeks _originally_ meant it--stands for the strange spark that flies between two creatures, two things that are equilibrated, or in living relationship. It is a goal: to come to that state when the spark will fly from me to Flat-foot, the brown hen, and from her to me.

I shall leave off addressing her: “_Oh my flat-footed plush arm-chair!_” I realise that is only impertinent anthropomorphism on my part. She might as well address me: “_Oh my skin-flappy split pole!_” Which would be like her impudence. Skin-flappy, of course, would refer to my blue shirt and baggy cord trousers. How would _she_ know I don’t grow them like a loose skin!

In the early Greeks, the spark between man and man, stranger and stranger, man and woman, stranger and strangeress, was alive and vivid. Even those Doric Apollos.

In the Egyptians, the spark between man and the living universe remains alight for ever in those early, silent, motionless statues of Pharaohs. They say, it is the statue of the soul of the man. But what is the soul of a man, except _that_ in him which is himself alone, suspended in immediate relationship to the sum of things? Not isolated or cut off. The Greeks began the cutting apart business. And Rodin’s remerging was only an intellectual tacking on again.

The serpent hasn’t got his tail in his mouth. He is on the alert, with lifted head like a listening, sparky flower. The Egyptians knew.

But when the oldest Egyptians carve a hawk or a Sekhet-cat, or paint birds or oxen or people: and when the Assyrians carve a she-lion: and when the cave-men drew the charging bison, or the reindeer, in the caves of Altamira: or when the Hindoo paints geese or elephants or lotus in the great caves of India whose name I forget--Ajanta!--then how marvellous it is! How marvellous is the living relationship between man and his object! be it man or woman, bird, beast, flower or rock or rain: the exquisite frail moment of pure conjunction, which, in the fourth dimension, is timeless. An Egyptian hawk, a Chinese painting of a camel, an Assyrian sculpture of a lion, an African fetish idol of a woman pregnant, an Aztec rattlesnake, an early Greek Apollo, a cave-man’s paintings of a Pre-historic mammoth, on and on, how perfect the timeless moments between man and the other Pan-creatures of this earth of ours!

And by the way, speaking of cave-men, how did those prognathous semi-apes of Altamira come to depict so delicately, so beautifully, a female bison charging, with swinging udder, or deer stooping feeding, or an antediluvian mammoth deep in contemplation. It is art on a pure, high level, beautiful as Plato, far, far more “civilized” than Burne Jones. Hadn’t somebody better write Mr. Wells’ History backwards, to prove how we’ve degenerated, in our stupid visionlessness, since the cave-men?

The pictures in the cave represent moments of purity which are the quick of civilization. The pure relation between the cave-man and the deer: fifty per-cent. man, and fifty per-cent. bison, or mammoth, or deer. It is not ninety-nine per-cent. man, and one per-cent. horse: as in a Raphael horse. Or hundred per-cent. fool, as when F. G. Watts sculpts a bronze horse and calls it Physical Energy.

If it is to be life, then it is fifty per-cent. me, fifty per-cent. thee: and the third thing, the spark, which springs from out of the balance, is timeless. Jesus, who saw it a bit vaguely, called it the Holy Ghost.

Between man and woman, fifty per-cent. man and fifty per-cent. woman: then the pure spark. Either this, or less than nothing.

As for ideal relationships, and pure love, you might as well start to water tin pansies with carbolic acid (which is pure enough, in the antiseptic sense) in order to get the Garden of Paradise.

BLESSED ARE THE POWERFUL

BLESSED ARE THE POWERFUL

The reign of love is passing, and the reign of power is coming again.

The day of popular democracy is nearly done. Already we are entering the twilight, towards the night that is at hand.

Before the darkness comes, it is as well to take our directions.

It is time to enquire into the nature of power, so that we do not crassly blunder into a new era: or fall down the gulf of anarchy, in the dark, as we cross the borders.

We have a confused idea, that _will_ and power are somehow identical. We think we can have a will-to-power.

A will-to-power seems to work out as bullying. And bullying is something despicable and detestable.

Tyranny, too, which seems to us the apotheosis of power, is detestable.

It comes from our mistaken idea of power. It comes from the ancient mistake, old as Moses, of confusing power with _will_. The _power_ of God, and the _will_ of God, we have imagined identical. We need only think for a moment, and we can see the vastness of difference between the two.

The Jews, in Moses’ time, and again particularly in the time of the Kings, came to look upon Jehovah as the apotheosis of arbitrary _will_. This is the root of a very great deal of evil; an old, old root.

Will is no more than an attribute of the ego. It is, as it were, the accelerator of the engine: or the instrument which increases the pressure. A man may have a strong will, an iron will, as we say, and yet be a stupid mechanical instrument, useful simply as an instrument, without any _power_ at all.

An instrument, even an iron one, has no power. The power has to be put into it. This is true of men with iron wills, just the same.

The Jews made the mistake of deifying Will, the ethical Will of God. The Germans again made the mistake of deifying the egoistic Will of Man: the will-to-power.

There is a certain inherent stupidity in apotheosised Will, and a consequent inevitable inferiority in the devotees thereof. They all have an inferiority complex.

Because power is not in the least like Will. Power comes to us, we know not how, from beyond. Whereas our will is our own.

When a man prides himself on something that is just in himself, part of his own ego, he falls into conceit, and conceit carries an inferiority complex as its shadow.

If a man, or a race, or a nation is to be anything at all, he must have the generosity to admit that his strength comes to him from beyond. It is not his own, self-generated. It comes as electricity comes, out of nowhere into somewhere.

It is no good trying to intellectualise about it. All attempts to argue and intellectualise merely strangle the passages of the heart. We wish to keep our hearts open. Therefore we brush aside argument and intellectual haggling.

The intellect is one of the most curious instruments of the psyche. But, like the will, it is only an instrument. And it works only under pressure of the will.

By willing and by intellectualising we have done all we can, for the time being. We only exhaust ourselves, and lose our lives--that is, our livingness, our power to live--by any further straining of the will and the intellect. It is time to take our hands off the throttle: knowing well enough what we are about, and choosing our course of action with a steady heart.

To take one’s hand off the throttle is not the same as to let go the reins.

Man lives to live, and for no other reason. And life is not mere length of days. Many people hang on, and hang on, into a corrupt old age, just because they have _not_ lived, and therefore cannot let go.

We must live. And to live, life must be in us. It must come to us, the power of life, and we must not try to get a strangle-hold upon it. From beyond comes to us the life, the power to live, and we must wisely keep our hearts open.

But the life will not come _unless_ we live. That is the whole point. “To him that hath shall be given.” To him that hath life shall be given life: on condition, of course, that he lives.

And again, life does not mean length of days. Poor old Queen Victoria had length of days. But Emily Brontë had life. She died of it.

And again “living” doesn’t mean just doing certain things: running after women, or digging a garden, or working an engine, or becoming a member of Parliament. Just because, for Lord Byron, to sleep with a “crowned head” was life itself, it doesn’t follow that it will be life for _me_ to sleep with a crowned head, or even a head uncrowned. Sleeping with heads is no joke, anyhow. And living won’t even consist in jazzing or motoring or going to Wembley, just because most folks do it. Living consists in doing what you really, vitally want to do: what the _life_ in you wants to do, not what your ego imagines you want to do. And to find out _how_ the life in you wants to be lived, and to live it, is terribly difficult. Somebody has to give us a clue.

And this is the real _exercise_ of power.

That settles two points. First, power is life rushing in to us. Second, the exercise of power is the setting of life in motion.

And this is very far from _Will_.

If you want a dictator, whether it is Lenin, or Mussolini, or Primo de Rivera, ask, not whether he can set money in circulation, but if he can set life in motion, by dictating to his people.

Now, although we hate to admit it, Lenin did set life a good deal in motion, for the Russian proletariat. The Russian proletariat was like a child that had been kept under too much. So it was dying to be free. It was crazy to keep house for itself.

Now, like a child, it is keeping house for itself, without Papa or Mama to interfere. And naturally it enjoys it. For the time it’s a game.

But for us, English or American or French or German people, it would not be a game. We have more or less kept house for ourselves for a long time, and it’s not very thrilling after years of it.

So a Lenin wouldn’t do us any good. He wouldn’t set any life going in us at all.

The Gallic and Latin blood isn’t thrilled about keeping house, anyhow. It wants Glory, or else Glory. Glory on horse-back, or Glory upset. If there was any Glory to upset, either in France or Italy or Spain, then communism might flourish. But since there isn’t even a spark of Glory to blow out--Alfonso! Victor Emmanuel! Poincaré!--what’s the good of blowing?

So they set up a little harmless Glory in baggy trousers--Papa Mussolini--or a bit of fat, self-loving but amiable elder-brother Glory in General de Rivera: and they call it power. And the democratic world holds up its hands, and moans: “_Dictators! Tyranny!_” While the conservative world cheers loudly, and cries: “_The Man! The Man! El hombre! L’uomo! L’homme! Hooray!!!_”

Bunk!

We want life. And we want the power of life. We want to feel the power of life in ourselves.

We’re sick of being soft, and amiable, and harmless. We’re sick to death of even enjoying ourselves. We’re a bit ashamed of our own existence. Or if we aren’t we ought to be.

But what then? Shall we exclaim, in a fat voice: “_Aha! Power! Glory! Force! The Man!_”--and proceed to set up a harmless Mussolini, or a fat Rivera? Well, let us, if we want to. Only it won’t make the slightest difference to our real living. Except it’s probably a good thing to have the press--the newspaper press--crushed under the up-to-date rubber heel of a tyrannous but harmless dictator.

We won’t speak of poor old Hindenburg. Except, why didn’t they set up his wooden statue with all the nails knocked into it, for a President? For surely they drove _something_ in, with those nails!

We had a harmless dictator, in Mr. Lloyd George. Better go ahead with the Houses of Representatives, than have another shot in that direction.

Power! How can there be power in politics, when politics is money?

Money is power, they say. Is it? Money is to power what margarine is to butter: a nasty substitute.

No, power is something you’ve got to respect, even revere, before you can have it. It isn’t bossing, or bullying, hiring a manservant or Salvationising your social inferior, issuing loud orders and getting your own way, doing your opponent down. That isn’t power.

Power is _pouvoir_: to be able to.

Might: the ability to make: to bring about that which may-be.

And where are we to get Power, or Might, or Glory, or Honour, or Wisdom?

Out of Lloyd George, or Lenin, or Mussolini, or Rivera, or anything else political?

Bah! It has to be in the people, before it can come out in politics.

Do we _want_ Power, Might, Glory, Honour, and Wisdom?

If we do, we’d better start to get them, each man for himself.

But if we don’t, we’d better continue our lick-spittling course of being as happy, as happy as Kings.

“The world is so full of a number of things
We ought all to be happy, as happy as Kings.”

Which Kings, might we ask? Better be careful!

Myself I want Power. But I don’t want to boss anybody.

I want Honour. But I don’t see any existing nation or government that could give it me.

I want Glory. But heaven save me from mankind.

I want Might. But perhaps I’ve got it.

The first thing, of course, is to open one’s heart to the source of Power, and Might, and Glory, and Honour. It just depends, which gates of one’s heart one opens. You can open the humble gate, or the proud gate. Or you can open both, and see what comes.

Best open both, and take the responsibility. But set a guard at each gate, to keep out the liars, the snivellers, the mongrel and the greedy.

However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn’t help us at all. The real power comes in to us from beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand.

And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honour and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty. We may have length of days. But an empty tin can lasts longer than Alexander lived.

So, anomalous as it may sound, if we want power, we must put aside our own will, and our own conceit, and _accept_ power, from the beyond.

And having admitted the power from the beyond into us, we must abide by it, and not traduce it. Courage, discipline, inward isolation, these are the conditions upon which power will abide in us.

And between brave people there will be the communion of power, prior to the communion of love. The communion of power does not exclude the communion of love. It includes it. The communion of love is only a part of the greater communion of power.

Power is the supreme quality of God and man: the power to cause, the power to create, the power to make, the power to do, the power to destroy. And then, between those things which are created or made, love is the supreme binding relationship. And between those who, with a single impulse, set out passionately to destroy what must be destroyed, joy flies like electric sparks, within the communion of power.

Love is simply and purely a relationship, and in a pure relationship there can be nothing but equality; or at least equipoise.

But Power is more than a relationship. It is like electricity, it has different degrees. Men are powerful or powerless, more or less: we know not how or why. But it is so. And the communion of power will always be a communion in inequality.

In the end, as in the beginning, it is always Power that rules the world! There _must be_ rule. And only Power can rule. Love cannot, should not, does not seek to. The statement that love rules the camp, the court, the grove, is a lie; and the fact that such love has to rhyme with “grove”, proves it. Power rules and will always rule. Because it was Power that created us all. The act of love itself is an act of power, original as original sin. The power is given us.

As soon as there is an _act_, even in love, it is power. Love itself is purely a relationship.

But in an age that, like ours, has lost the mystery of power, and the reverence for power, a false power is substituted: the power of money. This is a power based on the force of human envy and greed, nothing more. So nations naturally become more envious and greedy every day. While individuals ooze away in a cowardice that they call love. They call it love, and peace, and charity, and benevolence, when it is mere cowardice. Collectively they are hideously greedy and envious.

True power, as distinct from the spurious power, which is merely the force of certain human vices directed and intensified by the human will: true power never belongs to us. It is given us, from the beyond.

Even the simplest form of power, physical strength, is not our own, to do as we like with. As Samson found.

But power is given differently, in varying degrees and varying kind to different people. It always was so, it always will be so. There will never be equality in power. There will always be unending inequality.

Nowadays, when the only power is the power of human greed and envy, the greatest men in the world are men like Mr. Ford, who can satisfy the modern lust, we can call it nothing else, for owning a motorcar: or men like the great financiers, who can soar on wings of greed to uncanny heights, and even can spiritualise greed.

They talk about “equal opportunity”: but it is bunk, ridiculous bunk. It is the old fable of the fox asking the stork to dinner. All the food is to be served in a shallow dish, levelled to perfect equality, and you get what you can.

If you’re a fox, like the born financier, you get a bellyful and more. If you’re a stork, or a flamingo, or even a _man_, you have the food gobbled from under your nose, and you go comparatively empty.

Is the fox, then, or the financier, the highest animal in creation? Bah!

Humanity never bunked itself so thoroughly as with the bunk of equality, even qualified down to “equal opportunity”.

In living life, we are all born with different powers, and different degrees of power: some higher, some lower. The only thing to do is honorably to accept it, and to live in the communion of power. Is it not better to serve a man in whom power lives, than to clamour for equality with Mr. Motor-car Ford, or Mr. Shady Stinnes? Pfui! to your equality with such men! It gives me gooseflesh.

How much better it must have been, to be a colonel under Napoleon, than to be a Marshal Foch! Oh! how much better it must have been, to live in terror of Peter the Great--who was great--than to be a member of the proletariat under Comrade Lenin: or even to _be_ Comrade Lenin: though even he was greatish, far greater than any extant millionaire.

Power is beyond us. Either it is given us from the unknown, or we have not got it. And better to touch it in another, than never to know it. Better be a Russian and shoot oneself out of sheer terror of Peter the Great’s displeasure, than to live like a well-to-do American, and never know the mystery of Power at all. Live in blank sterility.

For Power is the first and greatest of all mysteries. It is the mystery that is behind all our being, even behind all our existence. Even the Phallic erection is a first blind movement of power. Love is said to call the power into motion: but it is probably the reverse: that the slumbering _power_ calls love into being.

Power is manifold. There is physical strength, like Samson’s. There is racial power, like David’s or Mahomet’s. There is mental power, like that of Socrates, and ethical power, like that of Moses, and spiritual power, like Jesus’ or like Buddha’s, and mechanical power, like that of Stephenson, or military power, like Napoleon’s, or political power, like Pitt’s. These are all true manifestations of power, coming out of the unknown.

Unlike the millionaire power, which comes out of the known forces of human greed and envy.

Power puts something new into the world. It may be Edison’s gramaphone, or Newton’s Law or Cæsar’s Rome or Jesus’ Christianity, or even Attila’s charred ruins and emptied spaces. Something new displaces something old, and sometimes room has to be cleared beforehand.

Then power is obvious. Power is much more obvious in its destructive than in its constructive activity. A tree falls with a crash. It grew without a sound.

Yet true destructive power is power just the same as constructive. Even Attila, the Scourge of God, who helped to scourge the Roman world out of existence, was great with power. He was the scourge of _God_: not the scourge of the League of Nations, hired and paid in cash.

If it must be a scourge, let it be a scourge of God. But let it be power, the old divine power. The moment the divine power manifests itself, it is right: whether it be Attila or Napoleon or George Washington. But Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson, and Lenin, they never had the right smell. They never even roused real fear: no real passion. Whereas a manifestation of real power arouses passion, and always will.

Time it should again.

Blessed are the powerful, for theirs is the kingdom of earth.

... LOVE WAS ONCE A LITTLE BOY

... LOVE WAS ONCE A LITTLE BOY

Collapse, as often as not, is the result of persisting in an old attitude towards some important relationship, which, in the course of time, has changed its nature.

Love itself is a relationship, which changes as all things change, save abstractions. If you want something really more durable than diamonds you must be content with eternal truths like “twice two are four”.

Love is a relationship between things that live, holding them together in a sort of unison. There are other vital relationships. But love is this special one.

In every living thing there is the desire, for love, or for the relationship of unison with the rest of things. That a tree should desire to develop itself between the power of the sun, and the opposite pull of the earth’s centre, and to balance itself between the four winds of heaven, and to unfold itself between the rain and the shine, to have roots and feelers in blue heaven and innermost earth, both, this is a manifestation of love: a knitting together of the diverse cosmos into a oneness, a tree.

At the same time, the tree must most powerfully exert itself and defend itself, to maintain its own integrity against the rest of things.

So that love, as a desire, is balanced against the opposite desire, to maintain the integrity of the individual self.

Hate is not the opposite of love. The real opposite of love is individuality.

We live in the age of individuality, we call ourselves the servants of love. That is to say, we enact a perpetual paradox.

Take the love of a man and a woman, today. As sure as you start with a case of “true love” between them, you end with a terrific struggle and conflict of the two opposing egos or individualities. It is nobody’s fault: it is the inevitable result of trying to snatch an intensified individuality out of the mutual flame.

Love, as a relationship of unison, means and must mean, _to some extent_, the sinking of the individuality. Woman for centuries was expected to sink her individuality into that of her husband and family. Nowadays the tendency is to insist that a man shall sink his individuality into his job, or his business, primarily, and secondarily into his wife and family.

At the same time, education and the public voice urges man and woman into intenser individualism. The sacrifice takes the old symbolic form of throwing a few grains of incense on the altar. A certain amount of time, labor, money, emotion are sacrificed on the altar of love, by man and woman: especially emotion. But each calculates the sacrifice. And man and woman alike, each saves his individual ego, her individual ego, intact, as far as possible, in the scrimmage of love. Most of our talk about love is cant, and bunk. The treasure of treasures to man and woman today is his own, or her own ego. And this ego, each hopes it will flourish like a salamander in the flame of love and passion. Which it well may: but for the fact that there are two salamanders in the same flame, and they fight till the flame goes out. Then they become grey cold lizards of the vulgar ego.

It is much easier, of course, when there _is_ no flame. Then there is no serious fight.

You can’t worship love and individuality in the same breath. Love is a mutual relationship, like a flame between wax and air. If either wax or air insists on getting its own way, or getting its own back too much, the flame goes out and the unison disappears. At the same time, if one yields itself up to the other entirely, there is a guttering mess. You have to balance love and individuality, and actually sacrifice a portion of each.

You have to have some sort of balance.

The Greeks said equilibrium. But whereas you can quite nicely balance a pound of butter against a pound of cheese, it is quite another matter to balance a rose and a ruby. Still more difficult is it to put male man in one scale and female woman in the other, and equilibrate that little pair of opposites.

Unless, of course, you abstract them. It’s easy enough to balance a citizen against a citizeness, a Christian against a Christian, a spirit against a spirit, or a soul against a soul. There’s a formula for each case. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, etc., etc.

But the moment you put young Tom in one scale, and young Kate in the other: why, not God Himself has succeeded as yet in striking a nice level balance. Probably doesn’t intend to, ever.

Probably it’s one of the things that are most fascinating because they are _nearly_ possible, yet absolutely impossible. Still, a miss is better than a mile. You can at least draw blood.

How can I equilibrate myself with my black cow Susan? I call her daily at six o’clock. And sometimes she comes. But sometimes, again, she doesn’t, and I have to hunt her away among the timber. Possibly she is lying peacefully in cowy inertia, like a black Hindu statue, among the oak-scrub. Then she rises with a sighing heave. My calling was a mere nothing against the black stillness of her cowy passivity.

Or possibly she is away down in the bottom corner, lowing _sotto voce_ and blindly to some far-off, inaccessible bull. Then when I call at her, and approach, she screws round her tail and flings her sharp, elastic haunch in the air with a kick and a flick, and plunges off like a buck rabbit, or like a black demon among the pine trees, her udder swinging like a chime of bells. Or possibly the coyotes have been howling in the night along the top fence. And then I call in vain. It’s a question of saddling a horse and sifting the bottom timber. And there at last the horse suddenly winces, starts: and with a certain pang of fear I too catch sight of something black and motionless and alive, and terribly silent, among the tree-trunks. It is Susan, her ears apart, standing like some spider suspended motionless by a thread, from the web of the eternal silence. The strange faculty she has, cow-given, of becoming a suspended ghost, hidden in the very crevices of the atmosphere! It is something in her _will_. It is her tarnhelm. And then, she doesn’t know me. If I am afoot, she knows my voice, but not the advancing me, in a blue shirt and cord trousers. She waits, suspended by the thread, till I come close. Then she reaches forward her nose, to smell. She smells my hand: gives a little snort, exhaling her breath, with a kind of contempt, turns, and ambles up towards the homestead, perfectly assured. If I am on horse-back, although she knows the grey horse perfectly well, at the same time she _doesn’t_ know what it is. She waits till the wicked Azul, who is a born cow-punching pony, advances mischievously at her. Then round she swings, as if on the blast of some sudden wind, and with her ears back, her head rather down, her black back curved, up she goes, through the timber, with surprising, swimming swiftness. And the Azul, snorting with jolly mischief, dashes after her. And when she is safely in her milking place, still she watches with her great black eyes as I dismount. And she has to smell my hand before the cowy peace of being milked enters her blood. Till then, there is something _roaring_ in the chaos of her universe. When her cowy peace comes, then her universe is silent, and like the sea with an even tide, without sail or smoke: nothing.

That is Susan, my black cow.

And how am I going to equilibrate myself with her? Or even, if you prefer the word, to get in harmony with her?

Equilibrium? Harmony? with that black blossom! Try it!

She doesn’t even know me. If I put on a pair of white trousers, she wheels away as if the devil was on her back. I have to go behind her, talk to her, stroke her, and let her smell my hand; and smell the white trousers. She doesn’t know they are trousers. She doesn’t know that I am a gentleman on two feet. Not she. Something mysterious happens in her blood and her being, when she smells me and my nice white trousers.

Yet she knows me, too. She likes to linger, while one talks to her. She knows quite well she makes me mad when she swings her tail in my face. So sometimes she swings it, just on purpose: and looks at me out of the black corner of her great, pure-black eye, when I yell at her. And when I find her, away down the timber, when she is a ghost, and lost to the world, like a spider dangling in the void of chaos, then she is relieved. She comes to, out of a sort of trance, and is relieved, trotting up home with a queer, jerky cowy gladness. But she is never _really_ glad, as the horses are. There is always a certain untouched chaos in her.

Where she is when she’s _in_ the trance, heaven only knows.

That’s Susan! I have a certain relation to her. But that she and I are in equilibrium, or in harmony, I would never guarantee while the world stands. As for her individuality being in balance with mine, one can only feel the great blank of the gulf.

Yet a relationship there is. She knows my touch and she goes very still and peaceful, being milked. I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and her feel. And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her. There _is_ a sort of relation between us. And this relation is part of the mystery of love: the individuality on each side, mine and Susan’s, suspended in the relationship.

Cow Susan by the forest’s rim
A black-eyed Susan was to him
And nothing more--

One understands Wordsworth and the primrose and the yokel. The yokel had no relation at all--or next to none--with the primrose. Wordsworth gathered it into his own bosom and made it part of his own nature. “I, William, am also a yellow primrose blossoming on a bank.” This, we must assert, is an impertinence on William’s part. He ousts the primrose from its own individuality. He doesn’t allow it to call its soul its own. It must be identical with _his_ soul. Because, of course, by begging the question, there is but One Soul in the universe.

This is bunk. A primrose has its own peculiar primrosy identity, and all the oversouling in the world won’t melt it into a Williamish oneness. Neither will the yokel’s remarking: “Nay, boy, that’s nothing. It’s only a primrose!”--turn the primrose into nothing. The primrose will neither be assimilated nor annihilated, and Boundless Love breaks on the rock of one more flower. It has its own individuality, which it opens with lovely naïveté to sky and wind and William and yokel, bee and beetle alike. It _is_ itself. But its very floweriness is a kind of communion with all things: the love unison.

In this lies the eternal absurdity of Wordsworth’s lines. His own behaviour, primrosely, was as foolish as the yokel’s.

“A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And nothing more--”

A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him
And a great deal more--

A primrose by the river’s brim
Lit up its pallid yellow glim
Upon the floor--

And watched old Father William trim
His course beside the river’s brim
And trembled sore--

The yokel, going for a swim
Had very nearly trod on him
An hour before.

And now the poet’s fingers slim
Were reaching out to pluck at him
And hurt him more.

Oh gentlemen, hark to my hymn!
To be a primrose is my whim
Upon the floor,
And nothing more.

The sky is with me, and the dim
Earth clasps my roots. Your shadows skim
My face once more....
Leave me therefore
Upon the floor;
Say _au revoir_....

Ah William! The “something more” that the primrose was to you, was yourself in the mirror. And if the yokel actually got as far as beholding a “yellow primrose”, he got far enough.

You see it is not so easy even for a poet to equilibrate himself even with a mere primrose. He didn’t leave it with a soul of its own. It had to have his soul. And nature had to be sweet and pure, Williamish. Sweet-Williamish at that! Anthropomorphised! Anthropomorphism, that allows nothing to call its soul its own, save anthropos: and only a special brand, even of him!

Poetry can tell alluring lies, when we let our feelings, or our ego, run away with us.

And we must always beware of romance: of people who love nature, or flowers, or dogs, or babies, or pure adventure. It means they are getting into a love-swing where everything is easy and nothing opposes their own egoism. Nature, babies, dogs are so lovable, because they can’t answer back. The primrose, alas! couldn’t pipe up and say: “Hey! Bill! get off the barrow!”

That’s the best of men and women. There’s bound to be a lot of back chat. You can _Lucy Gray_ your woman as hard as you like, one day she’s bound to come back at you: “Who are _you_ when you’re at home?”

A man isn’t going to spread his own ego over a woman, as he has done over nature and primroses, and dogs, or horses, or babies, or “the people”, or the proletariat or the poor-and-needy. The old hen takes the cock by the beard, and says: “_That’s me, mind you!_”

Man is an individual, and woman is an individual. Which sounds easy.

But it’s not as easy as it seems. These two individuals are as different as chalk and cheese. True, a pound of chalk weighs as much as a pound of cheese. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the scales.

That is to say, you can announce that men and women should be equal and _are_ equal. All right. Put them in the scales.

Alas! my wife is about twenty pounds heavier than I am.

Nothing to do but to abstract. _L’homme est né libre_: with a napkin round his little tail.

Nevertheless, I am a citizen, my wife is a citizeness: I can vote, she can vote, I can be sent to prison, she can be sent to prison, I can have a passport, she can have a passport, I can be an author, she can be an authoress. Ooray! OO-bloomin-ray!

You see, we are both British subjects. Everybody bow!

Subjects! Subjects! Subjects!

_Madame_ is already shaking herself like a wet hen.

But yes, my dear! we are both subjects. And as subjects, we enjoy a lovely equality, liberty, my dear! Equality! Fraternity or Sorority! my dear!

Aren’t you pleased?

But it’s no use talking to a wet hen. That “subject” was a cold douche.

As subjects, men and women may be equal.

But as objects, it’s another pair of shoes. Where, I ask you, is the equality between an arrow and a horseshoe? or a serpent and a squash-blossom? Find me the equation that equates the cock and the hen.

You can’t.

As inhabitants of my backyard, as loyal subjects of my _rancho_, they, the cock and the hen, are equal. When he gets wheat, she gets wheat. When sour milk is put out, it is as much for him as for her. She is just as free to go where she likes, as he is. And if she likes to crow at sunrise, she may. There is no law against it. And he can lay an egg, if the fit takes him. Absolutely nothing forbids.

Isn’t that equality? If it isn’t, what is?

Even then, they’re two very different objects.

As equals, they are just a couple of barnyard fowls, clucking! generalised!

But dear me, when he comes prancing up with his red beard shaking, and his eye gleaming, and she comes slowly pottering after, with her nose to the ground, they’re two very different objects. You never think of equality: or of inequality, for that matter. They’re a cock and a hen, and you accept them as such.

You don’t think of them as equals, or as unequals. But you think of them _together_.

Wherein, then, lies the togetherness?

Would you call it love?

I wouldn’t.

Their two egos are absolutely separate. He’s a cock, she’s a hen. He never thinks of her for a moment, as if she were a cock like himself; and she never thinks for a moment that he is a hen like herself. I never hear anything in her squawk which would seem to say: “_Aren’t I a fowl as much as you are, you brute!_” Whereas I always hear women shrieking at their men: “Aren’t I a human being as much as you are?”

It seems beside the point.

I always answer my spouse, with sweet reasonableness: “My dear, we are both British Subjects. What can I say more, on the score of equality? You are a British Subject as much as I am.”

Curiously, she hates to have it put that way. She wants to be a human being as much as I am. But absolutely and honestly, I don’t know what a human-being is. Whereas I do know what a British Subject is. It can be defined.

And I can see how a _Civis Romanum_, or a British Subject can be free, whether it’s he or she. The he-ness or the she-ness doesn’t matter. But how a _man_ can consider himself free, I don’t know. Any more than a cock-robin or a dandelion.

Imagine a dandelion suddenly hissing: “_I am free and I will be free!_” Then wriggling on his root like a snake with his tail pegged down!

What a horrifying sight!

So it is when a man, with two legs and a penis, a belly and a mouth begins to shout about being free. One wants to ask: which bit do you refer to?

There’s a cock and there’s the hen, and their two egos or individualities seem to stay apart without friction. They never coo at one another, nor hold each other’s hand. I never see her sitting on his lap and being petted. True, sometimes he calls for her to come and eat a titbit. And sometimes he dashes at her and walks over her for a moment. She doesn’t seem to mind. I never hear her squawking: “_Don’t you think you can walk over me!_”

Yet she’s by no means downtrodden. She’s just herself, and seems to have a good time: and she doesn’t like it if he is missing.

So there is this peculiar togetherness about them. You can’t call it love. It would be too ridiculous.

What then?

As far as I can see, it is desire. And the desire has a fluctuating intensity, but it is always there. His desire is always towards her, even when he has absolutely forgotten her. And by the way she puts her feet down, I can see she always walks in her plumes of desirableness, even when she’s going broody.

The mystery about her, is her strange undying desirableness. You can see it in every step she takes. She is desirable. And this is the breath of her life.

It is the same with Susan. The queer cowy mystery of her is her changeless cowy desirableness. She is far, alas, from any bull. She never even remotely dreams of a bull, save at rare and brief periods. Yet her whole being and motion is that of being desirable: or else fractious. It seems to unite her with the very air, and the plants and trees. Even to the sky and the trees and the grass and the running stream, she is subtly, delicately and _purely_ desirable, in cowy desirability. It is her cowy mystery. Then her fractiousness is the fireworks of her desirableness.

To me she is fractious, tiresome, and a faggot. Yet the subtle desirableness is in her, for me. As it is in a brown hen, or even a sow. It is like a peculiar charm: the creature’s femaleness, her desirableness. It is her sex, no doubt: but so subtle as to have nothing to do with function. It is a mystery, like a delicate flame. It would be false to call it love, because love complicates the ego. The ego is always concerned in love. But in the frail, subtle desirousness of the true male, towards everything female, and the equally frail, indescribable desirability of every female for every male, lies the real clue to the equating, or the _relating_, of things which otherwise are incommensurable.

And this, this desire, is the reality which is inside love. The ego itself plays a false part in it. The individual is like a deep pool, or tarn, in the mountains, fed from beneath by unseen springs, and having no obvious inlet or outlet. The springs which feed the individual at the depths are sources of power, power from the unknown. But it is not until the stream of desire overflows and goes running downhill into the open world, that the individual has his further, secondary existence.

Now we have imagined love to be something absolute and personal. It is neither. In its essence, love is no more than the stream of clear and unmuddied, subtle desire which flows from person to person, creature to creature, thing to thing. The moment this stream of delicate but potent desire dries up, the love has dried up, and the joy of life has dried up. It’s no good trying to turn on the tap. Desire is either flowing, or gone, and the love with it, and the life too.

This subtle streaming of desire is beyond the control of the ego. The ego says: “This is _my_ love, to do as I like with! This is _my_ desire, given me for my own pleasure.”

But the ego deceives itself. The individual cannot possess the love which he himself feels. Neither should he be entirely possessed by it. Neither man nor woman should sacrifice individuality to love, nor love to individuality.

If we lose desire out of our life, we become empty vessels. But if we breakout own integrity, we become a squalid mess, like a jar of honey dropped and smashed.

The individual has nothing, really, to do with love. That is, his individuality hasn’t. Out of the deep silence of his individuality runs the stream of desire, into the open squash-blossom of the world. And the stream of desire may meet and mingle with the stream from a woman. But it is never _himself_ that meets and mingles with _herself_: any more than two lakes, whose waters meet to make one river, in the distance, meet in themselves.