Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 944
The blood-consciousness is the first and last knowledge of the living soul: the depths. It is the soul acting in part only, speaking with its first hoarse half-voice. And blood-consciousness cannot operate purely until the soul has put off all its manifold degrees and forms of upper consciousness. As the self falls back into quiescence, it draws itself from the brain, from the great nerve-centers, into the blood, where at last it will sleep. But as it draws and folds itself livingly in the blood, at the dark and powerful hour, it sends out its great call. For even the blood is alone and in part, and needs an answer. Like the waters of the Red Sea, the blood is divided in a dual polarity between the sexes. As the night falls and the consciousness sinks deeper, suddenly the blood is heard hoarsely calling. Suddenly the deep centers of the sexual consciousness rouse to their spontaneous activity. Suddenly there is a deep circuit established between me and the woman. Suddenly the sea of blood which is me heaves and rushes towards the sea of blood which is her. There is a moment of pure frictional crisis and contact of blood. And then all the blood in me ebbs back into its ways, transmuted, changed. And this is the profound basis of my renewal, my deep blood renewal.
And this has nothing to do with pretty faces or white skin or rosy breasts or any of the rest of the trappings of sexual love. These trappings belong to the day. Neither eyes nor hands nor mouth have anything to do with the final massive and dark collision of the blood in the sex crisis, when the strange flash of electric transmutation passes through the blood of the man and the blood of the woman. They fall apart and sleep in their transmutation.
But even in its profoundest, and most elemental movements, the soul is still individual. Even in its most material consciousness, it is still integral and individual. You would think the great blood-stream of mankind was one and homogeneous. And it is indeed more nearly one, more near to homogeneity than anything else within us. The blood-stream of mankind is almost homogeneous.
But it isn’t homogeneous. In the first place, it is dual in a perfect dark dynamic polarity, the sexual polarity. No getting away from the fact that the blood of woman is dynamically polarized in opposition, or in difference to the blood of man. The crisis of their contact in sex connection is the moment of establishment of a new flashing circuit throughout the whole sea: the dark, burning red waters of our under-world rocking in a new dynamic rhythm in each of us. And then in the second place, the blood of an individual is his own blood. That is, it is individual. And though we have a potential dynamic sexual connection, we men, with almost every woman, yet the great outstanding fact of the individuality even of the blood makes us need a corresponding individuality in the woman we are to embrace. The more individual the man or woman, the more unsatisfactory is a non-individual connection: promiscuity. The more individual, the more does our blood cry out for its own specific answer, an individual woman, blood-polarized with us.
We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that the woman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer. And we force it to be so. To our disaster. The woman who thinks and talks as we do is almost sure to have no dynamic blood-polarity with us. The dynamic blood-polarity would make her different from me, and not like me in her thought mode. Blood-sympathy is so much deeper than thought-mode, that it may result in very different expression, verbally.
We have made the mistake of turning life inside out: of dragging the day-self into the night, and spreading the night-self over into the day. We have made love and sex a matter of seeing and hearing and of day-conscious manipulation. We have made men and women come together on the grounds of this superficial likeness and commonalty — their mental, and upper sympathetic consciousness. And so we have forced the blood to submission. Which means we force it into disintegration.
We have too much light in the night, and too much sleep in the day. It is an evil thing for us to prolong as we do the mental, visual, ideal consciousness far into the night when the hour has come for this upper consciousness to fade, for the blood alone to know and to act. By provoking the reaction of the great blood-stress, the sex-reaction, from the upper, outer mental consciousness and mental lasciviousness of conscious purpose, we thereby destroy the very blood in our bodies. We prevent it from having its own dynamic sway. We prevent it from coming to its own dynamic crisis and connection, from finding its own fundamental being. No matter how we work our sex, from the upper or outer consciousness, we don’t achieve anything but the falsification and impoverishment of our own blood-life. We have no choice. Either we must withdraw from interference, or slowly deteriorate.
We have made a corresponding mistake in sleeping on into the day. Once the sun rises our constitution changes. Once the sun is well up our sleep — supposing our life fairly normal — is no longer truly sleep. When the sun comes up the centers of active dynamic upper consciousness begin to wake. The blood changes its vibration and even its chemical constitution. And then we too ought to wake. We do ourselves great damage by sleeping too long into the day. The half-hour’s sleep after midday meal is a readjustment. But the long hours of morning sleep are just a damage. We submit our now active centers of upper consciousness to the dominion of the blood-automatic flow. We chain ourselves down in our morning sleep. We transmute the morning’s blood-strength into false dreams and into an ever-increasing force of inertia. And naturally, in the same line of inertia we persist from bad to worse.
With the result that our chained-down, active nerve-centers are half-shattered before we arise. We never become newly day-conscious, because we have subjected our powerful centers of day-consciousness to be trampled and wasted into dreams and inertia by the heavy flow of the blood-automatism in the morning sleeps. Then we arise with a feeling of the monotony and automatism of life. There is no good, glad refreshing. We feel tired to start with. And so we protract our day-consciousness on into the night, when we do at last begin to come awake, and we tell ourselves we must sleep, sleep, sleep in the morning and the daytime. It is better to sleep only six hours than to prolong sleep on and on when the sun has risen. Every man and woman should be forced out of bed soon after the sun has risen: particularly the nervous ones. And forced into physical activity. Soon after dawn the vast majority of people should be hard at work. If not, they will soon be nervously diseased.
CHAPTER XV
THE LOWER SELF
So it comes about that the moon is the planet of our nights, as the sun of our days. And this is not just accidental, or even mechanical. The influence of the moon upon the tides and upon us is not just an accident in phenomena. It is the result of the creation of the universe by life itself. It was life itself which threw the moon apart on the one hand, the sun on the other. And it is life itself which keeps the dynamic-vital relation constant between the moon and the living individuals of the globe. The moon is as dependent upon the life of individuals, for her continued existence, as each single individual is dependent upon the moon.
The same with the sun. The sun sets and has his perfect polarity in the life-circuit established between him and all living individuals. Break that circuit, and the sun breaks. Without man, beasts, butterflies, trees, toads, the sun would gutter out like a spent lamp. It is the life-emission from individuals which feeds his burning and establishes his sun-heart in its powerful equilibrium.
The same with the moon. She lives from us, primarily, and we from her. Everything is a question of relativity. Not only is every force relative to other force or forces, but every existence is relative to other existences. Not only does the life of man depend on man, beast, and herb, but on the sun and moon, and the stars. And in another manner, the existence of the moon depends absolutely on the life of herb, beast, and man. The existence of the moon depends upon the life of individuals, that which alone is original. Without the life of individuals the moon would fall asunder. And the moon particularly, because she is polarized dynamically to this, our own earth. We do not know what far-off life breathes between the stars and the sun. But our life alone supports the moon. Just as the moon is the pole of our single terrestrial individuality.
Therefore we must know that between the moon and each individual being exists a vital dynamic flow. The life of individuals depends directly upon the moon, just as the moon depends directly upon the life of individuals.
But in what way does the life of individuals depend directly upon the moon?
The moon is the mother of darkness. She is the clue to the active darkness. And we, below the waist, we have our being in darkness. Below the waist we are sightless. When, in the daytime, our life is polarized upwards, towards the open, sun-wakened eyes and the mind which sees in vision, then the powerful dynamic centers of the lower body act in subservience, in their negative polarity. And then we flow upwards, we go forth seeking the universe, in vision, speech, and thought — we go forth to see all things, to hear all things, to know all things by acquaintance and by knowledge. One flood of dynamic flow are we, upwards polarized, in our tallness and our wide-eyed spirit seeking to bring all the universe into the range of our conscious individuality, and eager always to make new worlds, out of this old world, to bud new green tips on the tree of life. Just as a tree would die if it were not making new green tips upon all its vast old world of a body, so the whole universe would perish if man and beast and herb were not always putting forth a newness: the toad taking a vivider color, spreading his hands a little more gently, developing a more rusé intelligence, the birds adding a new note to their speech and song, a new sharp swerve to their flight, a new nicety to their nests; and man, making new worlds, new civilizations. If it were not for this striving into new creation on the part of living individuals, the universe would go dead, gradually, gradually and fall asunder. Like a tree that ceases to put forth new green tips, and to advance out a little further.
But each new tip arises out of the apparent death of the old, the preceding one. Old leaves have got to fall, old forms must die. And if men must at certain periods fall into death in millions, why, so must the leaves fall every single autumn. And dead leaves make good mold. And so dead men. Even dead men’s souls.
So if death has to be the goal for a great number, then let it be so. If America must invent this poison-gas, let her. When death is our goal of goals we shall invent the means of death, let our professions of benevolence be what they will.
But this time, it seems to me, we have consciously and responsibly to carry ourselves through the winter-period, the period of death and denudation: that is, some of us have, some nation even must. For there are not now, as in the Roman times, any great reservoirs of energetic barbaric life. Goths, Gauls, Germans, Slavs, Tartars. The world is very full of people, but all fixed in civilizations of their own, and they all have all our vices, all our mechanisms, and all our means of destruction. This time, the leading civilization cannot die out as Greece, Rome, Persia died. It must suffer a great collapse, maybe. But it must carry through all the collapse the living clue to the next civilization. It’s no good thinking we can leave it to China or Japan or India or Africa — any of the great swarms.
And here we are, we don’t look much like carrying through to a new era. What have we got that will carry through? The latest craze is Mr. Einstein’s Relativity Theory. Curious that everybody catches fire at the word Relativity. There must be something in the mere suggestion, which we have been waiting for. But what? As far as I can see, Relativity means, for the common amateur mind, that there is no one absolute force in the physical universe, to which all other forces may be referred. There is no one single absolute central principle governing the world. The great cosmic forces or mechanical principles can only be known in their relation to one another, and can only exist in their relation to one another. But, says Einstein, this relation between the mechanical forces is constant, and may be expressed by a mathematical formula: which mathematical formula may be used to equate all mechanical forces of the universe.
I hope that is not scientifically all wrong. It is what I understand of the Einstein theory. What I doubt is the equation formula. It seems to me, also, that the velocity of light through space is the deus ex machina in Einstein’s physics. Somebody will some day put salt on the tail of light as it travels through space, and then its simple velocity will split up into something complex, and the Relativity formula will fall to bits. — But I am a confirmed outsider, so I’ll hold my tongue.
All I know is that people have got the word Relativity into their heads, and catch-words always refer to some latent idea or conception in the popular mind. It has taken a Jew to knock the last center-pin out of our ideally spinning universe. The Jewish intelligence for centuries has been picking holes in our ideal system — scientific and sociological. Very good thing for us. Now Mr. Einstein, we are glad to say, has pulled out the very axle pin. At least that is how the vulgar mind understands it. The equation formula doesn’t count. — So now, the universe, according to the popular mind, can wobble about without being pinned down. — Really, an anarchical conclusion. But the Jewish mind insidiously drives us to anarchical conclusions. We are glad to be driven from false, automatic fixities, anyhow. And once we are driven right on to nihilism we may find a way through.
So, there is nothing absolute left in the universe. Nothing. Lord Haldane says pure knowledge is absolute. As far as it goes, no doubt. But pure knowledge is only such a tiny bit of the universe, and always relative to the thing known and to the knower.
I feel inclined to Relativity myself. I think there is no one absolute principle in the universe. I think everything is relative. But I also feel, most strongly, that in itself each individual living creature is absolute: in its own being. And that all things in the universe are just relative to the individual living creature. And that individual living creatures are relative to each other.
And what about a goal? There is no final goal. But every step taken has its own little relative goal. So what about the next step?
Well, first and foremost, that every individual creature shall come to its own particular and individual fullness of being. — Very nice, very pretty — but how? Well, through a living dynamic relation to other creatures. — Very nice again, pretty little adjectives. But what sort of a living dynamic relation? — Well, not the relation of love, that’s one thing, nor of brotherhood, nor equality. The next relation has got to be a relationship of men towards men in a spirit of unfathomable trust and responsibility, service and leadership, obedience and pure authority. Men have got to choose their leaders, and obey them to the death. And it must be a system of culminating aristocracy, society tapering like a pyramid to the supreme leader.
All of which sounds very distasteful at the moment. But upon all the vital lessons we have learned during our era of love and spirit and democracy we can found our new order.
We wanted to be all of a piece. And we couldn’t bring it off. Because we just aren’t all of a piece. We wanted first to have nothing but nice daytime selves, awfully nice and kind and refined. But it didn’t work. Because whether we want it or not, we’ve got night-time selves. And the most spiritual woman ever born or made has to perform her natural functions just like anybody else. We must always keep in line with this fact.
Well, then, we have night-time selves. And the night-self is the very basis of the dynamic self. The blood-consciousness and the blood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can stay at the source. Nor even make a goal of the source, as Freud does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood.
When you go to sleep at night, you have to say: “Here dies the man I am and know myself to be.” And when you rise in the morning you have to say: “Here rises an unknown quantity which is still myself.”
The self which rises naked every morning out of the dark sleep of the passionate, hoarsely-calling blood: this is the unit for the next society. And the polarizing of the passionate blood in the individual towards life, and towards leader, this must be the dynamic of the next civilization. The intense, passionate yearning of the soul towards the soul of a stronger, greater individual, and the passionate blood-belief in the fulfillment of this yearning will give men the next motive for life.
We have to sink back into the darkness and the elemental consciousness of the blood. And from this rise again. But there is no rising until the bath of darkness and extinction is accomplished.
As social units, as civilized men we have to do what we do as physical organisms. Every day, the sun sets from the sky, and darkness falls, and every day, when this happens, the tide of life turns in us. Instead of flowing upwards and outwards towards mental consciousness and activity, it turns back, to flow downwards. Downwards towards the digestion processes, downwards further to the great sexual conjunctions, downwards to sleep.
This is the soul now retreating, back from the outer life of day, back to the origins. And so, it stays its hour at the first great sensual stations, the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion. But the tide ebbs on, down to the immense, almost inhuman passionate darkness of sex, the strange and moon-like intensity of the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion, then deep, deeper, past the last great station of the darkest psyche, down to the earth’s center. Then we sleep.
And the moon is the tide-turner. The moon is the great cosmic pole which calls us back, back out of our day-self, back through the moonlit darknesses of the sensual planes, to sleep. It is the moon that sways the blood, and sways us back into the extinction of the blood. — And as the soul retreats back into the sea of its own darkness, the mind, stage by stage, enjoys the mental consciousness that belongs to this retreat back into the sensual deeps; and then it goes extinguished. There is sleep.
