ETHICS, PSYCHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY

THE REALITY OF PEACE

I

THE TRANSFERENCE

Peace is the state of fulfilling the deepest desire of the soul. It is the condition of flying within the greatest impulse that enters us from the unknown. Our life becomes a mechanical round, and it is difficult for us to know or to admit the new creative desires that come upon us. We cling tenaciously to the old states, we resist our own fulfilment with a perseverance that would almost stop the sun in its course. But in the end we are overborne. If we cannot cast off the old habitual life, then we bring it down over our heads in a blind frenzy. Once the temple becomes our prison, we drag at the pillars till the roof falls crashing down on top of us and we are obliterated.

There is a great systole-diastole of the universe. It has no why or wherefore, no aim or purpose. At all times it is, like the beating of the everlasting heart. What it is, is for ever beyond saying. It is unto itself. We only know that the end is the heaven on earth, like the wild rose in blossom.

We are like the blood that travels. We are like the shuttle that flies from never to for ever, from for ever back to never. We are the subject of the eternal systole-diastole. We fly according to the perfect impulse, and we have peace. We resist, and we have the gnawing misery of nullification which we have known previously.

Who can choose beforehand what the world shall be? All law, all knowledge holds good for that which already exists in the created world. But there is no law, no knowledge of the unknown which is to take place. We cannot know, we cannot declare beforehand. We can only come at length to that perfect state of understanding, of acquiescence, when we sleep upon the living drift of the unknown, when we are given to the direction of creation, when we fly like a shuttle that flies from hand to hand in a line across the loom. The pattern is woven of us without our foreknowing, but not without our perfect unison of acquiescence.

What is will, divorced from the impulse of the unknown? What can we achieve by this insulated self-will? Who can take his way into the unknown by will? We are driven. Subtly and beautifully, we are impelled. It is our peace and bliss to follow the rarest prompting. We sleep upon the impulse; we lapse on the strange incoming tide, which rises now where no tide ever rose; we are conveyed to the new ends. And this is peace when we sleep upon the perfect impulse in the spirit. This is peace even whilst we run the gauntlet of destruction. Still we sleep in peace upon the pure impulse.

When we have become very still, when there is an inner silence as complete as death, then, as in the grave, we hear the rare, superfine whispering of the new direction; the intelligence comes. After the pain of being destroyed in all our old securities that we used to call peace, after the pain and death of our destruction in the old life comes the inward suggestion of fulfilment in the new.

This is peace like a river. This is peace like a river to flow upon the tide of the creative direction, towards an end we know nothing of, but which only fills us with bliss of confidence. Our will is a rudder that steers us and keeps us faithfully adjusted to the current. Our will is the strength that throws itself upon the tiller when we are caught by a wrong current. We steer by the delicacy of adjusted understanding, and our will is the strength that serves us in this. Our will is never tired of adjusting the helm according to our pure understanding. Our will is prompt and ready to shove off from any obstruction, to overcome any impediment. We steer with the subtlety of understanding and the strength of our will sees us through.

But all the while our greatest effort and our supreme aim is to adjust ourselves to the river that carries us, so that we may be carried safely to the end, neither wrecked nor stranded nor clogged in weeds. All the while we are but given to the stream, we are borne upon the surpassing impulse which has our end in view beyond us. None of us knows the way. The way is given on the way.

There is a sacrifice demanded — only one, an old sacrifice that was demanded of the first man, and will be demanded of the last. It is demanded of all created life. I must submit my will and my understanding — all I must submit, not to any other will, not to any other understanding, not to anything that is, but to the exquisitest suggestion from the unknown that comes upon me. This I must attend to and submit to. It is not me, it is upon me.

There is no visible security; pure faith is the only security. There is no given way; there will never be any given way. We have no foreknowledge, no security of chart and regulation; there is no pole- star save only pure faith.

We must give up our assurance, our conceit of final knowledge, our vanity of charted right and wrong. We must give these up for ever. We cannot map out the way. We shall never be able to map out the way to the new. All our maps, all our charts, all our right and wrong are only record from the past. But for the new there is a new and for ever incalculable element.

We must give ourselves and be given, not to anything that has been, but to the river of peace that bears us. We must abide by the incalculable impulse of creation; we must sleep in faith. It will seem to us we are nowhere. We shall be afraid of anarchy and confusion. But, in fact, there is no anarchy so horrid as the anarchy of fixed law, which is mechanism.

We must be given in faith, like sleep. We must lapse upon a current that carries us like repose, and extinguishes in repose our self-insistence and self-will. It will seem to us we are nothing when we are no longer actuated by the stress of self-will. It will seem we have no progression, nothing progressive happens. Yet if we look, we shall see the banks of the old slipping noiselessly by; we shall see a new world unfolding round us. It is pure adventure, most beautiful.

But first it needs the act of courage: that we yield up our will to the unknown, that we deliver our course to the current of the invisible. With what rigid, cruel insistence we clutch the control of our lives; with what a morbid frenzy we try to force our conclusions; with what madness of ghastly persistence we break ourselves under our own will! We think to work everything out mathematically and mechanically, forgetting that peace far transcends mathematics and mechanics.

There is a far sublimer courage than the courage of the indomitable will. It is not the courage of the man smiling contemptuously in the face of death that will save us all from death. It is the courage which yields itself to the perfectest suggestion from within. When a man yields himself implicitly to the suggestion which transcends him, when he accepts gently and honourably his own creative fate, he is beautiful and beyond aspersion.

In self-assertive courage a man may smile serenely amid the most acute pains of death, like a Red Indian of America. He may perform acts of stupendous heroism. But this is the courage of death. The strength to die bravely is not enough.

Where has there been on earth a finer courage of death and endurance than in the Red Indian of America? And where has there been more complete absence of the courage of life? Has not this super-brave savage maintained himself in the conceit and strength of his own will since time began, as it seems? He has held himself aloof from all pure change; he has kept his will intact and insulated from life till he is an automaton — mad, living only in the acute inward agony of a negated impulse of creation. His living spirit is crushed down from him, confined within bonds of an unbreakable will, as the feet of a Chinese woman are bound up and clinched in torment. He only knows that he lives by the piercing of anguish and the thrill of peril. He needs the sharp sensation of peril; he needs the progression through danger and the interchange of mortal hate; he needs the outward torture to correspond with the inward torment of the restricted spirit. For that which happens at the quick of a man’s life will finally have its full expression in his body. And the Red Indian finds relief in the final tortures of death, for these correspond at last with the inward agony of the cramped spirit; he is released at last to the pure and sacred readjustment of death.

He has all the fearful courage of death. He has all the repulsive dignity of a static, indomitable will. He has all the noble, sensational beauty of arrestedness, the splendour of insulated changeless- ness, the pride of static resistance to every impulse of mobile, delicate life. And what is the end? He is benumbed against all life, therefore he needs torture to penetrate him with vital sensation. He is cut off from growth, therefore he finds his fulfilment in the slow and mortal anguish of destruction. He knows no consummation of peace, but falls at last in the great conclusion of death.

Having all the resultant courage of negation, he has failed in the great crisis of life. He had not the courage to yield himself to the unknown that should make him new and vivid, to yield himself, deliberately, in faith. Does any story of martyrdom affect us like the story of the conversion of Paul? In an age of barrenness, where people glibly talk of epilepsy on the road to Damascus, we shy off from the history, we hold back from realizing what is told. We dare not know. We dare to gloat on the crucifixion, but we dare not face the mortal fact of the conversion from the accepted world, to the new world which was not yet conceived, that took place in the soul of St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

It is a passage through a crisis greater than death or martyrdom. It is the passage from the old way of death to the new way of creation. It is a transition out of assurance into peace. It is a change of state from comprehension to faith. It is a submission and allegiance given to the new which approaches us, in place of defiance and self-insistence, insistence on the known, that which lies static and external.

Sappho leaped off into the sea of death. But this is easy. Who dares leap off from the old world into the inception of the new? Who dares give himself to the tide of living peace? Many have gone in the tide of death. Who dares leap into the tide of new life? Who dares to perish from the old static entity, lend himself to the unresolved wonder? Who dares have done with his old self? Who dares have done with himself, and with all the rest of the old-established world; who dares have done with his own righteousness; who dares have done with humanity? It is time to have done with all these, and be given to the unknown which will come to pass.

It is the only way. There is this supreme act of courage demanded from every man who would move in a world of life. Empedocles ostentatiously leaps into the crater of the volcano. But a living man must leap away from himself into the much more awful fires of creation. Empedocles knew well enough where he was going when he leaped into Etna. He was only leaping hastily into death, where he would have to go, whether or not. He merely forestalled himself a little. For we must all die. But we need not all live. We have always the door of death in front of us, and, howsoever our track winds and travels, it comes to that door at last. We must die within an allotted term; there is not the least atom of choice allowed us in this.

But we are not compelled to live. We are only compelled to die. We may refuse to live; we may refuse to pass into the unknown of life; we may deny ourselves to life altogether. So much choice we have. There is so much free will that we are perfectly free to forestall our date of death, and perfectly free to postpone our date of life, as long as we like.

We must choose life, for life will never compel us. Sometimes we have even no choice; we have no alternative to death. Then, again, life is with us; there is the soft impulse of peace. But this we may deny emphatically and to the end, and it is denied to us. We may reject life completely and finally from ourselves. Unless we submit our will to the flooding of life, there is no life in us.

If a man have no alternative but death, death is his honour and his fulfilment. If he is wintry in discontent and resistance, then winter is his portion and his truth. Why should he be cajoled or bullied into a declaration for life? Let him declare for death with a whole heart. Let every man search in his own soul to find there the quick suggestion, whether his soul be quick for life or quick for death. Then let him act as he finds it. For the greatest of all misery is a lie; and if a man belong to the line of obstinate death, he has at least the satisfaction of pursuing this line simply. But we will not call this peace. There is all the world of difference between the sharp, drug-delicious satisfaction or resignation and self-gratifying humility and the true freedom of peace. Peace is when I accept life; when I accept death I have the hopeless equivalent of peace, which is quiescence and resignation.

Life does not break the self-insistent will. But death does. Death compels us and leaves us without choice. And all comparison whatsoever is death, and nothing but death.

To life we must cede our will, acquiesce and be at one with it, or we stand alone, we are excluded, we are exempt from living. The service of life is voluntary.

This fact of conversion, which has seemed, in its connexion with religion, to smack of unreality, to be, like the miracles, not quite credible, even if demonstrable, is a matter of fact essentially natural and our highest credit. We know what it is to prosecute death with all our strength of soul and body. We know what it is to be fulfilled with the activity of death. We have given ourselves body and soul, altogether, to the making of all the engines and contrivances and inventions of death. We have wanted to compel every man whatsoever to the activity of death. We have wanted to envelop the world in a vast unison of death, to let nothing escape. We have been filled with a frenzy of compulsion; our insistent will has co-ordinated into a monstrous engine of compulsion and death.

So now our fundamental being has come out. True, our banner is ostensible peace. But let us not degrade ourselves with lying. We were filled with the might of death. And this has been gathering in us for a hundred years. Our strength of death-passion has accumulated from our fathers; it has grown stronger and stronger from generation to generation. And in us it is confessed.

Therefore, we are in a position to understand the “phenomenon” of conversion. It is very simple. Let every man look into his own heart and see what is fundamental there. Is there a gnawing and unappeasable discontent? Is there a secret desire that there shall be new strife? Is there a prophecy that the worst is yet to come, is there a subtle thrill in the anticipation of a fearful tearing of the body of life at home, here, between the classes of men in England; a great darkness coming over England; the sound of a great rending of destruction? Is there a desire to partake in this rending, either on one side or the other? Is there a longing to see the masses rise up and make an end of the wrong old order? Is there a will to circumvent these masses and subject them to superior wisdom? Shall we govern them for their own good, strongly?

It does not matter on which side the desire stands, it is the desire of death. If we prophesy a triumph of the people over their degenerate rulers, still we prophesy from the inspiration of death. If we cry out in the name of the subjected herds of mankind against iniquitous tyranny, still we are purely deathly. If we talk of the wise controlling the unwise, this is the same death.

For all strife between things old is pure death. The very division of mankind into two halves, the humble and the proud, is death. Unless we pull off the old badges and become ourselves, single and new, we are divided unto death. It helps nothing whether we are on the side of the proud or the humble.

But if, in our heart of hearts, we can find one spark of happiness that is absolved from strife, then we are converted to the new life the moment we accept this spark as the treasure of our being. This is conversion. If there is a quick, new desire to have new heaven and earth, and if we are given triumphantly to this desire, if we know that it will be fulfilled of us, finally and without fail, we are converted. If we will have a new creation on earth, if our souls are chafing to make a beginning, if our fingers are itching to start the new work of building up a new world, a whole new world with a new open sky above us, then we are transported across the unthinkable chasm, from the old dead way to the beginning of all that is to be.

II

The beginning of spring lies in the awakening from winter. For us, to understand is to overcome. We have a winter of death, of destruction, vivid sensationalism of going asunder, the wintry glory of tragical experience to surmount and surpass. Thrusting through these things with the understanding, we come forth in first flowers of our spring with pale and icy blossoms, like bulb-flowers, the pure understanding of death. When we know the death is in ourselves, we are emerging into the new epoch. For whilst we are in the full flux of death, we can find no bottom of resistance from which to understand. When at last life stands under us, we can know what the flood is, in which we are immersed.

That which is understood by man is surpassed by man. When we understand our extreme being in death, we have surpassed into a new being. Many bitter and fearsome things there are for us to know, that we may go beyond them; they have no power over us any more.

Understanding, however, does not belong to every man, is not incumbent on every man. But it is vital that some men understand, that some few go through this final pain and relief of knowledge. For the rest, they have only to know peace when it is given them. But for the few there is the bitter necessity to understand the death that has been, so that we may pass quite clear of it.

The anguish of this knowledge, the knowledge of what we ourselves, we righteous ones, have been and are within the flux of death, is a death in itself. It is the death of our established belief in ourselves, it is the end of our current self-esteem. Those who live in the mind must also perish in the mind. The mindless are spared this.

We are not only creatures of light and virtue. We are also alive in corruption and death. It is necessary to balance the dark against the light if we are ever going to be free. We must know that we, ourselves, are the living stream of seething corruption, this also, all the while, as well as the bright river of life. We must recover our balance to be free. From our bodies comes the issue of corruption as well as the issue of creation. We must have our being in both, our knowledge must consist in both. The veils of the old temple must be rent, for they are but screens to hide from us our own being in corruption.

It is our self-knowledge that must be torn across before we are whole. The man I know myself to be must be destroyed before the true man I am can exist. The old man in me must die and be put away.

Either we can and will understand the other thing that we are, the flux of darkness and lively decomposition, and so become free and whole, or we fight shy of this half of ourselves, as man has always fought shy of it, and gone under the burden of secret shame and self- abhorrence. For the tide of our corruption is rising higher, and unless we adjust ourselves, unless we come out of our veiled temples, and see and know, and take the tide as it comes, ride upon it and so escape it, we are lost.

Within our bowels flows the slow stream of corruption, to the issue of corruption. This is one direction. Within our veins flows the stream of life, towards the issue of pure creation. This is the other direction. We are of both. We are the watershed from which flow the dark rivers of hell on the one hand, and the shimmering rivers of heaven on the other.

If we are ashamed, instead of covering the shame with a veil, let us accept that thing which makes us ashamed, understand it and be at one with it. If we shrink from some sickening issue of ourselves, instead of recoiling and rising above ourselves, let us go down into ourselves, enter Che hell of corruption and putrescence, and rise again, not fouled, but fulfilled and free. If there is a loathsome thought or suggestion, let us not dispatch it instantly with impertinent righteousness; let us admit it with simplicity, let us accept it, be responsible for it. It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them. For they are of us. We are angels and we are devils, both, in our own proper person. But we are more even than this. We are whole beings, gifted with understanding. A full, undiminished being is complete beyond the angels and the devils.

This is the condition of freedom: that in the understanding, I fear nothing. In the body I fear pain, in love I fear hate, in death I fear life. But in the understanding I fear neither love nor hate nor death nor pain nor abhorrence. I am brave even against abhorrence; even the abhorrent I will understand and be at peace with. Not by exclusion, but by incorporation and unison. There is no hope in exclusion. For whatsoever limbo we cast our devils into will receive us ourselves at last. We shall fall into the cesspool of our own abhorrence.

If there is a serpent of secret and shameful desire in my soul, let me not beat it out of my consciousness with sticks. It will lie beyond, in the marsh of the so-called subconsciousness, where I cannot follow it with my sticks. Let me bring it to the fire to see what it is. For a serpent is a thing created. It has its’ own raison d’etre. In its own being it has beauty and reality. Even my horror is a tribute to its reality. And I must admit the genuineness of my horror, accept it, and not exclude it from my understanding.

There is nothing on earth to be ashamed of, nor under the earth, except only the craven veils we hang up to save our appearances. Pull down the veils and understand everything, each man in his own self-responsible soul. Then we are free.

Who made us a judge of the things that be? Who says that the water-lily shall rock on the still pool, but the snake shall not hiss in the festering marshy border? I must humble myself before the abhorred serpent and give him his dues as he lifts his flattened head from the secret grass of my soul. Can I exterminate what is created? Not while the condition of its creation lasts. There is no killing the serpent so long as his principle endures. And his principle moves slowly in my belly; I must disembowel myself to get rid of him. “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out.” But the offence is not in the eye, but in the principle it perceives. And howsoever I may pluck out my eyes, I cannot pluck the principle from the created universe. To this I must submit. And I must adjust myself to that which offends me, I must make my peace with it, and cease, in my delicate understanding, to be offended. Maybe the serpent of my abhorrence nests in my very heart. If so, I can but in honour say- to him, “Serpent, serpent, thou art at home.” Then I shall know that my heart is a marsh. But maybe my understanding will drain the swampy place, and the serpent will evaporate as his condition evaporates. That is as it is. While there is a marsh, the serpent has his holy ground.

I must make my peace with the serpent of abhorrence that is within me. I must own my most secret shame and my most secret shameful desire. I must say, “Shame, thou art me, I am thee. Let us understand each other and be at peace.” Who am I that I should hold myself above my last or worst desire? My desires are me, they are the beginning of me; my stem and branch and root. To assume a better angel is an impertinence. Did I create myself? According to the maximum of my desire is my flower and my blossoming. This is beyond my will for ever. I can only learn to acquiesce.

And there is in me the great desire of creation and the great desire of dissolution. Perhaps these two are pure equivalents. Perhaps the decay of autumn purely balances the putting forth of spring. Certainly the two are necessary each to the other; they are the systole-diastole of the physical universe. But the initial force is the force of spring, as is evident. The undoing of autumn can only follow the putting forth of spring. So that creation is primal and original, corruption is only a consequence. Nevertheless, it is the inevitable consequence, as inevitable as that water flows downhill.

There is in me the desire of creation and the desire of dissolution. Shall I deny either? Then neither is fulfilled. If there is no autumn and winter of corruption, there is no spring and summer. All the time I must be dissolved from my old being. The wheat is put together by the pure activity of creation. It is the bread of pure creation I eat in the body. The fire of creation from out of the wheat passes into my blood, and what was put together in the pure grain now comes asunder, the fire mounts up into my blood, the watery mould washes back down my belly to the underearth. These are the two motions wherein we have our life. Is either a shame to me? Is it a pride to me that in my blood the fire flickers out of the wheaten bread I have partaken of, flickers up to further and higher creation? Then how shall it be a shame that from my blood exudes the bitter sweat of corruption on the journey back to dissolution; how shall it be a shame that in my consciousness appear the heavy marsh-flowers of the flux of putrescence, which have their natural roots in the slow stream of decomposition that flows for ever down my bowels?

There is a natural marsh in my belly, and there the snake is naturally at home. Shall he not crawl into my consciousness? Shall I kill him with sticks the moment he lifts his flattened head on my sight? Shall I kill him or pluck out the eye which sees him? None the less, he will swarm within the marsh.

Then let the serpent of living corruption take his place among us honourably. Come then, brindled abhorrent one, you have your own being and your own righteousness, yes, and your own desirable beauty. Come then, lie down delicately in the sun of my mind, sleep on the bosom of my understanding; I shall know your living weight and be gratified.

But keep to your own ways and your own being. Come in just proportion, there in the grass beneath the bushes where the birds are. For the Lord is the lord of all things, not of some only. And everything shall in its proportion drink its own draught of life. But I, who have the gift of understanding, I must keep most delicately and transcendingly the balance of creation within myself, because now I am taken over into the peace of creation. Most delicately and justly I must bring forth the blossom of my spring and provide for the serpent of my living corruption. But each in its proportion. If I am taken over into the stream of death, I must fling myself into the business of dissolution, and the serpent must writhe at my right hand, my good familiar. But since it is spring with me, the snake must wreathe his way secretly along the paths that belong to him, and when I see him asleep in the sunshine I shall admire him in his place.

I shall accept all my desires and repudiate none. It will be a sign of bliss in me when I am reconciled with the serpent of my own horror, when I am free both from the fascination and the revulsion. For secret fascination is a fearful tyranny. And then my desire of life will encompass my desire of death, and I shall be quite whole, have fulfilment in both. Death will take its place in me, subordinate but not subjected. I shall be fulfilled of corruption within the strength of creation. The serpent will have his own pure place in me and I shall be free.

For there are ultimately only two desires, the desire of life and the desire of death. Beyond these is pure being, where I am absolved from desire and made perfect. This is when I am like a rose, when I balance for a space in pure adjustment and pure understanding. The timeless quality of being is understanding; when I understand fully, flesh and blood and bone, and mind and soul and spirit one rose of unison, then I am. Then I am unrelated and perfect. In true understanding I am always perfect and timeless. In my utterance of that which I have understood I am timeless as a jewel.

The rose as it bursts into blossom reveals the absolute world before us. The brindled, slim adder, as she lifts her delicate head attentively in the spring sunshine — for they say she is deaf — suddenly throws open the world of unchanging, pure perfection to our startled breast. In our whole understanding, when sense and spirit and mind are consummated into pure unison, then we are free in a world of the absolute. The lark sings in a heaven of pure understanding, she drops back into a world of duality and change.

And it does not matter whether we understand according to death or according to life; the understanding is a consummating of the two in one, and a transcending into absolution. This is true of tragedy and of psalms of praise and of the Sermon on the Mount. It is true of the serpent and of the dove, of the tiger and the fragile, dappled doe. For all things that emerge pure in being from the matrix of chaos are roses of pure understanding; in them death and life are adjusted, darkness is in perfect equilibrium with light. This is the meaning of understanding. This is why the leopard gleams to my eye a blossom of pure significance, whilst a hyena seems only a clod thrown at me in contumely. The leopard is a piece of understanding uttered in terms of fire, the dove is expressed in gurgling watery sound. But in them both there is that perfect conjunction of sun and dew which makes for absolution and the world beyond worlds. Only the leopard starts from the sun and must for ever quench himself with the living soft fire of the fawn; the dove must fly up to the sun like mist drawn up.

We, we are all desire and understanding, only these two. And desire is twofold, desire of life and desire of death. All the time we are active in these two great powers, which are for ever contrary and complementary. Except in understanding, and there we are immune and perfect, there the two are one. Yet even understanding is twofold in its appearance. It comes forth as understanding of life or as understanding of death, in strong, glad words like Paul and David, or in pain like Shakespeare.

All active life is either desire of life or desire of death, desire of putting together or desire of putting asunder. We come forth uttering ourselves in terms of fire, like the rose, or in terms of water, like the lily. We wish to say that we are single in our desire for life and creation and putting together. But it is a lie, since we must eat life to live. We must, like the leopard, drink up the lesser life to bring forth our greater. We wish to conquer death. But it is absurd, since only by death do we live, like the leopard. We wish not to die; we wish for life everlasting. But this is mistaken interpretation. What we mean by immortality is this fulfilment of death with life and life with death in us where we are consummated and absolved into heaven, the heaven on earth.

We can never conquer death; that is folly. Death and the great dark flux of undoing, this is the inevitable half. Life feeds death, death feeds life. If life is just one point the stronger in the long run, it is only because death is inevitably the stronger in the short run of each separate existence. They are like the hare and the tortoise.

It is only in understanding that we pass beyond the scope of this duality into perfection, in actual living equipoise of blood and bone and spirit. But our understanding must be dual, it must be death understood and life understood.

We understand death, and in this there is no death. Life has put together all that is put together. Death is the consequent putting asunder. We have been torn to shreds in the hands of death, like Osiris in the myth. But still within us life lay intact like seeds in winter.

That is how we know death, having suffered it and lived. It is now no mystery, finally. Death is understood in us, and thus we transcend it. Henceforward actual death is a fulfilling of our own knowledge.

Nevertheless, we only transcend death by understanding down to the last ebb the great process of death in us. We can never destroy death. We can only transcend it in pure understanding. We can envelop it and contain it. And then we are free.

By standing in the light we see in terms of shadow. We cannot see the light we stand in. So our understanding of death in life is an act of living.

If we live in the mind, we must die in the mind, and in the mind we must understand death. Understanding is not necessarily mental. It is of the senses and the spirit.

But we live also in the mind. And the first great act of living is to encompass death in the understanding. Therefore the first great activity of the living mind is to understand death in the mind. Without this there is no freedom of the mind, there is no life of the mind, since creative life is the attaining a perfect consummation with death. When in my mind there rises the idea of life, then this idea must encompass the idea of death, and this encompassing is the germination of a new epoch of the mind.

III

We long most of all to belong to life. This primal desire, the desire to come into being, the desire to achieve a transcendent state of existence, is all we shall ever know of a primum mobile. But it is enough.

And corresponding with this desire for absolute life, immediately consequent is the desire for death. This we will never admit. We cannot admit the desire of death in ourselves even when it is single and dominant. We must still deceive ourselves with the name of life.

This is the root of all confusion, this inability for man to admit, “Now I am single in my desire for destructive death.” When it is autumn in the world, the autumn of a human epoch, then the desire for death becomes single and dominant. I want to kill, I want violent sensationalism, I want to break down, I want to put asunder, I want anarchic revolution — it is all the same, the single desire for death.

We long most of all for life and creation. That is the final truth. But not all life belongs to life. Not all life is progressing to a state of transcendent being. For many who are born and live year after year there is no such thing as coming to blossom. Many are saprophyte, living on the dead body of the past. Many are parasite, living on the old and enfeebled body politic; and many, many more are mere impurities. Many, in these days, most human beings, having come into the world on the impulse of death, find that the impulse is not strong enough to carry them into absolution. They reach a maturity of physical life, and then the advance ends. They have not the strength for the further passage into darkness. They are born short, they wash on a slack tide; they will never be flung into the transcendence of the second death. They are spent before they arrive; their life is a slow lapsing out, a slow inward corruption. Their flood is the flood of decomposition and decay; in this they have their being. They are like the large green cabbages that cannot move on into flower. They attain a fatness and magnificence of leaves, then they rot inside. There is not sufficient creative impulse, they lapse into great corpulence. So with the sheep and the pigs of our domestic life. They frisk into life as if they would pass on to pure being. But the tide fails them. They grow fat; their only raison d’etre is to provide food for a really living organism. They have only the moment of first youth, then they lapse gradually into nullity. It is given us to devour them.

So with very many human lives, especially in what is called the periods of decadence. They have mouths and stomachs, and an obscene will of their own. Yes, they have also prolific procreative wombs whence they bring forth increasing insufficiency. But of the germ of intrinsic creation they have none, neither have they the courage of true death. They never live. They are like the sheep in the fields, that have their noses to the ground, and anticipate only the thrill of increase.

These will never understand, neither life nor death. But they will bleat mechanically about life and righteousness, since this is how they can save their appearances. And in their eyes is the furtive tyranny of nullity. They will understand no word of living death, since death encompasses them. If a man understands the living death, he is a man in the quick of creation.

The quick can encompass death, but the living dead are encompassed. Let the dead bury their dead. Let the living dead attend to the dead dead. What has creation to do with them?

The righteousness of the living dead is an abominable nullity. They, the sheep of the meadow, they eat and eat to swell out their living nullity. They are so many, their power is immense, and the negative power of their nullity bleeds us of life as if they were vampires. Thank God for the tigers and the butchers that will free us from the abominable tyranny of these greedy, negative sheep.

It is very natural that every word about death they will decry as evil. For if death be understood, they are found out. They are multitudes of slow, greedy-mouthed decay.

There are the isolated heroes of passionate and beautiful death: Tristan, Achilles, Napoleon. These are the royal lions and tigers of our life. There are many wonderful initiators into the death for re-birth, like Christ and St. Paul and St. Francis. But there is a ghastly multitude of obscene nullity, flocks of hideous sheep with blind mouths and still blinder crying, and hideous coward’s eye of tyranny for the sake of their own bloated nothingness.

These are the enemy and the abomination. And they are so many we shall with difficulty save ourselves from them. Indeed, the word humanity has come to mean only this obscene flock of blind mouths and blinder bleating and most hideous coward’s tyranny of negation. Save us, oh, holy death; carry us beyond them, oh, holy life of creation; for how shall we save ourselves against such ubiquitous multitudes of living dead? It needs a faith in that which has created all citation, and will therefore never fall before the blind mouth of nullity.

The sheep, the hideous myrmidons of sheep, all will and belly and prolific womb, they have their own absolution. They have the base absolution of the I. A vile entity detaches itself and shuts itself off immune from the flame of creation and from the stream of death likewise. They assert a free will. And this free will is a horny, glassy, insentient covering into which they creep, like some tough bugs, and therein remain active and secure from life and death. So they swarm in insulated completeness, obscene like bugs.

We are quite insulated from life. And we think ourselves quite immune from death. But death, beautiful death searches us out, even in our armour of insulated will. Death is within us, while we tighten our will to keep him out. Death, beautiful, clean death, washes slowly within us and carries us away. We have never known life, save, perhaps, for a few moments during childhood. Well may heaven lie about us in our infancy, if our maturity is but the buglike security of a vast and impervious envelope of insentience, the insentience of the human mass. Heaven lies about us in our consummation of manhood, if we are men. If we are men, we attain to heaven in .our achieved manhood, our flowering maturity. But if we are like bugs, our first sight of this good earth may well seem heavenly. For we soon learn not to see. A bug, and a sheep, sees only with its fear and its belly. Its eyes look out in a coward’s will not to see, a self-righteous vision.

It is not the will of the overweening individual we have to fear today, but the consenting together of a vast host of null ones. It is no Napoleon or Nero, but the innumerable myrmidons of nothingness. It is not the leopard or the hot tiger, but the masses of rank sheep. Shall I be pressed to death, shall I be suffocated under the slow and evil weight of countless long-faced sheep? This is a fate of ignominy indeed. Who compels us today? The malignant null sheep. Who overwhelms us? The persistent, purblind, bug-like sheep. It is a horrid death to be suffocated under these fat-smelling ones.

There is an egoism far more ghastly than that of the tyrannous individual. It is the egoism of the flock. What if a tiger pull me down? It is straight death. But what if the flock which counts me part of itself compress me and squeeze me with slow malice to death? It cannot be, it shall not be. I cry to the spirit of life, I cry to the spirit of death to save me. I must be saved from the vast and obscene self-conceit which is the ruling force of the world that envelops me.

The tiger is sufficient unto himself, a law unto himself. Even the grisly condor sits isolated on the peak. It is the will of the flock that is the obscenity of obscenities. Timeless and clinched in stone is the naked head of the vulture. Timeless as rock, the great condor sits inaccessible on the heights. It is the last brink of deathly life, just alive, just dying, not quite static. It has locked its unalterable will for ever against life and death. It persists in the flux of unclean death. It leans for ever motionless on death. The will is fixed; there shall be no yielding to life, no yielding to death. Yet death gradually steals over the huge obscene bird. Gradually the leaves fall from the rotten branch, the feathers leave naked the too-dead neck of the vulture.

But worse than the fixed and obscene will of the isolated individual is the will of the obscene herd. They cringe, the herd; they shrink their buttocks downward like the hyena. They are one flock. They are a nauseous herd together, keeping up a steady heat in the whole. They have one temperature, one aim, one will, enveloping them into an obscene oneness, like a mass of insects or sheep or carrion-eaters. What do they want? They want to maintain themselves insulated from life and death. Their will has asserted its own absolution. They are the arrogant, immitigable beings who have achieved a secure entity. They are it. Nothing can be added to them, nor detracted. Enclosed and complete, they have their completion in the whole herd, they have their wholeness in the whole flock, they have their oneness in their multiplicity. Such are the sheep, such is humanity, an obscene whole which is no whole, only a multiplied nullity. But in their multiplicity they are so strong that they can defy both life and death for a time, existing like weak insects, powerful and horrible because of their countless numbers.

It is in vain to appeal to these ghastly myrmidons. They understand neither the language of life nor the language of death. They are fat and prolific and all-powerful, innumerable. They are in truth nauseous slaves of decay. But now, alas! the slaves have got the upper hand. Nevertheless, it only needs that we go forth with whips, like the old chieftain. Swords will not frighten them, they are too many. At all costs the herd of nullity must be subdued. It is the worst coward. It has triumphed, this slave herd, and its tyranny is the tyranny of a pack of jackals. But it can be frightened back to its place. For its cowardice is as great as its arrogance.

Sweet, beautiful death, come to our help. Break in among, the herd, make gaps in its insulated completion. Give us a chance, sweet death, to escape from the herd and gather together against it a few living beings. Purify us with death, O death, cleanse from us the rank stench, the intolerable oneness with a negative humanity. Break for us this foul prison where we suffocate in the reek of the flock of the living dead. Smash, beautiful destructive death, smash the complete will of the hosts of man, the will of the self-absorbed bug. Smash the great obscene unison. Death, assert your strength now, for it is time. They have defied you so long. They have even, in their mad arrogance, begun to deal in death as if it also were subjugated. They thought to use death as they have used life this long time, for their own base end of nullification. Swift death was to serve their end of enclosed, arrogant self-assertion. Death was to help them maintain themselves in statu quo, the benevolent and self-righteous bugs of humanity.

Let there be no humanity; let there be a few men. Sweet death, save us from humanity. Death, noble, unstainable death, smash the glassy rind of humanity, as one would smash the brittle hide of the insulated bug. Smash humanity, and make an end of it. Let there emerge a few pure and single men — men who give themselves to the unknown of life and death and are fulfilled. Make an end of our unholy oneness, O death, give us to our single being. Release me from the debased social body, O death, release me at last; let me be by myself, let me be myself. Let me know other men who are single and not contained by any multiple oneness. Let me find a few men who are distinct and at ease in themselves like stars. Let me derive no more from the body of mankind. Let me derive direct from life or direct from death, according to the impulse that is in me.

IV

THE ORBIT

It is no good thinking of the living dead. The thought of them is almost as hurtful as their presence. One cannot fight against them. One can only know them as the great static evil which stands against life and against death; and then one skirts them round as if they were a great gap in existence. It is most fearful to fall into that gap. But it is necessary to move in strength round about it, on the actual fields of life and death. We must ignore the static nullity of the living dead, and speak of life and speak of death.

There are two ways and two goals, as it has always been. And so it will always be. Some are set upon one road, the road of death and undoing, and some are set upon the other road, the road of creation. And the fulfilment of every man is the following his own separate road to its end. No man can cause another man to have the same goal or the same path as himself. All paths lead either to death or to the heaven on earth, ultimately. But the paths are like the degrees of longitude, the lines of longitude drawn on a geographer’s globe — they are all separate.

Every man has his goal, and this there is no altering. Except by asserting the free will. A man may choose nullity. He may choose to absolve himself from his fate either of life or death. He may oppose his self-will, his free will, between life and his own small entity, or between true death and himself. He may insulate and cut himself off from the systole-diastole of life and death, either within his own small horny integument of a will, or within the big horny will of the herd of humanity. Humanity is like a mass of beetles: it is one monstrosity of multiple identical units. It is like the much- vaunted ant-swarms, an insulated oneness made out of myriads of null units, one big, self-absorbed nullity. Such is humanity when it is self-absorbed.

And so much free will have we: if life comes to us like a potentiality of transcendence, we must yield our ultimate will to the unknown impulse or remain outside, abide alone, like the corn of wheat, outside the river of life; if death comes to us, the desire to act in strength of death, we must have the courage of our desire, and ride deathwards like the knights of the Dark Ages, covered with armour of imperviousness and carrying a spear and a shield by which we are known; we must do this, of our own free will and courage accept the mission of death, or else roll up like a wood- louse enfolded upon our own ego, our own entity, our own self-will, roll up tight on our own free will, and remain outside. So much free will there is. That the free will of humanity can provide a great unified hive of immunity from life, and death does not make us any more intrinsically alone from life and death. That we are many millions cut off from life and death does not make us any less cut off. That we are contained within the vast nullity of humanity does not make us other than null. That we are a vast colony of wood-lice, fabricating elaborate social communities like the bees or the wasps or the ants, does not make us any less wood-lice curled up upon nothingness, immune in a vast and multiple negation. It only shows us that the most perfect social systems are probably the most complete nullities, that all relentless organization is in the end pure negation. Who wants to be like an ant? An ant is a little scavenger; ants, a perfect social system of scavengers.

So much free will there is. There is the free will to choose between submitting the will, and so becoming a spark in a great tendency, or withholding the will, curling up within the will, and so remaining outside, exempt from life or death. That death triumphs in the end, even then, does not alter the fact that we can live exempt in nullity, exerting our free will to negation.

All we can do is to know in singleness of heart which is our road, then take it unflinching to the end, having given ourselves over to the road. For the straight road of death has splendour and brave colour; it is emblazoned with passion and adventure, sparkling with running leopards and steel and wounds, laguorous with drenched lilies that glisten cold and narcotic from the corrupt mould of self- sacrifice. And the road of life has the buttercups and wild birds whistling of real spring, magnificent architecture of created dreams. I tread the subtle way of edged hostility, bursting through the glamorous pageant of blood for the undying glory of our gentle Iseult, some delicate dame, some lily unblemished, watered by blood. Or I bring forth an exquisite unknown rose from the tree of my veins, a rose of the living spirit, beyond any woman and beyond any man transcendent. To the null, my rose of glistening transcendence is only a quite small cabbage. When the sheep get into the garden they eat the roses indifferently, but the cabbages with gluttonous absorption. To the null, my pageantry of death is so much mountebank performing; or, if I tilt my spear under the negative nose, it is monstrous, inhuman criminality, to be crushed out and stifled, to be put down with an unanimous hideous bleating of righteousness.

There are two roads and a no-road. We will not concern ourselves with the no-road. Who wants to go down a road which is no road? The proprietor may sit at the end of his no-road, like a cabbage on its blind gut of a stalk.

There are two roads, the no-road forgotten. There are two roads. There is hot sunshine leaping down and interpenetrating the earth to blossom. And there is red fire rushing upward on its path to return, in the coming asunder. Down comes the fire from the sun to the seed, splash into the water of the tiny reservoir of life. Up spurts the foam and stream of greenness, a tree, a fountain of roses, a cloud of steamy pear-blossom. Back again goes the fire, leaves shrivel and roses fall, back goes the fire to the sun, away goes the dim water.

So and such is all life and death — apart from the sluglike sheep. There is swift death, and slow. I set a light to the flowery bush, and the balance overtopples into the road of flame; up rushes the bush on wings of fiery death, away goes the dim water in smoke.

The sheep feed upon the moist, fat grass till they are sodden mounds of scarcely kindled grey mold. Quick, the balance! Quick, the golden lion of wrath, pierce them with flame, drink them up to a superb leonine being. It is the quick way of death. Sheep blaze up in the sun in the golden bonfire of the lion; they trickle to darkness in spilled dark blood. The deer is a trembling flower full of shadow and quenched light, fostered in the immunity of the herd. The self-preservation of the herd is round about the shy doe; she will multiply so that the earth is alive with her offspring — if it were not for the tiger. The tiger, like a brand of fire, leaps upon her to restore the balance. His too-much heat drinks their coolness; he waters his thirst with the moist fawn. And the flame of him goes up in the sun brindled with tongues of smoke; the deer disappear like dark mists into the air and the earth. He is a crackling bush burning back to the sun, and burning not away. They are the mists of morning stealing forth and distilling themselves over the sweet earth. So the uneasy balance of life adjusts itself here with the aid of violent death.

Shall we be all like lambs, pellucid Bickerings of shadow? Yes, but for the quick mottled leopard and the all-vivid spark of the sharp steel knife. Shall we be all tigers, brands seized in the burning? It is impossible. For even the mother-tiger is quenched with insuperable tenderness when the milk is in her udder; she lies still, and her dreams are frail like fawns. All is somehow adjusted in a strange, unstable equilibrium.

We are tigers, we are lambs. Yet are we also neither tigers nor lambs, nor immune sluggish sheep. We are beyond all this, this relative life of uneasy balancing. We are roses of pure and lovely being. This we are ultimately, beyond all dark and light. Yes, we are tigers, we are lambs, both in our various hour. We are both these, and more. Because we are both these, because we are lambs, frail and exposed, because we are lions furious and devouring, because we are both, and have the courage to be both, in our separate hour, therefore we transcend both, we pass into a beyond, we are roses of perfect consummation.

Immediately we must be both these, both tigers and lambs, according to the hour and the unknown balance; we must be both in the immediate life, that ultimately we are roses of unfailing glad peace.

Nevertheless, this is the greatest truth: we are neither lions of pride and strength, nor lambs of love and submission. We are roses of perfect being.

It is very great to be a lion of glory, like David or Alexander. But these only exist on the lives they consume, as a fire needs fuel. It is very beautiful to be the lamb of innocence and humility, like St. Francis and St. Clare. But these only shine so star-like because of the darkness of the night on which they have risen, as the lily of light balances herself upon a fountain of unutterable shadow.

Where is there peace, if I take my being from the balance of pure opposition? If all men were Alexanders, what then? And even if all men followed St. Francis or St. Bernard, the race of mankind would be extinct in a generation. Think, if there were no night, we could not bear it; we should have to die. For the half of us is shadow. And if there were no day, we should dissolve in the darkness and be gone, for we are creatures of light.

Therefore, if I assert myself a creature purely of light, it is in opposition to the darkness which is in me. If I vaunt myself a lion of strength, I am merely set over and balanced against the lambs which are gentle and meek. My form and shape in either case depend entirely on the virtue of resistance, my life and my whole being. I am like one of the cells in any organism, the pressure from within and the resistance from without keep me as I am. Either I follow the impulse to power, or I follow the impulse of submission. Whichever it is, I am only half, complemented by my opposite. In a world of petty Alexanders, St. Francis is the star. In a world of sheep the wolf is god. Each, saint or wolf, shines by virtue of opposition.

Where, then, is there peace? If I am a lamb with Christ, I exist in a state of pure tension of opposition to the lion of wrath. Am I the lion of pride? It is my fate for ever to fall upon the lamb of meekness and love. Is this peace, or freedom? Is the lamb devoured more free than the lion devouring, or the lion than the lamb? Where is there freedom?

Shall I expect the lion to lie down with the lamb? Shall I expect such a thing? I might as well hope for the earth to cast no shadow, or for burning fire to give no heat. It is no good; these are mere words. When the lion lies down with the lamb he is no lion, and the lamb, lying down with the lion, is no lamb. They are merely a neutralization, a nothingness. If I mix fire and water, I get quenched ash. And so if I mix the lion and the lamb. They are both quenched into nothingness.

Where, then, is there peace? The lion will never lie down with the lamb; in all reverence let it be spoken. Whilst the lion is lion, he must fall on the lamb, to devour her. This is his lionhood and his peace, in so far as he has any peace. And the peace of the lamb is to be devourable.

Where, then, is there peace? There is no peace of reconciliation. Let that be accepted for ever. Darkness will never be light, neither will the one ever triumph over the other. Whilst there is darkness, there is light; and when there is an end of darkness, there is an end of light. There are lions, and there are lambs; there are lambs, and thus there are lions predicated. If there are no lions feline, we are the devourers, leonine enough. This is our manhood also, that we devour the Iambs. Am I in my conceit more than myself? Not more, but less. I lie down with the lamb and eat grass. What, then, I am only the neutralization of a man.

Where, then, is there peace, which we must seek and pursue, since it is the ultimate condition of our nature? It is peace for the lion when he carries the crushed lamb in his jaws. It is peace for the lamb when she quivers light and irresponsible within the strong, supporting apprehension of the lion. Where is the skipping joyful- ness of the lamb when the magnificent, strong responsibility of the lion is removed? The lamb need take no thought; the lion is responsible for death in her world.

But let there be no lion, and no exquisite apprehension in the lamb, what does she degenerate into? A clod of stupid weight. Look in the eyes of your sheep, and see there the pitch of tension which holds her against the golden lion of pride. See in the eyes of the sheep the soul of the sheep, giving with coward’s jeering malice the lie to the great mystic truth of death. Look at the doe of the fallow deer as she turns back her eyes in apprehension. What does she ask for, what is her helpless passion? Some unutterable thrill in her waits with unbearable acuteness for the leap of the mottled leopard. Not of the conjunction with the hart is she consummated, but of the exquisite laceration of fear as the leopard springs upon her loins, and his claws strike in, and he dips his mouth in her. This is the white-hot pitch of her helpless desire. She cannot save herself. Her moment of frenzied fulfilment is the moment when she is torn and scattered beneath the paws of the leopard, like a quenched fire scattered into the darkness. Nothing can alter it. This is the extremity of her desire, this desire for the fearful fury of the brand upon her. She is balanced over at the extreme edge of submission, balanced against the bright beam of the leopard like a shadow against him. The two exist by virtue of juxtaposition in pure polarity. To destroy the one would be to destroy the other; they would vanish together. And to try to reconcile them is only to bring about their nullification.

Where, then, is there peace if the primary law of all the universe is a law of dual attraction and repulsion, a law of polarity? How does the earth pulse round her orbit save in her overwhelming haste towards the sun and her equivalent rejection back from the sun? She swings in these two, the earth of our habitation, making the systole-diastole of our diurnal, of our yearly life. She pulses in a diurnal leap of attraction and repulsion, she travels in a great rhythm of approach and repulse.

Where, then, is there peace? There is peace in that perfect consummation when duality and polarity is transcended into absorption. In lovely, perfect peace the earth rests on her orbit. She has found the pure resultant of gravitation. She goes on for ever in pure rest, she rests for ever in perfect motion, consummated into absolution from a complete duality. Fulfilled from two, she is transported into the perfection of her orbit.

And this is peace. The lion is but a lion, the lamb is but a lamb, half and half separate. But we are the two halves together. I am a lion of pride and wrath, I am a lamb with Christ in meekness. They live in one landscape of my soul; the roaring and the tremulous bleating of their different voices sound from the distance like pure music.

It is by the rage and strength of the lion, and the white, joyous freedom from strength of the lamb, by the equipoise of these two in perfect conjunction, that I pass from the limitation of a relative world into the glad absolution of the rose. It is when I am drawn by centripetal force into communion with the whole, and when I flee in equivalent centrifugal force away into the splendour of beaming isolation, when these two balance and match each other in mid- space, that suddenly, like a miracle, I find the peace of my orbit. Then I travel neither back nor forth. I hover in the unending delight of a rapid, resultant orbit.

When the darkness of which I am an involved seed, and the light which is involved in me as in a seed, when these two draw from the infinite sources towards me, when they meet and embrace in a perfect kiss and a perfect contest of me, when they foam and mount on their ever-intensifying communion in me until they achieve a resultant absolution of oneness, a rose of being blossoming upon the bush of my mortality, then I have peace.

It is not of love that we are fulfilled, but of love in such intimate equipoise with hate that the transcendence takes place. It is not in pride that we are free, but in pride, so perfectly matched by meekness that we are liberated as into blossom. There is a transfiguration, a rose with glimmering petals, upon a bush that knew no more than the dusk of green leaves heretofore. There is a new heaven on the earth, there is new heaven and new earth, the heaven and earth of the perfect rose.

I am not born fulfilled. The end is not before the beginning. I am born uncreated. I am a mixed handful of life as I issue from the womb. Thenceforth I extricate myself into singleness, the slow- developed singleness of manhood. And then I set out to meet the other, the unknown of womanhood. I give myself to the love that makes me join and fuse towards a universal oneness; I give myself to the hate that makes me detach myself, extricate myself vividly from the other in sharp passion; I am given up into universality of fellowship and communion, I am distinguished in keen resistance and isolation, both so utterly, so exquisitely, that I am and I am not at once; suddenly I lapse out of the duality into a sheer beauty of fulfilment. I am a rose of lovely peace.